The Shores Beyond Time

by Kevin Emerson

  Phoebe beside him at Lunch Rocks. Running ahead of him in the lava tubes.

  Next to him on the couch of the Cosmic Cruiser, playing Roid Wraiths. Kissing her there and feeling so embarrassed afterward.

  Her false face melting off in the heat of the Delphi baths.

  Hugging to travel to Telos.

  Pulling her through space toward the doorway.

  A few rows ahead in their Year 10 classroom, looking back at him and Shawn through her long pink hair, trying to relay the specifics of some plan or another.

  Up on Vista, with her arms out, beneath the solar storm. She’d been thinking of her own red sun, Liam realized. I had no idea.

  So many memories, each of which seemed more precious now and somehow not quite enough—if only he’d known then how this ending would feel, he would have enjoyed everything more, but how could you ever really know?

  And he felt, too, like Phoebe was feeling this same thing, like she was traveling with him, through time, seeing it all, like her presence was right there beside him. Maybe they could just keep going—

  “Xela.” Her dad this time.

  Phoebe moved a millimeter away, exhaling hard, or maybe it was a sob. The spell was broken, and Liam felt himself back in the present, like he was weighted to the floor.

  But before she pulled away, Phoebe leaned close to his ear: “Find me in the safe place,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “The—”

  Paolo appeared in the doorway. “Xela, now.”

  Phoebe stepped back, her eyes fixed on him. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” said Liam, “but . . .”

  “Good luck, Liam,” said Paolo. He held his arm out to Phoebe.

  Her eyes locked with Liam’s one last time. “This is how it has to be.” She turned—“Bye”—and walked out.

  Liam stood there for a moment, a supernova inside. All of this was too much. He didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to take a single step into his future feeling this alone. This is how it has to be. Why? And yet he knew, for all the reasons he’d heard their parents lay out. That said, it had seemed like Phoebe had meant something else by that. What exactly was the safe place? His memories?

  “Hey there.” Kyla stepped inside.

  “Hey.” Liam wiped his eyes.

  “Sorry, do you need a minute? Or . . .”

  “No, it’s all right. How are my parents doing down on the surface?”

  “They’re at the third sampling site and it’s still going well. Listen, what happened to you guys out there?”

  Liam recounted flying through the portal and back.

  Kyla listened, her face serious. When Liam was finished, she didn’t speak for a moment.

  “What?” said Liam.

  “I don’t know. What happened to your bot?”

  “Oh.” Liam picked up JEFF’s head. His eyes were still that mellow amber, and Liam could feel a humming inside, as JEFF restarted. “He acted weird on the other side of the portal too. Like it overloaded his processors or something.”

  “Do you know what kind of overload?” Kyla asked.

  “Um, not really. I think he said something about an incompatibility.”

  Kyla’s face darkened.

  “What?”

  “We’ve been having some weird lags and artifacting in our feed from the portal. Losing helmet cams momentarily, delays in the signal from the hard line. We checked the logs of the Artemis’s comms processors and they are spiking with errors that say INCOMPATIBILITY DETECTED, REGION UNKNOWN.”

  “That’s what JEFF said.”

  “They resolve themselves almost immediately, but no one can figure out where they’re coming from, except that they seem to be related to the feed from the other side.”

  “What do you think they mean?”

  Kyla shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s just . . . something’s not right about this place. Ever since we got here, it’s just felt . . . off. I mean, why would this place really make an entire universe just for us?”

  “We were wondering the same thing,” Liam admitted. “What does the captain think?”

  Kyla laughed under her breath. “Nobody knows what’s going on in the captain’s head. I used to think I knew him, used to look up to him actually. But ever since we got here . . . sometimes I think he’s more interested in this place’s secrets than he is in the survival of his crew.” She looked like she might say more, but she turned instead toward the sound of increased commotion outside the ship. “Come on,” she said. “I’m headed back to the bridge, but you can watch them depart if you want.”

