"Well the most obvious one is if I change something, all of you might cease to exist."
"We'll take that risk," said Jen, a split second before Tasha did.
I looked at them one by one. Jess and Lea both nodded as my eyes fell on them.
"I'm not prepared to take that risk."
"But you already have," said Tasha, firmly.
"What?"
"Your second life civilization vanished. Something caused that. And I don’t mean a nuke sent into the past."
"How do you know?"
"I don’t know, but I also read as much as you do."
"So?"
"The most likely explanation…"
"Is still just a guess."
"True. But…"
"We don’t know what happened to the time line while you were alone on that ship."
I looked at Jen in shock.
"I read too you know," she grinned at me. "For all we know, the moment you were taken from the planet, the timeline shifted because you going back and changing something, was inevitable from that point on. The city you lived in never happened, because something you did moved all those people's ancestors somewhere else."
"Will do."
"Did," said Tasha, before Jen could say it. "The fact it's still in your future, is not the point. The civilization on your planet vanished. Totally. Ours is out there. Our cousins are out here. We all came from somewhere, and your missing civilization could be both. Or not, and all three come from somewhere else, and are related even further back. But the civilization is gone, so something happened back then to turn a planet with lots of people on it, into a planet with no people on it at all. It might have even been a war which killed everyone, or the nuke you think you sent back."
"But the nuke couldn’t have done it by itself," added Jess. "From what you've told us, there was a war in progress, and this war was not nearby where you lived. So even if you sent back a very powerful nuke, the other side of the war would not have been affected. And we know there was no radiation contamination of any great scale, simply because there is none detectable on your planet now. One nuke is just going to change the background radiation levels only slightly. Even if you sent back several, there isn’t going to be enough ambient radiation to kill all the people on the planet."
"So something else happened to them," said Jen.
"Are you suggesting I killed them all?"
It caught them by surprise I think.
"I don't know what you did," said Tasha, "but I don’t for a moment believe you would kill off a whole planet of people."
"I could."
"Yes, but you haven’t. Why else do you have a penal colony, if not to have an alternative to killing?"
"I have killed though."
"Only those needing killing," said Jen.
"Here's a thought," said Lea, suddenly.
She stopped, as everyone looked at her.
"What?"
"Maybe there was a war after you left, between magicians, and the most powerful ones destroyed everything."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because you weren't there to stop them!"
I sighed again. I had thought of it. It was one of those trains of thought better off not explored.
"She has a point," said Tasha.
"It’s a moot point though."
"Why?"
"Because I can't get back there."
"Why not?" asked Lea.
I think the others let her ask it, because they knew she would, and they didn’t want to.
"I don’t know when I left. There is absolutely no record of the times I lived in, so there is no way I can get the intent right to do such a jump."
"You're over thinking it as usual, my love."
Tasha was smiling at me, but I wasn’t able to smile back. She took my hand.
"What am I missing then?"
She told me.
Twelve
The ship appeared in orbit of my planet, directly over where my first life village used to be. We'd taken a detour to get here, and filled the cargo holds with food, water, consumables of all kinds, and anything we wanted to make sure we had at least one of.
Just in case.
Tasha had made an interesting case for how to go back. But I wasn’t going to do this without the means to live for a very long time with nothing. All it took was one minor error in intent, and we could be left so far out in the void, we could never get back.
Of course the girls had laughed it off, but the space part of the jump was just as far as the time aspect, and if I got it all wrong, we could end up so far from any sun, I’d be unable to connect to them, and thus not be able to power a jump far enough to be useful. If the worst happened, I wanted to make sure we could live on the ship for a life time if need be.
The girls indulged me, maybe because it was an opportunity of a lifetime to really shop. Tasha had other things to shop for.
Tasha had made one very good suggestion, and I jumped down to the surface to carry it out. The monument was as I'd left it.
When I jumped back to the ship a few minutes later, the monument stood in the center of a huge X, with a force wall around it so no matter what happened, it couldn’t be disturbed. It wasn’t foolproof, in so far as a lot of things could wipe it from existence, but assuming nothing too untoward happened, it would give me something to aim for to get us back. In essence I was creating in my mind, a fixed point in time and space, so we could return to the same time and place we left from.
So went the theory, anyway.
The girls were waiting for me on the main bridge, and I stood there looking at them for a minute. They waited for me to say something.
"Are you all sure you want to come?"
"Shut up, and get on with it," said Jen.
"I want to hear it."
"It," said Tasha, and they all laughed.
I gave her the look, and she made an effort to be serious.
"I'm coming Thorn. If anything happens to the timelines while we jump, I want to be with you when it does. And whatever consequences there are from doing this, I want to share them with you."
