The Shores Beyond Time

by Kevin Emerson

  “A couple more blocks.” Liam tilts his face to feel the sun, smaller now than it will be in his final days on Mars, but still great and orange and bright. When he looks away, blinking the green blobs from his eyes, he notices the skitter of cockroaches beneath a bench. They make him smile.

  “You didn’t answer my other question,” says Iris.

  “Oh, sorry. What?”

  “The chronometer. Did you ever experience time differently before you acquired it?”

  Liam’s hand drifts to his wrist, wishing to feel the smooth metal of the chronologist’s silver watch, but it is gone. And yet, since he woke up in his present, he has found that he no longer needs it to move through time, or at least into the past. Moments like the one on the balcony are just there, behind his eyes. He can push out of his present and journey through them, seemingly with ease. “Not really,” he says. “Unless you count worrying too much about the future. But that’s just anxiety stuff.”

  “Perhaps,” says Iris, “and yet it is also possible that your ability to worry about futures so acutely is in fact a bit of sixth-viewpoint awareness—”

  “When you say viewpoints, you mean dimensions.”

  “That is your word for them, yes. There is no perfect translation in your language.”

  “And how many of those are there?”

  “That is the question,” says Iris. “From the data I’m assimilating, it seems that your scientists have theorized twelve dimensions of reality. But it is possible that there are quite a few more. Most humans only experience four. However, you have already perceived the fifth and sixth, and you’re just beginning.”

  Those last words cause a tremor of worry. “It was the watch that changed me. The chronologist said so.”

  “Yes, but part of what I need to ascertain is whether the watch could have changed anyone of your kind, or just you.”

  Liam shrugs. Iris said a lot of things like this. “And how’s that going?”

  “I am making progress.”

  “So you think I’m still changing?” Liam asks.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I guess so. It used to be hard for me to push even a little bit out of my own timeline.” He looked around the street. “Now we’ve left it completely. It’s still a little weird though.” This move—leaving his past self—does cause a strange feeling inside, a sort of emptiness, like a wind blowing through him. “You’re helping me do this, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but less each time. You’re very impressive.”

  “Thanks,” Liam says, but inside, more worry. These changes were what brought him face-to-face with that supernova, with the doorway—and with the future he is not yet ready to face. You can’t hide here forever, he thinks to himself.

  But maybe just a little longer.

  He turns onto a side street lined with storefronts. “Here it is.”

  They enter a VirtCom boutique. Its flex-glass cases are filled with devices to augment one’s virtual experience, both wearable and for the home. Liam finds what he is looking for in the Wellness area: a selection of slim wristbands called atomic watches. Each has a simple display of only the date and time, shielded beneath a tough plastic layer, the band made of a flexible polymer. The watches are designed to keep precise time, completely independent of the VirtCom or any network. His link has been error-riddled since he started traveling like this. Even rebooting it is barely enough to keep it from glitching.

  Liam selects a brown band made to look like old Earth leather. The display has green numbers against a white background.

  “Fascinating store,” says Iris. “Is that what you need?”

  “It should work,” Liam says, except he needs to scan the bar code on the back, and his link, as usual, is currently flashing multiple error messages. Besides, it’s not like he’d have any credits, or like his link, from the future, would be able to sync with this version of the Mars VirtCom in the past.

  “That’s not really an issue for you, though, is it,” says Iris.

  No. It isn’t. Liam closes his fist around the watch and looks over his shoulder at the ibex-shaped bot running the store. When he sees it’s busy, he pushes away, out of the store and out of the moment completely, back into the blur of the timestream, where the events of his life stretch in both directions like an arrangement of bubbles. He turns toward his present and pushes that way, flowing through his last years on Mars, through the fiery blasts of that final day and at Saturn, into the dark of space, the long void of stasis on the way to Delphi, on and on. As he goes, he is aware of a faint haze beyond these events, the suggestion, like shapes in a fog, of those other versions of his past, other realities and timelines that he’s wondered about.

