"There is a spacefaring species out there, and they attacked us without trying to communicate first. I fear you'll meet them before you can defend yourselves, and be swallowed up by whatever empire they possess."
"But you said you saw us here in the future?"
"Yes. But I didn’t look at what kind of situation your people were in then."
"Not to worry I think. We have mages. If necessary, we'll hide. We know the form of the walls you create, and defensive walls will be something we can work on for future defense. This is now our world, and we will be ready for whoever comes. Your part is done. Leave us to do ours. May the civilizations we build, one day know each other again."
Once again, I nodded, and jumped back to the ship.
On the way home, I stopped off in a system with a rather large fleet presence. A battle had obviously been recently fought, and one side had lost. Curiosity had me looking at the species who'd won.
They appeared to be plants.
Fifty Four
The following day, we loaded up the last remaining ship.
It was the first one I’d created, much smaller than the others. But it only needed to move about two villages worth of people. My own, and about the same number of people who'd either been outcast from all the other kingdoms, or had known people well enough to be invited to join them.
A good number were mages of one type or another. And one was an Oracle. When everyone else was gone, my checking for anyone missed, showed her still at her little hut in the woods. She hadn't said anything about wanting to stay, and I’d known the Matriarchy would not be taking her. I’d expected her to simply turn up, but she hadn't.
I copied her entire glade to a spot outside my village, and moved her there. Concentrating on finding anyone else either left behind or hiding, I found a number of small groups of people, and moved them to the town square. Some of them were not happy about it, but I took the time to convince them staying would be suicide. Some didn’t believe me anyway, but I wasn't leaving anyone behind.
The Oracle was the last to leave. The girls were on the bridge in orbit, waiting for me to move the big ship up there, so we could all go home. But the Oracle hadn't left her hut, even though the whole glade had been copied aboard.
"Not coming with us?" I asked her, appearing on the other side of her skrying platter from her.
"I have no place anywhere."
"Not true. You simply haven't found it yet."
"And you think it's with your people?"
"Perhaps. Or maybe it's with a people none of us have met yet."
"How could that be?"
"Space is huge. You've seen a lot of it. Maybe not as much as I have, but enough to know anything is possible out there. And where we're going, people travel space, and other species will soon be discovered. You could play a role in that. Maybe you're essential to that."
"I doubt it. No-one has valued what I can see so far."
"I have."
"I guess so. But I feel connected here. Will I where we're going?"
"I can put you back where your hut was, assuming the clearing still exists."
"But when?"
"You can probably tell me more about the time shift involved. It’s a long way into the future, but going back will be a great deal more precise than coming here was."
"But there's no magic there?"
"Not yet. But the mages we bring will change all that. You can be a part of shaping the society to come."
"If they let me."
"They will. I'll see to it they will."
"That sounds ominous."
"It shouldn’t. I won't be leading anything, just making sure what we build is for all."
She sighed.
"But you'll let me go off on my own if I decide on solitude?"
"Of course."
She was silent for a time.
"Can I bring my skrying platter with me? Not this one. I’d prefer to keep the original, instead of this copy and the copy on the ship I know you made."
"No problems."
"Let's go then."
I moved the ship into orbit, not far from Jen's ship, moved her to the bridge with her original stump and skrying platter, water and all, and myself to my island. A few seconds later, there was nothing but dust there, and I jumped to the bridge behind her.
The Oracle was looking around the bridge in wonder. The others had just turned to see who it was appearing, but not yet reacted.
"It looks bigger than I thought," she said. There was no awe or wonder there, just interest. She saw Jen frown. "I've seen it a few times over the last couple of days, as you left each time. It's all a mystery to me, but I know you know what you’re all doing, so I can accept it all."
"Welcome," said Jen, finding her voice. "Take a seat." She looked at me, and nodded towards the stump. "Can you find a better place for that please?"
I grinned, and moved it a spare stateroom in my part of the ship.
"Are we ready to go home?" asked Lea, grinning.
"Not quite," I responded. "We have a slight detour first."
The ship moved to park on top of the other ship, as before, and locked down.
A moment later, two years had passed.
Fifty Five
"I don’t think we have much time."
The battle mage looked at me. We were standing inside a cave, in the hills above where the castle still stood.
"Why do you say that?"
I pointed to a severed hand, still clasping a gun. It was badly decomposing, indicating it'd been here for some time. Most likely around two weeks. Nearby were piles of dust, and scattered around the cavern, was everything I'd vanished from my first ever vanishing, through to the guns I'd removed from the station as Jen and I had escaped. I'd aimed for just before the first missile arrived, but had obviously cut it too close.
"What is here is everything I vanished up until shortly before the first missile. It could be as little as minutes now. We better go."
I looked around. Part of my teen years was here, starting from the day my magic had first manifested. But looking at the odds and ends scattered around, there was nothing I wanted.
