Chapter 30
“Lyle?”
“I’m here, Dad. I hope you slept well.”
I got out of the Impala and stretched my neck and back.
Then I shuffled to the cafeteria, sword again perched on my shoulder like I was an extra off the set of Excalibur.
I listened for any sound, watched for any movement, but the museum was as dead as it had been the day before.
I pulled more food from the storeroom and used the sword as an awkward package opener.
Then I sat at the same table and looked over the waves, now little more than shadowy shapes moving and crashing against the glass.
“So, war, you think?” I asked. Sleeping hadn’t helped.
I was still tired. Drained. I wanted to put my head down or go back to the Impala and sleep.
I wasn’t fitting together right. The last few days had scattered apart the puzzle that was me, leaving hazy afterimages behind.
Images of Lyle as a dying old man. Of Miri.
Of the Vale Riders and the torture, the pain.
Of the hopeful, utopian vision of Anjari’s time.
My body was reacting with a pulsing weariness and a kind of floaty disassociation.
I recognized it in myself, but I couldn’t put the puzzle pieces back together.
“That did all this?” Lyle asked.
“Yeah. Wrecked Anjari’s paradise. I was hoping we’d find out what happened.”
“It’s only a guess, but war is the best guess I have. Especially given the aerial bombardment you experienced yesterday. The age you were in last may have seemed like a paradise, but it was still one populated by humans. Fallible, aggressive, and violent.”
“You’d think we’d grow out of all that.”
“Maybe we will yet.” Lyle made a throat-clearing sound. “Dad, we need to decide where you should make the next jump.”
I looked around the cafeteria. “Maybe not in the middle of a big glass dome right next to the ocean, you think?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Think I should head back to Anjari’s spot? Where the Hollywood sign was?”
“I don’t know. There’s still that ship outside that shot at you.” Lyle made a contemplative sound. “Maybe just outside the museum? It’s another choice. A risk to go, a risk to stay.”
I watched the dark waves beat on the dome. “We’ll head for the entrance. Time it carefully. Step just outside right at five fifty.”
“All right.”
I busied myself eating as much as I could stomach.
At five, I stood and left the cans on the table with a silent apology for whoever came along, however many years from now, and had to clean them up.
If anyone ever did. I retraced my path, backward through time, along the human history exhibits.
Unwinding the clock step-by-step. I passed the image of myself in Berkeley.
Walked by the Impala, my makeshift bed the night before.
I stopped at the knight and gave him back his sword.
It had a few extra notches and scars along the edge and tip from using it as a big can opener and impromptu pry bar.
I felt better leaving it with its rightful owner.
If I was being honest with myself, I didn’t think I had it in me to use it on another human.
I’d already blown one man apart with a single trigger pull.
Hacking someone with a sword wasn’t on my bucket list. I wasn’t a killer—or rather, I didn’t want to be one again. I’d figured that much out about myself.
The broad front doors of the museum were not difficult to find, even in the darkness of predawn, thanks to the suit’s night vision enhancement.
I was worried the doors wouldn’t open, but I found the locking mechanism and shifted the heavy tumblers.
The metal moved with a rusty scrape, but it moved.
I drew the mask over my head, breathed cool filtered air, and cautiously pulled open the door.
Outside, ash drifted and swirled in the darkness.
Steps led away from me toward a street where the vague outline of ruined buildings slumped amid piles of debris.
“Careful, Dad,” Lyle whispered.
I looked up, but in a darkness that not even the night vision could penetrate, I didn’t see the hulking ship in the sky.
I couldn’t even make out the clouds. I checked the time.
The headache was pulsing back and forth between my temples.
Five fifty-one. I tried my best to minimize my profile, crouching low and skirting along the low granite wall down the steps to the street.
I checked the forearm pad again. The headache built. I faced back toward the museum, toward the open front doors. My refuge, however brief.
“Here we go,” I whispered.
The world slipped sideways.
This time the ground didn’t seem to move beneath me, even though I went from crouching on shattered pavement and a thick layer of ash to grass.
The museum vanished as though it had never existed.
I was on a small mound of swaying, straw-like grass, the wind pushing at my back.
I rose and looked out across a clear blue ocean.
