Crucible of Time

by Jeffrey A. Carver

“Would it help if I formally invited you and your staff to visit The Long View?”

  “I think it might,” Dakota said. “And as XO, I accept!” Her eyes were ablaze at the prospect. “It is so good to see you again! And also, I don’t mind saying . . . to see someone who knew the world I grew up in.”

  “I feel the same way,” he said, wondering, Should I invite her to come back to Shipworld with me? She’d love it! But she has a life, and Harrad, to go back to. His head swam a little at the overwhelming reminder of his loss and reconnection with humanity. “I guess I’d better get back to my flock. Let me know when you’re all ready to come over. Sooner the better.”

  Dakota rose. “It’ll have to be soon, I think. The skipper didn’t want to come right out and say it, I don’t think, but he and the navigator are a lot more worried than they let on about getting back to the starstream. Seriously, we don’t know how to get back into it from here. If we can’t solve that problem, we could be here for a very long time!” Her voice caught with fear. Was she thinking about Harrad?

  Bandicut followed her to the door. “Let’s talk about it with your people and mine. Dinner at my place?” Ruall? Dark? You do know how to solve their problem, right?

  Chapter 26

  Lost Friends

  ANTARES MOVED DOWNSTREAM.

  Gliding along the ghoststream felt easy to do, and yet it was like stepping out onto a long, narrow beam, bridging some unfathomable gulf high in the sky. There was no visible safety net. It was her mind, everything that was truly her, stretching out toward infinity, seeking to find her lost friends. The absurdity of the hope tugged at her, and she began to tremble with anxiety.

  *Slowly. Take it slowly.*

  The stones calmed her. Good thing. She needed a Thespi of her own, someone to connect with her just closely enough to ease her fears.

  She imagined star clouds whirling around her, and then that happened for real, as she glided forward in space and down the slippery slopes of time, following the luminous thread.

  Eventually that thread was joined by another, somehow stretching diagonally across space. It grew to become a glowing, transparent tube like a star-spanner frozen in motion. Antares and the ghoststream merged right into it and suddenly slowed to a crawl. Antares asked her stones what was happening.

  *We have intersected with the starstream. We thought this might be a good place to pause and try again.*

  Antares did so. She called out to Ik, and to Julie. She called again.

  As before she felt, heard, saw nothing.

  At least, she felt nothing that seemed anything like Ik and Julie. It did seem to her that there were things moving somewhere in the starstream. She sensed them at a great distance, but she could make nothing more of the feeling.

  /What now? Do I just keep calling out? That seems futile./

  Before the stones could reply, she heard, from far up the ghoststream, a controller team member attempting communication. The distortion was considerable. /Readings here . . . -ry unsteady. Procee- . . . discretion . . . -reat care./

  She called back: /You’re breaking up./

  And then she heard Napoleon’s voice. /Lady . . . believe you must . . . closer to them . . . -haps . . . -illions . . . in time . . . light-years . . . /

  She answered slowly and meticulously, through the stones, /I will proceed as advised. If you hear anything from them . . . /

  The controller again: /-ill tell you. Keep . . . /

  The stones interrupted to say, *Suggest you let us monitor the connection backward. You focus on lis“Charli, can you hear me?

  tening, and watching.*

  And with that, she felt herself slipping farther down the ghoststream . . . faster, faster. With each backward spin of the invisible calendar surrounding her, her heart grew heavier.

  ***

  The meadow in which Julie was kneeling already seemed otherworldly; but when holes started to yawn open in the ground all around her, it was too much. Julie cried out and grabbed at fistfuls of grass, clutching at the ground cover as if she might physically hold the meadow together. Maybe a sheer effort of will would make a difference. “What’s happening?” she wailed, but there was no one to hear.

  The meadow was turning into grass-covered Swiss cheese. Through the larger holes, she saw stars. The meadow would soon be a fisherman’s net suspended in the stars. And after that? Would she fall through into the sky?