"What she said," said Lea, "only without the personal attachment. I'm your friend, and this is what friends do."
"They bully someone into doing something stupid, and jump off the cliff with them?"
"Yes," said Jess. "That’s exactly it."
"And we're not bullying you into anything," said Jen. "You've always known you had to go back. You even tried. This way, we can back you up, and we have the resources of the ship to fall back to if necessary."
I looked around at them. My lover, and my three friends.
"I can't talk you out of it."
"Shut up, and get on with it," said Jen again.
Thirteen
The ship appeared in orbit of my planet, directly over where my first life village, actually was.
I'd spent an hour alone in my stateroom, making sure I had the intent right and fully focused. I'd made sure the girls had understood interrupting me in any way, might kill us all. They were to stay on the bridge, doing nothing, until I came out again.
Tasha had made several suggestions, and they seemed to have worked. She'd said to follow the sun back through space, as I wound back time, thus tying both space and time to a common element, the sun. Her other suggestion was to keep following the sun back, until a day after I’d left.
The theory was, my sub conscious knew exactly where and when I’d left from, and one day later made sure I didn’t meet myself accidently.
Maybe she did read more than I did. Or read more of the books which mattered. Because it turned out she was completely right.
I cast my sight down to the planet, and first of all checked on what was there. Castle and village were as I remembered, so I started searching for myself. I couldn’t find me, so began looking for people I knew.
My family were at home. Mum was crying, Dad holding her as they sat in the living room, not doing anything, not
saying anything. My sisters were in their rooms. I was surprised to find both of them crying as well. The Mayor was in his office, preparing for the next choosing ceremony.
The masters were absent, and I found, not in the village at all.
The king was holding court, and I watched for a short time. There was no sign he'd tried to kill someone not too long before.
I was pretty certain this was after I left, but it could have been the same afternoon as easily as the next day.
My sight was set to circle ever wider around the village until the masters were found. Since we'd safely arrived, I joined the girls on the bridge.
"Are we there yet?" asked Lea, grinning.
"Are you ready to go?" asked Jen, looking annoyed.
I grinned at them.
"Check your sensors."
"Why?"
"Just do it."
She checked.
"Your house is gone. So's the monument. Oh."
I grinned at her.
"What?" asked Jess.
"There is a village below us now, and a castle off some distance from it. There's also a number of other castles on the continent, and there appears to be a battle in progress."
"Battle?"
A flat map appeared on a screen, and she pointed to a spot. I sent my sight there, and found there was indeed a battle going on.
"Damnit!"
I shifted into my reaper look, put a force wall around me, and jumped.
I appeared in the middle of a meadow now slick with blood and dismembered body parts, between two warriors with swords raised, and about to strike each other. They struck me instead, their swords bouncing off my wall, and making both of them lose their balance.
Two long lines of soldiers were hacking away at each other all along the middle of the meadow. On the low hills on either side were command tents, with banners waving in the light breeze. Outside them, observing things, were presumably the generals.
Those immediately around me stopped fighting, and tried to push their way around me, although some had recoiled in fear.
"STOP!" I commanded, my voice amplified to carry across the whole field.
All movement stopped.
"Go HOME, and take your wounded with you. NOW!"
A fire ball struck my wall, coming from in front of one of the tents. As I looked, another one formed in front of a man standing there, and launched at me. I let it hit my wall, and sent the man to my penal colony. As an afterthought, I checked if the island was there, and found it was. So was the predator, although the one I saw looked bigger, and meaner. And hungrier. I’d dropped him on the beach, but if he had the ability to move himself, he's soon find he was in bigger trouble than he thought he was, since he wasn’t on the same planet anymore.
"Go Home!" I repeated, adding even more compulsion, and slowly the lines drew away from each other.
I stood there, watching, until the field was empty of living people. I concentrated, and piles of jewelry, the contents of pockets, and anything distinctive which might identify a person, appeared by each command tent, depending on which side the person had belonged to.
I used my wall to raise myself in the air, and from above, I carved out a large hole, and moved all the bodies into it, laid out with dignity. Their swords and other weapons appeared in a pile in the middle of my island, but I left those in armour, in their armour. The hole filled itself, and a grave marker appeared on top.
The leaders on each side were still there watching what I’d done.
"GO HOME!" I bellowed at them, with as much compulsion as I could put into the command.
As one, they all turned, and followed their troops, leaving the tents and everything else behind.
I let myself sink slowly to the ground, shifted back into my normal look, and jumped back to the ship.
Fourteen
"I tell you, he should be here."
"He's not."
"What makes you so sure?"
"It's his safety jump spot. This glade was where he practiced jumping to, once he was able to make it this far."
