The Time Surgeons

The nearby orbiting white dwarf stars were discovered by the scientists of Praxia three quarters of a century before they were found by Pachmeny in a timeline that never existed. The implications were realized five years after that and ever since then, the scientific resources of Praxia were bent toward finding a solution.

Some scientists were confident of finding an answer: after all, knowledge was growing at a breakneck pace and had already gone beyond that of the Ancients. Unfortunately they could not say what the solution might be.

Large shelters far underground might provide a haven for some; might even provide a nucleus for resettlement of the surface decades or centuries later. Construction of many such shelters and research into the best ways to ensure their long term survival were begun. Beyond an elite chosen for their essential skills, equality of access was to be guaranteed by a lottery. But many wondered who the true winners would be: those given places in the shelters, perhaps gaining nothing beyond a long lingering death, or those left behind to perish more suddenly.

Fleeing to other stars was another option, but nobody knew how. The best extrapolations of known methods of propulsion could achieve fabulous speeds, but even they were a mere fraction of the speed of light, and the inhabitants of such ships would not long outlast the death of their home world before being overtaken by the same holocaust. But here too research proceeded apace, in the hope that some breakthrough would allow acceleration close enough to the speed of light, soon enough for it to matter.

For a while the equations of spacetime excited great interest. The scientists who studied such arcane knowledge had found that those equations allowed piercing the geometry of spacetime with a kind of tunnel, which potentially could jump great distances without needing to accelerate at all. Maybe great ships could be built, able to generate their own tunnels to travel faster than light. Or what if a fixed tunnel could be made spanning many light years of space? If such a tunnel could be created, perhaps it would allow an exodus to another world, far away from the fury to come. And unlike solutions involving shelters or ships, both needing to fit people inside and keep them alive, potentially far more people could be saved if all they had to do was to leave their homes and walk onto a far planet.

But by the time Accimbali began his own studies disillusionment had set in. The equations might allow tunnels through spacetime, but only under conditions that nobody understood or had any idea how to achieve. Research continued, but more out of grim wishful thinking than any real optimism that success was achievable in principle, let alone before the end of the world.

But advances had been made, and if nobody knew how to create a stable tunnel or one larger than microscopic, at least the general conditions under which one could be initiated had been elucidated. Nobody had yet succeeded in the task but at least it seemed theoretically possible.

Accimbali succeeded.

Accimbali sat at a starkly utilitarian table, feeling the eyes of the Lords and other luminaries arrayed before him, boring into him. He gazed back calmly. Over the years he had learned calm. No matter what emotions roiled beneath the surface it was better to present an untouched mask to those above him. Passions were regarded with suspicion, as passions implied personal goals and therefore less than perfect devotion to the needs of the Group. Civilizations might have risen, fallen and risen again, but one thing had stayed constant: the remarkable coincidence between the needs of the Group, the ambitions of its leaders, and obedience to their desires.

Today was a day when passions were raging beneath the calm face of the scientist. Today I am playing for the fate of the world.

“We have poured a lot of time and resources into your project, Accimbali,” pointed out Barramor, currently Headman of the Committee for World Defense. “Are you telling me you have failed? You promised us travel to the stars. And now, when travel to the stars has become necessary, you tell us it can’t be done?”

“I never promised travel to the stars, Great One. What I said was that my own research, coupled with our better understanding of some of the obscure equations preserved from antiquity, seemed to hold hints of means to tunnel through spacetime. The Ancients called these tunnels ‘wormholes’, though even they had no more than theoretical hints of them. The hints held out promise of rapid travel over immense distances, a way to bypass the lightspeed limit. Hints, not promises. Good enough hints to be worth investigating. But yes, I have failed: while such tunnels do appear to be possible, they cannot be used for travel between the stars. They are too unstable. Perhaps with greater understanding we might find a way. But I do not think it is possible, not within our lifetimes. It would need an understanding of a layer of reality beneath or beyond our most advanced theories, one for which we lack even hints, let alone guideposts.”

“Then we are doomed,” declaimed the Paraxam himself. “All we can do is hide, and hope it is enough despite all our calculations to the contrary. Or hope that others can find a way to send ships to the stars, while yet others find ways to shield them from the supernova. In either case our resources are better spent elsewhere.”

Accimbali looked slowly from face to face, then quietly dropped his bombshell. “Yet there may be a way.”