  “Ik! Ik!” /Ik, where are you? I need you!/

  This can’t be real.

  She closed her eyes and called silently to her stones, but all she felt was the world vibrating like a plucked string. Even with her eyes closed, she felt the meadow fade away. She felt suspended in time, vibrating like a violin string between the deep past and the far future. She felt wetness on her cheek—tears leaking from her closed eyes. What sort of existence was this?

  She blinked her eyes open. Now there was only space, spanned by a narrow, diaphanous ribbon, pale blue with golden overtones, stretching from low and behind her on the left, and then up out of sight to her right. The starstream. Probably the timestream, too, entwined with it. She thought with a surge of panic that she was no longer in that stream, that she had been thrown clear of it by the blowback of the disentanglement pulse. The meadow had vanished altogether. Was this her mind imposing some kind of meaning on something that made no sense? Despair clawed at her. I will never get home again. Not even to Shipworld. Ik . . . Ik, I hope you make it. Except that she really didn’t want Ik to make it without her. I don’t want to be stranded here alone! Please, God!

  She heard a faint whisper from her stones—they were alive!—saying, *We are working. We are trying.*

  Staring through her tears at that ribbon, she felt a rapid vibration, pastfuturepastpresentfuturepastpresent . . . and she began to choke as she wept.

  ***

  Ik could not understand what he was looking at, or why. A landscape of shattered ice. Or why he was out of contact with Julie Stone, who was encapsulated in this ghoststream with him. Surely the ghoststream could not split into separate streams. Could it?

  His voice-stones remained silent. Perhaps they didn’t know, either.

  The frozen landscape was moving now, great ice shards rising and falling and shifting, as though the entire landscape were floating on top of a rolling ocean. “Hrah,” he murmured to himself. “Why are you doing that?” He sighed through his ears, once, then barked, /Julie Stone! Are you here? Can you hear me?/ As before, he heard no reply.

  He turned around slowly, and as he rotated, he saw that the emptiness of space was filled in as he turned, filled in with more of the churning ice pack. Moon and stars, it’s an illusion. It has to be. Is it the work of the enemy? Or my own mind?

  Something sang in the sky over him, and he looked up to see a narrow band of light stretched across the sky, diagonally from where he was facing, almost like a rainbow but far brighter and more substantial. The singing was like a high-tension line in an electrical storm, rather than a voice. It wailed and warbled, as though trying and failing to hold a steady pitch. As he focused on the strange band, he was aware that the landscape was gradually turning transparent. He stood on a single outcropping of ice and rock, but that outcropping was now adrift in space.

  /Stones, I don’t care if you don’t understand this any better than I do. I need your help!/ He tried to make his inner voice sound commanding. /I believe we are at risk of detaching from the ghoststream. We need a plan./

  There was no response.

  He tried a different tack. /If you are afraid of a bad plan, it is still better than no plan at all./

  At last the stones stirred.

  /Do you have a plan?/

  *We must first try to locate Julie Stone and her translator-stones.*

  /Hrah, my thoughts precisely. Do you know how?/ He paused a moment, and then said, /I withdraw the question./ And then he added, /We must be rejoined. Not just to each other, but to that band out there./ He pointed. /To the ghoststream.
/

  *We agree. But we are uncertain how.* The stones sounded sad, almost resigned. That, more than anything else, frightened Ik.

  ***

  Charli felt the sudden change in a strangely tangible way, as though she were solid like Bandicut. It felt like all the air being sucked out of a habitat. The quarx flashed on a memory from long ago, when the Rohengen moon died in that terrible war—millions of years and many lifetimes ago. An entire world had vented to vacuum, and Charli’s host had died. It was a sickening memory, and she had to force her thoughts away from it.

  I am in the starstream. Air is not a question in the starstream; there is no air. So what did I just feel?

  The next sensation was a perceptible chill.

  There is no warmth or cold in the starstream. What is happening?

