Dream Called Time (17 page)

I jumped on that. “All right, then, why do I need to go to the planet? To see the tribe? To see the Jxin? Can they help us?”

He shook his head. “They do not help.”

“Can I do something to help them?”

“You are them.” He moved his shoulders. “You are not them.”

I felt like screaming. “Do you know how frustrating it is, trying to communicate with you?”

“Yes.” He gave me a direct look as he repeated my exact words back to me. “Do you know how frustrating it is, trying to communicate with you?”

I got the message. “I’m sorry. I know you’re trying. I’m afraid because I don’t understand you, I won’t do what you want, and then you’ll hurt my friend Shon because of it.”

“No hurt.” He turned back to watch through the viewer.

The launch landed in a small clearing bordered on three sides by dense, lush green forests. At the northern edge a wide path had been cleared and paved with immense disks cut from pale wood of tree trunks, and fitted together with diamond-shaped insets of golden brown stone. Over the path more botanicals floated, tethered to the ground by fine- linked wooden chains and providing shade from the bright yellow sun’s light.

I looked for the shining towers I had seen in a vision during one of my many Maggie-induced hallucinations, but they were nowhere in sight. Neither were the ruins we had discovered when we’d actually found and landed on Jxinok during my investigation into the terrible age plagues inflicted by the black crystal on the Oenrallians and the Taercal.

“Where are they?” I asked Shon as he powered down the engines.

He nodded toward the north. “Coming.”

Since the Jxin hadn’t bothered to acknowledge or respond to our signals, I wasn’t expecting a welcoming party to meet our launch. Shon gestured for me to disembark, and followed me down the ramp as it lowered to the soil. I watched the path leading out of the clearing, expecting the Jxin equivalent of a security patrol to appear at any moment.

I heard their laughter first: high, soft, and pretty. Then I saw four figures moving toward us, all dressed in sleeveless ground-length light blue robes.

They moved effortlessly, their limbs fluid and their gait unhurried. Their long, narrow skulls had slits rather than ears, and their eyes were tilted in an angular slant, but their blunted noses and small mouths weren’t all that different from my own. From the subtle contrasts in their bone structures and the arrangement of their long hair, I guessed them to be two males and two females.

They halted a short distance from me and Shon and regarded us in silence. Now and then they glanced at one another as if they were having a conversation we couldn’t hear, and since over the years Maggie had demonstrated vast telepathic abilities, I guessed they didn’t need to use their mouths to communicate.

“Am I supposed to talk to them,” I asked Shon, “or just look at them?”

“You may speak to us, primitive,” one of the males said in flawless Terran.

“I’m Dr. Cherijo Torin. This is Dr. Shon Valtas.” I thought trying to explain that Shon was possessed and had abducted me might not be a good idea right off the bat. “Have you received the signals sent to you from the ship in orbit?”

“We have heard them,” one of the females said, sounding bored. To the others, she said, “We should return. The circle will be forming soon.”

“Excuse me,” I said in a louder voice when the four started to turn back. “Why didn’t you answer our signals?”

Three kept going, but the second male remained long enough to say, “We had no wish to” before he followed the others.

I turned to Shon. “All right, I’ve seen them, and I’ve talked to them, and they’re not interested in us. Can we go back to the ship?”

“See more.” Shon pointed at the departing Jxin. “Talk more.”

“I already don’t like them,” I mentioned as we started after them. “I don’t think my opinion is going to improve on closer acquaintance.”

Either the four Jxin weren’t aware that we were tailing them, or they didn’t care. From their complete lack of reaction to discovering that we’d landed without permission on their world, I was voting for the second. By now Xonea and the rest of the crew must have been frantic about me and Shon leaving on a launch; I wanted to get back to the ship before the Jorenians found a way to send down some launches, invade Jxinok, and begin disemboweling these people.

