Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II

by Padgett Lively

  “She would have had to be with two men in rather quick succession,” Ambrosius finished for him emotionlessly. “But not as quickly as you might think. A woman can remain fertile for many days, and as fraternal twins, you and your sister, half-sister, would have come from two different ova. In this case, the sperm was from two different fathers as well.”

  “So Arthur Bradley is my father, but not Odette’s?” Odell asked, hoping to redirect the conversation away from his mother’s sex life.

  “It would appear so.”

  “And Odette’s existence…?”

  “The result of a prophecy.”

  Odell blinked. “A prophecy?” He laughed a little under his breath. “For real?”

  The man suddenly smiled. It was an oddly studied effort, yet it made his face look almost human. But he quickly reverted back to an immutable reserve that Odell was finding uncannily similar to his own mother’s brittle detachment.

  “It does sound absurd,” Ambrosius agreed as he walked over to the edge of the plateau and looked out toward the blue-tinged horizon. “But I am deadly serious, for our enemy is nothing less than time itself.”

  Odell came around the bed to stand next to him.

  “Time,” he pronounced, confidently clicking into professor mode, “is a dimension, a measure, a concept. It may even prove to be subjective. What it is not is sentient. It cannot be evil, or wrong, or express enmity. It just is.”

  “An exploding volcano does not have to express hostility to wreak havoc and destruction.” Ambrosius turned to look at Odell. “You are wiser than many of your kind, if only because of your mother. You even possess some of her abilities, as does your sister, Ettie. So you must listen to me and understand, quickly. Time constricts; that is its overriding characteristic.”

  “But—”

  Ambrosius held up his hand. “You must listen. Forget your training. This is not up for debate. I am stymied by your language. Perhaps it is better to say that in concert with certain human behaviors, time constricts. Or rather, it contracts and accumulates, it draws into itself and brings everything with it, everything. It impacts all aspects of life, organic and inorganic.”

  He stopped as if expecting an interruption. When none came, he explained, “We stand now in a multi-temporal intersection. The paths from this place move only forward—”

  “But the past…” Odell protested.

  “…cannot be accessed from here. It can only be reached through a temporal inter-dimensional flux, or TIF, as you have coined them.”

  Odell looked at him sharply. “I haven’t published—“

  “Yes, yes,” Ambrosius replied, waving an impatient hand, “we know of your research. It is not surprising, as Ivy’s son, that you would have some ability with time travel.”

  Odell only stared at him silently, so Ambrosius continued, “This intersection is where the prime timeline is constructed second by second. Ideally it moves forward unhindered by outside forces as each new decision is made, as each unforeseen natural occurrence unfolds, and so forth.”

  Odell looked around him and asked, “Alternate timelines? Parallel universes?”

  “They exist, but only in the most fragmentary way. They are like shadows, used mostly as a resource of possibilities that the prime timeline draws upon as it moves forward.”

  Odell’s brow creased, and he looked at Ambrosius. “So, whether this process is natural or the result of interference, there is only ever one dominant timeline?”

  Ambrosius nodded reluctantly, “An incomplete explanation, but somewhat correct.”

  Unused to his pronouncements being found wanting, Odell grunted irritably.

  Ambrosius didn’t seem to notice as he explained further, “While this process is a natural one, the place where we now stand is not a natural occurrence. It has been made by human hands, or rather, those of the Liberi.”

  “Liberi… children?” Odell’s Latin was sketchy, but he knew that word. “Who are the Liberi?”

  Ambrosius furrowed his brow in a momentary gesture of frustration. “It is confusing, I know. We have been called by many names and have been depicted in folktales throughout history, proditoris aevus, or Time Traitor, being the most common. Liberi, however, is what we call ourselves, although it is ironic that we stopped having children long, long ago.”

  “But, Ivy… my mother?”

  “Ah, you’ve hit upon the prophecy.” He attempted another stiff smile. “But I get ahead of myself.”

  Ambrosius walked back to the bed and sat down.

  Odell was reluctant to join him there, unsure in what context, if any, this man had availed himself of his mother’s bed. But it being the only piece of furniture available, Odell sat down at the headboard and leaned back against it.

  “This intersection, as well as your TIFs, was built over long millennia by my people as a way to more effectively fight time constriction. That time has found a way to use some of our tools against us, is not surprising.”

  Odell allowed an edge of annoyance to creep into his voice, “You speak as if time is thinking… planning.”

  “It is, but not in the way you understand. It is a force, inexorable, relentless in the pursuit of its own nature.” He paused, searching for words. “You once had a prophet, a great man, who said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ ”

  “Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Odell informed him.

  “Yes.” Ambrosius nodded his head. “It is a fine sentiment, a grand motivation, but it is wrong. Outside of human thought, there is no moral universe. There is only time, and it does not arc toward justice or any other human quality. It does not know right from wrong. It only is. It only does. Yes, time dilates and lengthens, but we have found that when mixed with certain human activities it constricts, choking out life, breaking it down to its basic components, accumulating its most fundamental building blocks.”

  “But this is what I have said—”

  “No, you said it cannot be the enemy, because it is not sentient, but it finds and uses sentient beings to do its bidding.”