"Better do what you came here for then."
I concentrated my intent, and a force wall came into being around the inside of the cavern, and the cave system it was part of.
Back on the ship, my sight looked down from above, and showed on one of the screens. Almost immediately, the ground seemed to shudder. There was no explosion like we'd seen in the skrying, so the wall was holding. But I could feel pressure on it. I cast out a second sight to look at the castle, put it up on another screen, and watched it start to crumble.
We watched for several more hours. By that time, the castle was gone, as was every village in my kingdom. The other castles and every other building across the land mass, was also in the process of disintegrating.
"I don’t understand," said the Oracle.
This wasn’t the first time she'd said this, as seeing my sight on a screen had surprised her.
"Where's the explosions?" asked Jen. She nodded. "Thorn put up a force wall around where the explosions were going to happen. Nothing gets through his walls."
"But why is this different to my skrying? We saw the explosions. We saw massive ejections of rocks, dirt, and dust. Why is this different?"
I sighed. I'd read theories about this. All eyes fixed on me.
"The thing about looking at the future is, the act of looking at it, changes it. You see something happening, and it changes the way you think, and can cause you to act differently. In this case, the devastation I saw made me concerned about the whales and other marine life. So I've done something different, putting a force wall in place, hoping to reduce the effects."
"But I see the true future. It can't change like this."
"Maybe you don't." She looked shocked. "Maybe you see the potential timelines, and the most likely becomes what you see."
"Sounds feasible," said Jess. "You can't show something d
evastating to Thorn, and expect him to not do anything about it."
"And perhaps that is why you showed him that for," added Lea. "So he would change something."
"No," she said, the word drawn out.
"We have plenty of time to figure it out," I said.
"We'll help," added the battle mage.
She looked dubious, but refrained from saying anything else.
"Do we stay here and keep watching?" I asked. "Or do we move forward a month, and see what the result was?"
The consensus was to move forward, and I was pretty sure no-one wanted to hang around, just so I could watch the other end of my past, in normal time.
After moving us a month into the future, the screens showed exactly the same thing. A wider look though, showed no sign of any building anywhere. Both the volcanoes had still erupted, and the sky was dark with smoke and ash. Very few trees were still standing, and a long way away, there were still huge waves making their way around the planet. My island looked like it had been washed clean, and it was on the other side of the world.
The force wall was still there, and the hills looked mostly unchanged. When I dropped the wall, most of the hills dropped into the cave system, and below. Rather than wait hours for the dust to settle, I pushed the dust down, and forced it to settle.
Now the hills looked like I remembered from my five year wait. But they were substantially lower now, from what I remembered from my second life.
"What happened?" asked Lea.
"The force wall held the hills up. When I removed it, everything above dropped into the presumably much deeper holes created by the explosions. The shock waves still went out. All I changed was preventing the dust from the explosions entering the atmosphere, and it cost a lot of the ground below the cave system."
"How is that?" asked the Oracle.
"Instead of the explosions going upward, and creating dust from what was above, the explosions went downward, creating huge holes. Everything above fell into the holes."
"So no ice age?" asked Tasha.
"Hard to know. There is no snow down there now, and there was going to be. So it has changed. Only one way to find out. Be back in a minute."
I jumped down to where the village had been. There was nothing left but the outline of what had been there. Even though it was summer, the air was crisp and cold, as if winter was beginning. Winter would undoubtedly bring snow, and probably lots of it. The village had rarely seen snow, so this cold, now, meant temperatures had dropped a lot. Maybe not an ice age, but I expected winters would be really difficult for a long time to come.
But this was better than I’d seen, and the effects on the whales and other marine life, would hopefully be minimal. It would be cold for a long time, but maybe I’d stopped the eternal winter, and iced up oceans.
Back on the ship, I relayed what I’d found.
"Time to go home now?" asked Lea.
"Not yet. I need to do a little tidying up."
I moved to my bridge, and settled myself in my once normal seat. My sight went out to the first of the colonies. It appeared to be doing well. A quick check of the ship to ensure no-one was inside, and I discovered it'd been substantially stripped of anything which could be moved, and was useable. I'd not expected it, but probably should have. A thought, and the ship crumbled into dust, which slowly settled to the bottom of the sea. I left the jetty intact. Shocked faces would report the ship vanishing to the rest of the colony.
I repeated this four more times. The amount of stripping varied, but none of it was hard technology. Some low tech stuff could probably kick-start technological development ahead of schedule, but I doubted it. They had no understanding of what any of it did. Even a mattress was something they couldn’t yet duplicate. Striving for it might make reinventing them quicker, but then, they'd known about them anyway, and having them for as long as they lasted, wasn’t going to change much. The mages could copy them, but copying wasn’t inventing them, or understanding how they were made. And with a bit more thought, maybe not. Copying required the materials to be at hand. And not all of them were.
