The Shores Beyond Time Read online

  “Maybe.” But Peter didn’t think so.

  A week later, as the cadet program drew to a close, there was a second chance to practice with the MGS suits. Once again, Peter signed up. Once again, the suit made him “sick.” Once again, he hiked to the deserted mountaintop.

  He came to the wide vista and stood in what he thought was the exact same position he’d been in last time. He aimed his link at the spot where the figure had appeared. He had since downloaded an app that allowed for even slower motion capture, though it drained the battery quite fast. He was only able to shoot twenty seconds of video before his link died.

  That evening, after recharging . . . there it was again. The figure was even clearer this time. It had large milky, pearlescent eyes. It seemed to have two noses, one above the other. And four legs, perhaps even many extra fingers. On one wrist, it wore a large silver watch. It was still gazing up into the sky, same as it had been last time.

  What could it be? Over the following weeks after he returned home, Peter searched the VirtCom for any kind of character from a movie or stream that resembled this one. Any costume you could buy, any drawing that someone had done. He searched for mentions of VirtCom artifacts that only appeared in slow motion—by the way, how did that even make any sense? He searched for mentions of strange phenomena in the Utah Extraction District; there were many, alien and UFO sightings of all kinds, even claims of a whole town that had briefly vanished, in what used to be Arizona, but all those episodes had occurred over one hundred years ago, back before the area had been largely abandoned. Moreover, those accounts sounded far-fetched, at best. And yet . . .

  Could this be some sort of alien being?

  Whatever it was, Peter never shared his video with anyone after Darius. He wasn’t the type to post much on his virtual profile anyway, but this felt strangely private, a secret all his own. Even more than that, over time, Peter began to believe that maybe, just maybe, the figure had been there specifically for him—like it was sending him a message, or it was the message, if only he could understand what it said.

  The school year marched on, and afterward, life for Peter, as is often the case in one’s teenage years, became busy. He didn’t end up spending a semester on Mars, but he did finish school with a flurry of perfect grades, after which he went off to university to study advanced space travel mechanics and physics. He’d always been interested in the space program, but now it felt like a purpose, perhaps even a design . . . as if the stars were calling to him.

  EARTH YEAR: 2167

  50 KM SOUTH OF THE MARS COLONIAL TRAINING ACADEMY—MOAB STATION

  UTAH EXTRACTION DISTRICT

  NORTH AMERICAN FEDERATION

  “Explain to me why we’re going here again?”

  “I just want to check something out.” Peter led the way up the slope. Around them, deep red evening light bled over the sandstone.

  “You know I was looking forward to sleeping on the subsonic, right?” said Mariah, trailing behind him. “Also, I packed for the beach, not for hiking.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  They were on their way to vacation in Chile, where the oceans were still cool enough to swim in summer. All of their friends, who were also, as of today, fellow Academy graduates, had gone straight there on the subsonic transport, but Peter had insisted on flying in an old thruster that could barely clock six hundred kilometers per hour.

  “This better be quick,” said Mariah.

  “It will be,” said Peter, not really listening.

  Crossing the UED, he’d begun to worry that he wouldn’t remember the spot, but every contour was familiar to him, burned into his memory from hours of studying maps and rewatching his old videos.

  He’d wanted to get back here for years. Finally, this evening, there’d been an excuse.

  The juniper forest had been burned to black stalks at some point during the six years since his cadet days, but the view from the rocky mountaintop spine was still the same: magnificent folds and towers of earth in all directions, painted in burning hues as the sun settled into the polluted haze blanketing the horizon.

  “Okay,” said Mariah, arriving beside him, not breathing that hard—she’d always been more serious about keeping in shape. “This is pretty, but so are the beaches at Valparaiso, and there I could have a cervezarita.”

  “You know the reefs are fake, right?” said Peter, smiling at the familiar sensation of sand-bristled wind on his face, that smell of the hot rocks.

  “Who cares? You can’t find real ones anymore, and snorkeling is fun. Also they’re supposed to have the best fish clones. Even stingrays.”

  Peter was busy getting his link ready and positioning himself. When Mariah saw him aiming it in her direction, she put her hands on her hips and smiled.

  “Can you move?” Peter said, watching the screen and waving his hand.

  She slid over a step.

  “No, I mean, like, behind me. Out of the shot.”

  Mariah arched her eyebrows. “How romantic.” She shuffled down the rocky slope.

  “Hey,” said Peter. “Listen, you know how people always ask me what the secret was to graduating top of our class, or why, when I could have had any other position in the fleet, I put in for the outer planet survey training?”

  “You’re brilliant, ambitious, and . . . eccentric,” said Mariah. “You don’t really need me to tell you that again, do you?”

  “There’s something else,” said Peter. He held his arms out. “This.”

  Miranda looked around. “What do you mean? This wasteland?”

  “No. . . .” Peter started recording a video, using the latest ultra-slow-motion app. It might have been stupid to say what he’d just said, since there really was very little chance this would work again—

  And yet didn’t he know, somehow, that it would?

  He recorded a clip and then played it back, his heart racing.

  There it was.