  “I can show you,” says Iris, still in the corner of his eye.

  “I know,” but saying that causes a tremor of fear.

  “Don’t be afraid. I told you, Liam, I’m a friend.”

  She does feel like a friend, but . . . “I still don’t know who you are.”

  “Don’t you, though?”

  Maybe he does. Because even though she is a human-like shape, even though she talks like him, and walks with him on Mars, he senses that she is something far greater, and far more powerful. He can almost feel the energy emanating from her, making ripples not only in his timestream, but in all of time. “You’re what’s on the other side of the doorway.”

  “I am.”

  That vision he glimpsed . . .

  “You’re Dark Star.” There, he has finally said it, and his nerves ring throughout his body. That means she’s part of the Drove, and—

  Iris makes a sound like crystal chimes, like laughter. “Oh no, I am nothing like the Drove. That’s not something you need to worry about.”

  She is in his every thought. “But they—”

  “So many questions,” Iris says, “always spinning you around. I want to answer them all, but I must ask for your patience, Liam. We have to take these things slowly. That is why I wanted to introduce myself here, in your past, where it’s safe. So you would know that I’m safe. That you can trust me. That, above all else, I want what’s best for you.”

  Liam nods. “So I’m not going to see you in the future?”

  “Oh, you will, but not just yet.”

  “Someone’s coming.”

  They’re getting close now, to his present, if he can still even call it that.

  I can. If for no other reason than because he can see almost nothing beyond it. Ever since he woke up, his future has been a murky darkness. Not even impressions.

  “I’m sorry about that,” says Iris. “As my systems power up, they tend to scramble perception in the lower dimensions. But don’t worry, soon the interference will clear and your future will again be visible. And once I achieve full functionality, well, just wait until you see what is possible then.”

  “Okay.” But that darkness feels cold. Even terrifying. It makes him want to stay away. To keep running to the past like this.

  “We don’t have to go back just yet, if you don’t want to.”

  “I know,” says Liam. Around him are the events on the Scorpius, flying after Phoebe in the skim drone, rescuing her from space, the terrible sight of the supernova, and his very last memories, of struggling to get to the doorway before he and Phoebe froze to death . . . The present is just ahead, the last light on the shore of the vast, formless ocean of the future. Deep breath. “I need to see what happens next.”

  “Suit yourself. I still have much to do as I power up. Don’t be afraid,” she adds.

  But he is. So very afraid, of what he doesn’t even know. It’s like a hundred different fears have swirled into a single roiling monster with a mind of its own, slithering about, fangs gnashing, tail slapping, threatening to devour him from the inside out.

  “Until next time,” says Iris.

  A familiar phrase . . . from when?

  He doesn’t remember. There’s so much to remember . . . but not now. Can’t avoid it any longer. L
iam swallows hard and pushes back to the present.

  4

  EARTH YEAR: 2256

  TIME TO DARK STAR FUNCTIONALITY: 16H:49M

  “Liam. Hey.”

  Liam’s eyes flickered open. Where was he? Darkness, lines like a ceiling. His bedroom? The research station? The Cosmic Cruiser? His head ached, his mouth dry, his stomach quavering.

  Images washed around in his mind like he was drifting in waves: the avenue on Mars, the balcony, the hangar on the Scorpius with Mina’s stasis pod beneath him.

  And then all of them burned in the boiling light of Centauri A, about to go nova, no no no—

  “Come on, wake up. Someone’s coming.”

  A silhouette beside him.

  Liam pushed onto his elbows, causing a fresh wave of pain inside his skull. He was lying in a stasis pod—an older, boxy model, its controls dark.

  A hand on his arm. Lavender skin, speckled with short gray bristles.

  “You okay?”

  Phoebe’s face was so different: the human disguise gone, revealing her Telphon skin, her white braid coiled around the top of her head. Only her eyes appeared human; she had to wear the adapters to see. If anything, Liam thought it made her look stranger: like she was two people mixed together.

  “Still weird seeing me like this, isn’t it?”

