To the Last Syllable of Recorded Time - Part IX

To the Last Syllable of Recorded Time - Part IX

     It was too bad that the artifact hadn't worked -- a veritable army of Crown scientists had been dispatched to find out the reason behind a failure that had cost the lives of a huge portion of the Queen's third landing army -- infantry, but still...
     The Queen herself could still recall the moment when so many of her hopes had been crushed, when the golden oblong object had vanished from her hands in a flash of blinding light, taking a few of her troopers and a part of the station's equipment with it. Leaving her behind with red-hot fury that was all but choking her, and a group of gloating rangers on top of it all.
     They hadn't been gloating for long, of course -- and they hadn't been able to escape either. It was a small consolation regarding her loss, but she tried to derive as much satisfaction as she could from it. She would have had them psychocrystallized instantly, but all of her crystal production facilities had fallen prey to a well-organized rebellion. She rather suspected one of her own generals -- he had been dealt with swiftly and efficiently. There had been no crystals on the station -- she hadn't expected visitors. In retrospective she had to admit that she should have known better.
     Anyway, she could wait. Crystal production would be resumed in a few months, and she had enough slaverlords to burn until then. And until she had those four precious crystals, she would take her satisfaction where she could get it.
     Preferably by torturing the four humans that had been so bold as to assume that they could cross her.

