Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  Saka’s charge slowed as he neared the Wu Li, and he kept firing as the Wu Li fell, concussive charges that blew the Wu Li apart and made the Diamonds fall back….

  … while the smoke fell.

  Saka stood for a few seconds near the shredded bodies of the Wu Li. A Diamond came barreling out of the smoke and crashed into Saka. The decades old November Guard battle gear protected him for only another second, then burst apart with Saka inside it.

  Kess had seen Diamonds kill before. He knew what came next, a wild charge toward the next target –

  The Diamond crouched over Saka’s body, apparently confused.

  The largest Diamond, the size of a Torean worm, made its slow way down the corridor. It seemed to hesitate at Saka’s body, and then continued moving forward. The Diamond that had killed Saka didn’t move, and the huge Diamond rolled over it without pausing.

  The smoke was so thick by now that Kess could barely see the Diamond on the video feed, could barely see anything inside the base, on any track. The largest Diamond crept forward, more slowly than Kess had ever seen a Diamond move. Black streaks mottled it, black regions appearing within the nearly transparent Diamond’s shape.

  Three meters from the control room door, the Diamond stopped moving, and over the next ten minutes, melted into a viscous puddle.

  FOURTEEN HOURS LATER the Diamond at the bunker entrance abandoned its post.

  Kess watched it go.

  Something had felt off about Saka, the entire time they’d been in the base together. Kess had not paused to analyze it at the time: a lot had changed in two years.

  Kess knew what it was now. He knew what his father’s first thought had been upon seeing his son: I’m going to die.

  Face the world as it is, his father had taught him as a child.

  Died doing it, Kess thought.

  He sat at the workstation, unmoving, and waited.

  THIRTY-EIGHT HOURS after his father’s death, the Domish Navy arrived in force at the base. They cut through the main doors and found a small waldo waiting patiently inside, bearing the last message of Professor Sakamoto Modyan. They listened, tested the air to see if the poison had decomposed to a safe level. Finding that it had, the Navy went down and brought Kess Wu out.

  END

  Interlude – 2681 to 2821

  KESS WU MODYAN lived thirty-one decades after the end of the Man-Spacething War. Across all the worlds occupied by the Spacething invaders, only a very few fighting forces survived to see Earth and November starships in their skies again. One of them was the Domish Navy.

  Domain absorbed the Gomacki Federation after the war, and within Kess’s lifetime, the common usage of Tin Woodman as the planet’s name faded, to be replaced by Domain.

  Kess Wu Modyan married Corisande Trey: and Kess Wu Trey-Modyan lived long enough to see the birth of their great great grandson, Camber Tremodian.

  Smile and Give Me a Kiss

  2821 - 2873

  “HAVE YOU SEEN their wedding niche?”

  “No.”

  Joseph and Khalli wandered over to take a look. In the wedding niche stood a lifesize copy of their hosts and best friends, Andra and Annata de Khour d’Novembri. They were frozen in position, Andra swept backwards in Annata’s arms, kissing –

  At their approach, Andra and Annata finished the kiss, Annata pulling Andra back upright, and the pair of them smiled in Joseph and Khalli’s direction. They were cousins – tall, brown-skinned and green-eyed, with the look about them of their shared grandfather, Tyrel November. They looked so similar Joseph wondered in passing what had attracted them to one another. Joseph had always needed some hint of the strange in his relationships, and had found it in full measure with Khalli....

  The loop ran ten seconds or so – Andra and Annata smiled at Joseph and Khalli and chorused in near-unison, still slightly flushed from their kiss: “A long life and a happy one, and may you feel the joy that we feel.”

  An instant later they were posed again, Andra bent backward with Annata’s lips on her mouth. The loop had been flawless, no fractal artifacts or lack of solidity. Even Joseph’s high resolution Khabyr eyes, which could see the shapes of large molecules, had not been able to distinguish the loop from reality.

  Khalli said, “I want one.”

  THE SLISS SALESMAN had arrived on Scarecrow twenty-four days prior. It had been on November itself, it was said by those who could not know, hawking the services of what was plainly forerunner and possibly Zaradin technology. Khalli doubted the story. The House of November either would not have permitted the sliss to approach the planet with such technology, or would not have permitted it to leave, one or the other. But Scarecrow was less paranoid about such things, and with good reason. The planet’s entire population was less than a quarter billion humans and K’Aillae, originally refugees from Tin Woodman, the world they now called Domain, during the Man-Spacething War. They had no meaningful military presence and were not much of a target since the end of the war, and the drowsy, genteel society of Scarecrow reflected that.

  Khalli suspected the sliss spoke better Tierra than it let on. It didn’t answer most of her questions, Khalli assumed because it didn’t know the answers. “Entangle,” it said briefly. “Make copy. Loop a long time.” When Khalli asked how long the loop would last, the sliss said vaguely, “Longer than human.”

  Khalli laughed. “So our great-grandchildren will have something to remember us by.”