  Did this involve Ik and Julie Stone? Or the Mindaru? Charli still felt their distant presence, felt the rustle of their whispers, but could not see or locate them. She felt distress, and instability. Her friends were in danger. What danger? Should they not be moving?

  The starstream itself felt stable enough, but a significant change had just rippled through it.

  She no longer sensed the timestream—the movement emanating from the disturbance at Karellia.

  Had it just gone away?

  If the timestream was gone, how long could her friends survive? She was suddenly afraid she was about to relive the deaths of her Rohengen friends, but this time with Ik and Julie.

  Calmly, now. She focused carefully, using all of the tricks of perception that this n-dimensional existence provided. The timestream hadn’t quite vanished completely, but it was a fraying ribbon of light. Its vibration had gone out of sync with the starstream’s. All the power was leaving it.

  Suddenly Charli realized what must have happened.

  They’ve turned it off. John and Li-Jared and the others. They’ve turned off the temporal disturbance at Karellia, and the shutdown is rippling down the whole length of the starstream!

  Her breath of fear sharpened, but was leavened by a bubble of hope. Would this stop the Mindaru? If that was true, it was good; it was what they had set out to do; it signaled the success of their mission. But what of Julie and Ik?

  She must look harder.

  She stretched her senses. She could see where the timestream had separated into strands and threads, unraveling all the way down into time and space. Farther down, way down, she could see other entities—Mindaru, foundering and drifting, unable to continue their movement toward the future. That was definitely good. But now she could finally make out where Ik and Julie were: in a ghostly strand that had detached from the main body of the timestream, and—worse than that—had split into two fragile threads, parted from each other. Charli did not understand all of this, but she knew that her friends were in peril.

  They were tiny flecks on spidery threads of light, and both threads appeared to be in the process of disintegrating. If that happened, would Julie and Ik simply vanish into the void? Were they even physically there, or were they as noncorporeal as she was?

  Charli struggled to think of a way to help. Can I do nothing for them, except watch them die?

  ***

  Once that last battle with the plague from out of time was done and Dark was sure that her friends were safe, she’d slipped away quietly, letting them come together and join forces without interruption. There was something she wanted to check on—something she had sensed on her last survey back at the starstream. She thought about speaking of it to her friends, but decided to examine it more closely before raising any hopes. The gokat seemed to be the only one watching her leave, and Dark murmured to her, “Not now, dancing one. I may call for you later, but this time you should stay. Stay and grow strong again. Then, if I have need, you will be able to help.” Bria stayed—but Dark felt the gokat’s gaze following as she slipped away into the folds of n-space.

  Dark was thinking ahead. She needed not just to approach the starstream again, but to reenter it. She needed to see if what she thought she’d felt was really true: that Charli was still there. Dark had had no communication with the quarx since the battle that knocked them all out of the starstream—and knocked Charli out of the mind of John Bandicut. But if Charli was still alive, Dark hoped to find her.

  Traveling back to the starstream did not take long. Dark could move fast when she didn’t have to limit her mode of travel for the sake of her companions. She circled around the ghostly ribbon of light, trying to decide on the best place to enter. She didn’t know that much about the starstream, beyond the obvious, that it was a channel of stressed n-space layered along a fine fracture in the fabric of three-dimensional space, and that it provided a river down which many ships sailed. The last time she had entered it with her friends, the result had been a battle with the plague, the Mindaru. While she doubted that would happen every time someone entered the stream, it did give her pause. The starstream was beautiful; it was not harmless.

  No matter; she was searching for any echo of Charli. When she had sensed the quarx before, it had been during a busy emergence from the starstream of the Mindaru they had just dispatched. She’d been too focused on the Mindaru to take a closer look. Now, she sensed no indication of the quarx from the outside, though perhaps that was because there was no active opening. After circling twice, she gave up on looking for a best place to enter, and simply found a small vibrational point and went in.