     "A timeshift... This is disturbing news indeed." Although she tried to maintain the illusion that this was just one more problem she could cope with, Ariel's habitual composure shattered as guilt assailed her in great, sickening waves. The secret was not hers to keep, she knew. She had done it nevertheless, deluding herself all the while that it was the best for Xanadu, the best for the scattered remains of the once glorious empire. How wrong she had been.
     And Niko still trusted her, looked up to her for guidance. Didn't know that she, too, had been betrayed by her mentor in so many ways, by the whole society that had bought their own freedom at the cost of destroying her race.
     Now, finally, she was about to find out.
     "Niko... There is something you should know." Ariel's old eyes were two pools of endless pain, but she forced herself to continue, knowing that her anguish reverberated in Niko's mind through the close link they shared. "Twenty-one cycles ago, when you were a very small child, Xanadu was part of a huge interstellar empire. We had achieved so much, technologically, and yet we were stagnating, content with what we had. Losing the knowledge again bit by bit, without noticing the decay."
     "But --"
     "No. Let me finish." Rubbing her temples tiredly, Ariel continued. "The Circle noticed. Being the real power behind the official leaders, they decided to do something about it. Expansion, in their eyes, was the only possibility. War had proved useful in some circumstances, so they decided to start by attacking the League of Planets -- a remote conglomeration of planets that was young, still growing -- and therefore thought easy prey." Ariel sighed, remembering the years of bloodshed and desperation that had followed.
     "They weren't. When we started attacking their outer colonies, the response was unexpected, and shattering. Especially one of the newer spacefaring races, the humans, had weapons and ships with a power of destruction lost to us. Too late we realized that our technological development of the last hundreds of years had concentrated on comfort rather than military goals. Within twenty years of war, most of our worlds were annexed or destroyed, and the bulk of their fleet was advancing towards Xanadu itself."
     Niko watched incredulously as Ariel shuddered with remembered fear, looking through her with glassy eyes. "We had to do something, or we were doomed. The Circle gathered together for the third time that day to discuss the possibilities -- there weren't many. Then, Levteris remembered a device from a past civilization, that had been used for time travels. We had never been able to replicate it -- the technology was alien to us, and attempts to use it had had disastruous results, so it had been locked away hundreds of years ago, and was being closely guarded.
     "He suggested we use it to alter the time flow, reduce the League to backyard, non-spacefaring planets in one clean sweep. He said it could be done, provided the Circle worked it together, telepathically. There was dissention, but Levteris had always been a gifted orator, so he convinced them, one by one. The threat of Earth's genetically altered soldiers landing on Xanadu was much more real, more horrible than that of a time manipulation attempt gone awry. The brought the artifact in a few hours later, and there it began --"
     Niko wept. She couldn't stop the tears raining down her cheeks more than Ariel could stop her pained confession. "Where were you?" she cried. "Why didn't you do something?"
     Ariel was crying, too. Big, silent tears rolled down the leathery skin, but she continued. It was too late to stop. "I was Levteris' apprentice, next in line for a seat in the Circle. I disapproved, but I was powerless to stop them. And I was afraid of dying, so I simply waited for fate to decide. It did. Within hours, all that remained of the League were a few uninteresting planets without spacefaring technology. Their fleet disappeared, as did the colonies. But we paid a price -- our empire wasn't restored. We had discontinued their evolution, but we hadn't been able to counteract our losses, because of an error in operating the artifact. You see, in using it we had deleted most of our empire along with them. All that remained was -- you."
     Niko sobbed, grief reverberating between her and her mentor with devastating effects. "Me?"
     "Yes. One of the few prisoners we had made on the occasion of our first attack -- on a colony of scientists. Your parents had been propulsion physicists -- they were erased from time along with the others. For reasons nobody has been able to explain, you remained -- a frightened child, barely one cycle old. I felt so guilty then -- I had just only fully realized what we had done. I left Levteris, vowing never to return, and took you with me. In a way, I think I was trying to make up for what we had done."
     Niko tried to swallow the angry words threatening to spill out of her in a shower of crushed trust. She had been living a lie -- it was time to find out the truth. "How come you remember anything? You shouldn't have memories of things that never happened."
     "Oh, but they did happen. The artifact takes those in its vicinity with it when it changes reality -- that's its purpose. We were simply transferred into the new timeline, so we retained our memories."
     Niko had stopped crying -- instead, an icy resolve had started to creep into her voice, her whole stance. She was standing now, looking down at Ariel with fathomless eyes. Her voice was cool when she continued her interrogation.
     "Why didn't you use the artifact again, restore the empire with it?"
     "We didn't dare -- it had almost ended in a catastrophe the first time around. The artifact -- it spawnes a huge lot of alternate timelines. It can even mix them, regardless of discontinuities in the causality chains. The Cirlce chose such a mix and prepared to collapse the timeline so that it would become the new reality. They hadn't known that the probabilities didn't stop shifting once a timeline was chosen -- they didn't react fast enough. When they managed to collapse it, the timeline they chose had altered. Our empire no longer existed. The figured they had been lucky -- all of them were still alive. Nobody wanted to risk it a second time."
     "What about my dreams? The artifact was used again, in another time. Not ours." Recalling the Queen's confused groping for probabilities, Niko paused to think, then suddenly pierced Ariel with an icy look. "What happens if the one using it forgets to collapse the chosen line? Or simply doesn't know it has to be done?"
     "All of the spawned timelines continue to exist -- until the artifact overloads. A permanent time-space rupture is the effect, destroying allexisting timelines. That's what the Circle was afraid of. If your dreams mirror an alternate reality, your Queen might have indeed started a chaos of timelines that still exists. If so, the artifact will overload -- in a few days of our time, probably." Niko's icy gaze was hard to bear, but Ariel still struggled to gather her scattered thoughts. She owed the girl this much, and more.
     "The catch is that the one using it will never notice a failure. He or she will simply continue to exist -- probably in a timeline where the artifact hasn't worked -- until the overload takes place."
     Niko's eyes closed for a moment as she pondered the alternatives. "Yes. This would make sense..." Opening them again, she fixed Ariel with a glare that was true ice. "I'll go to my room now -- I have to think this over."
     Although she knew it was a useless attempt, Ariel still had to try. "Niko... I was younger then, afraid of facing death. I don't hope you can forgive me -- but I hope you can understand. Someday."
     At first, Niko was tempted to keep walking, leaving a room where the memories left no room to breathe. But the bitterness was all-encompassing, and blazing in her eyes as she turned back.
     "You were a coward, Ariel. No more, no less. And," she added, almost spitting out the words, "you raised me in your image. If I'm right, this world is doomed anyway -- along with countless others. I'm going to find a way to undo this, and I promise you that I'm not going to take the easy way out the way you did."
     The shush of the closing door sounded loud and final in the ensuing stillness.

To the Last Syllable of Recorded Time - Part IX

From Betamountain.org