  Liam followed Kyla out, JEFF under his arm, and stood beside a line of Artemis crew members, the two who’d been keeping watch in the hangar plus a few more, all holding rifles at their sides. The last Telphons were climbing up into the Styrlax ship, carrying boxes of supplies. Phoebe was between them, but she didn’t look over. Liam watched until the last of them had stepped through the door. . . .

  Phoebe’s head popped out. She waved. A brief smile.

  Liam waved back, throat tight. Bye.

  She disappeared inside, and a moment later, the ship hummed and lifted off the ground. It rotated and slid toward the airlock. Liam scanned its exterior, looking for a window or something, but its sides were sheer metal. Could Phoebe see him somehow? He waved, just in case, the lump growing in his throat.

  Find me in the safe place.

  What had she meant?

  The inner airlock door rumbled open. The Styrlax ship flew in, and the door closed and they were gone, the hangar plunging into silence.

  The Artemis crew members headed for the elevator to the bridge, leaving Liam alone in the hangar. He just stood there, a storm inside.

  A many-fingered hand patted his shoulder. “Are you ready to go?” asked the chronologist.

  No. He just wanted to return to the compartment and lie in the stasis pod. “Do I have time to watch them leave? Just until they’re through the portal safely?”

  “Of course, we have all of time available.”

  Liam crossed the hangar to a window. He watched the Styrlax ship slide smoothly away from the Artemis, passing in front of the portal to the new Earth. Its thrusters flared and it accelerated toward the portal home—not home anymore, not for us. Liam barely breathed as the ship became a shooting star . . . and in a ripple of green light, it was gone.

  “The Telphon ship is safely through,” Kyla said over Liam’s link.

  Good-bye, Liam thought, and felt his throat welling up again.

  A bell-like tone sounded. Liam looked down to see JEFF’s eyes glowing bright green. “Greetings, and welcome to your personal assistant. If you are a registered user of this bot, say your name now.”

  “Liam Saunders-Chang.”

  “Acknowledged. For additional identification, please authenticate with fingerprint scan—correction: fingerprint scanner not located. Update: multiple systems not located.”

  “That’s because you’re just a head.”

  “One moment . . .” JEFF’s eyes flickered. “Your saved settings indicate your preference for the voice personality JEFF. Would you like to continue?”

  “Yes.”

  Another flickering pause. . . . “Good morning, Liam! I am glad to be back, or at least what is left of me.”

  “I’m glad you’re back too, JEFF.”

  “Liam.” It was Mina, over the link. “How are you holding up?”

  “Okay.”

  “I hear your little romantic mission was nearly a disaster.”

  “Yeah. Do Mom and Dad know?”

  “I don’t think so, and we might want to skip telling them. I’m on the bridge right now. I’m watching them at the third sample point and it’s this polar spot and there are these weird penguin-like critters. You should come up and see it. It’s pretty cool. It might even cure your broken heart.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m serious, though, come up.”

  “I wi
ll,” Liam said, glancing at the chronologist. “I’ll be there in like—”

  “Liam, I’m sorry to interrupt,” said JEFF, “but that information is inaccurate.”

  “What information?”

  “Your parents’ location. They are not at the third sample point.”

  “What’s he talking about?” said Mina.

  “I don’t know,” said Liam. “Did they visit the spots out of order from the original plan or something?”

  “The plans are incorrect,” said JEFF. “There are no sample points.”

  “Come on, JEFF,” said Mina. “They—”

  “There are no sample points because there is no planet.”

  “What?” said Liam. And yet a twinge of nervous energy ignited inside.

  “When we transited the portal,” said JEFF, “my sensors detected a massive amount of data, but I did not detect a planet, nor any stars, cosmic radiation, or anything that would normally be evidence of physical space.”

  “Your sensors probably just got scrambled,” said Liam, and yet his breath had shortened, his mouth getting dry.