Satisfied I’d not left anything which might substantially change the way things went in the future, I walked back to the main bridge.
"Now can we go home?" asked Lea.
I nodded, concentrated on the jump, destination firmly in mind, and we shifted.
Pads and screens lit up, as communications were re-established. Both the Oracle and battle mage jumped in surprise. I let the girls concentrate on what was coming in. Finally, Lea turned to me.
"Everything looks normal to me."
I could feel shock showing on my face.
"What do you mean normal? Has anything changed at all?"
"Not as far as I can see."
"Me either," said Jen. "Coms appear to have had a couple of minute drop out. Nothing more."
"History texts seem to be the same," said Tasha.
"Our orange cousins seem to be the same as well."
"How can nothing have changed?" I yelled.
Fifty Six
The girls kept checking.
I was going to put the village back where it had been, but first it needed the excavations I'd made to find the remains, replaced. I was about to do it, when a thought made me stop.
The village hadn't been in a great position as far as water was concerned. And now, there was the whole land mass to choose from.
After a little pondering, I jumped back to the ships, where the creation mages had already constructed the jetty to shore, and stood looking inland from it. I realized I’d put us just off from where the main port of the second life city had been. It had a small river mouth nearby, and was a natural harbor.
Decision made without really thinking about it, I recreated the village not far from the water. Easy walking to the river, the harbor, and to nearby forests. Looking outward, I found the land teaming with life, which hadn't been hunted in millennia. The bay was full of fish, and other potential seafood.
The whales were singing!
With the village in place, the villagers disembarked, and went in search of their homes. The others gathered in the main square, while the mages went about the task of creating a second village for them, further up along the river.
I cast my sight over to the other side of the landmass, and found, somewhat to my surprise, the clearing was still there. The Oracle's hut and belongings appeared there as I copied them. She was waiting nearby, and I nodded to her. But she didn’t ask to be moved there.
The mages didn’t need me for new house creation. With the girls following me, I walked back to where the monument still stood. The Oracle looked at it strangely. Her nod seemed to indicate she'd come to some understanding, but I didn’t ask.
"You've seen this before," said Tasha. "Haven't you?"
"Yes. I didn't know what it was. But I have seen it several times. I don’t understand how though."
"Potential timelines," I said.
"Actually, something else is bothering me."
"What?" asked Jen.
"Now I'm standing here, closer to two of my skryings with Thorn, having seen them makes no sense."
Now she mentioned it, I understood why.
"How so?" asked Jess.
"Twice now, I've seen events in the future. I mean, the future from here, not back where we just were."
"I feel a but coming," said Tasha.
"But, that’s impossible."
"Why?" asked Lea.
"Because the timeline changed. Something done in the future, changed the past, and removed the civilization which was here. But what I saw was events before the change, but seen after the change. And that's impossible."
"Apparently not," I said, grinning.
"It is. Even if I see possible futures, there is no way I can see a future no longer there."
The memory of a face popped in. I could see she'd had the same memory flash.
"Maybe you had help?" I suggested.
"Her?
"
"Her who?" asked Tasha.
"No idea," I said. "Just a face we saw at the same time as the skryings. Could have been a higher being?"
"Huh?" exclaimed Lea.
"Some people would call such a being a god. And do regularly in novels. But we'll probably never know, unless she chooses to reveal herself one day."
"I hope not."
Lea shuddered, and we laughed. But I had to agree with her. Meeting a higher being was, at the least, daunting.
"None of this really makes any sense, but maybe that’s the point."
"I have a theory," said Tasha.
"Sorry, what?"
"A theory about how the civilization which vanished from here came to be."
"Go on."
"Originally, a really powerful mage came along at a key time, when the five kingdoms were at war for survival, population pressures driving the need to expand. It was maybe a decade or two later than when we were there, but I think Thorn still became powerful enough to not only return from the future he was sent to, to learn, but he became powerful enough to move kingdoms. His time here in the civilization broadened his understanding of science and the universe in general, and he took that back with him. His need for peace exerted itself later in life, but he only moved four of the kingdoms. His own kingdom remained where it was, and expanded across the whole now empty continent, evolving over time, to form the city he was sent to, closing the loop."
"How would I know about other planets?"
"You'd have been lying on a beach somewhere listening to whale song, and cast your sight into the heavens. You already knew about other planets, but now your sight could visit them. You’d have seen what life was out there already, and curiosity would have caused you to find empty planets where it was possible to live. And maybe between you and a certain Oracle, how to create peace would have come to you."
"But ships?"
"You’d have upsized a house to hold a whole village, and found how to make it water tight. Then upsized it again to hold a whole kingdom. Moving it across space might have taken you longer, but you’d have figured it out."
"But that isn’t what happened."
Tomorrow's Spacemage Page 16
