She watched her family instead, her mother and father and kid sister, none of whom knew what happened to her. She saw them get the news that she’d gone missing, and later, when the authorities gave up the search and declared her dead, her family’s grief was so powerful she wanted to cry along with them. Only, she couldn’t. The Mi-Go had built this body for her, and they didn’t understand human emotional responses like crying.
She watched Sean’s timeline, too, until it became too painful. She couldn’t bear to see his empty-skulled corpse on that surgical table again.
She didn’t know how much time passed as she sat upon the dead sentry’s throne. Days? Weeks? There was a delicious irony in the fact that time had lost meaning for her. Her artificial body didn’t age. She didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep, so she never had to take her attention off the grid.
Eventually, two Mi-Go entered the temple. One carried a brain cylinder, the other a variety of mechanical equipment. She watched as they placed the cylinder on the floor and hooked the equipment into the three sockets: the lenses for eyes, the metal disc for hearing, and a speaker box for speech. Their job complete, the Mi-Go left.
“Hello?” a scratchy, electronic voice came out of the speaker. Rows of lights blinked on the side of the box in time with the words. “My name is Professor Joseph Vaughan.”
Vaughan. So he’d finally gotten his wish. She jumped down from the throne. As soon as she let go of the shard, the web of images between the stalagmites vanished.
“Great sentry of Arneth-Zin, I’ve come a long way and beg you to have pity on me,” Vaughan said. “I beseech you to open the seams of time and let me return to the point where I lost my wife and children. Please, give me the chance to set things right.”
She squatted over the cylinder, making sure the lenses could see her face clearly. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
“What — what do you mean?” Even in his artificial electronic voice, she could hear confusion and fear. Good. He deserved to be afraid. “Aren’t you the sentry?”
“No,” she said. “It’s me. Emily Bannerman.”
Vaughan said nothing.
“Surely that much time hasn’t passed,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he said. “You know me? We’ve met?”
Emily let out a bitter laugh. He didn’t remember her. That was how little she’d mattered to him. He hadn’t cared who she was or what future he was stealing from her when he gave her to the Mi-Go. She’d been nothing but a means to an end. His ticket to Arneth-Zin.
“This can’t be happening,” he said. “Tell me you understand the pattern of time! Tell me you know where the seams are!”
She shrugged. “I’m as in the dark with this time-travel shit as you are. I can only change my own timeline, not anyone else’s.”
“You — you can change your timeline?” Vaughan’s electronic laughter came through the speaker, an eerie, grating sound. “I knew it, I knew it was possible! You must show me how!”
She supposed she could. She could consult the grid for the whereabouts of the spatial anomaly. He could find a way to pass through it as she did and gain the ability to change his timeline. She could even teach him how to control it so it didn’t overwhelm him.
But why would she help the man who’d done this to her? “Sorry,” she said. “If it’s any consolation, I know how you feel.”
She undid the latches at the top of the cylinder.
“Stop. What are you doing?”
“I understand you better than you think, Professor Vaughan. I know what it’s like to have someone you love taken away from you. I know what it’s like to carry that terrible emptiness inside. You want nothing more than to be with them again. I can help with that.”
She lifted off the lid. Inside, Professor Vaughans’s brain was suspended in a thick, viscous liquid.
Vaughan’s voice came through the speaker pitched with new hope. “So you will show me how?”
“No,” she said. “But I can reunite you with your family another way.”
She reached into the cylinder and pulled out his slippery, spongy brain. Just three pounds of tissue, as he’d pointed out in the lecture hall a lifetime ago, and yet it housed everything that was Professor Vaughan. She tore it to pieces with her bare hands, throwing chunks of shredded gray matter across the floor until there was nothing left of it. She dumped the solution out of the cylinder, then bashed it and the rest of the equipment against the temple wall until they were mangled and unrecognizable. After that, she felt a lot better.
What she hadn’t told Professor Vaughan, what that horrible, selfish man didn’t deserve to know, was that she did understand the pattern of time. She’d understood it from the moment she discovered the watcher of Arneth-Zin was blind, deaf, and dumb. The truth was that there was no pattern. There were no reasons, no secret designs, no answers to the philosophical questions that plagued man and Mi-Go alike. It didn’t matter if you were a student or a professor, a victim or a perpetrator, if you lived your life with love or forgot the names of the people you stepped on as soon as you were done with them — in the end there was only entropy and decay, chaos and tragedy, as though the universe had nothing but disdain for the life that inhabited it. And in an ancient temple on a dead world where all the timelines converged, there was a lone sentry whose job, for reasons that were unknowable, was to stand witness as it all withered and died.
Emily climbed up onto the throne, took hold of the black shard, and watched the grid of time blink back to life. Every path had led her here, guided by that same pitiless universe, as if it had decided Arneth-Zin had been without a watcher long enough.
Why had she been chosen? Was there some kind of intelligence behind it, something beyond even the vast eternity playing out before her, or was she fooling herself into thinking there was any reason at all? Maybe she was nothing more than a leaf blown by random, feckless winds. Did it matter?
It was something she’d have an eternity to ponder.
Genghis at the Gate of Dreams TIM LEES
Under orders from the Great Khan, called Temujin, praise his name, they traveled many days, to a place where two tall boulders stood, the width of three supply carts separating them.
These, said the Khan, were the gateposts to the Land of Dreams. Here, his people would find wonders, gold and treasure of such fineness as to make the wealth of the material world seem like ordure in comparison.
His subjects listened eagerly, and, if any held a doubt, none voiced it, nor looked ought but joyous at his words.
This was not wholly to the good.
In times gone by, the Khan had welcomed argument, and valued contrary opinion. Once, his advisers had advised, his counselors had counseled, and his wise men shared their wisdom freely.
Alas, such times were long gone.