Les Méandres du temps
La Suite du temps -1
La Suite du temps -1
Daniel Sernine
(Prologue, p. 1-16)
With the back of his fingers, Karilian touches the glass, as if to be sure there is indeed a barrier between him and this immense vista, rounded mountains that grow paler as they follow one another into a misty horizon. The fresh air of the Appalachians does not come to him, it isolates him, as least a little bit.
Behind him, Cotnam notices his gesture.
"Would you prefer to be on the balcony? It will be almost as peaceful: you won't hear the birds."
"No, no, in the lounge it will be perfect."
The room is a good refuge against agoraphobia, the view is harmless on the other side of the big window pane.
Cotnam leaves the room.
Karilian doesn't move, controlling his unease, deliberately looking at the Maine forest rolling to the edge of the vale and going up a mountain - very old and very modest mountains.
Taking flight.
Like a falcon skimming the top of the trees with supernatural speed, the rolling green moving fast under him, as the mountain sides rush at him. Gliding upwards and over, plunging into a new valley and its dizzying depths.
"Taking Flight": that is the title Safié gave to a recent work she's exhibited in the Olympus Gallery, a very effective cinehologram which she believes represents a psy trance.
Did she really experience it, did she really live through this aerial survey of a terrestrial landscape?
The flight Karilian is experiencing, trance after trance, is an inner one, towards the depths of a mind that unfurls inside itself like a glove turned inside out, or rather a sleeve, endlessly. Towards an ever larger space that defies all physical analogies. It doesn't go in any particular direction, it's a gradual transition to another state of awareness, the awareness of another continuum where dimensions are elastic and reversible.
Karilian is ready. Behind him, he heard Ghyota place both briefcases on a coffee table and switch on the apparatus. Part of his brain, the part that is always comparing, imagines the contrast between the control panels and this warmly wood-panelled room. He can see the misty horizons of this late afternoon, he feels the heat of the sun, the limpid glass of the window shot through with photons, he imagines the cold, matte shine of the apparatus. All these visual textures anchor his mind in reality.
Ghyota places a fragile-looking device on Karilian's head, like headphones, more precisely a network with multiple headphones, small ones, none of which go into his ears: they are sensors that replace the electrodes of an electroencephalograph.
Karilian adjusts them to familiar spots on his skull and on the sides of his neck, an automatic gesture, as he sits down without ever taking his eyes off the immense vista.
The osmosyringe is ready in Ghyota's hand.*** A glow in the sky. Agnès looks up while brusquely closing the trunk of the car. A pink, blurry light that slowly becomes more distinct, whiter and more vivid.
Agnès only sees it for three seconds and the glow disappears behind a low mountain top in the west. She shivers in the twilight. She has no reason to doubt her senses: the light was clearly visible against the deep blue of the sky.
Reflexively wiping her hands with a tissue, she keeps on looking in that direction, left of the road. She decides it was only a plane; she shouldn't have listened to Mrs. Lester's gossip about flying saucers sometimes seen over the region. Without exactly knowing why, she associates flying saucers and kidnapping. Especially the kidnapping of children.
She looks closer to home, towards the seat of her convertible and she is suddenly overwhelmed by a sudden unease, like a hot flash: Nicolas has disappeared.
He's not playing by the car. The road, in both directions, is deserted. The woods are pitch black; the emergency flashers only light the shoulder.
"Nicolas," she shouts, "Nicolas!"
"I'm here."
The little boy emerges from the ditch at the side of the road: he went to pee.
Agnès refrains from scolding him: she doesn't want him to sense her nervousness.
"Get in, quick. It's fixed."*** A large shadowy room, banks of screens.
"OK, she's moving again."
The headlights are switched on, the car moves forward.
A finger on a key makes the image zoom out until the car is only two luminous white dots.
"I think she spotted Zaft's final approach."
"One more sighting doesn't matter, just another one. But they're piling up and the Pentagon will end up investigating."*** She should put the top up, but she's already late enough because of that flat tire! And Jeanne wasn't even home! There was no point in demanding this visit, if she wasn't going to be there the day Agnès said she would come! "It's easy: the first house in the village, just after the sign post." She did spot the house easily, but she'd found only a note pinned to the screen door asking for her to wait a while. Jeanne, a physician, had received an emergency call from a neighbouring village, but she would come back as soon as possible.
Apparently she'd been unable to extricate herself, because Agnès and Nicolas waited almost three hours for her. Agnès wouldn't have been as patient if the neighbour, the charming but loquacious Mrs. Lester, hadn't invited her to sit in her garden while waiting for her cousin. And Nicolas seemed to have fun with the little girl.