  The figure was still standing there, ghostlike. All these years later. Black robes, blue skin, too many legs. The only thing that had changed was its pose. Now it was looking down at its wrist, at that silver watch. The other hand was positioned over the watch, as if about to press it.

  “It’s really here,” said Peter.

  Miranda reluctantly peered over his shoulder. “What on earth is that?”

  “Actually, I don’t think it’s from Earth at all. I saw this exact thing, this being, when I was here six years ago. In this exact same spot.”

  Mariah gazed up the slope, to where the video indicated the being should be. Then back at the screen. She crossed her arms. “You’re telling me you brought me out into the middle of nowhere to see a VirtCom artifact? Of some weird cosplayer?”

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “You know what, Peter? You’re always playing your little mental games, and I’m usually fine with it, but this . . . whenever you’re done making spooky videos, I’d like to go. You could have come and done this on your own time. And now I’m missing time that’s really important to me.”

  “Mariah . . .”

  She trudged down into the charred forest without looking back. Peter watched her for a moment. He should probably go after her.

  Instead, he readied his link to make another video.

  The sun had set, leaving a cooling world of magentas and lavenders, canyons settling beneath their shadow shrouds. Heat fled the world in gusts. Peter recorded, and then watched. The being still stood there, hand poised over its watch. The watch itself seemed to be giving off a faint blue light.

  Peter looked back at the empty ridge. “I see you!” he shouted over the wind. It made him smile, in spite of his shivering.

  Below, the thrusters of their ship grumbled to life. Mariah would kill him if he didn’t get down there. He took one more look around this place, admiring its peace and emptiness. One more look at the spot where the figure was hidden by . . . time? Maybe. Now that he had finally graduated from the academy, p
erhaps he could find some serious scientists in the fleet to show these videos to. This could be his big discovery. Maybe he could even bring them here sometime. . . .

  Of course, Peter couldn’t possibly know that there would be no next time. At least, not here on Earth. Because barely twelve short years later, as Peter was just returning from his second deployment in the Saturn moons, the world would be halted in its tracks by the stunning news that the sun had begun to change, that a supernova was mere decades away, that they had to evacuate Earth—first for Mars, and then for Aaru-5. All at once, everything changed.

  Two years after that, when Peter heard from one of his commanding officers that the sun’s changing state was confounding even the top scientists in the field, and that whatever had happened to it had apparently begun years before, he would think of that being, standing there on the mountaintop.

  Had it known about the sun? Had it even had something to do with it?

  Peter would wonder briefly whether he could have prevented the supernova by sharing his videos or leading a research team to the ridgeline, but on that night in 2167, such concerns had been far from his mind, and just as when he’d been younger, Peter decided to keep his discovery to himself. This time, however, it was because of something very strange that happened next, just before he returned to Mariah and his ship.

  Peter had stowed his link and taken a last look around the vast landscape, enjoying the feel of the sandy breeze on his face. He’d just taken his first step down the trail—when he glanced at the ridgeline again and had another idea, this one brazen, dangerous even. He scrambled up to where, on his video, that figure appeared to be standing, and put his hand into the exact spot.

  Did he feel something there? Almost like his hand began to tingle . . .

  He took another step, moving completely into the space where the being in the video seemed to be.

  And then he surely did feel something. A sort of buzzing. The energy of whatever was here with him—or was it just the humming of his nerves? No, it had to be more than that.

  He began to stretch, to fade, but also to intensify. As if his senses were miles away. Like the universe was expanding around him, or like he was expanding into it. He was no longer on the Utah ridgeline. Instead, he found himself surrounded by a field of stars, so many stars, but also so much blackness in between, uncountable presence and unfathomable emptiness, beginnings, endings, all without a true up or down, all swirling. . . .

  And then a shadow fell over him. Something loomed, beckoning, drawing him in. He could see it clearly now: a large, dark structure. It looked like a doorway, with towering metal sides and a roiling black center. The sight of it froze him from within. As he drew closer, the sides of the doorway began to sparkle with silver circuitry, as if it sensed him coming—

  “Peter.”

  Something was beside him now, in the vast dark space. Something that shimmered with pale greenish-white light, something he couldn’t quite see out the corner of his eye, unless he strained to turn as hard as he could, and even then still not quite—

  A figure. But not that tall being with the robes and the many legs. This one was smaller, younger. It looked like a girl, except she seemed to be made of a million tiny mirrors reflecting starlight.

  “I can show you,” she said. Her voice was like glass, her words like an icy breeze that at first chilled him but then lit up inside him like energy.

  “Show me what?”

  “What you seek.”

  “The grand design?” Peter said instinctively.

  “The higher viewpoints. I need your help, Peter.”

  He shivered. The doorway had grown larger and continued to draw him in. And now Peter spied something through it. On the other side was a great complex of circular black arms, bathed in iridescent green light. A machine, a space station . . . and yet he felt certain it was more than that: that it was also alive.

  “Is this my future?” he asked.

  “It can be,” said the girl.

  Whatever that structure was, it seemed so massive, so beyond anything he’d ever known, that anyone had ever known. . . .

