The Seeds of Time (57 page)

She watched as a crew member inserted his fingertips into the panel. A section pulsed with a deeper glow.

Ashe noted her reaction. “It’s biochemical, Clio. We interact through touch. The ship responds at the molecular level.”

“It’s really alive then … almost humanlike.…”

“It’s not conscious, not in a human way. Still, we treat it with respect. It has life, life that we share on a molecular and cellular level. If cut, it feels a kind of pain. We don’t cut it.”

“But you control it, engineer it. It’s not a creature. Not free.”

“No, not free, not equal in the sense you mean. This isn’t paradise, Clio, please be clear on that. Humans still dominate my world. If there’s some—metaphysical unity or something—that we’re supposed to achieve, my people certainly haven’t found it. If there are levels of knowing, we’ve got at least to the level of Respect. Maybe that’s just the first rung on the ladder, I don’t know.”

Clio watched as the crew member pulled a section up from the plane of the console. It emerged as a wedge. In its deeper layers lay white sheets like flattened bone. Here were the deeper circuits, like the circuit Teeg had stolen. The bones of FTL.

“This is an FTL ship?” she asked.

He nodded. “The pod uses simple fusion for short transits. For long voyages, an interface with the fabric of space-time. Not a matter of propulsion.” Ashe nodded toward the instrumentation, with its bank of screens like a film of soap stretched taut. “It’s laid into the programs, into the fabric of the pod itself and especially into one circuit plate.”

“How much could my people learn from one circuit board, from a technology so advanced, so basically alien?”

“They could take the program, deengineer it, figure out the whole approach. Given enough time, it could be done.”

They stood for a minute in the eerie hush of the place. Whatever the pod’s secret ways, they were as silent as the blood rushing through her own veins.

He led her off the flight deck. The corridor branched
into a narrow passageway and a door parted before them, sliding aside like a nictitating membrane.

They were in a small room with a bed platform and two chairs, where above them in the ceiling was set a portal to the wavering stars. Ashe saw the direction of her look. “It’s a projection screen, a relay of the actual local stars. We’re working on deep-space translucency. Windows.”

Clio sank into a chair. “Why bother with me, Ashe? Don’t you have a war to fight?”

“We want you to understand. And to side with us, if possible. You have a right to know. Because this is how it all grew to be, Clio. Those seeds you planted. This is how it grew.”

She closed her eyes, seeing the bridge, with its waxy flat surfaces, its secret controls, accessed by biologically knowing hands. Her seeds had grown beyond her comprehension. Her civilization had become unrecognizable. “I could never hope to fly this ship,” she said.

“No.”

She remembered sitting at the controls of the crashed ship on Niang, the living surface of its instrumentation. “Ashe,” she said, “what was that crashed ship doing on Niang—the one that Teeg stole the FTL from?”

“It was a science expedition to Niang to research the native biota … as it was fifteen hundred years ago. Paleobotany. Biology is our fascination. Almost a fatal fascination in this case. Anyway, we lost the ship in a crash; everyone on board died. We sent another expedition back in time to dismantle the FTL circuitry. But when we found the ship, it had been ransacked. Key pieces missing. When Teeg took that circuit, he set in motion the twinning … the time of probabilistic uncertainty … the Cousin.”

“And you’d do anything to get that circuit back … even destroy your own universe. But once on board the
Galactique
, couldn’t you have sabotaged the ship in some way?”

“After the bombing of Vanda loading bay, I never really tried.” Ashe answered her unspoken question. “I met you.”

Now, that was about as near a declaration of love as Clio could imagine. And all of a sudden she could imagine herself in love with this man as well. Yet she probed: “Was I worth letting down your people?”

“Question I asked myself a lot. Guess I answered yes.”

“But you killed Ryerson.”

Ashe looked at her, steady on. “Ryerson got in my way. I wanted to eliminate Tandy as a factor in the ground mission. He’s a powerful man. I meant to kill him.”

Clio put her head on the back of the chair, resting. When she opened her eyes, Ashe was standing next to the chair, his hand resting along the back, close to her head.

“You’re tired,” he said. He touched her left temple with his fingertips. “I brought you here so you could sleep.” As he spoke he stroked the side of her head in that slight indentation between her eyebrow and hairline.

It was a gentle pressure, his fingers on her skin, but she felt it deep in her abdomen.

“Does that feel good because you’re doing something biotic with your fingertips?”

“Yes. I’m massaging your temples.”

Clio breathed as shallow as she knew how, keeping that touch on her face, sensing that he would retreat if she spoke. Mucking up the legend, he might say. She found that she had brought her hand up to touch his wrist. “Just as long as it’s nothing more.”

“It’s nothing more if that’s what you want.”

“I might want ordinary physical company.”

He knelt down at the side of the chair, slid his hand behind her head. He watched her for a long while. “You’re so tired. You look so tired,” he said. “I hope I’m wrong.”

“That’s right.” Clio cupped his face with her hands. “You’re wrong.” He moved toward her as she pulled him to her, and she touched his lips with hers, felt his ordinary warmth and tasted his ordinary taste, as the shock of contact hummed through and through her. He pulled back for a moment, moved to rest his face in her hair. The sweetness of the moment peeled back like a ripe fruit, the innocence of it, so unlike the fast clash of desire with shipboard lovers,
quick to move to the main point, all fretting hands and workmanlike skill. Ashe spoke her name, way back in his throat, murmured sweet names in her ear, some that she recognized. And kissed her again. She stood up, came around to where he was kneeling, and pulled the zipper at her neck. She stepped out of her boots as he unzipped them. He stood up far enough to sit on the edge of the chair, pulling her toward him by the waist, into the sheltering enclosure of his thighs. He waited until she had pulled the zipper all the way down to her belly, and unfastened her belt before he pulled the flight suit away from her, tossing them aside along with undershirt, pants, dog tag.

