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of the wheelchair. '
'Apparently he didn't give much of a shit one way or the other."
Tanvirah opened her mouth, but Kane said quietly and firmly, "That's enough
from both of you."
She turned her dark, furious eyes on him. "I don't think it is, sir. If Dad
had any idea Mr. Bry was up here, alive '' She broke off, groping for words.
"He would have arranged for his repatriation?"
TALON AND FANG 79
Kane inquired quietly. "It was fine with your old man for me to live up here
alone, but not Bry?"
Tanvirah cast her eyes downward for a moment, then raised them to stare
steadily into Kane's face.
"That's not exactly how I would have phrased it, but yes."
"I didn't want that fuckin' Lakesh to know I was up here!" Bry's voice rose in
a strident bray of outrage.
"I never wanted to see him again."
He turned furious eyes on Kane. "What the hell is she doing here in the first
place?"
Kane quickly explained to Bry how Tanvirah came to be in the redoubt. As he
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did so, she gave the
mat-trans unit a swift visual inspection. Just as her father had described, on
a small plaque above the keypad encoding panel, imprinted in faded maroon
letters, were the words Entry Absolutely Forbidden
To All But B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-Trans. Even Lakesh didn't know who the
B12 cleared personnel had been and what had become of them, though he had
opined they had probably jumped from the installation after the nukecaust,
desperately searching for a place better than Cerberus and doubtlessly not
finding it.
Tanvirah frowned at how the metal plate on the elevated jump platform gaped
open, exposing the confusing circuit network of the emitter array. From the
aperture stretched a web of fiber-optic cabling, terminating in a control
console spanning the far wall. The console was crescent shaped, surrounding a
single operator's chair in the center. It bristled with thousands
80
JAMES AXLER
of tiny electrodes and complexities of naked circuitry, leading to a
switchboard containing relays and readout screens. Below the console rested a
small square generator bolted to a wheeled pallet. She guessed it was there to
provide power to some secondary systems.
Projecting above the inner horseshoe curve of the console, attached to a
stanchion, revolved a model of
Earth around three feet in diameter. The contoured surface showed rivers,
lakes and oceans in blue, forests in various shades of green, deserts in beige
and light gray for mountain ranges. Cities were rendered in pale yellow. The
carefully detailed surface was mostly beige.
"So this is it?" Tanvirah demanded. Her tone held a ringing note of challenge,
of deep skepticism. "Your homemade version of a temporal dilator?"
"You don't sound impressed," Kane observed dryly.
"Should I be?"
Bry shrugged. "This isn't the first time the gateway unit was altered to act
as a time machine. Your father used the fundamentals of the quantum interphase
mat-trans inducers to break through the chronon structure, utilizing the
quincunx effect to its full potential."
Tanvirah regarded him coldly with an over-the-shoulder glance. "It looks like
you cobbled it together from odds and ends found in "
"Tom Edison's basement?" Bry interrupted sardonically. "That was one of your
father's favorite expressions. It got really tiresome."
TALON AND FANG 81
"The truth can be, sometimes," she shot back.
Kane smiled wryly. "Bry and your old man cobbled this particular thing
together many years ago."
Tanvirah took a sharp, startled breath. "For the Omega Path?"
"Exactly," Bry confirmed smugly. "So it's more than a piece of junk. It's a
historical artifact."
Tanvirah couldn't argue with Bry, even had she wanted to. She retained very
vivid memories of what her
father had told her about the Omega Path program, his one attempt at temporal
manipulation.
Without access to the specs and data of Operation Chronos, Lakesh was unable
to duplicate their accomplishments, so he decided to circumvent them. He saw
to the creation of the Omega Path program and linked it with the mat-trans
gateway.
The concept was sound to dispatch Kane and Bri-gid back through time to a
point only a month before the nukecaust, so they could hopefully trigger an
alternate event horizon and thus avert the apocalypse.
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The Omega Path had worked, at least insofar as translating them into a past
temporal plane, but they came to learn it was not their world's past, but
another's, almost identical to it. Any actions they undertook had no bearing
on their world's present or future.
Lakesh could only speculate on what had happened, and on the system of physics
at work. Operation
Chronos had functioned on the "chronon" theory, that time wasn't continuous,
but made up of subatomic particles jammed together like beads on a string. Ac-
82 JAMES AXLER
cording to the theory, between each bead, each individual unit of time might
exist in an infinite series of parallel universes, fitted into the probability
gaps between the chronons.
Tanvirah retorted stiffly,' 'It's an artifact that you've probably damaged
beyond all hope of repair with your tinkering."
"We followed Erica's specs," Bry said defensively.
"As best we could, anyway," Kane interjected.
Tanvirah said grimly, "My mother said it would never work...you can't
recapture something that was.
That's like lighting a candle and trying to get the same flame on the wick as
the time before."
"That's because you look at time from a single perspective," Kane countered.
"Just like I was raised to believe. I've had to alter my consciousness over
the last fifteen years to be able to accept that the passage of time is like a
perpetual motion machine, which depends a great deal on subjectivity."
Tanvirah narrowed her eyes. "That's metaphysical claptrap."
Bry chuckled, a sound like pieces of dry parchment being rubbed over violin
strings. "We know Earth is in motion, don't we? We have measurable phenomena
and reference points that tell us so. We are moving in relation to something
else, the universe at large. But we can't feel Earth turning at twenty-five
thousand miles per hour, can we? We can't feel the fact that the world is
going around the Sun or that the Sun is going
TALON AND FANG 83
around the galactic center. But we know it to be true, both subjectively and
objectively."
"So you're saying," ventured Tanvirah, "that since we're moving forward at the
same rate of speed, we can't actually relate to time except as a subjective
phenomenon?"
Kane nodded. "Pretty much, yeah."
She shook her head impatiently. "Time is also relative to mass and velocity."
"Which makes it exist as a continuum," Bry stated, "a series of events running
in a continuous stream from the instant of the Big Bang all the way to the
future, when entropy catches up with it. The only way we can perceive separate
moments of time, the events, is subjectively. We believe in the flow ergo we
have the flow. Remember what Einstein said, that the distinction between past,
present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
Tanvirah gave the appearance of pondering Bry's words, but Kane received the
distinct and uneasy impression she was only pretending. "So if you don't
believe in the flow, then you can alter time?"
Bry nodded. ' 'Essentially.''
"Then what keeps you stuck in one place and one era?" she challenged
triumphantly.
"The chronon wave," Kane replied promptly. "We're riding it, surfing it."
"Think of humanity as a glob of mercury on a sheet of glass," Bry suggested.
"It runs across the glass
84 JAMES AXLER
when we tilt it at either slow or fast speeds, depending on the angle of the
tilt."
Tanvirah cast her glance from the console to the model of Earth to the upright
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gateway unit. She didn't say anything, but Kane saw the unease flickering in
her eyes.
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