  “Follow the space-time distortions,” said the girl. “Trace the signal, written in gravitational waves. An event will happen soon in your timeline. No one else will know its source. That is where you must begin.”

  Peter’s vision started to swim. He began to blur—no, it was more like he had many arms and many legs, branching in all directions, like he was at the center of many possibilities, perhaps, oh perhaps, all of possibility.

  Older selves, younger, alternate histories and futures and beyond all of it,

  Always looming,

  That doorway, and the giant shadowy structure in the green light.

  “Find me,” she said again, “and all of this can be yours.”

  “I will,” he answered.

  The light grew, and so did the variations, branching and branching, all of it spinning faster as he sank into the great doorway. . . .

  Peter came to and found himself lying on the rocky slope. Blinking at the field of stars, not all around him anymore, just the normal night sky overhead, Venus gleaming, the brushstrokes of the Milky Way.

  Back on Earth. But from where?

  His hip and shoulder ached. Throbbing from the back of his head. Peter found blood there. He propped himself up on his elbows. He was lying a few meters down from the spot on the ridgeline. He felt like he’d traveled a great distance, and yet there was the pink rim of the horizon, the sun having just set. There was the sound of the thrusters from his shuttle. Barely a moment had passed. . . .

  He winced and saw the doorway behind his eyelids, the great structure beyond it, heard the glassy voice of that girl, like a dream.

  Find me.

  “Peter!” Mariah’s voice echoed up the hillside.

  He got to his feet, checked to be sure his link was in his pocket, and then, with a last look at the empty ridgeline, stumbled down the slope. Ducking through the burned forest, trudging down the trail, his mind far off.

  “Finally,” Mariah said as he entered the cockpit. “I swear I was about to—what happened to you?”

  “Nothing,” said Peter, his heart racing. “Just tripped. Total klutz. Ready to go?”

  “Uh, yeah.” She held out her link. It was playing a clip of their friends Rian and Jaime singing. “The subsonic had karaoke.”

  “Sounds fun.” Peter strapped in and activated the liftoff sequence.

  “They’ll be in Valpo in under an hour.”

  “Nice.” What were they talking about?

  Mariah slouched in her seat. A minute later, she huffed and left the cockpit.

  They flew across the twilit Utah desert. Across the midnight Gulf of Mexico. They spent a week in Valparaiso and afterward moved in together at the Helsinki officers’ station. They broke up a year later, and the next time Peter saw her, they were in the virtual auditorium as Secretary General Wells made his fateful speech about the end of the solar system, Mariah fighting tears, while Peter tried not to smile. Six years after that, Mariah died on a rocket test mission, her craft burning up in the Martian atmosphere. Peter saw the streak of fire as he was prepping a flight team up at the orbital docks, where the superstructure of the prototype starliner Artemis was nearly complete. He only learned later that she’d been on board.

  He had never told anyone about the strange being, or the girl made of light, the vision she had showed him. Instead, he’d worked his way up the ranks of the starliner program. Hard, relentless work, and some luck—or was it a grand design?—earned him command of the Artemis.

  And four years later, while on board the great ship en route to map the rogue planet Kazu-4—a prime candidate to be the first waypoint designated Delphi—Peter revealed to his crew that they had a second, top secret objective: to analyze the source of mysterious space-time distortions and gravitational wave emissions, which, in the rush to evacuate Earth and plan the colonization of Aaru-5, had never been
properly investigated.

  Nor did he mention that these orders to investigate had not in fact come from ISA command. Sometimes Peter laughed to himself, when he thought of where those orders had really come from.

  Throughout all the years between that Utah night and the moment when the Artemis encountered the great doorway in space—a discovery that would lock him and his crew on a course of events that would determine a good deal more than just the fate of this universe—scarcely a day went by when Captain Peter Barrie did not rewatch those old videos on his link and think of that great structure in the green light and the shimmering girl who had called to him from across the stars.

  Indeed, every now and then, some fellow officer would notice him speaking quietly to himself as he stood on the bridge or studied the navigation charts.

  “What is that little thing you’re always muttering?” Lieutenant Lyris had even asked him once, as they neared their mysterious destination.

  “It’s nothing,” Captain Barrie replied. He smiled, and she smiled back, and though they’d become quite close, she didn’t ask again. Later, when it was too late, she would wish she had.

  On they sped through the dark of space, and as the great doorway, and his fate, drew ever closer, Captain Barrie kept repeating those same words to himself, like a vow:

  “I am coming.”

  TIME LINE

  2175: Humanity discovers that, contrary to all previous scientific understanding, the sun will soon explode in a supernova. The International Space Agency devises a plan to first evacuate Earth to colonies on Mars, and then leave the solar system altogether for the distant planet Aaru-5, a journey that will take 150 years.

  2194: The Starliner Artemis, the prototype of the colonial fleet, is lost, eight years into its test voyage.

  2209: Phase One of the ISA Colonization Protocol is completed. On Aaru-5, known by its inhabitants as Telos, the resulting firestorm destroys the surface of the planet, leaving only a handful of Telphon survivors.

  2213: The last colonists depart Mars on the Starliner Scorpius.