“You just said it was impossible. Explain.”

“The equations are those of spacetime. We cannot tunnel through space. We can, however, tunnel through time.”

He waited for the gasps and mutterings to die down, saying nothing more.

Finally the Paraxam turned his gaze on him. “Explain.”

Accimbali drew a deep breath, and allowed his gaze to wander over those present. He knew his greatest danger lay in Sharalay. They had been students together, briefly torrid lovers, both members of a secret society which had no name only a shared philosophy. It had no leaders, but had existed in the great Universities for centuries. It had survived by being invisible.

There had long been tension between the remnants of the Sages of the Concord and the barbarian Lords of Praxia. Even when the larger culture around them had absorbed the invaders, the rulers retained a pride in their barbarian roots, and might and power were valued more highly than wisdom. Wisdom, knowledge, and the Sages who embodied it were handmaidens of the Group and servants of its Leaders.

Had not history itself proved that this was the natural order?

The sages and their intellectual heirs thought differently. Such thoughts arose most naturally and vigorously among the young. But whether the millennia of evolution of brains or minds had brought men more patience, or greater timidity, or simply more wisdom, their resistance remained in the shadows. Theirs was a resistance not meant to overthrow a regime but to keep an idea alive. A resistance that knew the invaders had already been largely tamed by the remnant, superior soul of the vanquished, and now waited to complete that job: to finally see the rule of force subjugated to the gentle rule of wisdom.

So they had no name, no leaders, and no aim but the pursuit of wisdom, and the dissemination throughout society of men and women armed with that wisdom. For a goal that would not be reached within their lifetimes, but their lives would have helped achieve. Their one rule was that there would be no active protests, and certainly no action against the Lords. Those of a more fiery temperament were eased into their own path.

There they either learned wisdom in time, or died.

Like many cultures throughout history where strength was key to success, women had played a subservient role in Praxia. As it became more civilized such prejudices had begun to recede. This had been accelerated by the discovery of the impending catastrophe, just as in past societies the pressures of war had achieved likewise. By Accimbali’s time all positions and careers were theoretically open to women; however old prejudices die hard, and if paths were open to them still they were strewn with obstacles. A woman could succeed but she had to be exceptional.

Accimbali knew that the others present were all intelligent, else they would have not reached their current positions or, having reached them, long survived the plots of others who sought the same thing. For the same reason they were driven and ruthless. But their intelligence was of a more practical kind. An intelligence focused on goals and the machinations of men; not the intelligence of an artist or scientist. He knew he should not underestimate them, but was comfortable in his greater knowledge: he was confident he could answer any questions they were likely to ask.

Sharalay was another matter, he knew when his gaze was briefly stopped by her perceptive dark blue eyes. She was personal scientific adviser to the man she sat next to, Thegrado, most powerful of the Lords and both presumptive heir to the Paraxam and his chief rival. The ascension of heir to ruler was neither guaranteed nor always due to the voluntary retirement of the previous incumbent.

For Sharalay, a woman, to be his personal advisor was testament to both her brilliance of intellect and the focus of her drive. Accimbali knew it was probably also a testament to her willingness to be one of Thegrado’s many mistresses. Everyone knew the man jikked around like a rabbit in heat. Society hadn’t evolved that much, and unless Thegrado was particularly liberal in his thinking, brilliance would not be enough for a woman to rise so high by his side unless she also lay at his side. Looking into the dark pits of Thegrado’s eyes, Accimbali doubted his thinking was very liberal.

Like many intellectuals, Accimbali was supremely confident in his own intellect. But back when they were students even he had sometimes wondered whether Sharalay’s incisive mind bettered his. Now he wondered whether that brilliance had survived, and if it had whether it would be fast enough to deduce what he would not be saying today. And if it was, where her true loyalties now lay.

Looking into her eyes, he could see the first but could not read the second, and his mouth dried briefly with fear. It is too late to change course now. Now I cast my dice in the lap of the gods. Perhaps she will see nothing. But if she does see, she is my greatest danger – or greatest opportunity.

“A wormhole through space is unstable,” Accimbali began. “In theory it can be held open by forms of matter and energy that we can put into the equations as mathematical terms, but bringing those into reality is currently beyond even our imagination.

“But extending a wormhole back through time creates tensions that are mathematically similar, in a sense creating virtual negative energy. Even so it requires a great amount of power and is not especially stable. But it is stable enough for a large body, a human body, to move into the past. It will last only half an hour or so, but that is long enough for many purposes.”