  Odell stared at him, practically speechless. “You… you cannot be serious,” he sputtered. “You are suggesting that time uses people to promote its own ends?”

  “You are incredulous, but have you never asked yourself why people want power, money, and land? Why they accumulate? Why they are never content with all of some, or some of all? Why history seems to repeat the same story over and over? The same mistakes?”

  “Yes… I mean no, of course I have. Who hasn’t? But, well, it’s human nature.”

  “You are correct,” Ambrosius agreed. “But it is also the nature of humans to expand—their minds, their emotions. Even more importantly, to give, to make connections, to build anything, everything… homes, communities, relationships. Only under these circumstances can time expand as well, but its primary nature is to break these things down, to contract and accumulate. It is a volatile mixture, time and human nature.

  “Those in power are often viewed as the strongest, but they are in reality almost always the weakest of humanity. If they did not succumb to the lure of power and wealth, if the need to accumulate did not dominate all others, the evolution of my kind would never have been necessary. The universe could be maintained in balance through the efforts of us all.”

  “I think that is what he meant,” Odell said contemplatively.

  “Who?”

  “Martin Luther King,” he replied. “He didn’t mean that there was some magical moral universe that created justice. I believe he meant that through the efforts of us all and with constant vigilance, we would arrive at justice, at long last.”

  A surprisingly natural smile played about Ambrosius’s lips. “It is too many years since I have spoken to one of your kind.”

  “So we can blame this all on time,” Odell concluded skeptically, “war, famine, bigotry, and all that ills us.”

  Ambrosius rose and paced a little to and fro. “No,
these things would exist without time’s influence; only their persistence and overwhelming prevalence can be blamed on time. What time does, in collusion with human behavior, is make them stronger, harder to fight; it amplifies them. And because it is time, it never tires of the fight. That is why we came into being.”

  “Time Traitors,” Odell murmured, and then more loudly, “Just what exactly do you do?”

  “We live very long, for one. And we possess abilities and technologies that can create things such as this intersection and the TIFs. We monitor the timeline and try to stop the worst of it, but we grow few and often we fail.”

  “Like when I created the Temporatus and redirected the timeline.”

  “Yes,” Ambrosius nodded in agreement. “That was the first instance of time using our own tools, in this case the TIFs, against us. But it had a fortuitous outcome.”

  Odell looked at him puzzled and then said with dawning understanding, “The prophecy…”

  “A Time Traitor had not been born for several centuries,” Ambrosius explained. “We had evolved separately from humans over millennia. At first we were strong and our allies, like your Martin Luther King, Jr., were many. But our numbers have dwindled, as have our allies. The desire for money, power, fame, seems to have invaded every community, every household, and every individual. One can fight these forces here and there, but when it becomes the overriding desire and passion of so many…” He shook his head in a strangely affecting gesture of helplessness. Odell watched him in silence.

  Finally, Ambrosius sighed deeply and cleared his throat. “It was Ivy who had the vision. She was the last to have been born, the youngest of the Liberi. She saw a baby, a girl, who would be stronger than all of us combined, a child who could flow effortlessly between dimensions, who could see into many timelines, one who could begin to control the very nature of time.”

  Odell hadn’t known he was holding his breath until he blew it out on one word, “Odette.”

  “Yes.” Ambrosius nodded in agreement. “Your sister.”

  “Does she know this?”

  Odell caught a flicker of some strong emotion in the depths of Ambrosius’s eyes. “Partially, yes,” he admitted.

  “We knew Odette would be born,” he explained, “but not when or where. We searched the timeline, but found no trace of her. Your mother selected a time and place, seemingly at random. She met a man, Arthur Bradley, and you were born, but your sister died. It was a devastating blow.”

  Odell remembered it as if it were some ancient history written about someone else. He also remembered his mother, so cold, so unloving.

  “Then you, unwittingly of course, and with the assistance of some nefarious characters, brought forth an alternate history, changing the timeline. It was one where Ivy had left me only a short time before meeting the rather unpleasant alternate incarnation of Arthur Bradley.”

  “My father, again.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why? Why was she so bitter, even after Odette had been born?”

  “To insert herself randomly into the prime timeline, Ivy had to exist in several different shadow dimensions at the same time. This is very difficult to do and extremely taxing. We can all do it to some extent, but Ivy was the most gifted. She, however, was never entirely whole in any one of them. And her fate in most, if not all, was… tragic.”

  Odell was suddenly filled with an overwhelming sadness. “I guess that explains a lot.” He stood, grasping hard at the headboard. “It is a terrible thing to ask of someone.”

  “No one asked it of her; she offered.” Ambrosius turned to face Odell, his eyes veiled, his mouth set in a grim line. “Ivy understood the risks and the costs, but we had no choice.

  “She knew that to bring forth this child, she would have to die; a part of the prophecy she held back from me until it was too late.” His face reverted back to its original frozen mask. “And she did,” he said grimly, “die, that is, many times.”

  They were both silent, staring out at the far-off mountains with pointed peaks as flatly one-dimensional as a child’s drawing.