"And he should be here now?"
"Why now?"
"Because I sent him here a day into the future."
Well that explained the time jump.
I’d found the five masters in the glade I'd intended to jump to, that day I’d been forced to flee for my life, and jumped there invisible, so I could decide if I revealed myself to them then and there, or if I should wait. For all I knew something I didn’t know about was going on.
I knew they'd all fed me power, but it'd never occurred to me one of them might have pushed me into the future as well. It explained a lot.
It was midday. The sun was high in the sky. And this was my special place.
"How good was your time magic? Could he have arrived already and left, or not arrived at all yet."
"I've no idea."
"You never tried it before?"
"No. I’d been thinking about it for a long time, and it seemed like he needed it in order to survive."
"Probably true. Had he just jumped straight here, the king would have known about it, and gone after him."
"The king thinks he's dead, which is a good thing."
"Are you sure he isn’t dead?"
"I'm not dead," I said, dropping the invisibility.
They whirled around, the battle mage gathering power in case he needed to defend himself. I could see him relax when he recognized me. He stepped in front of the others. As the senior mage, they let him speak for them.
"Thorn?"
"Me."
"What have you done to yourself?"
I grinned at them.
"I got older."
"It's only been a day."
"For you. It's been more than seven years for me."
"How?"
I looked at the movement master.
"You said you pushed me into the future?"
"Yes, but just a day."
"You underestimated the amount of energy and the various intents all coming together at once. As well as me losing focus at the last instant."
"How far did you go?"
"I don’t know. Several thousand years at least."
He was stunned. They all were.
"No wonder you look so different," said the battle mage. "Is this what they wear in the future?"
"Where I was anyway. The future is a lot different."
"But you came back. Why?"
"I made some mistakes. Magic didn’t exist there, and I had to relearn how to use it, and figure out how to use it without the training I was supposed to get from you. Certain things I did early on, changed the future somehow."
"Changed the future? How?"
"There is none. In about two years and two weeks' time, events begin, and everyone dies. It's not urgent right now, I think."
"How do you know this?"
"Where I jumped to, had a city the size of which you couldn’t comprehend if I tried to explain it. I was forced to leave two years after I arrived there, and when I went back not long after, the city was gone, as if it never existed."
I looked at them, but they said nothing, disbelief on their faces.
"It's taken me a long time to figure out how, but I came back to try and change what I did. And if I can't, figure out how to save everyone."
A ward tingled in the back of mind. Not one of mine either. One of theirs, and I found it interesting I could pick up on it so easily.
"None of you move!" came from behind a large bush, a little way away.
As we all turned towards the voice, a tallish man stepped out. I recognized him immediately as one of the mages who'd tried to kill me.
"So, you still live, young Thorn. Your king will be so pleased to find out you're not dead after all. He was so looking forward to training you."
"I think not."
He had about a second to react to my tone of voice, and the sudden power I drew on, before I sent him to a different part of the penal island, from where
I’d sent the previous mage.
It was unlikely the two would meet, but if they did, the predators would likely be dining on whatever they left of each other.
Fifteen
"How did you do that?"
"Where did you send him?"
"Is he still alive?"
The battle and movement masters remained silent, but both regarded me with awe.
"I moved him to an island I know of, so yes he is still alive. For now. There's a particularly nasty predator there, so he may survive if he sees the first one coming."
"But how?"
"Movement magic, the same way movement mages move themselves. Needs a bit more power to move someone else though, but power isn’t one of my issues."
The movement master made a short bow towards me.
"But what if he comes back?" asked the basics mage.
"He won't."
"He's at least as powerful as any two of us combined," said the creation mage. "Even if you sent him a long way away, he will find his way back."
"I doubt it. He's not on this planet anymore."
There was silence for a full minute, as they absorbed this. What blew me away was their acceptance of what I said. They knew nothing of planets, but accepted there were more of them, simply because I said there were. I shook my head once, and waited for one of them to break the silence.
"A boy left," said the battle mage, "and not only does a man return, but he returns as a master."
He also bowed his head to me. The other three followed his lead.
"Master of some things perhaps. But there are gaps in what I can do. There are also things I can do which you wouldn’t understand if you saw me do them."
"How so?"
"The future is a strange and complicated place, compared to here."
"We'll do our best to fill in your gaps young Thorn, but you must expand our skills as well."
"There may not be time," said the healing mage. "Last reports suggested the next battle should have begun by now." He looked at me. "A war has been raging for years now, but we keep such knowledge from you youngsters, in order to stop you rushing off to it. We all expect the king to come for us any day now, to throw our skills into the next attack."
Tomorrow's Spacemage Page 4