The room was silent for long moments, and Accimbali could almost see the thoughts running through their minds as they first tried to see, then grasp, the implications.

Finally Barramor asked, “How sure are you of this?”

Accimbali shrugged. “I am as certain as I can be of the mathematics. To confirm it in practice will need experiments using a lot of precisely directed energy. That is why I am here.”

Then Sharalay said, “But back in time to what place? We are moving through space all the time.”

“Spacetime is bent by matter, so fortunately for our purposes the wormholes are anchored to the gravitational well of the Earth. So we would end up here, not falling into the empty space between the stars.”

“You say about half an hour,” said Barramor. “That is not very long. What happens then?”

“Then it closes. Without experiments we can’t be sure of the details. However my investigations indicate that sending large masses into the past cause spacetime distortions which will probably prevent repetition in times too near. So we could achieve a number of small scale journeys but they would be to different times.”

“How different?”

He spread his hands. “I don’t know. We are at the edge of my understanding at this point. I think at the scale of a single human body it will only be a few days. But then it increases exponentially. If we send a hundred people through then I guess… decades. Decades between migrations. And if we tried sending only one or two people at a time, the distortions accumulate into much the same delays.”

They are now thinking that this is of little use for saving the world, but it might save their own skins. They are wondering how much they care.

He saw men exchanging glances, as if assessing how much others expected them to care. Then Sharalay spoke. “But travelling into the past… then doing things in that past. What about the Ancestor Paradox, the contradictions you get if you change the past in a way that prevents your being born, in which case where did you come from?”

“I imagine it is impossible. Perhaps that is part of the reason why the limits to transfer are there: nature’s way to prevent paradoxes.”

She nodded, then sat silently. He could see the thinking in the depths behind her eyes; saw a look of puzzlement, then a slight widening of her eyes as the puzzlement began to morph into horror.

He blinked slowly, then idly scratched his left ear. Our old signal for danger, the need to keep silent. She will remember it. But will she notice it? And if she does… will she obey it or betray me? Is she still loyal to our past and the ideals of our youth, or is she now one of those we despised? Now I will learn and perhaps I will die for nothing. Now the fate of the world is as much on her head as mine.

He watched her stare at him, saw her lips open; then she nodded again as if satisfied and leant back in her chair.

“I see. Yes. Obviously we need more study, but clearly nature will not allow us to achieve the impossible.”

The Paraxam had watched the exchanges silently but now spoke. “You have done well, Accimbali, but as amazing as your achievement is – if it is real – it is not the answer we were hoping for. Still, surely it is better to save some than none. And as you say, this is the edge of your understanding. Perhaps further investigation will expand our options. I am favorably inclined to give you all the resources you need, within reason. Does anyone else have any comments or suggestions?”

Those in the room looked around at each other, except for Sharalay, who remained frozen in her chair staring at Accimbali, and there was a general murmur of assent to the Paraxam’s words.

“Accimbali?”

“Thank you, Noble One. I shall present a more detailed plan to you all as soon as I can. But may I make one other request?”

The Paraxam nodded in assent to continue.

“I would ask Thegrado’s permission for Sharalay to work with me on this task. I am aware of her brilliant mind and think she will be of great value to this enterprise.” And Thegrado will be happy, as his woman will be inserted as a spy at the highest levels; and the Paraxam will be happy, as it will strengthen Thegrado’s obligations to him.

“I have no objection, Noble One,” said Thegrado graciously.

A faint smile played over the Paraxam’s lips. “We shall make it so, then. Sharalay, you will make yourself available to assist Accimbali in any way he wants. Accimbali, develop your plan and present it for approval, but I don’t foresee any problems. Since you have asked for Sharalay’s help, I will expect an independent appraisal from her as well once she has had time to examine your findings in detail. You are both dismissed.”

Accimbali and Sharalay rose, bowed in assent and farewell, then left the group to their other deliberations.

As they walked out then sat in the transport taking them to Accimbali’s offices, they continued an animated discussion of Accimbali’s discoveries, though still avoiding the questions he could see raging behind her eyes.

Finally they sat in his private office, and he offered her a drink which she now held in her hand. She took a sip, but then something broke inside her. She stood abruptly and banged her glass down on his desk, the amber liquid sloshing over its sides, and glowered down at him, leaning her weight on her fists.