  “No.” Except it was. And yet she was still Phoebe, his friend, who had risked her life so that they could save their families and their people, together.

  Who was also an alien from another planet who had lied to him for years. That was still weird, too.

  “Where are we?” she asked, glancing around the compartment. As she did, she coughed lightly.

  “Back on the Artemis, I think,” said Liam, surveying the sparse furniture and bathroom, these primitive-looking stasis pods.

  Liam and Phoebe had ended up on the Artemis before, when they’d first encountered that strange doorway in space. After barely escaping Barro and Tarra in the ruins on Delphi, Liam and Phoebe had used the chronologist’s watch to travel into Phoebe’s past, to her home world of Telos, before the humans had razed it with Phase One. On their way back to their present, the watch had started to go haywire, and they had run into the doorway. When they had taken a closer look, it had pulled them in, but the watch had prevented them from being sucked all the way through, and instead deposited them on the Artemis, nearly thirty years in the past.

  As far as anyone on Mars or in the colonial fleet had ever known, the Artemis had been lost to some unknown calamity. When Liam and Phoebe had arrived, the Artemis had been investigating the same doorway, and had become caught in its pull, but the chronologist had rescued the two of them just moments before the ship had actually been drawn through, so they couldn’t be entirely sure of its fate.

  Based on their current surroundings, it appeared that the Artemis had indeed survived.

  “But where are we?” asked Phoebe. “Or should I be asking when?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Liam, and yet that wasn’t entirely true.

  “The last thing I remember is jumping out of the Styrlax ship,” said Phoebe. “It was so cold. I thought I—” She blinked at tears. “You saved me.”

  “Barely,” said Liam. “You were out there over a minute. I think only that second heart of yours kept you alive.”

  “There’s something I should thank my parents for,” Phoebe said with a brief grin. “If they’re even still alive.”

  “They are,” said Liam. “At least, they were when we left. I talked to your mom. I told her about the countermeasures the starliners were planning, so they could escape.”

  “Thank you,” said Phoebe. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Yeah I did,” he said, and yet he wondered for just a moment: Would she have done the same? Phoebe’s feelings were much more complicated when it came to humans. She’d made an exception for him, of course, and for his parents, and so yes, Liam figured she would have. Probably. “I tried to fly us back to the Scorpius,” said Liam, “but the skim drone died.”

  The fiery image of Centauri A flashed in his head, causing a ripple of fear like it had so many times before. He had been seeing it in his mind’s eye more and more on their journey from Mars, eventually learning that it was, in fact, in his future. He squeezed his eyes shut. Had to remind himself: not your future anymore. You escaped, you’re okay. “We were stranded,” he said, “so I used the watch to get to the doorway.”

  Phoebe rubbed his arm with her bristled fingers. “You used the hug function,” she said, referring to their term to describe how Liam and Phoebe time traveled together with the watch.

  “Yeah,” said Liam. “I barely remember going through it.” He glanced at his wrist, wishing he still had the chronologist’s watch. He’d tried looking back at his recent past to see what had happened to it, as well as where exactly they were now, but he’d been unconscious from the moment they’d reached the doorway until waking up here in this compartment, and so there was only a gray void there in his timestream, similar to how periods of stasis looked. He’d considered trying to push out of his own timeline to see more—Iris surely could have helped him—but Iris was a whole other situation, one that he barely understood. She almost seemed like a dream . . . yet he knew better. And her presence meant that wherever the Artemis was, Dark Star was close by.

  Outside the compartment, echoing footsteps were drawing closer.

  Phoebe coughed again. “The door’s locked. I checked before I woke you. Like we’re prisoners. Do you even know how long we’ve been here?”

  Liam checked the one link they shared between them, which was in the port on his sleeve. It was flashing with error messages. He opened the home screen. Only one of the blinking messages, connection failure, had to do with the link being unable to sync with the Artemis, which had technology almost thirty years older than this device. The other messages, internal clock discrepancy, date field error, overlapping time code, all had to do with what Liam had been doing in the few moments that he had been awake before Phoebe but had pretended to be asleep.

