It seemed to Sianna that her eyes snapped open with an almost audible click, that her mind spontaneously uplinked into fully-awake turbo mode without her having any say in the matter. She shook her head bemusedly. She must be doing too much computer work if she was thinking of her own mind in programming terms.
The Sunstar gleamed in her window, the almost-right-colored light relentlessly cheerful. She popped up out of bed, her feet hitting the floor just as the invigorating odor of fresh, hot coffee wafted into her nose from the automatics in the kitchen. She blinked, stretched, and looked about herself eagerly, as if it were Easter morning and there were presents and painted eggs to be found.
Why on Earth did she feel so good? She should have felt like death warmed over after a night like that, not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
No, wait. It was not that she felt good, exactly. She considered for a moment. She felt stretched, taut, ready. She was tired and stiff. But the restless night had primed her somehow. She felt strangely pulled along by outside forces, as if someone or something else were full of energy and enthusiasm, were lifting her up, poking her to get her moving and alert.
Alert. That was the word for it. Ready for something that was going to come her way, something she could not pursue. Reaching for it would only make it recede into the grey distance.
A thought, an idea—no, a whole line of reasoning, was simmering there in the back of her head, biding its time, waiting for its moment.
Let it come. Let it alone. Leave it alone and it will come home, wagging its tail behind it. Sianna had learned the hard way, early on, that she could not force ideas. Thoughts and ideas were delicate things. Touch them and the bloom was gone.
She headed for the bathroom and a good hot shower, moving carefully, trying to keep her mind from pouncing on whatever-it-was in the back of her head. She tried to think quietly, thinking of the little, the light, the unimportant, so as not to disturb her subconscious. She found herself moving quietly, like a host tiptoeing about when a guest is sleeping.
Think of other things. Enjoy the shower. Tell yourself you can find something nice to wear, even if the laundry should have been done a week ago. Go to the kitchen, get your coffee, make toast and think about putting jam on it. But don’t do it. The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day, she told herself with mock seriousness.
Wait a second. Sianna looked up from her plate of buttered, jamless toast and stared unseeing at the wall. The ancient, whimsical paradox was part of it, part of the whatever-it-was in the back of her mind that she was trying to tempt out into the open.
Time. Something about time. Her dreams had been about time, about gaps in time.
There. She had it. She knew. The Saint Anthony. There. There it was. Sianna crunched down on a biteful of toast, a feeling of triumph washing over her. She had known it would come to her. The Saint Anthony, the probe the people back in the Solar System had managed to drop through the wormhole just before contact was lost, five years before. The literature mentioned its onboard clock being wrong. Everyone had always assumed it was a malfunction, though one or two rather fringy theorists insisted that the time shift had been a real effect, a distortion in space-time caused by transit through a worm-hole. The unmanned probe’s onboard clock had been thirty-seven minutes fast, or some such number.
Conventional wisdom had it that the clock circuitry had been scrambled a bit during the probe’s admittedly rough ride. That didn’t make a great deal of sense, of course. Any malf that could scramble the clock circuit should have fouled up all sorts of other things. Okay, suppose it hadn’t been a malfunction? What had happened to those missing minutes? No, wait up. Think it through. Not missing minutes. Extra minutes. If the Saint Anthony chronometers were right, it had come from thirty-seven minutes in the future. It had experienced thirty-seven more minutes of time than Earth.
That was what reminded her of the White Queen’s rules concerning jam, except it was the thirty-seven minutes, and not the jam, that were always some when else, out of reach. One slice of time was forever missing, a gap between the Saint Anthony‘s experience of the Universe and Earth’s. Suppose the clock error was a real effect. Suppose the Saint Anthony’s clock was an accurate report of what time it was back in the Solar System. That, in turn, meant that the Solar System had somehow jumped thirty-seven minutes into the future as seen from Earth and the Multisystem.
In the yesterdays before the Charonians took Earth, Earth and the Solar System had kept the same time. The far-off dream of MRI was that maybe, somehow, the Earth could be taken home to the Solar System. Then Earth and Solar System could be to-gether in some far off time to-morrow. Sianna put the archaic hyphen in the words as she thought it out. So why did the two places not have the same time to-day?
Nice question, all right. But how to find the answer? Why thirty-seven minutes? Why not forty-two minutes, or three days, or 123 years? What if that duration, thirty-seven minutes, held the answers, or at least some guide to the questions?
Where had those minutes been lost—or gained? Which of the two—Earth or the Solar System—had gone forward or backward in time, and how, and why?
Had the Saint Anthony been thrown forward in time during its transit through the wormhole? Or had the Earth been thrown backward in time?
But no, she was getting muddled. The Saint Anthony had been sent through the same wormhole that had taken the Earth. All sorts of mathematical models allowed for a wormhole to induce time distortions—but none of them would cause the wormhole to be selective about it.
That was why no one believed the SA time data. Any time distortion should have hit the probe and the planet equally. Unless, of course, everyone had it wrong and Earth had not fallen through the same hole. If the Earth had arrived in the Multisystem through some other mechanism, instead of through the wormhole that linked Moonpoint here in the Multisystem and Earth point back in the Solar System, then all bets about how the Multisystem worked were off, and the Charonians had some completely unknown mechanisms up their sleeves. It was bad enough that they were the masters of gravity power. If they could control time as well, humanity might as well just quit now.
Alternatively, something had happened to Earth since its arrival. But what, and how? And how was it no one had noticed it happening? Sianna shut her eyes and shook her head to clear it. It was all too damned confusing. No wonder everyone had decided the on-board clock data had to be erroneous. If its clock was right, then it might mean that everything else of the precious little they knew about the Multisystem was wrong.
So what the devil had happened? Was the whole Earth missing thirty-seven minutes of its own existence? How could that be? And what alternative explanations might there be? Thoughtful, Sianna took a bite of toast and tried to keep from getting too excited. She had the very definite feeling that she was on to something.
Slowly, carefully, methodically, she told herself. She set to work making a proper breakfast, oatmeal with milk, an orange, two sausages. It was the sort of day when she would forget to eat. Best to fill up now so she’d be able to work longer before she collapsed. Getting the automatics to make breakfast required only the tiniest fraction of her attention. She put the rest of her mind to work on the question at hand. By the time she had demolished her meal without tasting a bit of it, she had a good half-dozen ideas. She had to get down to the institute and start digging. She left the dishes for the kitchen to take care of.