Now the sun has set and they're still only halfway to their destination. There will be no one at the border crossing. God knows when she will be able to put Nicolas to bed in the cabin on Lake Megantic where they are spending their summer, while her husband Charles comes and joins them on the weekends.
"It's getting frosty, love, roll your window up or you'll get an earache."
Agnès can't help thinking about the light in the sky. It was too bright to be the navigation lights of a plane. It was more like a landing light in its intensity, but it can't be: the nearest airport worthy of the name is in Sherbrooke and the light was not going down in that direction.
It was not a shooting star or a meteorite, either: you can see those only for a second, they do not decelerate when approaching the Earth and they don't follow an oblique trajectory very close to a horizontal line. Moreover it really didn't look like that.
What, then?
According to Mrs. Lester, nocturnal lights have been reported several times, as well as "reflections" during the day. Hogwash!
Still, Agnès feels anxious.
A pink, orangey light catches her eye in the side rear-view mirror. A car, far behind? She looks closely, doesn't see anything. She then realizes the mirror is not angled correctly: she must have knocked it askew while she was changing the tire. It no longer shows the road behind them, it shows the sky behind.
Someone from the village, according to Mrs. Lester, claims to have been followed for three miles, and precisely on Road 27. Oh, why did she listen to the old magpie!
Her eyes moving like those of a hunted animal, Agnès looks up first in front of her then briefly on each side and to the back in order not to stop watching the road.
"What are you looking at, Mummy?"
The child has noticed the way the car is weaving a bit on the road.
"Nothing!"
But her tone has not escaped Nicolas. She only hopes he won't see what she just saw between the trees: the pink orangey light. A curve in the road switched it from the back to her right.
"There is a picnic on your sock," she says, trying to sound normal.
And while he bends over to look at his feet, almost invisible in the dark, Agnès hurriedly reorients the side rear-view mirror, still trying to spot the light.
It's no longer there. Was it a mirage?
No, it's there all right. She can almost see it if she bends forward a bit. A pale orange light, its shape impossible to make out through the leafy branches and the points of the conifers whizzing by; it's following the car.
"I can't find the picnic."
"Leave it be."
Yes, it's following them, behind the curtain of trees, adjusting its speed to the Mustang's!
"Why are you driving so fast, Mummy?"
Nicolas senses his mother's fright and it makes him nervous. But in the dark he cannot see Agnès' frantic eyes constantly turning to the rear-view mirror.
"What do they want with us? What do they want?" Agnès says through her teeth, her hand gripping the wheel.
No other cars on the road, and the border crossing is still a long way off.
The light keeps on following, flickering between the trees.
Agnès suddenly sees her salvation: a road opening on their left. While braking, she turns, tires screeching. Fortunately, the side road is not perpendicular to the main road, but at an angle, and quite a wide one.
On this dirt road, Agnès has to slow down. It is so narrow that the foliage forms an arch with a few openings above their heads.
At the fork, the light disappeared from the inside rear-view mirror. One-handed, Agnès modifies its angle, with small sharp knocks. Suddenly, clearer than it appeared to be before, the light leaps into the mirror when the foliage gets less thick, above the road that goes up a hill.
That only lasts half a second, and then again it can only be seen sporadically.
"Mummy, what is it?"
Nicolas is frightened too, but only by his mother's terror, as he hasn't seen anything yet. She reacts, controlling herself: she must not frighten Nicolas.
"We'll get home more quickly this way, I think."
Where does this road lead? Agnès has no idea. What if it's a dead-end?
Perhaps she should stop, cut the engine and douse the lights, and wait, so that it would just pass and go away; the foliage would shield them. But Agnès doesn't dare to brake, afraid the light would come closer and stop above them. The very thought makes the fine hair stand up on the nape of her neck. She accelerates again.
The headlights sweep up and down the trees with each lurch of the car. Suddenly, there is a curve. Agnès turns sharply to the left, braking. But she at once turns right again: the headlights revealed a barrier across the road after the curve, at the entrance to a small clearing. One end is simply supported on a forked piece of wood, but at the other end, near the counterweight, it's embedded in a solid pylon.
The screech of mangled steel, an explosion of scattered glass, the dull sound of a broken skull.*** Deep in his trance, Karilian starts. He's so surprised that his control fails and he opens his eyes. With a wide-eyed, disbelieving look, as though he didn't understand what has just happened. He closes them again, but it's too late. He refrains from making an annoyed gesture.
"What is it?" Ghyota inquires.
"An eddy," he says in a low voice, "a big eddy. Inject me with another dose."