  SHE IMAGED A wedding gown in the old style, dark blue silks such as her mother had worn in her own traditional wedding, not quite a century prior. Joseph wore actual cloth, a severe, shimmering dark red suit woven from the buds of the native Scarecrow scarata. It took the sliss a while to get everything set up; they had heard it could only do three sittings a day, and watching it work, Khalli believed it. Finally it was ready for them, and they stepped up onto the stage together.

  “Face this way,” it said.

  They did, Joseph sliding one arm about her waist. He looked at her as if he wanted to memorize her – that grin, those dark Khabyr eyes –

  “Do something,” the sliss said, and Joseph didn’t hesitate.

  “Smile,” he said, “and give me a kiss.”

  THE YEARS FLOATED by, one much like the other. They raised a child together, a boy named Annata for the friend who had introduced them, and he went off to November and then to Earth, where he did something important, neither of them were quite clear what, for the Face of Night. He sent messages to them that grew more esoteric and more infrequent with each passing year, and they responded as best they could. Then came the message that for their fiftieth anniversary he would be returning from Earth to see them in person: and despite his long absence, or perhaps because of it, they were surprised at how happy the thought of his return made them.

  At dinner on their anniversary they entertained their guests, but then retired to spend time with their son, after the guests had left. He had changed but he was still their son, and after some brief awkwardness they found each other again, parents and their oddly sophisticated child.

  “I have changed,” Annata allowed. “You haven’t, though, not much.”

  Joseph smiled. “Your mother hasn’t changed in fifty years. Not much enamored of bodyshaping. I was surprised – you know, we had a loop made before we were married? We put the platform in storage most of that time, but it still works – we took it out for the anniversary and set it up again. She looks just the same.”

  “Did you?” Annata had seen a few of them them growing up, in various households; they’d been popular, once. “I hadn’t known you’d had one made. May I see it?”

  AFTER OVER FOUR decades in the dark, they were back in the light again. Joseph had finally grown accustomed t
o the dark – the resumption of the light bothered him more than he’d thought he could be bothered by anything.

  “Someone’s coming,” said Khalli dully.

  Joseph knew she was correct; he could feel the observation seeking him, a dim tug on his architecture.

  “It’s them,” said Khalli. Her voice was flat, dead. “And some man I don’t know ... he’s going to look at me and tell her again how she hasn’t aged.”

  Still Joseph didn’t answer. He hadn’t said anything in all the long years of the dark, except when forced to – and here it was, showtime, they came, they entered the room, observation descended upon the pair of them with a suffocating weight and it happened now, and his lips twitched and then slid easily into the old shape, Joseph straightened and turned to Khalli and slid one arm about her waist, looking as if he wanted to memorize her – that grin, those dark Khabyr eyes –

  “Smile,” said Joseph, “and give me a kiss.”

  END

  Platformer

  3021 - 3022

  AFTERWARD, VANESSA MA tried to explain to me what had happened to her. She shared sensorium with me, bits of her own holistic timeline – everything from what had happened to her, to how she’d felt about it at the time.

  I had experienced every sexual act known to the human race, and quite a few unknown to it, and some of those latter sat in my sensorium very oddly.

  But I had never been kissed.

  SIX DAYS BEFORE boarding the starship Almundsen, Vanessa Ma went hiking in Earth’s Great Northern Forest. There were still humans living there – a few non-humans, too – but very many fewer than during the peak population of Earth, back in the twenty-second Century A.D. Most of what had been North America and Canada was now wild again; she hiked five days without seeing another sentient being, and showed up at Almundsen just hours before the tachyon starship went superluminal.

  In the best-case scenario, it would be seven months aboard ship, and then the Platform that was their destination, before she saw Earth again, or smelled air that hadn’t come from an airplant.

  HER FIRST IMPRESSION of the Rose From Earth was that it was a very small town.

  “YOU DIED, VINCE.”

  Vince nodded. He looked fine, waiting in the recovery room for permission to go out into the world. A little uncoordinated. Muscle memory is real, and his body had none – I sympathized. “I know that,” he said. “I don’t know much else yet.”

  “Your parents asked me to tell you what happened.”

  “They’re angry, Erin.”

  And he was unhappy, maybe even heartbroken.

  I shrugged. “They seemed calm to me. I can’t tell with adults.” I could tell with my parents, sometimes – my second mother was easy enough to read, but she meant to be. “So. They restored you from your last snapshot. We were flyabout fourteen days. Your body and your Razor’s shiplog were destroyed.” He’d lost those two weeks of personal memory and an entire quarter of Caravan time while he was being regrown and decanted.

  “I remember Carandra Mennin and I –”

  “Yes.” He’d had a crush on Carandra since we were children. “She hasn’t been to see you since your death, and the first thing you did, awakening, was ask for her.”

  “She doesn’t answer.”

  “I spoke to her. She won’t,” I said simply. “You had an affair on flyabout, and then you were dead. She moved on.”

  I didn’t have anyone I cared about like that. But I had other things that mattered to me, memories that existed not even in logs. I’d flown home carefully, after his death.

  We fell / all together / out of presence / into darkness / and there

  / bided / waited / planned

  WE RESTED AT Temchen, and when the Caravan’s mapping scouts showed a new Gate at Yppado, the Black King decided to visit it.

