Guardian of the present

By M R Winters

I woke late. An auspicious occasion, for today is my last day as the oldest in the village. In truth, “Today” does not have any meaning here on Charok, but I use the term in deference to convention, and to keep my sanity intact, or at least what is left of it.

Here in the nexus, we mark the passing of time by counting sleep intervals. When I am tired, I sleep, when I wake, we call it “today”. It is difficult to organise a routine when the passing of time has little meaning, but demarcation, such as it is, by the means of framing events as before and after sleep has some facility. My name is Doctor Bo-ran Deltis. I’m an archaeologist who has travelled to the stars but everyone on Charok calls me “Ran”.

We landed here a little over thirty-thousand sleeps ago. That is my sleeps. Others sleep at different rates and the rates change as the tides of time wash through us. You see, Charok is in an eddy in the fabric of reality. Here, at the nexus of the vortex, time is different and only exists as a subjective matter. The passing of time is only what you think it is. I guess that is true of the rest of the universe, but the regular heartbeats of orbits and decay add notches to the flow of time, so a second is a second irrespective of where you are or what you are doing, except if you are travelling at relativistic speeds. And Charok.

When we landed, the fusion pile stopped working, a consequence of local disregard for time, although thankfully, heat and light still had meaning, and our bodies still functioned. In an admittedly different way, but still functioning. So, without the fusion drive, which had faithfully propelled us from our habitation module orbiting outside the nexus, we had to resort to solid fuel rockets strapped to the side of our ship in case of emergency, aided by the not inconsiderable skill of Captain Ya. A case of foresight favouring the brave.

Ya, a physicist by training, was the first of us to realise the consequences of our situation and it was she who instituted the ritual of the “Unopened Present”. She never told us what is inside the box but forbade anyone from opening it just before she took her own life. Since then, we have observed her last order religiously, just passing the titanium flash paper wrapped box from person to person on the occasion of someone ascending to village elder-hood. I have held it for a thousand of my sleeps, but tomorrow I will give it to Cre and he will keep it until someone surpasses his age. He could, of course, keep speeding up his time, which we call ST, short for Subjective Time, until he is nothing more than a blur, but that would mean he could not interact with the rest of the village and life would become meaningless.

Keeping the Unopened Present forever is not an option. We all try it briefly. I did for a dozen sleeps. But wandering around a still village observing statues soon palls. That is how Ya killed herself. She sped up until she passed out of existence. She sat at her desk, scribbling feverishly until her hands blurred out of reality, quickly followed by the rest of her. She left a note pinned to the top of the box. It said, “This box is an anchor. It establishes a rhythm of events, a ritual to keep you all sane. Pass it to the oldest person in the village, measured by the number of sleeps they have undertaken. Never open it.”

Then she disappeared. We have been gifting the box to the latest elder ever since, and she was right. It adds meaning to the sameness.

Tomorrow, I will rise early, gift the Unopened Present to Cre, then go Ra-berry picking before the second sun rises and bakes the earth. He has promised to synchronise our ST for the day of the gifting, then we will drift apart as I slow to a more restful state. I’m not sure what I will do with my time, such as it is. Being Guardian of the Present is an honour, although I am the first to admit it wore thin several hundred sleeps ago. So, I’m happy to pass it on. If only to relieve myself of the burden.

I prepare for sleep by lifting my mattress off its Secwood frame and taking the Unopened Present from its hiding place. Putting it carefully on my table, I stepped back to admire its glittering surface, made from the remnants of the ship’s light-sails, and felt an urge to open it. My predecessor, Abrm, cautioned me of this. He described his own feelings in the hours leading to the gifting.

“You will want to pry inside when it is in your hands for the very last time,” he said. “They warned me, and it stilled my hand, which is why I am telling you. You must be strong.”

I could feel that tug now and I took a step forward, my arms outstretched, hands trembling. His words came to mind, and I forced myself to look away, sit on the edge of the bed, focus on anything else, but my eyes drifted back to the glittering cube, barely a third of a metre on each side as it sat foursquare on the table. It seemed to pulse with energy, not visibly, but intangibly, an unseen force drawing me towards it. I closed my eyes and recited the first stanzas of the poem I composed in my early days as the elder. It talked of our old life on Earth, so long, and so far away. Oh, how I yearned for those days: to return to my studies in the ancient walls of Cambridge, to drink beer and eat cheese on a sunlit day near a river. So far away.

I woke. It was the day of the gifting and the Unopened Present sat on my table, still complete. Dressing quickly, I took a seat at the table, my hands pressed flat on the surface, untrusting of my will. The noise of my gate opening focused my attention, and a sharp knock sounded at my door. It was Cre, and I felt relieved.

“Come in, Cre,” I answered, my voice barely a croak, “the door is open.”

The door swung wide and there in the low light of first sun, framed by the arch, stood broad-shouldered, Cre. He nodded a greeting and took a seat at the table, his square, blunt shape dwarfing the delicately carved furniture I favoured.

“This is it?” He pointed at the box on the table. I nodded, and he reached out with his powerful hands to grasp it. “I’ll take it then.”

I touched his arm lightly.

“Wait a while,” I said. “I have things to pass on.”

He dropped his hands to the table and turned his hard-featured face towards me.

“What things?” Cre was the most taciturn of us. An engineer by trade, he never let go of the practice of communicating with brevity.

“Things passed on by previous elders,” I replied.

“Go on,” he prompted.

“It is best to hide the box,” I began. “There have been many attempts to remove it. So, find a good hiding place, rather than put it on display.”