The walk from the clearing to the Jxin settlement took only a few minutes, and as soon as I saw the first of their dwellings, I realized why I hadn’t spotted them as we landed. The shining crystal towers Maggie had shown me were nowhere to be seen; these Jxin had built their much more modest homes out of opaque white-gold and ivory stone that reflected the colors around them, allowing the dwellings to blend in perfectly with the surrounding forest.

The structures were also arranged in tall clusters of cylindrical white stone tubes that led up to oval chambers of the darker white-gold stone. What alloys they had used were pure gold in color and seemed to serve only as some sort of exterior decoration.

As beautiful as the Jxin colony was, I didn’t see any drones, equipment, or other variety of technology. There were plenty of people in various colored robes, and the dwellings, but nothing else. To my eye the place appeared almost barren.

Some of the Jxin glanced at us as we walked into their settlement, but the majority walked by us as if we weren’t even there. I didn’t attempt to speak to any of them as Shon and I stopped in the center of the colony, where we stood and watched a large group forming a standing circle in between the largest dwelling clusters.

I didn’t like this. I hadn’t yet seen one child or elderly person; everyone in the colony appeared to be a young, healthy adult. “What are they going to do? Sacrifice their young, or eat their old people?”

A female in a yellow robe walking past me heard what I said and turned around. She came over and touched my cheek, and then said, “We do not make sacrifices. We have no young or old among us. We do not eat.”

My jaw dropped as I recognized her face. “Maggie?”

“We have no names.” She tilted her head. “You do not belong here.”

“Are you forgetting who you’re talking to? It’s me, Cherijo. The surrogate daughter you’ve been tormenting for the last ten years.” When she didn’t react, I went to her and grabbed her by the arms to give her a shake. “No more games. Why did you do this? Why bring the ship here? Did you send the protocrystal to infect Shon so you could get me down here?”

“I do not know you, Cherijo.” She said my name slowly, as if she was uncertain of the pronunciation. “We do not have children, so you cannot be my daughter. I have no control over you, this male, or your ship. I have no reason to bring you here.”

“You’re lying.” I was so angry I could have beaten her into the ground. “Don’t deny it. How else would you speak my language so perfectly? You came to Terra. You helped my father create me. You pretended to be my mother. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you?”

“I absorbed your language when I touched you. I have never left our world.” She seemed amused now. “I am too new. It will be a very long time before I am sent out to give life.”

I glanced around us. “You’ve never left this world.”

She laughed. “To depart, one must gather and perfect and purify for many eons. I have lived only a thousand years. I cannot leave.”

“She speaks truth,” Shon said to me. “Jxin child.”

My hands dropped away as I tried to sort it out. “She’s only a kid in this time?” He inclined his head. “So what now? Am I supposed to stop her from leaving? Kill her? Make sure I’m never born, something like that?”

“You cannot stop this,” he said, pointing toward the circle of Jxin.

The people in the circle had joined their hands, and held their faces up toward the sun. The light streaming over them intensified and reflected into the center of the circle, where it formed into a glowing ball that grew brighter and whiter by the moment. When it was almost too bright to look at, some of the people in the circle let go of the others and began walking toward it. When they reached the light, they disappeared into it briefly, and then reemerged a few seconds later, their bodies glowing with the same energy.

“What the hell are they doing?” I murmured. “Sunbathing?”

“It is purification of the essence,” Maggie said, smiling at the circle. “Soon our elders will attain the perfection required to shed their bodies forever. Then the Great Ascension will truly begin.”

“You’re dumping your bodies to become a big ball of light?” I shook my head. “Truly stupid, more like.”

“It is so much more than you could possibly understand.” She gave me a pitying look. “How tiresome it must be, to have such a primitive mind.”

I showed her my teeth. “At least I’m not trying to turn into an ambulatory spot emitter.”

The last of the Jxin in the circle went in and came out of the light, which faded as they joined hands and appeared to reabsorb it into their already glowing bodies. After that, they wandered away in different directions, their illuminated bodies making the watching Jxin smile and nod and laugh.

I suppose the whole deal would have sent a xenobiologist into raptures, but I found it about as interesting as watching a bunch of drones switch on.