  “I do not think so. According to my sensors, there is no planet on the other side of that portal, but instead a vast electrical field with incredible power. It overloaded my processors within moments.”

  “Electrical field . . . ,” Liam repeated.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Mina. “We’re literally looking at the planet right now. Mom and Dad and the team are down there. They’ve sent reports back to us—”

  “My data logs from the other side of that portal indicate otherwise.”

  “Did you fry his circuits?” Mina asked.

  “JEFF!” Liam’s heart was starting to pound. He thought of Phoebe’s reaction. “I saw the planet, and the sun.”

  “The only three-dimensional information that my sensors picked up was a field of bright blue lights contained in some sort of large space. This corroborates with what Phoebe experienced.”

  “You talked to Phoebe?”

  “Yes, she is the one who rebooted me, after we compared notes about what we’d seen.”

  “Right.” Liam pictured her lying there in the plaza while he’d been talking to the chronologist.

  So many blue stars, Phoebe had said.

  “I think it is even more important now that you come with me,” said the chronologist.

  “Liam, this is Kyla. Your sister relayed this new information from your bot. I don’t know what’s going on—I mean, we can see your parents and talk to the team, and all our sensors and readings about the planet check out, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “There was that similarity I mentioned, between the data errors we’ve been having and what your bot experienced through the portal. I think maybe you should bring him up here and we’ll see what’s what.”

  “We need to go before you bring the bot upstairs,” the chronologist said quietly.

  Liam covered his link. “Why?”

  “Because the bridge will not provide the answer you seek. This blue light that Phoebe and your bot refer to . . . I know its source. And I believe it will reveal where your parents are.”

  Liam swallowed hard, a chill spiking through him. “You don’t think my parents are on new Earth either.”

  “I do not.”

  “But they think they are . . . so if they’re not there, where are they?”

  “I think, given this information, there may be something far different going on here than we believe.”

  Liam looked at the crystal, pulsing in the chronologist’s hand. Iris . . . what is going on? That little doubt he’d had about her, about this place, that he hadn’t wanted to listen to, had grown into a buzzing fear inside him.

  “Are you ready?” said the chronologist.

  Liam nodded, still gazing at the crystal. “Where are we going?”

  “To the cylinder we observed at the center of Dark Star. I believe this is where the answer lies, but I need your help to fully make sense of it. I can take you there slightly back in time, and then return you to this exact point so that you can join your sister on the bridge.”

  “Liam, are you there?” Mina asked.

  “Yeah . . .” Liam slipped on waves of fright. Could he even trust the chronologist? But through everything that had happened on Mars, the chronologists had always told Liam the whole truth. More than his parents, even more than Phoebe.

  “I’m on my way up,” he said into the link.

  Then he muted the channel and turned to the chronologist. “Okay, let’s go.”

  16

  TIME TO DARK STAR FUNCTIONALITY: 00H:14M

  “I do not think you need to hug me. Just stand nearby.”

  Liam put down JEFF’s head and moved beside the chronologist. He swallowed against a sour taste in his mouth. The jet flame in his gut now felt like a full-blown inferno. They are not at the third sample point. “I’ll be right back,” he said to JEFF.

  “I suppose I will be right here,” JEFF said from the floor.

  The chronologist tapped his orange crystal, and the world blurred around them as they moved backward along the chronologist’s timeline—a flash of darkness and nebula, then the plaza with the statue where he had met up with Liam, and before that, a twisting labyrinth of empty corridors. They arrived in the hangar, rows of Dark Star ships on either side. Reality stuck together again. Liam saw the chronologist’s previous self departing the area for the elevators.

  “This way.”