“By the fact that you didn’t want me to ask some obvious questions, I can only assume that you don’t have good answers to them,” she accused in a voice now hoarse with barely suppressed emotion. “Worse, I can only assume that it isn’t that you don’t have answers, but that you don’t want to give them. Given the way you warned me to shut up, I assume that our noble Lords won’t like it either. So spill it, Accimbali! What’s your game? Or to be more precise, have you gone utterly mad?”

Accimbali calmly sipped his drink, watching her.

“You are still beautiful, Sharalay. Especially when you are angry.”

“Jikk you, Accimbali! Maybe I’ll go straight to Thegrado with my suspicions. Answer my jikking question.”

“And still the same old Sharalay,” he said with a smile as she fumed. “Just as fiery and, considering your questions, just as brilliant. So I am glad you are here and you obeyed my request. I didn’t know what side you were on.”

“Maybe I’m on nobody’s side. Except mine, the truth’s, and by implication, our great Lords’. Don’t think just because I’m here that I’m on your side. My suspicions can strike me suddenly at any time. So answer the jikking question!”

He nodded and put down his drink, rather more gently than she had. “All right. No, I have not gone mad. At least,” he added with a bitter laugh, “I don’t think so. I wish I had. But if you had any deeper questions perhaps you should ask them now.”

She glared at him. “Fine. I can see how you want to play this. Admit nothing, see how much I know. And I suppose if I were in your position I’d do the same. So as you wish. Your answer to my question about time travel paradoxes was a steaming pile of horse manure and you know it. ‘Oh, if we’re careful we can get away with it?’ Seriously? This isn’t going to work unless we go back a long way. Nobody is going to want to go back to our own dark ages. We’re going to want to pick some era long ago, when life can be easy and a small numbers of refugees can be safe from rampaging natives. Aren’t we?”

“Yes. So?”

“So you know as well as I do how contingent the future is. The tiniest change can rewrite history. If we do this our present will be obliterated. We will save at most a few hundred people, at the cost of everyone else’s lives. Worse, whatever world replaces this one is still dead. So what are you really trying to do?”

“Surely saving some people is worth it? Don’t you think?”

“What I think is that this is going to be a very expensive exercise. What I think is that you are building your own escape tunnel to save your own skin, which you will get away with because our dear leaders want to escape with theirs too, the rest of the world be damned!”

“Sharalay, the rest of the world is doomed regardless. We have twenty years left. I think it will take ten of those years to develop the technology to turn the theory into practical reality. Another few years to refine things. This is our only chance, and our Lords will not agree to it if there is no hope. And while they will fiercely proclaim their desire to save the whole world, they will agree to it even if the only hope is for them and their friends. But they must have that hope, or we are all dead.”

“So that’s it, then. It is your private escape route. But you know our Lords are not yet ready to accept it, so it is too risky for them to know the truth. So we don’t ask too many questions, and we rely on any suspicions they may have to collide with their personal wish to survive, so they remain silent too?”

He stared at her in silence for a while, then picked up his glass, swirled the ice, and sipped. “Sit down, won’t you? Finish your drink.”

She looked at him for another few moments, then gave a sigh which could have been bitter, resigned or damning, and sat back down. She picked up her drink, downed half of it in one gulp and glared at him.

“Jikk you, Accimbali. I think I’ll just spill it and watch you burn, you bitchspawn.”

“You could tell them, but do you think they would thank you? They might praise your devotion and loyalty and service to the people: for a couple of months. They must, because their public faces are all for the people; and to be fair, with the best of them even in reality. But they didn’t get where they are without being fundamentally all about themselves and their own advancement. I have looked into Thegrado’s eyes, and I think you know as well as I do how he would reward you. They will know you have cost them their lives. Whatever it costs me it will cost you more.”

“Jikk you. But I repeat myself.”

“You know it is true. You feel it even in your own soul. When faced with your own death, if this way out were offered to you, you know you would take it. Don’t blame me. Don’t blame them. And not one person in the world you feel sorry for would do otherwise.”

She lowered her eyes and replied softly, “I… I don’t know.”

They were silent for a while. Then Accimbali sighed.

“You are a brilliant woman, Sharalay,” he said. “So I must lay all my cards on the table. You will find out anyway.”

She looked up at him, puzzled.

