Drift pattern, p.12
Drift Pattern, page 12
~ Fifteen ~
August 16, 1044: La Rioja, Spain
LlA rOhx-spAN
[42.2870733/2.539603/4.603.388.823/5485:18:18]
xgust 16, 1044
prE-hI nO kqwu
Luci is finally able catch her breath as she studies her hands, which have returned to a steady state of opaqueness. “Wow, that was intense!”
In contrast, Macer’s reply from behind is placid. “The leap skip? Yes, the first few times can be a thrill. Believe it or not, like with anything, it becomes mundane after a while.”
The hatch slides open, and Royse helps Macer onto the platform from the longchair. Finally, he assists Luci. Judging by the hay and sunlight shooting through the ramshackle wooden construction, they’re in the rafters of a barn.
“The chancellor speaks five languages,” Royse boasts. “It’s unlikely we’ll encounter any of the interval’s residents, but if we do, let him do the talking. He can always say that I’ve taken a vow of silence, and you . . . well, you’re a woman. There’s not much for females to say in this interval.”
As Luci wonders if she should be offended by the statement, Macer chimes in. “It works out in our favor that any area Mozarab monks living at Suso are hermits that have a tendency to avoid others. Still, Royse is right to be cautious as we make our way there.”
“What’s that over there?” Luci asks, pointing at a different-looking longchair from the two that brought them here.
“That was one of my father’s,” Macer says. “It’s a bit of an antique by today’s longchair standards, but it still gets the job done.”
“But why is it here?” she asks.
Royse busies himself with the external panel of the transport he came in. “You’re going to want to step back a little,” he says. “I’m sending this one back.”
Before Luci can ask what Royse means, Macer answers her original question. “The older one over there has a one-to-one path.”
“What does that mean?”
“Unlike the longchairs that brought us here today,” Macer explains, “it has only one destination, my home and back. Sometimes Royse and I use it rather than going into the city.”
“Sir,” Royse courteously interrupts, “I’m sending in thirty. Please stand clear.”
“Luci, please step this way,” Macer says, motioning to her. “Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe I’m just some sentimental fool, but I do enjoy taking that model from my office to here and back. Another challenge with the early design was how every leap skip required a passenger be aboard.”
Royse calls from behind them with bravado, “So you can’t do this!”
The more modern longchair Royse had been fiddling with makes a popping sound and then vanishes from sight.
“Don’t worry, Luci,” Macer says. “We’ll take the prototype one back. There’s no need to be concerned. For all intents and purposes, it’s just like the other units.”
She looks at Royse. “I guess we don’t have much choice now.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Royse answers under his breath to her.
Luci quickly pieces together that the source of Royse’s irritation is that he won’t be traveling with them on the return trip, since his longchair will skip back to the Spike instead of Macer’s home.
They descend the creaky wooden stairs of the hayloft in what has become their standard order: Royse in front, then Macer, and then Luci.
She asks, “So this isn’t the Grange?”
“No,” Macer answers, pulling the cowl of his monk garb over his bald head. “The Grange is an underground facility beneath the monastery. It’s a brief stroll from here. That’s the reason for the stitch.”
“The clothing?”
Macer answers, “Yes. In the event we encounter any residents of the interval, we want to be careful not to disrupt things. We have a non-contamination edict.”
There’s a cybo posted near the barn door on the ground level. It’s hunched over, dressed in a loose-fitting monk’s tunic with a churka modified to look like a thick walking stick with a bulbous head. She tries her best to ignore it as they move past, but the stench of it forces her to cover her nose with a sleeve.
Royse slides a board to the left, revealing the same type of plastic door pad as the one back in Macer’s guesthouse. He places his hand on the palm reader and taps his Viatorio. A vertical slat slides down, revealing a trio of other churkas that have been modified to look like wood. He lifts one from the rack, and the panel slides shut again.
Royse resumes his protection mode as he steps through the barn door, searching the outside for anything that’s amiss. The intense look on his face causes Luci to suspiciously scan the area for attackers as well.
It’s near dusk, and recent rainfall has left a dewy freshness in the country air. Careful not to slip on the slick grass, the three descend the hill to a worn dirt pathway that’s turned to mud. Luci wonders how proficient Royse is with the blaster. If assassins have been dispatched to this interval, they could be hiding in any of these trees to ambush them. Just how good is the big man leading them with a churka?
Macer says to Luci in a hushed tone, “The color green—I suspect many citizens of Relicus post for jobs here just to see the trees and foliage. So much green.”
Arrays of insect and bird noises celebrate the watering of the trail’s lush foliage. Maneuvering over and around mud puddles, Luci tugs the back of Macer’s frock and says in a hushed tone, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just have the longchairs appear at the monastery?”
Macer softly answers Luci as they methodically follow the bodyguard’s steps, “Longchairs placed too close to the source of the vortex are disruptive, since they aren’t a constant. They leap skip from juncture to juncture. In contrast, the chrono portal for the Grange remains open, flowing like a river from this interval into ours. It never stops.”
