by Jean Johnson
“The . . . time moved. The day sped up and raced by. The evening lightning storm came by . . . but I knew I was still standing here in midmorning,” he finished, confusion creasing his brow. “Ia . . . I saw the future.”
She nodded, and held out the ball to Fyfer. He quirked one of his dark brows but took the crystal ball—and sucked in a sharp breath, as real as the previous one had been faked. He didn’t drop to his knees, but he did shudder. Taking pity on him, Ia took it back.
“What did you see?” she prodded him when he just blinked and breathed.
“Uh . . . the crew, the other students from school . . . they’re going to call me on my wrist unit . . . ask me out to dinner with the group,” he revealed.
Ia probed the future, and nodded. “Go ahead and accept . . . but tell them you plan to shift majors at the end of the semester.”
“Shift majors?” Fyfer protested. “Why would I want to shift majors? I’m great at acting! I actually enjoy it. Besides, you told me to go into acting school.”
She pinned her brother with a firm look. “Because I also told you that you would need to shift majors. You’re going to start studying law—”
“Law!” he protested, throwing up his hands. “Why me? Why law?”
“And politics,” Ia finished. Sphere cupped in her right hand, she ticked off three of the fingers on her left hand. “Rabbit is studying sociology, psychology, and behavioral sciences. Thorne is studying economics, business management, and logistics. You need to study law, acting, and politics. I’ve told you this, Fyfer. Over and over and over.
“Rabbit will be in charge of organizing the Free World Colony and its resistance movement. She can write a very moving speech, but she is not a public speaker, and thus not a public motivator. We all know that the adults wouldn’t take her seriously just because of her size. Thorne will be in charge of the FWC’s physical needs, making sure the cities are well-planned and well-provisioned, with strategic defenses, housing and feeding, powering and cleaning needs all carefully considered and arranged. You will be the face of the Free World, but you need to be more than just a face to motivate people. You need to know the difference between wrong and right, just and unfair, and that means studying acting, politics, and law.”
“Only Church slaves study law and politics. All those classes at Thorne’s college are filled with forehead-circling fanatics.” He wrinkled his nose in disgust, then mockingly scribbled his finger on his forehead, making a face.
Ia gave him a disgusted, sardonic look. “How else did you think the Church was going to take over the government? They’re going to do it by the book, Fyfer. The Church’s leaders have been planning this since they funded their half of the push to find a new heavyworld to settle. It may have been a cosmic accident that they ended up on this world along with the saner contingents from Eiaven and the other heavyworld colonies who contributed, but they are here, and we have to deal with them. Your job will be to stave off the too-rapid degeneration of Sanctuarian society from within the political, social, and legal framework.”
“Isn’t there some other way?” Fyfer protested, throwing up his hands. “Any other way? You’re supposed to be able to see all the twists and turns for a thousand years! Isn’t there some other way than . . . than to turn me into a Kennedy, or a MacKenzie, or some other historically big-named politarazzi?”
She wished there was. Ia clenched her hands and closed her eyes. She searched on the timeplains, the great, amber-hued prairie of existence crisscrossed by a thousand million lifestreams. What she needed was a way to show him what his best future path could be, without the trauma of actually dragging him into his own timestream and holding him there. Fyfer had the grace to stay silent while she dipped into stream after stream in rapid, practiced succession, but pouted when she opened her eyes and shook her head, fingers tightening on the ring in her grasp.
“. . . I’m sorry, Fyfer. But I need you to do what I’m telling you. You’re very charismatic and quick-witted when you want to be, and you know how to skirt the fine line between believability and showmanship. You are going to save a lot of people from slipping into the madness of believing the Church’s doctrines and dogmas in the coming years.” Ia held his gaze, though she softened her expression. “I need you, Brother. I need you to do what I myself cannot.
“Everyone on this world needs you . . . and they will need you to study law and politics, so you can use those as your sword and shield in the fight against the fanatics of the One True God!” She flung out her left hand in the direction of the city . . . and realized her right hand was no longer clutching a sphere. Instead, it now held a pink peach bracelet, a wrist-sized torus of rippling, stiffened crystal shaped something like either a turbulent stream or a fluttering veil. Confused, Ia stared. She hadn’t consciously tried to shape it . . . or . . . had she?
Acting on impulse, Ia grabbed Fyfer’s wrist with her free hand and dropped the torus-bracelet-thing on his palm. He shuddered, eyes widening much like he had when it had been a mere sphere, but this time dropped to his knees as well. Sagged, more like it. Thorne hissed and shifted forward, ready to catch Fyfer in case he didn’t fall safely, but Fyfer ended up merely kneeling. Rather than touching his brother, Thorne stopped next to him, glancing up in confusion at their sister.
Unsure what was happening to him, Ia extended a finger and brushed his temple very lightly, intending to use her minor telepathic skill to probe his thoughts. What she got instead was swept onto the timeplains next to her brother, who stood waist-deep in the waters of his own stream, his gaze fixed on the surface as scene after scene rushed past. Hissing, she hauled herself out and snatched the overgrown ring from his hand, freeing him as well.
Fyfer sucked in a deep breath and let it out again, coughing a bit. “God! God above!” He blinked and looked up at her. “Is . . . is that what you always see? Like a series of 3-D movies, snippets of . . . of moments . . . ?”
Wary, Ia merely asked, “What, specifically, did you see?”