  Finally, Odell asked, “Why am I here? By all accounts, I shouldn’t exist, and neither should Ettie. If Ivy’s goal was to give birth to Odette, then when the timeline was reset, Ivy would have no purpose there, and I shouldn’t have been born.”

  Ambrosius shook his head, and Odell felt rather than saw his amusement. “Didn’t I tell you it wasn’t that simple?”

  “No, you didn’t,” Odell huffed, and then laughed when Ambrosius shrugged his shoulders. “You mean, you don’t know.”

  “Super-evolved humans we may be, but we are still only human. There is much that remains a mystery.”

  “Great,” Odell said with resignation, “What do I have to do?”

  “We now believe that the alternate reality where Odette was born is a default timeline. Any unnatural interference will always result in some variation of it.”

  Odell gave him a quizzical look and opened his mouth to speak.

  “Yes, yes,” Ambrosius anticipated him, “one would assume infinite variation, but time is always seeking to contract and will try to revert the timeline to a period of tremendous social constriction. And even within this alternate reality, the differences can number in the billions, although it may be only a small change.” He sighed a little sadly. “We were confident that we had discovered the pattern, a formula that would, when interference occurred, help us determine in what direction the timeline would veer and easily correct it. So confident were we… well, we felt secure in initiating our own historical mission to… um… to promote a more expansive future.”

  Odell noted his hesitancy. “What happened?”

  “We don’t know,” he answered bluntly. “We believe there has been a seismic upheaval in the timeline. The dimensions are jumbled and fragmented, making it especially difficult to see how it is manifesting in the present or future.” Ambrosius made an uncharacteristically agitated gesture. “It is almost as if the interference is random or, ah… childish even. That is why we need Odette so desperately now. She is more capable of sifting through the obstructions.”

  “And you need me,” Odell asked again, “to do what?”

  “You must take over Odette’s mission,” he answered. “While she searches the dimensions for this latest breach, you must address a specific need in the past.”

  Odell looked at him questioningly. “Okay, where then?”

  “It is a time of expansion and connection,” Ambrosius explained. “A time of much promise, but also of missed opportunities. It was to be the beginning of an epoch of long and peaceful balance, and it is there you must change the course of history.”

  Odell stiffened. “Change history? Not preserve it?”

  Ambrosius cleared his throat uncomfortably and admitted, “It is not ideal, but it is the only way to reverse the damage that time has done in the ensuing centuries.”

  Odell stared down at his hands uncertainly. When he looked up again, Ambrosius had stood and walked over to the edge of the plateau. Odell joined him there.

  “Okay, when?”

  “It is a time not entirely unfamiliar to you, only a few years from when you were held captive,” Ambrosius replied. “But before I go into detail, I must ask if you understand. Not that you believe, or even agree with what I have told you, but that you truly understand what you are up against.”

  Odell turned his gaze from the horizon to look at the impassive profile.

  “Basically,” he replied dryly, “time is the Devil.”

  Nine

  AVA PEERED AT the lit screen of her handheld palmavox and twisted the dial to expand the image. She had never before been tempted to explore the tunnels running beneath the campus, and today was no exception. What drove her into the dark, musty, and enclosed spaces that she normally would have avoided at all costs was the need to reach Odell without being detected by the constabulary patrol that had followed her last night and then again this morning.r />
  She had seen various maps of the tunnels before. Some included passageways that were only rumored to exist. Although, she personally didn’t believe one could have escaped discovery by the avid student sleuths who had traversed these subterranean byways for at least the last century. However, standing now at the intersection of two obscure tunnels, she began to suspect that her path was indeed leading to one such hidden gem.

  Odell’s message had explicitly said that she was not to attempt the passage if there were any possibility of being observed. Although dimly lit by flickering lights along the walls, Ava clicked on her electric torch to search the tunnels more effectively for any other people. Detecting none, she put the torch back in her bag and walked forward to stand at the intersection of a narrow X created by the two crossing tunnels.

  Pipes snaked up and down the walls and hung in profusion from the ceiling. At this time of year, they carried hot vapor to heat the buildings, effectively creating a somewhat tropical atmosphere in the tunnels as well.

  Ava loosened the high-buttoned collar of her shirt and was grateful she had eschewed the nicety of a corset for this particular outing. As it was, her dress was practical without being entirely unfashionable. She wore a blue and white striped shirt over which was thrown her favorite safari jacket. Cinched with a wide black belt, her heavy cotton navy-blue skirt stopped just above worn, yet still serviceable boots. She had piled her thick, tightly coiled hair atop her head, but had left the matching wide-brimmed plush hat back at her office.

  Having memorized the map, Ava tucked the palmavox into one of her many jacket pockets. She tugged her leather gloves more securely onto her hands and pushed the canvas bag slung over her shoulder so that it rested against the small of her back.

  As per Odell’s instructions, she found the third pipe up from the floor and counted its sections as it crisscrossed the wall and finally veered off down the right-most tunnel. When she reached the twelfth section, she stopped.

  Ava tentatively touched the pipe. Even through her gloves, she could tell it was cold. She stepped back and saw that the brickwork right above this section appeared rippled, but still looked like a solid piece. This was an optical illusion according to Odell.