"Another one? We can't..."
"Half a dose, then. Quickly! I take responsibility for the risks."
But at the same moment, Karilian claps his hands over his ears, repressing a grimace. A purely instinctive gesture: the scream exploded inside his head.*** "Mooooooommy!"
Silence, a deep silence, followed the impact. Then this distressed scream.
The intact headlights illuminate the solid birch that stopped the car and made it bounce back a bit. Its white bark makes a sharp contrast with the darkness of the forest, branding itself on Nicolas' retinas.
The moon that was red a moment ago is now almost white, emerging above the trees, icily oblivious to the tragedy it has just caused.* Ghyota worriedly watches the luminous curves moving on the monitors.
"It's not me," Karilian whispers, "it comes from outside."
"What was it? It wreaked havoc on all your graphs.
"A scream, a big mental shriek."
Pain. Distress. Especially distress. Karilian has never perceived anything that intense. The cry of a child torn out off its mother's arms. And something else, something more, like suddenly liberated energy.
"It happened very close."
"We should tell Cotnam."
"Yes, in a moment. But first inject me, quick."
Why she is measuring a half dose of propsychin, he talks in a low voice, as much for himself as for her.
"So sudden. And I broke my trance..."
"You spoke of an eddy."
"A disturbance, yes. A significant one. As if the course of time had abruptly readjusted itself. Just before that scream."
The drug is spreading through Karilian's carotids, up to certain centres in his brain.
"The eddies... the eddies were so strong that..."
But his words dry up, once again he is not entirely present in the big lounge of the cabin.*** In order not to see the bloody hair of his mother, Nicolas stares fixedly at the luminous birch trunk. It has grown slightly at an angle, on the left, whereas on the right there is a secondary trunk, thinner, rooted behind the first one.
Blood is still running down Nicolas's cheek, from a cut on his forehead. But he doesn't feel it. He only feels the weight of this head that no longer has any shape, his mother's head.
However, there is the noise of an engine. Tires crunch on the gravel. Car doors slam. Voices... Somebody comes near, gently lifts his mother's body. The little boy keeps on staring at the birch, while the weight of her head disappears from his arm.
Now the car door is opened on his side, fingers touch him gently, palpate him. Someone unfastens his safety belt. Talks to him softly, takes his hands. He stops whimpering.
Hands everywhere: under his armpits, his knees, his bum. He has no weight for those four vigorous arms. He is being pulled up. He is being kidnapped! Frantically he tries to hold on to his mother, grips a wet arm.
"Mommyyyyyyy!"*** That scream again. But less loud this time. Karilian touches his temple.
"Still too choppy, impossible to see clearly. Did you call Carla Cotnam?"
"She is busy: a minor alert at the perimeter of the base."
"All this must be connected. The mental scream, the disturbance in the temporal flux, it's coming from very close. Let's go down and see her."
He stands up and walks with measured steps through the lounge. He still sees his environment, a part of his brain does direct him, but it's like an exercise in funambulism during a mathematical discussion. He is still wearing the net of sensors and Ghyota follows him, having hastily closed the briefcases.
In the basement, they take the hidden elevator and in the car Ghyota opens one of the ultra-thin briefcases to check the graphs of Karilian's EEG and pulse. She is not reassured by what she sees and she calls a medic to the base headquarters on the intercom, just in case.
As they enter, they find Carla and Greg Cotnam at the perimeter security control board - the "Securimaster" as they call the computer that coordinates everything. A checkerboard of video screens gleams in the half light, bathing all the people present in a jade-coloured light.
Karilian spots the screens that Carla and Greg are watching. On one of them, there is a large bird's eye view of the clearing where the barrier cuts across the way: a wrecked convertible, with a body at the wheel, a police car from which a policeman is speaking in a microphone, probably calling an ambulance; two men got out of an all-terrain vehicle to speak with the other policeman.
"The police arrived before Curtis and Finlay?" the base coordinator asks.
"The patrol car was driving on road 27. They saw this convertible going a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour, and they followed it."
"And why would that woman have taken the road leading to the base?"
"Look at this."
The attendant rewinds the recording and replays it on a big screen. Almost in close-up two people can be seen in the car, still in infrared. The woman, obviously nervous, frequently checks the rear-view mirror.
"Are they being chased?"
"Note the angle of the mirror."
The attendant freezes the picture just as the driver readjusts the mirror, after she turns onto the dirt road.
"She sees something in the sky."
"But we had no one on approach or taking off! Zaft had landed ten minutes before."
"No planes either on the viseptor."
"What then?"
"The moon, I'm afraid."