“What happens to the people who can’t purify their essence, or whatever?” I asked Maggie.

“There are no such people here.”

I folded my arms. “Every species has failures.”

“Not the Jxin.” She made a negligent gesture. “Once, long ago, before we attained all that we are, there were such disappointments. They were known as undesirables. Our ancestors culled them from our bloodlines and sent them away.”

I remembered the other civilization our long- range scanners had detected. “Were they sent to another planet in the next solar system?”

She nodded. “They were given a new world of their own, where they could indulge in their imperfections and harm and maim and destroy one another without our interference. Perhaps you should visit their planet.”

I ignored her snotty suggestion as I mulled it over. How convenient for Jxin, to simply purge their gene pool until it was sparkling clear, like their crystal art. I could guess who those nasty rejects had grown up to be, but it wouldn’t hurt to get a confirmation. “What do they call themselves, these undesirables?”

“We do not have contact with them,” she told me. “We do not care. I am finished speaking with you now.” She started to wander off.

“Oh, no.” I caught her arm. “I have it on good authority that we need to talk more.”

“We have spoken at length. I find you too limited to be of any interest to me.” She looked down at my hand. “The Jxin do not feel pain, and we cannot be injured. Tightening your grip will do nothing but hurt your hand.”

“I came here from the future,” I said. “I have some information you may find of interest.”

“You are not advanced enough to travel so.” But even as she said that, she looked closer at me and Shon, as if seeing us clearly for the first time. “But you are not us, and you are not them, and there are no others.”

“See? You worked it out, all on your own.” I didn’t want to discuss this out in the open, not when I wasn’t sure how Maggie or the Jxin would react, so I gestured toward the cluster dwellings. “Which mushroom is yours?”

She pointed to one of the top levels of a smaller cluster. “I commune there with other new ones.”

“That’ll work.” I led her in that direction, glancing back to see Shon walking to where the circle had been. He turned his head and gave me a nod.

“Do you have any star vessels on this planet I can borrow?” I asked Maggie as we entered the bottom level of her dwelling.

“We do not use star vessels. Why do you require one? You have one here and one in orbit.”

That squashed my idea of escaping back to the
Sunlace
in a Jxin launch. “It’s a long story.”

They might have looked simple and beautiful on the outside, but on the inside the Jxin’s homes were breathtaking. As they had evolved past the need for such commonplace things as water, food, and heat, the Jxin had evidently eliminated all the customary trappings that went along with them. Their homes were instead filled with art, music, and plants. The general theme connecting everything was native crystal: sculptures carved from it, music made by it, and plants growing from stunning arrangements of it.

The material used to construct the dwellings allowed the sunlight through, which made everything around us sparkle. It was a bit like walking into a home decorated almost entirely in diamonds. The only spaces I saw that weren’t being used as display areas were several regularly spaced, arch-shaped recesses in the walls.

Maggie took me up to an observation deck that looked out over the forest and at the same time magnified the view so that I could see nearly half the continent beyond the settlement. As I gawked a little—all right, my jaw landed on the floor and stayed there for a good ten minutes—she grew impatient.

“You keep me from my interests,” she told me. “Tell me what information you possess.”

“The undesirables your ancestors evicted from Jxinok call themselves the Odnallak,” I said, peering out the other side of the deck. “They’re in the process of trying to ascend. In the process they will create a malignant substance that is harmful to all intelligent life. Is that really the valley of the waterfalls over there? I thought that was like a couple thousand kilometers away from here.”

“It is the valley. You are mistaken about the undesirables. As they were, are, and will be, they will never ascend.” She didn’t even sound a little worried. “Can you find your way back to your little ship, or will you need directions?”

“Why do you think the Odnallak will fail to evolve like you?” I countered. “Up until you kicked them off the planet, they
were
you.”

“The undesirables are impure beings, and as such have no hope of perfection. They first refused correction of the flaws ingrained in their cells and then the impurities could no longer be removed; it was why they were sent away. If they do anything, they will destroy themselves.”