  Moments for her, anyway.

  He tapped to the clock. Amid its angry flashing he saw that the link thought the time was 7:04 a.m. Earth time, April 19 of the year 2256, for whatever that was worth. He looked at Phoebe and shrugged. “Maybe whoever is coming can tell us.” He raised his eyebrows hopefully, and yet his insides roiled with dread.

  The footsteps stopped just outside. Now a series of beeps: a code being entered into the keypad lock. Phoebe turned toward the door, crossing her arms and stiffening.

  In this unobserved moment, Liam quickly pushed up his sleeve, revealing the slim atomic watch. While the link said it was 7:04 a.m., the atomic watch read 11:46 a.m. Better to round up; call it five hours that he had spent in his past, while no time at all had passed here in the present. He reset the watch to match the link time, pulled a tiny black cylinder from the hip pocket of his thermal wear—an ink marker, which he’d also gotten on Mars—and pushed his sleeve up a bit farther. A string of numbers was scrawled along the inside of his forearm.

  10 3 .5 5 2 8 13

  He added a five to it and couldn’t help doing the math: nearly two days. He felt a pang of guilt. I should tell Phoebe, but he didn’t know what she’d think. Was there really anything wrong with what he’d been doing? He hadn’t missed any time here. And yet he hadn’t been here. And you’re exhausted, he thought to himself. And how would he explain Iris to Phoebe? Iris said she was a friend, and Liam didn’t feel like she was a danger, and yet that didn’t change the fact that he’d been having a running conversation with Dark Star, which was . . . he wasn’t sure exactly what it was. And if it was nearby, didn’t that mean the Drove were somewhere close, too? Iris had said not to worry about them, but what had she meant by that?

  Liam pulled down his sleeve and slipped the pen back into his pocket just as a green light illuminated on the control panel and the door to their compartment slid open.

&n
bsp; Outside, red lights flashed across a vast space. Distant walkways, rows of stateroom doors. Definitely the Artemis.

  “Good. You two are finally up.” A young woman stepped in. She was short and wore a gray jumpsuit uniform. Her head was shaved on the sides except for two thin bands that arced along either side, the hair long and blue and falling like waterfalls over her ears.

  “Who are you?” Phoebe asked.

  The woman snorted. “You’re one to talk. I’m Kyla, recently promoted to lieutenant on the Artemis. You probably don’t even know what that is, but—”

  “We’ve been here before,” said Liam. “When you found the doorway in space. Is that where, or when, this is?”

  Kyla cocked her head at him. For a moment, her face seemed to sag with exhaustion, and Liam noticed that her eyes appeared to be rimmed with dark circles. “Well, that makes about as much sense as anything else that’s happened lately. Jordy and I found you two during our salvage mission. Or rather, you found us. I have no idea how you got onto our ship, and I have no idea what you are”—she pointed at Phoebe—“but my job right now is to bring you to the captain. Can you both walk?”

  “Yeah,” said Phoebe. She glanced at Liam.

  “I’m good.” He eased himself over the side of the pod. His stomach still trembled, and he wavered on his feet. As he stood, he also had to stifle a yawn. How many hours since he’d last slept? And where had that been?

  “Sorry about the chill,” said Kyla. “The ship is heavily damaged, so we’re keeping all systems running in low power mode, to conserve as much energy as we can. I brought you some layers, and snacks.” She handed Liam two silver thermal hoodie sweatshirts and two nutri-bars.

  “I’m not poisonous,” said Phoebe.

  “Sure,” said Kyla.

  “Thanks.” Liam passed Phoebe her items. The sweatshirt was an adult size. He pulled his on, readjusting his Dust Devils jersey beneath it, and then tore open the nutri-bar. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. “How long have we been here?” he asked between bites.

  Kyla checked the primitive link on her sleeve. “You appeared in our ship about eight hours ago. I’m assuming you, at least, are human?”