  Liam followed him between the rows of ships, the chronologist’s orange light bobbing in the dark, pulsing slow and steady. Ahead, the towering silver cylinder dominated the center of the room, looming over them, the sleek surface seeming to glow, and Liam thought he could feel an energy buzzing from it, even more than he had before. Pressing against him, making it hard to move. . . . They reached the railing at the edge of the platform. Liam took a dizzying look down, tracing the side of the cylinder hundreds of meters to the pool of black hole beneath Dark Star. He looked up to see the chronologist crossing the catwalk without breaking stride.

  The door in the side of the cylinder slid open. Electric-blue light spilled out from inside.

  Blue lights. Liam took a tentative step onto the catwalk. “How did you open it?”

  “I didn’t. Well, I didn’t choose to. I have come to this spot multiple times, and the door never opened until my last visit.”

  “What do you think changed?”

  The chronologist paused at the threshold. “This station has been powering up the entire time we’ve been here, and whatever it is working toward seems to be nearly complete.”

  “Full functionality,” said Liam.

  “What I wanted you to see is in here.” The chronologist turned and stepped into the blue light.

  Liam stood there on the catwalk, staring at the glowing doorway. Run. The thought shot through his mind; he should run right now, get the Artemis to head back to their universe, call off the arrival of the fleet. He wasn’t sure why, but it suddenly felt obvious that that was the right thing to do, right now. . . .

  But his parents. What had happened to them? Whatever was through this door was part of the answer. And not only to that; to the other questions he’d been avoiding. . . .

  As he stood there on the catwalk, shaking, Liam realized something else about this moment: he leaned back from his present and looked toward the future, and while he still saw the same sunny moments of going to Earth, and all that would happen there, and while he could see himself saying good-bye to Phoebe just behind him in his past, he did not see the skim drone crash, or crossing the portal before that. Where were those memories? And then whatever came right after this moment also did not seem to exist. There was no cylinder with the blue light, no Liam with the chronologist. There was a moment directly ahead in his future, but it was him standing with Mina, on the bridge of the Artemis. They were watching the feed from the sample site, oohing and aahhing over the strange pengu
in-like creatures. How could that be what happened next, if he was standing here? Either he didn’t actually go through this door . . . or that future I’m seeing isn’t the real one.

  The thought froze him completely.

  There is no planet, JEFF had said.

  Had his timestream been manipulated? And if so, there was only one entity with the power to do such a thing. . . .

  The chronologist leaned back out. “Coming?”

  No. He wanted to leave, to get out of here—but he stepped toward the door, body shaking, heart hammering. He had come this far. Had to know. Had to find his parents.

  He stepped into a world of blue light and found himself on a sleek, circular platform that seemed to float in the center of the cylindrical space. There was a small gap between the platform’s edge and the rounded wall—but it wasn’t a wall, exactly. It was a surface made of small spheres, neatly lined up in perfect vertical and horizontal rows. Each sphere was maybe ten centimeters across, made of clear crystal, and inside was a floating, blue . . . spark, Liam thought first. Like a bit of pure energy. Each one hummed and grew and shrank in independent pulses. Here and there, they sprouted brief fingers of light, wavering tentacles, some of which momentarily splayed against the inner wall of the crystal, almost like they were seeking a way out. The very center of the energy was brilliant white, cooling to blue.

  These rows of spheres completely encircled the inner wall of the cylinder, and stretched upward and downward for how far Liam couldn’t tell: Two hundred meters? Five hundred? And it wasn’t exactly a wall because there was another layer of crystal spheres behind this first one, and another behind that, and on and on past what Liam could distinguish, many meters deep, it seemed, deeper than should even have been possible given the apparent size of the cylinder from the outside. Squinting in the light, Liam could now see that all of the spheres were held in place by a delicate lattice of gossamer-thin wire.

  But it was the spheres themselves, the sparkling, babbling lights inside . . . Their glow seemed to rise and fall like conversation. In spite of his fear and confusion, Liam stepped closer, held out his finger until it was nearly touching the surface of one. And the light inside, somehow, seemed to sense him. It gathered along the inside rim, almost like it was trying to make contact.