An appalled silence follows those words.
The voices of Finlay and Curtis can be heard softly conversing with the policeman, explaining that they live farther up the road and they were just going home when they heard the accident.
A medic arrives and examines Ghyota Karilian's graphs, which are stabilizing at an abnormally high level, on the screen she has opened up again. But Karilian doesn't care much. Since the beginning, he has been staring at another screen showing the police car and the little boy rigidly sitting on the front seat, eyes wide open. The first officer is softly dabbing at the cut on his forehead.
"It's him," Karilian says in a low voice. "He's the telepath."
Greg and Carla Cotnam turn and look at him. He tells them about the scream that crossed the psi continuum, the surge of mental energy that preceded it, disrupting in an instant the currents of time.
"I was in the trance. Imagine a man in a boat, rowing on the river of time. The current flows only one way but there is a multitude of eddies, the force lines of time, more or less parallel or meandering. They come together, they diverge. Under my hull, I could feel one of those currents, strong and regular. And suddenly, there is a disturbance, an eddy, and my boat is being violently shaken. The current had abruptly changed, time was readjusting itself."
He stares at the boy as though he was in contact with his mind through the screen and the hidden camera.
"This boy should be checked, perhaps taken to Erymede. He has remarkable potential."
"Impossible. We'll identify the mother through the licence plate numbers. I heard one of the officers mentioned they were living in Sherbrooke, in Canada. Perhaps we could keep track of the child, but it's the best we ca..."
"Yes, keep him in sight during the coming years. The boy threw a pebble in the stream, a pebble that made big waves. But that pebble..."
"I think we can show it to you," Carla Cotnam intervenes.
The accident can be seen in real time, with the pieces of the barrier falling down as the Mustang hits the birch and bounced back a little.
"The woman was killed instantly," the attendant says. "The boy didn't move, I wanted to see if he had also been hit by the barrier. Watch closely."
He rewinds and replays the sequence frame by frame. Despite the poor lighting, the number of images per second is high and the banding effect is limited to a slight blur behind the moving objects.
"There is about eighty centimetres separating the woman's head and the boy's head."
Images in emerald green, in jade green, the white headlights being automatically softened by the computer.
The barrier is made of a very straight young tree trunk whose branches have been cut, thinner at one end. It's waiting for the car to chop off everything that is at its level. Inexorably, by fits and starts, it approaches.
The windshield frame bends under the impact, the glass shatters: the Big Bang with the stars replaced by flying shards.
"Impact on the jaw."
Agnès's hair is whipping in the air, frame by frame, the jaw can be seen clearly when it unhinges and breaks under the skin of the chin. If the barrier had been cut at an angle, the woman would have been decapitated. As it is, it only jerks her head violently back, breaking the vertebrae of her neck.
"Forty centimetres between their heads when the barrier goes past the woman's head."
Like the stern of a boat, the barrier leaves shattered glass in its wake.
"And look, twenty centimetres in front of the boy's head, the barrier breaks as if from a double impact. One of the breaks happens where the windshield frame weakened it, but it was not enough to explain retroactively this breaking of the barrier.
"A fraction of a second more," ponders Carla Cotnam, "and the barrier would have crushed the boy's skull."
The big end of the barrier goes past the boy's forehead, the other, thinner part, the part that would have hit him, practically stops in its tracks then goes over his head like a balloon, very slowly.
"Rewind!"
A few shards of wood fly back to the barrier.
"There! Enlarge."
That's when it happened. A beam fifteen centimetres thick, which had just bent a steel frame, and yet it was broken as if it had had hit solid reinforced glass, or more precisely a solid diamond plate, which blocked the murderous chunk of wood and deflected it over its target.
All faces are turned toward that screen, whose light betrays the pallor of some of them. And the disbelief in their eyes.
Still softly, the voices of Finlay and Curtis can be heard, trying to make the accident more banal in the officers' opinion, in order to make up for the fact they didn't arrive first to investigate.
"Telekinesis," whispers Karilian. "A latent potential that virtually exploded at the critical moment. Survival instinct. Called upon and activated in a fraction of a second!"
A small blond head, eyes reflexively closed, face tensed, a child certainly unaware of the power he's just displayed.
Despite the extra dose of propsychin, Karilian is unable to go back into his trance, to find again the site of the disturbance and explore the new temporal line created in that instant: too many things are happening, ruining his focus. But he is sure of one thing: it is this boy who caused the eddy. Logically, the child was supposed to die on that dirt road. But he played a trick on time, he defended himself.
And now, he is going to change the future...
© 2004 Éditions Alire & Daniel Sernine
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