Luci rehearses this new concept aloud. “So the portal thing for the food is similar to tossing barrels into a flowing stream, and they just follow the current—in this case, the time current downstream to your interval?”
“In the simplest of terms, yes, something like that,” Macer says. “The vortex points are in a constant state of forward dispensation.”
Royse pauses in front as if he’s heard something. He scans the area, the churka an extension of his arm. Luci’s heartrate speeds up, but only the sound of bug noises register in her hearing.
Royse points out a plump brown rabbit in the tall grass on their left side.
Experiencing a slight bit of relief, Luci swallows and continues her questioning of Macer. “So you can’t skip back in time to gather food that you harvested from last year or, for that matter, even a week ago.”
“Right. Not even containers that were sent and delivered as recently as last night. A vortex like the one in the Grange is in a constant state of flux, moving in linear time, closing each microsecond as it passes by. There is a direct one-to-one correlation between the time here and in Relicus city; a quarter of an hour here is the same measurement of a quarter hour there.” He pauses to concentrate, stepping over a section of a fallen tree. “Even after all of these years, we still don’t know what causes the intervals or the few vortex points.”
This mystery excites and intrigues her. She embraces the distraction from any unseen foes in the forest. Luci rushes a step to get closer to Macer. “And you don’t know why they’re placed where they are?”
“The best theory that I ever heard was from Lucius Bunn. He was a man that worked with me—well, really, Waleen, my father. He suggested that time was like cloth—say a garment of some sort—and in that fabric there were buttons sewed in, holding it all together. Intervals would be that tiniest of spaces between the button and the buttonhole that the universe allows us to slip through.” He reaches for her hand and guides her over the obstacle of the fallen tree.
Luci nods in appreciation. “You mentioned in the warehouse that the intervals don’t necessarily open into monumental moments in mankind’s history, so if you wanted to meet Julius Caesar or Winston Churchill, you couldn’t.”
“True,” Macer answers. “We can only leap skip to where the universe allows us to go.”
“And you can’t return to the same exact moment in time twice? If you’re in one of these forward dispensation chronal energy things we’re about to see?”
“The vortex—yes, this is also true,” he answers softly as he scans the area.
Royse pauses again, but no rabbit emerges this time.
Luci speaks in an exaggerated whisper. “So, to use a word picture example, someone riding on a passenger train from my time could move from one of the very back car compartments to a front one as the train rolls down the tracks. After a few minutes, they return to the compartment in the back of the train.” She pauses to navigate around a wide puddle. “But even if the passenger returns to their original seat in the back, the same exact one from before, they’re not in the same place as they were because the transport has progressed down the rail.”
“Yes,” Macer says. “That’s a sound example.”
There’s something about it all that makes Luci’s brain itch. Academia has taught her to be certain of her understanding before she exposes a fallacy. “Let me make sure I’ve got all this. Longchairs skip from fixed points and arrive at fixed points except if they’re too close to an open vortex like the one we’re headed to see, and this is because . . .”
As she searches for the adequate terms, Macer interjects, “Due to how the dominant chronal energy attributes take precedence.”
She repeats the phrase “dominant chronal energy attributes,” committing it to memory.
Macer jumps in. “This is why we can’t leap skip from here to anywhere but back to Relicus City, and the duration we spend here will be relative to our return there.”
His confirmation slides the puzzle together in her mind. The conclusion is simultaneously exhilarating and disquieting. “Then you’ve got a problem,” Luci says in a somber voice. “If I understand all of this . . . even if I do manage to solve what’s destroying the interval openings across the world, and even if there’s a way to keep this ‘river of time’ flowing into the future, eventually, it’s all going to run out anyway.”
For the first time, Macer stops in place to look at her. The abrupt halt makes Royse take notice, and he hurriedly backtracks to them. “What’s wrong, sir?”
“It’s okay, Royse. What do you mean, Dr. Gaudiano?” Macer asks with widened eyes.
Luci’s stunned by the panicked look on his face and glances down at the mud on her shoes. “Well, what century is it today . . . where we are, what’s the year?”
“It’s 1044, August in 1044. Why?” Macer says, taking an anxious step in her direction.
She looks up at him. “This is 1044, and Shar said that the Night of Ten Million Fires, Hi no Kawa, occurs around the year—”
“The year 2068 PH,” Royse butts in. “Hi no Kawa begins in 2068.”
“Okay, so 2068, which means this place and any production ceases at that time.” She pauses to calculate. “That’s one thousand and twenty-four . . . so the city’s food source ends around year 3200 . . . 3215 to be exact.”
Royse and Macer look at each other, and then Macer confirms, “A thousand years into the Relicus City’s future?”
“Yes, if the food processing area we’re headed to right now doesn’t survive the catastrophic nuclear event in this place’s future, you’re done,” Luci says, slightly perturbed by their smugness. “What makes you think you’ll be able to grow food in Relicus’s future if you can’t grow it in 2191?”
Macer pauses. “You bring up an important point, but we’re more concerned with what’s happening now. If Gicul succeeds, there won’t be any future.”
Luci mutters to herself the line that her father used to say. “The future isn’t what it used to be.”