  Yppado – the name on an old K’Ailla map – hadn’t had a recognized Gate in the professed history of any species in the Caravan. No one had ever visited there as far as anyone was saying: and there were twelve hundred species in S’Pollant, every one vastly older than humanity.

  The movement of the stars causes the spacelace tunnels to stretch, to break and reform, as the shape of space between them alters. In the time frames humans tend to think in, the tunnels are stable enough; even out in the wilds around Sol, any given Gate pair is usually stable for hundreds of years.

  S’Pollant Caravan was halfway from Earth to the Core. Some groups of stars station-keep down here, traveling more slowly than out in the arms; Gate pairs frequently last thousands of years in those groups. But the bulge of the galactic core produces odd star paths as well – even stars traveling retrograde. Yppado, a borderline K type, a perfectly ordinary little orange star, was one of them. The mapping agents, rolling the maps backwards by the millennia, guessed it hadn’t had a viable Gate in as much as six million years.

  They are noisy, Almundsen, and they / intrude on our rest / not to be tolerated / the quiet we were promised / threatened with / punished with / now broken / one full rotation of the galaxy / before parole / has it passed? / is it time? / there is so little left / of us or me / no strength, no strength, enemies waiting / him / but we wonder

  All together the shattered fragments of Anchantiabrahar the Punished thought:

  What is a tachyon starship?

  A TRULY UNEXPLORED system, probably six million years from last contact? We were Platformers: I and five other young people snapshotted and went flyabout. We were Vince Sola, Carandra Mennin, Evel Sandor, Antine Marienchild, Vanessa Ma, and me, Erin Rose. We were all about the same age, that I knew, and I’d known everyone except Vanessa my whole life. I didn’t anticipate personal problems; Vince and Carandra were male and female and paired, I was male and uninterested. Evel was vaguely male at the moment, and ambivalent about everything, particularly love. Antine had been female and male and was now female again, and while she was willing to sleep with anyone who wanted to sleep with her, I knew she wouldn’t approach anyone. So Vince and Carandra would cocoon, and the rest of us would sleep in our ships, if anyone felt like sleeping – I like sleep as well as anyone, but we were only going to be out fifteen days.

  Nobody aboard the Caravan cared, except our immediate families. My father nodded and told me to stay in touch, my second mother kissed me, and my first mother told me to try not to get killed and to absolutely not get in the way of the Caravan’s researchers. The last she was serious about, because she was in charge of one group.

  THE PLANET DIDN’T have a name beyond Yppado-2. Its air wasn’t exactly breathable; we’d dropped to the surface seven days ago and had been exploring since. Its atmosphere was mostly nitrogen with about five percent oxygen. You could use it if you paid attention to how your lungs processed the air, but it was tiring. I stayed in my ship or my suit for the most part, and so did everyone else after briefly enjoying the pleasure of being unsuited again.

  None of the researchers bothered us, or we them. Technical civilizations are overwhelmingly found in free fall. Only young races are prone to clustering around planets. Gravity wells are inconvenient, for one thing. Beyond that the Continuing Time is a dangerous place – and planets are awfully hard to either move or defend. Family legend had it that Amanda Rose, an amateur historian, had left Earth back in 2180 after auditing a documentary on the history of the Continuing Time and counting how often planets were mentioned destroyed. The story was she hadn’t bothered to finish the documentary before deciding to build Rose from Earth.

  The researchers were looking for old tech, so they were up on the moons, in the asteroid and cometary belts. I don’t know why we ended up on the surface of the system’s sole Earth-sized planet, except that the girl from Earth suggested we drop, and no one said no.


  Vanessa was the only member of our party I didn’t know well. She and her mother had joined Rose from Earth three months back – you could do the math; if Vanessa was really young, and if they were really from Earth, they’d traveled mostly by tachyon starship, which meant that they were important or that they’d been owed by somebody important.

  She used feminine pronouns when we spoke Tierra, but flat intelligent gender with no tendencies in sensorium. It didn’t matter to me, but I thought of her as female, possibly because I’d been introduced to her that way. She was slightly taller than me, wiry and thin – pale with white hair when she hadn’t programmed makeup, which she rarely did. She had Kabhyr eyes, black from edge to edge, which was unusual on the Caravan, and lacked any noticeable secondary sexual characteristics except her speaking and singing voice, which was pretty.

  We camped twice with no incident. On our planned next-to-last day on planet, we came down near sunset in a small box canyon, running broadly north-south. Four of us, except Vince and Vanessa, settled down next to a small trickle of water, a creek you might call it, that flowed from north to south down the length of the canyon. Despite the presence of small amounts of water the world was near lifeless. Most rocky worlds are; Mars and Venus analogs are much more common than Earths. This little world wasn’t Mars yet, but it was headed in that direction.

  Vince spoke in my sensorium as we were settling down. “I see something about three klicks off.”

  Vanessa was on his wing, with her Kabhyr eyes. “Vanessa, you see it too?”

  “Something. I don’t know what. Might be rock formations, I suspect Vince is imagining things.”

  “OK. We’ll set up air and wait for you two.”