  The starstream wall passed over her like a gentle magnetic wave, in a rainbow of dimensions. It flared nicely, and sang softly in a rising and falling tone as she settled into the flowing current. Soon she heard a variety of other sounds: cries, murmurs, sighs, warbles, stutters. Some sounded like natural processes and some like living things.

  It took a little while. But then she heard it: Charli’s voice, as distinct to her as the voice of a star. Charli was calling out to someone, or something. It seemed to Dark that she sounded worried. Dark wasn’t sure how things worked in this place, or exactly how to communicate with Charli. She couldn’t pick out Charli’s location in the starstream, and she wasn’t sure if “location” meant anything here. She had a strange feeling that the quarx might be everywhere and nowhere, and that perhaps she, Dark, should simply call out and see if Charli could hear her. So she did.

  “Charli, can you hear me?

  “Charli, can you hear me?

  “Charli, can you hear me?”

  For a little time, she heard nothing in response. Until:

  /// Dark?

  Dark, is that you? ///

  Charli’s voice seemed faint at first. Then she seemed to find the right range, and her voice became stronger:

  /// Dark, have you come back? ///

  “Charli, you are alive!”

  /// I am alive!

  It is so good to hear a familiar voice!

  And you? Are you well? ///

  “I am well. Our friends are well. We have destroyed many of the enemy.” Dark felt a surprising surge of satisfaction and pride as she reported that.

  /// That delights me beyond measure!

  And John Bandicut? Is he well? ///

  “He seems so.”

  /// I miss him terribly!

  Do you know if he thinks of me?///

  A sadness whispered through Dark. Charli seemed to be everywhere in this place, and where Charli was, there was the grief of losing Bandicut. “I do not know his thoughts. I am sorry.”

  /// Of course not. How could you?

  Dark, I am grateful to hear your voice. ///

  For a moment Charli paused, as though gathering important thoughts. Then she blurted,

  /// Dark, you have come just in time.

  I need your help! ///

  That got Dark’s attention. “My help? What help can I give you?”

  /// There are other friends—Ik and Julie.

  Do you remember them? ///

  Dark was surprised by the sudden mention of friends from another time, not of this mission.
Ik she remembered, clearly. But hard as she tried, she could not recall a “Julie.” She said as much to Charli.

  /// No, of course not.

  Julie is from John Bandicut’s world,

  a fellow human.

  She must have come to Shipworld and met Ik.

  I do not believe John knows she is here. ///

  “Here? In the starstream? Or—?”

  /// In Shipworld.

  But also here, in the starstream.

  She and Ik are . . . ///

  The quarx was clearly struggling to find words.

  /// They are here, but in danger! Grave danger!

  If we do not help them, they may drown and be lost! ///

  “Drown? Lost? I do not understand.”

  /// Their hold in the stream is tenuous,

  and I fear it is coming apart. ///

  Dark puzzled over that. She extended her own senses again, scanning upstream and downstream, seeking a sign of the one she knew as Ik. If she could find Ik, she should also find Julie. “Can you show me?”

  /// Quiet your thoughts and search the stream. ///

  “I will try.”

  Dark shifted her focus and shifted again, exploring wavelengths and amplitudes, inhabited dimensions, sifting the starstream through her awareness like a stellar wind whispering through the singularity at her core. The starstream was a surprisingly noisy place—stray voices and thoughts, which were puzzling, but mostly just noises of the cosmos, the drumming of black holes at either end of the stream, the strumming of the cosmic hyperstring that ran through its heart, the dying echoes of the time-tide that had brought them all here, fading away now because it had been turned off at its source at Karellia.

  And it was in those echoes that she caught the first hint of what she was looking for: a kind of thread—fainter, but more structured, more intentional.

  This thread ran down the dimensions of time and space, intertwining with the path of the Karellian disturbance. But rather than being limited to the starstream, it seemed to come from a place beyond the starstream, beyond the edge of the galaxy itself—from the place, Dark thought in wonder, that her friends called Shipworld.