“What do you mean by that?” Macer asks.
“Nothing,” Luci answers. “Look, you should send a scouting party as far into the future as they can go to see how things are. Perhaps there’s some technology or something that—”
“Absolutely not,” Macer says. “A leap skip into a future interval could have dire consequences to the city.”
“But why? What’s the problem with that?”
“It’s illegal,” Royse blurts out. “Article two of the edict. That, plus longchairs have built-in FTTs to keep anyone from taking a leap skip forward.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she protests. “It’s a law that your society made. You can change it. He can change it—he’s the chancellor.” Luci feels like she’s pleading, but she doesn’t back down. “I’m not saying to give everyone access, just a few trusted emissaries like Shar or you, Royse. You two just go and report back how things are, how the problem got solved. Surely that’d be allowed, given what’s at stake.”
Macer shakes his head and answers in a somber voice, “It could be too disruptive.”
Luci’s voice comes out louder than expected. “How do you know that New Australia isn’t already doing something like this, that they haven’t skipped ahead into the future?”
“They haven’t,” Macer answers a little too quickly.
“You know this because they told you or something? How can you trust them? Even if there’s some treaty or something, how do you know?” She adds, “Where do they get their food from? Do they have a Grange interval too somewhere?”
“It’s inconsequential,” he says dismissively.
Luci guffaws. “How can you say that? The possibility of another food source, I know they’re your enemy or whatever, but that’s huge.” She can’t believe this. “What is it that you’re not telling me? How can I help if you continue to withhold stuff from me?”
“I’m withholding nothing,” Macer says, pointing his index finger at her face. “In fact, the reason we took the leap skip here should be proof that I’m trying to be as candid as I can be with you for the sake of the city. But a leap skip to the future wouldn’t serve what we brought you here to do.” Macer motions to Royse. “Come on, let’s get going.”
“Whatever,” Luci grumbles under her breath and grudgingly follows.
The three travel in wary silence for a few minutes until they reach the foothills of the blue-green mountains. Sprouting up from a small clearing among golden wheat fields is the stone structure of their destination. Macer turns as Luci approaches and puts his index finger to his lips. She nods her understanding to remain silent as she joins them on the stone pathway. The building has two naves separated by horseshoe arches. Unevenly spaced shafts of natural light pierce the area terminating on the rock floor. The trio enters the main doorway and moves into the square-segmented chapels inside.
Though they’re only whispers, Macer’s words echo off the cool, hard stone surfaces. “La Rioja is where the first words in Castilian Spanish were ever written down. This is the birthplace of the Spanish language. Two centuries from now, Gonzalo de Berceo will write the first poems in the Spanish language.” Macer points at one of the open areas to the right of them as they walk past. “In fact, his remains lie in the Romanesque chapel, or better said, he will be put to rest one day down in there.”
Royse steps past them, reaching for a spot on a nearby column. After a quick search, he slides down a small, flat panel masterfully disguised to match the color and texture of the buttress. He repeats the gesture he did in the barn of activating the palm reader while tapping the Viatorio affixed to his earlobe.
The soft hum of a machine engine makes Luci turn around, searching for the source. She realizes it’s coming from under the ground, but something else catches her attention. The ends of a tapestry are slowly curling up into themselves like an old-fashioned window shade. The slab behind the wall hanging gradually lowers at an angle until it forms a ramp downward into an area brightly lit with artificial light.
“Wow!” Luci exclaims with a soft chuckle.
“We shouldn’t linger,” Macer says, urging her down the stone slope.
With Luci in the front and Royse in the rear, the three proceed down a hallway lit by panels in the floor. Luci recognizes the material used is the same that led out of Macer’s guesthouse. She pauses, looking back as the ramp returns to a vertical position, sealing them in with a thud.
“We’re almost there, Doctor,” Macer says, indicating for her to continue.
She spots an opening on the right side at the end of the corridor up ahead. Luci detects a familiar stench even before they come within fifteen yards of the doorway, the sickening, putrid scent of a cybo. She wonders why, with all their technological advances, they can’t find a way to remove or better conceal the stink of these loathsome creatures. She fakes needing to adjust her medieval garment in order to allow Macer to go through the opening before her, but Royse waits.
As Luci hurries past the cybo sentinel, she bites her lip upon realizing that it’s female or at least had been female at some point in the past. They move into a vestibule lit from the floor as in the apartment. Royse approaches another palm reader pad on the wall, and seconds later, the door slides open with a pneumatic hiss. “Welcome to the Grange, Doctor.”
~ Sixteen ~
Luci steps forward a few feet to clutch the cool safety rail in both hands and brace herself. The unexpected vastness of the area below is dizzying and a sharp contrast to the eleventh-century structure bearing a smaller footprint above. She’s at the edge of a five-story balcony overlooking an enormous complex bathed in warm, pinkish LED light. Endless stacked rows of tightly arranged metal racks extend upward from the concrete floor; they easily reach thirty-feet high. All of the deep trays are filled to the brim with perfectly situated vegetation beneath slowly oscillating fans.