“I wish I did not have to tell you this. I wish it because you might betray me, and then the game is lost and with it the world. I wish it because it is something hard for anyone to bear, and I do not wish it on anyone else, least of all you. But your genius dooms you to know, because I need you.”

He looked into his empty glass, looked into hers, and poured them each more, as she continued staring at him in silence.

“I can only trust you with the truth and hope that – for the sake of what we had, what we were, or what you still are – that you will not betray me. The Lords must believe there is a way out, at least for them, or they will bury us. They are all survivors, but their vision is narrow. If they can see a way to survive they will do what they have to do. If they cannot, if instead they see only their doom, then they will hang on to hope for another solution: even if it gives them just an hour more of life, even if it means dragging down the whole human race into destruction for the sake of that hour.”

“What… what are you trying to say?”

“There is no way out. Not for them, not for us, not for anyone alive today.”

“So… what? Are you saying this is all a lie? For what purpose?”

“Oh, it is not a lie. But you are right. We cannot travel into the distant past without losing the present. But it is worse than that. It is not that we can escape and leave the rest of the world to its fate. The present can intrude into the past for only a short while. It can do things, things that persist: but just like the future, it will cease to be. If a man goes back into the past and changes the past, he too will cease to exist.”

“But then… but then what is the point?!” she cried.

He stared into the depths of his drink for long seconds, then lifted his eyes again to bore into hers.

“You have read the tales of the discovery of the legacy of the ancients. But have you considered how and why that legacy was left?”

“Why… to preserve their knowledge, knowing their end was near.”

“But have you considered the nature of their legacy? Built to last millennia, but also to be hidden for most of those millennia. They must have taken a long time to build. As if they knew their end was coming long before it arrived. They accepted their end, or could not prevent it, yet left their knowledge for others.”

She stared at him, then whispered, “As if they knew… knew their own future. Their own far future.”

He nodded. “Perhaps it means nothing. There is much we don’t know about the Ancients. Perhaps those caches were to them no more effort and time than building a warehouse is for us. But I don’t think so. Not when we compare them to the other remnants the Ancients left behind.”

“What… what are you getting at?”

“I think you see it yourself now.”

She nodded, dismayed. “I think I do. But tell me. It is time to tell me all.”

“Maybe you were right the first time, and I am mad,” he sighed. “But I think we are not the first to live in this time. There was another timeline, which had suffered the same disaster we have. For whatever reason, perhaps they simply ran out of time, they could not save themselves. So they changed the past: at the price of their own existence. They warned someone, someone able to preserve enough of the Ancient wisdom to give their heirs on a second timeline – us – a head start. As it turns out, it does not seem to be much of a head start. But maybe it will be enough this time.”

“Enough… for what?”

“To change history again. Not to preserve knowledge through the disaster that overtook our ancestors. To stop the disaster from ever happening.”

She tossed back the rest of her drink, and silently extended her glass for more. “But if we could do that… then we would grant the world millennia of progress. Not to start again, but to build on what they already had. We could… we could…”

“We could save the world.”

“At the price of our own lives. At the price of everyone’s lives. At the price of our entire history.”

“Yes.”

“It is insane.”

“Yes. But it is our only hope. You know as well as anybody on Earth what we have tried and what we have failed. Do you think we have a chance at an alternative? Some way to make our tunnels cross light years of interstellar space, or make starships able to carry thousands of people? Starships fast enough to outrun the storm, or tough enough to weather it?”

“No,” she whispered.

“No. We are all dead already. But we can give the world another chance. We will die, the billions of people in our history will never have been: but there will be new billions, people who never were but who now will live. Then perhaps our race will find a way to escape its doom.”

“Do we have the right? To do this? Maybe we have no right, and we should pass the decision on to others.”

“If we are right we have no choice. We must bear the burden ourselves. To do otherwise is to cast the existence of our species to chance. We cannot risk it.

“But we do not need to decide now, just leave our options open. We have years. Perhaps the technology will not work. Or we will be surprised and better solutions will be discovered: in which case we will take the lifeline given us and leave the past as it is. To change the past is risky, as how can we know we won’t make it even worse? So when the time comes and the end approaches, if there are no better solutions then must we do what we can. But if there are better solutions, then I will destroy our technology myself rather than see it used.”

The years since that day had been busy.

He had not intended to marry. But life has its own logic, and if he was fighting a war to save all life, he could not deny his own life; nor refuse whatever happiness he might win in the time he was granted.