“I . . . saw myself going to law school. It was hard—I could see myself hating you at times, but . . . then I saw what you were talking about. I was in a debate over some council position . . . and I turned some Church woman’s arguments upside down and in her face and . . . and I was winning, and it was a rush to win . . .” Fyfer shook his head. “I never would’ve thought I’d like politics. Politics are . . . ugh! But, this?”
Patting him on the shoulder, Ia left him to deal with whatever it was he had seen. Whatever it was, it hadn’t harmed her cause. Turning to her other brother, she held out the bracelet. Thorne backed up, hands raised out of accepting range.
“No, no, not me; that’s not necessary,” he protested. “Honest. I remember all too well my last visit into your timestreams.”
“And normally I wouldn’t subject you to that again,” Ia promised. “But unlike Fyfer, you know what that’s like . . . and I need to know if this is like that.”
Holding it out, she waited. He shifted, clearly uncomfortable, then wrinkled his nose and held out his palm. Dropping the bracelet onto his skin, she waited. He, too, gasped and sagged to his knees. His eyes blinked, flicking this way and that, no doubt viewing the same timestream images that Fyfer had seen. Or maybe not. After several seconds, her curiosity overwhelmed her, and Ia touched his forehead as well.
What she found shocked her. He wasn’t seeing his brother’s life-choices. Some of them, yes, but only from his own perspective, wherever their lives crossed. Most of what he was seeing were his own possible paths. Since they would continue to live and work together, the two stepbrothers’ lives intertwined quite a lot, but the perspective was purely from Thorne’s life and its choices. Plucking the bracelet from his hand, Ia waited while he shuddered and recovered.
“Okay . . .” Fyfer finally murmured, head nodding slightly. “How did you do that, Ia? You weren’t even touching me, yet you put all those images in my head!”
“That’s what I’m here to find ou
t,” Ia confessed, shrugging. She eyed the bracelet on her hand, then set it on the grass-trampled ground. As soon as she released it, the ever-present lurking of the timestreams in the back of her mind diminished just a little bit. Barely enough for her to notice, but it was just enough to detect. Picking it up again, she could hear the faint, psychic “hum” of the crysium, and could once again feel the timestreams crowding a little closer than usual.
Whatever she had done to the bracelet had changed it. This wasn’t a brief look into the immediate future by a few minutes, or a few hours. This was a look into the future by months, even years.
The strange, semi-alive biocrystal already defied logic. It was literally the discarded matter of the Feyori. The only sentient race to have evolved as beings of energy instead of matter, they were the only race in the known galaxy who could manage to convert energy to matter and back at the squared speed of light.
They did so by traveling faster than the fastest spaceship, whether it traveled through normal space by greasing the laws of physics through faster-than-light panels, or by siphoning itself through a hyperrift via other-than-light travel. Because the transformation from one form to the other was never one hundred percent complete, it was the Feyori who had introduced psychic abilities—using energy to manipulate matter, rather than the other way around—into the sentient races they had secretly bred with over the millennia.
The converse was also true. When they shifted back to energy-based bodies, the Feyori took a little bit of matter across with them. The easiest way to shed it and “purify” themselves was to find a world with a high enough gravity to pull it out of their bodies. By preference, they preferred high-energy worlds where they could “snack” at the same time. Sanctuary, with its churning core of both molten iron and gold, had a natural electrosphere as well as a natural magnetosphere. Lighting was nothing more than candied popcorn to the Feyori, making it a favorite dumping ground.
That dumped matter, discarded in the form of dust, combined itself with rainwater and the constantly generated energies from the storms plaguing Sanctuary every day. Seeded on bare rocks like the ones scattered through this field, the solution crystallized into sprays, with growth dependent upon just how much energy each shaft received. It was too tough to be cut, too difficult to break in all but the thinnest of shafts, and too bizarre for anyone to figure out how to use . . . unless they knew the secrets of both its origins and its strength, as Ia did.
But what to do with it? How to do it?
“Ia?” Thorne finally asked, catching her attention. She looked down at him. He shrugged. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure, but . . . I think this is the solution to my not being able to be in two, or three, or five hundred different places at once. Follow me,” she ordered, tucking the bracelet into one of the pockets on her brown military pants.
Without looking back, she headed into the middle of the field, looking for an easily overlooked spray. Selecting one, she touched the shaft. This time, the humming resonance was louder in her mind; this was a full-sized shaft on a spray twice as tall as her body. She only needed some of it, however.
Concentrating on the flow of energies, she siphoned off just enough to pull away a chunk barely the size of her head, then carefully reshaped the end of the shaft so that it looked whole and untouched. Only someone who intimately knew each and every shaft would be able to tell this one was now shorter. Settling on the ground, Ia prepped the lump she had separated. Carefully dividing it into eight fist-sized chunks, she shaped them into balls with a thought, then looked up.
Fyfer and Thorne had followed her, thankfully. She held out a sphere to each of them. Both hesitated. At the arch of her brow, each of her half brothers settled on the ground across from her and took a clear pink sphere. Tense, they waited for the future to once again drag them under.
Titles by Jean Johnson
Theirs Not to Reason Why
A SOLDIER’S DUTY
The Sons of Destiny
THE SWORD
THE WOLF
THE MASTER
THE SONG
THE CAT
THE STORM
THE FLAME
THE MAGE
SHIFTING PLAINS
BEDTIME STORIES
FINDING DESTINY
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
Teaser chapter