“You are unearthly beautiful, Clio,” he said. He held her at arms’ length, looking at her with eyes grown deep as the forest. She couldn’t remember anyone looking at her like that, though she’d seen the harsh mask of hunger many times. This was tenderness and joy, all cloaked in a velvety desire. He slipped out of his vest. She helped him undo his fastenings and things fell to the floor. Then he took her hand and led her to the bed platform, lying down and pulling her on top of him. His palm held her breast to his lips, as he kissed her again and again and she felt him thrust hard against her belly. Then he grasped her around the waist and pushed her lower and she heard him call her name as he entered her, felt his hand on the small of her back, pressing their bodies together, and she said, “My God, Ashe, you’re wonderful, oh you are wonderful,” and his face was flooded with his smile, and he said, “Call me Timothy.”

Afterward, Clio lay in the crook of his arm while overhead, the stars pursued their courses across the screen-wide section of sky.

“What do you think of when you look at the stars?” Clio asked.

“Just then I was thinking of home. Looking up at a starry night at home.”

“Do you want to go home?”

“Not at the moment.” He reached for her face, drew her close and kissed her. “I love you, Clio.”

“I want you to love me.”

“You got it.”

“Did they tell you to love me, to seduce me?”

“Yes. They assigned me to befriend you, any way that I could. To win your trust, win you to our side.”

“So much for mucking with the legend.” Clio drew back.

He brought her close again, hand guiding her shoulders to face him. “But I couldn’t do it. I pushed you away, baited you, scolded you. Refused you. Because from the very moment I saw you I loved you, loved you more than anyone, anything else. Between you and the struggle, I chose you. I’m a lousy warrior.”

“Love at first sight?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“You believe in that?”

“Yes.”

“Is it so easy to believe?”

“It is when it happens to you.”

“So when you told Teeg that you loved me, you meant it, even then?”

“It was the truth. Is it so hard to believe?”

She looked full into his face. The scar splitting his eyebrow flared on his temple as though remembering the old wound. She traced it with her finger. “Tell me again,” she said.

He pulled her down next to him. “I love you, Clio.”

She lay on her back, watching the square of local space in the ceiling. “You know what I think of when I look at the stars? I just think how fragile they are.”

“I never thought of stars as fragile.”

“Yes, you did. Isn’t that why you’re a warrior?”

He pondered that. “Maybe so.”

Clio slid toward the edge of the bed, swung her feet over. Saw her pile of clothes mixed with his. She jumped up, shook out her fatigues, and stood holding them against her body. “Get dressed, Timothy,” she said.

He reached for her. “I’m not done with you yet.”

She dropped her clothes, strode toward the bed, crouching beside it. “I’m not done with you, either.” She
touched his forearm, gripped it hard. “But there’s something I’ve got to do.”

“It can wait.”

“Not anymore.” She grabbed her clothes again, jamming her leg into her suit. “Waited too damn long already. I’m going to drop it to hell, throw it down the deepest crack on the planet.” She zipped up her suit to her neck, tucked her dog tag in. “Timothy,” she said. “I know where the FTL is. I know where it is. And I know how to bury it.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked as he grabbed his clothes.

“The Hell Crack,” she said.

Clio and Ashe crouched just below the Great Cave. Through a web of vines, they kept watch on the cave entrance and the sprawling ledge before it. In the swath of azure sky exposed by the hunkering rock, insects swirled in humming masses, netting the air and darkening it. Clio’s sweat-laden fatigues released their rank odors as the morning heat built.

Hidden behind Clio and Ashe in the cover of the forest was the largest force Ashe’s people could muster, along with armaments positioned and aimed at the cave entrance should it prove necessary.

Ashe moved forward, scrambling up to the cave’s stretched lip with Clio close behind. They plunged into the sudden dusk of Teeg’s New Merica headquarters. Ashe yanked a torch from the wall and lit it.

The cave air settled on their faces with instant clamminess. Clio brought her kerchief over her nose, to ward off the reek of the passageway, following the remembered route, the subtle landmarks of stone in the wavering light.

At branches in the passageway Ashe marked their route with his belt knife, with a sound like a claw on a cage. Clio squinted her eyes to help remember, then plunged on, following at last a slipstream of cold air as much as memory. Before her loomed, at times, the image of Jackson Tandy, the man whose dreams she would defy and destroy. Sometimes she saw him standing before the viewports of the
Galactique
longing for the stars, for the next stage of human adventure. But mostly the image was the two of them sitting against the cold barracks wall, the warmth of his arms, the
time beyond time, as he waited with her for life to seep back in. He was always for going on, leaving the past behind. Look at hell around you and call it heaven, it’s the best you’ve got. Make it yours.
No, Tandy. Don’t you see? We’re not ready to reap the stars, look at what we’ve done with the one we’ve got. She saw his eyebrow wrinkle, the slow shake of his head. Clio, Clio. You long for the stars, same as me, lost your family, same as me.…
Liquid on her face turned icy in the draft. She rubbed it away.