He had not intended to have a child. But love has its own logic, and after billions of years of the survival of the living, life did not easily let go of its legacy. And still he hoped that there would be a solution. That he was not bringing a child into the world only to erase her life by his own hand. That somehow there would be a better answer, that they all might live.

Over all those years he told himself that there would be an answer. Perhaps even one he found himself, and he would be the savior of those he loved as well as of the billions; not their killer.

But now he knew there would be no answer.

He and Sharalay had brought nobody else into their secret. It was too risky, and not needed. Their reports were written truthfully where possible, if incompletely. Their experiments were in the open, though their true intent might be disguised. Sharalay’s brilliance extended into the realm of computer programming, and she constructed a layer between the output of the instruments and the inputs to the recording and analytical engines. It would take a person of exceptional intellect to penetrate her deceptions. Such people were rare; any who came were not allowed near the secret code, their talents diverted elsewhere.

In public their relationship was one of cool, slightly hostile professionalism. It helped preserve the illusion that they were a check on each other; each respecting the other, but each maneuvering for their own advantage. It was a story easy to sell to men whose own lives turned on the same axis.

In private their relationship had an air of desperation and triumph, depending on their progress. Too often the triumph was itself the cause of their desperation, knowing its end if they failed in their greater aim of finding a less fatal solution.

For a while, in secret, they became lovers again, their lust driven by their desperation and triumph to its most logical climax. But it could not last. Each saw death in the other’s eyes, and their passion could not survive it.

Each found their own solution. Sharalay, powerful enough now in her own right to be immune from any displeasure of Thegrado, even if he himself had not moved on to other conquests, sought release in a string of short term relationships. They were not casual affairs. But they too could not survive the look of death, this time the one she saw gazing back from her own eyes. For a while each one brought her hope, the pulse of life damming the darkness in her soul. The light of lust in their eyes was the light of life, the legacy of a billion years. But when the light began to turn to love, she could not bear her own betrayal, and then she cried in incurable desolation, and moved on.

Accimbali found another: a woman whose intellect challenged him and who was working on space drive technology. When he met her she was young and filled with as much optimism as fire. She believed there would be a solution. She was delighted to bring a child into the world as a right and proper expression of their love, sure that the child would live long. As the years drew on, the fire began to fade with the optimism; Accimbali would sometimes see her gazing at their daughter with a look of equal love and despair. But it did not last. She would never give up until the heavens destroyed her; she would never believe she had failed until failure claimed her and no breath remained in her to struggle. It was one of the reasons he loved her; it was the fuel that let him survive what he saw in the mirror.

If their triumphs and despair were linked opposites, so were their hopes and fears. He retained the hope that he would never hold the fate of the world in his hands. Part of what let him was the good possibility that the war could not be stopped: but that was also his greatest fear. As the years went by and that fate drew closer, he would often recall one of their conversations. Soon after they had begun working together and their passions had reignited, Accimbali had woken one morning to see Sharalay lying on her side, eyes wide open, staring not at him but through him into space.

He squeezed her shoulder.

“Sharalay? What are you thinking of?” he asked.

She slowly gazed at him for a few seconds with her eyes still empty, then she focused on him. “You said… to change history. To stop the war. But what if the war can’t be stopped? There are some theories of history that insist it is the outcome of vast impersonal forces. How do you fight… that?”

It was a good question. Little was known about the war that had ended the Ancients, beyond the evidence from their ruined cities that it had been terrible. There was one fragment inscribed on a gold plate in a language of the ancients. No doubt had it been found by Praximar the gold would have been melted down and the knowledge lost, its meaning scattered among the atoms of a crown on Praximar’s noble head. But some long forgotten brave Sage, recognizing that it must hold a special value to be made of gold, had spirited it away in the Great Preservation that had saved much of the knowledge of Godsnest.

Without it Accimbali’s task might have been impossible. But it told the story of the start of the war. The world of the Ancients was fractured along many political and ethnic fault lines, but its two greatest powers had been the ‘USA’ and the ‘USSR’. Two nations separated by two letters but a vast enmity. At one end of the world you could almost walk from one to the other. At the other end their territories were separated by an ocean, with numerous smaller states huddled between them. The gulf between their philosophies was even greater, though perhaps less so in how their leaders applied them to their own policies and lives.