The pyramidal structure I’d seen was gone, as was the beached ship.
The sky above was cloudy but clean, turning brilliant yellow and orange as the sun peeked above the hills behind me.
In the far distance, beyond the curved line of the horizon, an immense towerlike structure rose into the sky, tapering from perspective or design, vanishing into the clouds.
“Interesting,” Lyle said in my ear.
White flakes, quite large, fell around me. But one landed on the black material of the suit and began to melt. Not ash. Snow.
“Remarkable,” a voice said behind me.
I turned. A … something stood on the grass with me, six or seven feet away.
Bipedal, two arms and two legs, but too tall and far too slender to be human.
Its skin was a swirling deep purple color that shimmered in the sunrise.
Its head was a smooth ovoid, with two large, oval eyes, two small holes for a nose, and a thin-lipped mouth.
It wore no clothing and had no genitals, just smooth curves like a clothing store mannequin.
“The ancient document heralding your arrival, as well as the evidence accumulated after your last transition point, was both precise and accurate,” the creature said in flawless English, colored by an accent a bit like Hindi mixed with something I couldn’t identify.
“Welcome, Scott Treder. And welcome, too, to your pseudo-sentient intelligence companion.” It bowed its head.
I stared. Then my eyes caught on the city behind it.
The city glowed in the light of the morning sun.
Spires and towers and buildings of all shapes and sizes rose like great spikes into the sky.
With the flakes of snow falling all around us, and the sunlight shining with surprising strength through the early-morning clouds, the entire scene had a dreamlike feel. Too incredible to be real.
The creature took a step forward, raising one hand. “Scott Treder, are you feeling all right? Can you understand me?”
“I’m—what—who are you?”
The creature stopped. Its purple-lipped mouth curved into a smile. “I am Raven. Semiautonomous, fully uplinked avatar of the Central Overmind.”
“Overmind?”
“Yes. This all must be very confusing and overwhelming for you. If my calculations are correct, you have just transitioned, in an instant, one thousand four hundred and thirty-six years. You come from a different era.”
“You could say that.”
“It is through luck, ingenuity, and the perseverance of historians and archeologists over the last millennium that the Central Overmind was able to piece together where you would most likely emerge on this date. It was off by only a small margin, within the error tolerance.”
“I … okay. Good job, I guess?”
“Please, come. I will show you what the world is like today.” It held its hand toward the city, like a butler ushering people for a party.
“Lyle?”
“I have no data beyond what you can see and hear, Dad,” Lyle said. “The suit’s sensors can’t even register this entity outside the normal visible spectrum.”
“Would you prefer to speak to the Central Overmind directly?” the creature, Raven, asked, still holding out its arm. I was conscious it had waited until Lyle finished speaking.
“Are there still … humans?”
“Of course. Yes, I could also bring you to a human if that would make you more comfortable.”
“No, that’s okay. I mean, I—I just—”
“Please, Scott Treder. Come with me. I will show you whatever you wish to see. You are perfectly safe. I will not allow harm to come to you.”
I stood there, not feeling I had much of a choice. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t trust it. Finally, I nodded. “Okay.”
The avatar led me to a car-sized silver ovoid sitting in the grass at the base of the hill.
The avatar strode with smooth, controlled motions, every step placed precisely.
At our approach, the ovoid rose a few inches into the air and split along hidden seams on either side.
Doors hatched open, revealing captains chairs.
It reminded me of Anjari’s aircar. She’d had that aircar two thousand years ago.
I wasn’t sure what I expected, now. If I should expect anything.
Something more advanced? Of course, I’d just come from what had looked like the wreckage of society—at least, the wreckage of New City of Angels.
I had no idea what humanity had gone through, the cycles of destructive war and peace.
I could only vaguely guess at what barriers had sprung up for technology, and what fundamental physical rules science could or could not overcome.
I needed a futurist. A scientist. Someone smarter than me.
Standing there, I thought back to what Donald Rhineland had said at the steak dinner.
Just a week ago for me, but twenty-eight hundred years ago for the rest of the world.
He’d asked, pointedly, why this was happening to me—specifically me.
I was just a normal guy. I wasn’t prepared for this.