“I doubt anyone in the village would want to risk getting past me,” he said, and raised a clenched fist. Undoubtedly the strongest of us, his past reputation for bar fights went before him.

“You can’t be with it all the time,” I insisted, “so it’s probably best to hide it until you have to pass it on.”

“Also,” I went on, “when the time DOES come to pass it on, you will feel an almost overwhelming urge to open it, to see what is inside. I felt it last night and so have all my predecessors.”

He stared at me, his mouth a thin line, eyes steady.

“How many elders have there been?” Cre asked after a moment’s pause.

“Seventeen,” I replied, “you are the eighteenth.”

“And none of them have peeked inside?”

“None,” I confirmed.

“Despite an almost overwhelming urge to do so?” Cre raised an eyebrow, a comical affectation giving his battle-scarred face a kindlier look. “Wouldn’t you say that is rather unscientific?”

“Captain Ya cautioned us not to do so,” I replied. “We – the former elders – regarded this as a sacred duty. To open the box would be contrary to everything in which we believe.”

“I see,” he said slowly, pinching his bottom lip as he did so. ““So how many of the elders have been physical scientists or engineers?”

“None,” I answered truthfully. “As far as I know, the elders have been drawn from the scholars of other disciplines: history, languages and so on, the closest we got was Bre-fortunais, the palaeontologist, and me, of course – she was elder about ten thousand sleeps ago. Why do you ask?”

“A physical scientist might wonder why the box is telling us to open it and an engineer might take practical steps to find out.” Cre pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. “I am, as you know, an engineer.”

He reached for the box and before I could intervene; he pulled the tab sealing the careful folds of titanium. One edge popped up, and then a second and an urge to examine the contents swept over me. Cre’s eyebrow puckered again.

“Interesting,” he said, and continued to unfold the thin, metallic covering. “Do you feel that?”

“I do,” I conceded. “It must come from the box.”

Inside was another box, this one made of rough-hewn local woods. A hinged lid, held in place with a single catch, covered the top of the box. Cre flipped it aside. Lifting the lid revealed a glowing mechanism, a startling fact, for nothing electronic worked here in the nexus. A small screen took up half the top area and a panel with glowing arrow-shaped buttons on the other half, ceding only one small area to a camera and microphone assembly near the halfway point.

“It’s a learning machine,” Cre said. “We use them to train people in skills outside their area of expertise when the need arises.”

The screen flicked to life and an image of Captain Ya Susquelwie appeared. She smiled.

“I knew it would be you, Cre, my old friend,” she said in her soft Asiatic voice. “You could never turn away from a challenge, least of all one wrapped in a mystery.”

“What does this all mean?” I said to the machine.

“Ah, Ran. I take it you are the retiring elder?” Ya’s eyes turned to me.

“I am, Captain.” I replied.

“You lucked out passing this on to Cre,” she said, her eyes shining. “Now you get to be one of our merry band’s saviours.”

“You have solved the problem of the nexus?” Cre asked, his eyes widening. He waved his hand at the box. “How do we do it? How did you do THIS?”

“It’s a long story, Cre,” Ya said, “but in brief, I discovered the nexus is a temporal storm, the centre of which is an eye of becalmed time. That is where you are. I reasoned I could only get out of the eye by accelerating myself to escape velocity, which is the point at which my entire being converted into information. This I did, but I didn’t want to leave you all behind, and once I’d reached the tipping point, there was no going back, so I constructed a conduit, through which I could pass information and placed the learning machine I salvaged from the wreck of the ship at one end of the conduit.”

“How did you do that?” I gasped.

“Sheer effort of will,” she said, “As you know, time-flows respond to your needs and wants in the eye. I created a pinch point in the nexus, focused on the centre of the box. Once created, it anchored itself there.”

“Why didn’t you just tell us?” Cre asked.

“I didn’t know,” Ya replied. “It was a bit of a Hail Mary Pass. If it didn’t work, all you would have found is a box with a dead learning machine and a psycho-impeller inside, and I would have been just scattered atoms.”

“Why did you caution us not to open the box?” I demanded. I could feel a hot flush of anger rising – all that time wasted.

“I needed to prepare the contents from the outside of the Nexus. If you’d interfered with it, I may never have got my message through.” Ya looked sorrowful for a moment. “I’m sorry to have deceived you. If I could have done it any other way, I would have done so. But I didn’t know what awaited me outside, and I didn’t want to give you false hope.”

“So, how are you powering this contraption?” Cre scratched his stubble encrusted head. “I’ve tried so many times to kick one of our machines into life, but nothing works here.”

“Two things,” Ya said, “this isn’t exactly here. It’s just a projection from outside the nexus. Once I’d linked the conduit I created with the leaning machine, it simultaneously existed in the outside universe and inside the eye. I’ll explain the physics to you once we get you all out.”

 “And the other thing?” Cre asked.

“As you know,” Ya replied, “the only thing that can escape a black hole is information. Knowledge if you like. The nexus is like a black hole, only not in space, but in time and the only thing that can go in and out of it is knowledge.”

“And?” Cre said. “How are you powering this thing?”

“I think I know, Captain.” I said as the implications of what she said triggered long forgotten memories.

“Feel free to tell us,” Cre said, swivelling his head to and from the screen to me.

“Knowledge,” I said slowly, “is power.”

As I said it, I could feel myself speeding up. Light started bending, and sound smeared across the audible range. I could just make out the captain shouting to Cre.

“Tell them, Cre,” she said, “tell them all.”