The War had started when the Soviets had launched a large scale nuclear attack on the United States, who had retaliated in kind. Other nations, allies or opportunists, had been drawn in. The tablet was unclear on why the Soviets had attacked, though it related a claim made by one of their diplomats, before he was executed, that their early warning system at a place called ‘Oko’ had reported an attack coming from the United States.

It was not much to go on, but it was a place to start looking.

So to Sharalay’s question he had simply replied, “Praximar.”

“Praximar? What do you mean?”

“Consider how the world might have been different, had he never been born. Or died of the fever while a child.”

“If history is made of forces not men, then it would not matter. Praximar did not conquer the Concord on his own. He was merely the sharp point of a barbarian horde. Maybe it would not have made a difference. Or maybe whatever difference it made would not have changed anything.”

“Yes, that is what they say. But Praximar was one of the greatest generals who ever lived. There had been many barbarian invasions before and all had been squashed. Without him the same would probably have happened. And the Concord had just uncovered Godsnest. Before long, they would have been unconquerable.

“And think on how small a thing it might have turned. Everyone knows the legend of the assassin’s arrow deflected by armor of Ancient metal. Praximar used it as proof that the spirits of the Ancients had chosen him. Assume it is true. We might as well, as the armor is still on display for all to marvel at. Two metal plates. Left behind by the Sages fleeing Godsnest because it seemed of too little value among all the other treasures. Two pieces of scorned metal that led to the ruin of the Concord.”

“If you are right… should we choose an easier task? Go back a shorter way, and kill Praximar. Save the Concord.”

“I don’t think we dare. Saving the Concord might buy us a century, but would even that be enough? I suspect the builders of Godsnest hoped their trove would be found much earlier, but they miscalculated. I don’t think we can blame them. Who can calculate the tides and misfortunes of future millennia? Perhaps if we killed Praximar all we would achieve is two other people lying here now, no closer to saving the world than we are.”

“I am afraid. Afraid of failing. Afraid of succeeding.”

He grasped a fistful of her hair, kissed it, and buried his face in it.

“Afraid? We should be afraid. But we must be bold. We cannot save the world by making small steps. Those others. The ones I think have already done this. They tried something small. Perhaps it was all they could try. They gave us breathing space, and my admiration and gratitude can’t be overestimated. But that’s all they gave us. They have passed a baton through time to us. We have to finish the job, and for that we need all the courage and boldness we can muster.”

“But the war. Two mighty nations and their client states! Whole armies! Thousands of nuclear warheads! A sheet of metal won’t be enough.”

He sighed. “I know. But we have to look. What was it that ancient Sage said? ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the world?’ Perhaps we will find no place to stand, or too many. In that case… well, there is always Praximar.”

So surreptitiously, in the midst of the other research, they had sent probing tunnels to the time vicinity of the start of the war, and began zeroing in on its immediate causes.

Their world was already familiar with the structure and writing of the long dead Russian language. With their probes and computers it was not too great a task to reconstruct how it was spoken. With their neural linkage technology, nor was it a great task for induced learning systems to train a human brain into fluency in both directions.

When finally they knew the truth, Accimbali and Sharalay stared at each other without speaking, each knowing the other’s thoughts. It could be done.

They still could fail. Perhaps the man they had found would not believe. Perhaps he would not believe enough, and would falter when tested and fail to act. Or perhaps he would act, but history was ruled by impersonal forces after all: and a day, a week, or a month later, the disaster would come regardless, unstoppable as an avalanche begun by a snowflake but not caring which snowflake was the cause.

But they did not act. Or maybe it is why they did not act. Instead they waited, in a mixture of fear and hope in which the fear continued to grow to absorb the hope.

Their positions gave them access to the latest scientific information. The science in their world was the best humanity had ever achieved, but even it had its limitations when faced with the gulf between the stars. They knew when the supernova would blaze its deadly glory over the Earth, but not exactly. They knew when was too soon and when it must be past. Between those two points was uncertainty, a range of probabilities peaking in the middle of a range spanning nearly a year.

The public were unaware of this. They thought that the event was still some years beyond that point, and were encouraged by frequent news of great, if still secret, progress. Those who knew the truth were enjoined to secrecy under the most dire penalties. Accimbali and Sharalay knew, and watched the fall of days with growing dread.

They knew that if they acted too soon they could be the worst murderers in history, destroying a world that might have been saved had they only waited long enough for the means to be discovered. But if they waited too long they might be unable to act at all. So as the date approached on which ‘no chance’ would tick over into ‘a tiny chance’, their fear began to gain an edge of terror.

Finally they agreed. It had to be the last day of certainty. They were already gambling the survival of humanity on their actions. They could not add to the gamble. They could not hold possible victory in their grasp and risk its loss to chance.

So now Accimbali found himself in a transport capsule, having hugged his wife and daughter goodbye, knowing he would never see them again. That he, they and his world would have never been.

Experiments with animals had been done. They had been sent back to deserted places, not too many centuries in the past, to minimize the risk of damage to the timeline. The Lords knew that risk was there so were prudent. But when it came to their own journeys, the risk did not matter for they would no longer be here. The animals had been monitored and appeared healthy. Then a burst of energy had been sent through the observing tunnel and vaporized them: they did not want the risk of inserting a creature from the future to run wild in the past, scattering unknown consequences into the winds of causality.

Or so Accimbali had told them, with the connivance of Sharalay’s data interception routines. In fact the animals had been sent to wilderness areas only a few years in the past, with a judicious selection of locales and seasons to hide the fact. They dared not risk anything more. And the animals had to be vaporized, as the last thing Accimbali wanted was for the Lords to see them vanish of their own accord.

Accimbali had told them that today would be the final experiment. He would take the risk on himself and go back to one of the times they had chosen. There was still risk, he said. The tunnels were at heart a quantum process. There were theories, held by many, that quantum events were indeterminate until set into reality by the observation of a conscious mind. This, Sharalay had argued, presented a risk that the animal experiments had not fully resolved. If there was a link between consciousness and the quantum realm, she pointed out, who knew what might happen to a human-level consciousness that traveled through such a tunnel? Perhaps the traveler would go mad, or lose their mind completely: an empty shell, present in body with their consciousness forever lost among the quantum pathways.

In public, Accimbali and Sharalay argued vigorously over this point, he dismissing it as a foolish interpretation of the equations. But reluctantly he agreed that, whatever his opinion, it could not be entirely dismissed as a possibility. So in public, the two came to an agreement that it must be tested.

Accimbali volunteered. Despite his enforced compromise with Sharalay, he said, he was completely confident that no harm would befall him, and he was proud to be a pioneer, the first of those who would follow him to this particular era. Many among the Lords secretly admired his cunning. They knew that whatever promises were made nobody, not even them, could be sure they would be among those who escaped. In one swoop, Accimbali both made himself a hero and guaranteed his place in the past.

Or he might die. But, Accimbali argued, that did not matter. If he died then he had failed. There was nothing more he could do, no way to save anybody: and if he’d stayed, his own death might have ended up more prolonged and painful than it would be this way. But if he were still alive after a day in the past then the main exodus could begin.

The leadership agreed. Having an official experiment scheduled made Accimbali’s plan much simpler. If the Lords had demurred they would have still found a way, but it would have been harder and far riskier.

And now Accimbali stood in front of the chamber. He surveyed the assembled luminaries, and then turned to Sharalay, standing beside him at the controls of the machine. He knew they expected some words on an occasion like this so he stood at attention, saluted the Paraxam, and spoke.

“This is the end of a journey of many years, but it is also the start of a new journey. One where no man has gone before. I salute you. I salute you all.

“Some of you, I will see on the other side.”

With that, he turned to include all those present in his salute. Then he extended his hand to Sharalay and gravely clasped her arm. He knew the others could see the tears in her eyes, but only he knew their full meaning.

He stepped into the chamber where a faintly glowing black dot awaited him. Then it rose to engulf him, and he was elsewhere.

The crowd watching the visual feed gasped. They saw the trees of a forest, the glow of a sunset painting shades of pink and yellow over high clouds.

Then Sharalay pressed a hidden button, there was a spark and a bang from the machinery, and the image went black.

As the room erupted in cries of consternation and questions, Sharalay turned gravely to the audience and just stood there, saying nothing, answering nothing.

Now nobody can see where you really are, Accimbali. Nobody can follow you or stop you across the gulf that separates us. Farewell, my co-conspirator, my fellow traveler, my friend, my lover. Are you a hero or a devil? Am I? Well, hero or devil, do your job well. You cannot save me, you cannot save us, but perhaps you can save the past and the future.