Bitter Oath (New Atlantis)(2)

The lift had arrived at the other end. Jac Ulster and his new Bonded Mate, Cara Westchester, a Newcomer who had recently been made a Retriever, stepped out into the cavern and nodded a greeting at the old Indian man. Jac looked tense and jittery, and was pulling at the lock of red-brown hair that fell across his forehead. He appeared to be a man who, having only recently made the transition into his final clone body, looked no more than twenty years old. Anders knew he was well over three hundred years old.

Cara strode along beside her Bonded, dressed as oddly as the Indian who had just left. Unlike Jac and the rest of the technicians in the cavern, who wore white, toga-like tunics, she was wearing a short skirt and floral blouse that befitted her Jump to Australia in 2009. Her pretty young face was pale with worry, and she kept casting Jac guilty looks out of the corner of her eye. This was only her second Jump, and there had been a lot of unrest amongst the Retrievers and Researchers since Hakon’s death in-situ yesterday. Maybe she was scared to go on this Jump?

The Portal had been empty for several minutes since Rene’s return. As Cara made her way slowly up the dais stairs, the doorway came alive with showering sparks once more, and the hum returned in earnest.

With a last worried glance back at her Bonded, who had turned his back on her, Cara stepped into the Portal. A second later, the shower dissolved.

Time seemed to warp strangely then, for Anders. What should have been only a few seconds before the Portal reactivated had, instead, become an extended period. There shouldn’t be this kind of gap. No matter how long the Jumper was at the other end, at Start Point they were programmed to return immediately after leaving.

However, it was much longer than that now. Which meant only one thing – Cara was in trouble.

And Jac knew it.

‘Give me a PA, I’m going in,’ Jac barked at him. For a moment, Anders could do nothing but stare at the banned Jumper in stunned horror.

By the time he could find words, Benjamin Kent, the Start Point Manager had answered. ‘You cannot go dressed like that, Jac. Go to wardrobe. I will get the rest of your equipment organised.’ The short, slightly portly man had risen from his console and come to stand at Jac’s side.

‘I can’t wait… I…’

‘Jac, do you want to find her? Do you want to bring her safely back?’ The man’s patient voice was in total contrast to Jac’s panicked tones.

Jac nodded. Words had deserted him.

‘Then get organised. I should send someone else, but I can see you would fight me on this. So, if you want to go after her, Jac, get your head in the game. Get dressed, review her Target’s dossier and the Set Down details. If you go in with your mind in chaos, you will be useless to her. Do you understand me?’

Jac nodded again, but his face took on a fierceness that was uncharacteristic, not only for him, but for their whole populace. No one showed this level of emotion. Ever.

As Anders watched Jac hurry away, he again felt the fear that Rene’s return had instilled in him. It was his own mortality calling out, warning him that time was running out for him, just as it was running out for these other citizens of New Atlantis. Their unchanging, peaceful world seemed suddenly off-kilter somehow, like a spinning top that had hit a stone. It wobbled and slowed, as it tried to find its centre once more. Anders had a feeling it would never find that same centre again.



Rene stood under the shower set for waterfall, as the water bombarded his old, filthy body. It always felt strange to be back here in this unchanging world after being away for a lifetime. Sometimes, when he lay on the hard ground beneath the stars that stretched across the sky like the tiny Christmas lights of his childhood, he wondered if this world was real at all. Sometimes, he felt as if it was simply a dream he had dreamed many times, that had taken on a reality of its own.

Then, when he came back here, it was as if that other life was nothing more than a dream, and this gentle, cultured place was the only reality. But if that were so, how was it that the body that had stood beneath this shower last had been young and fit – his skin only the light brown of weak tea. Yet now, it was old and wasted. And his skin was now as brown as a hazel nut, and wrinkled, thin and dry as vellum.

No, both worlds were real. And he crossed between them relentlessly, for his cause – the resurrection of their barely surviving planet.

Rene had never been a carefree child. From his earliest memories, the weight of the destruction to the Great Spirit’s natural world had been his heavy burden. His mother, an Obejwe of the First People in Canada and a fierce ecowarrior, had laid that burden on him. And his father, a French Canadian from Montreal, who had met his mother on one of her campaigns, and joined her as she fought to save what was left of the Canadian wilderness, was just as purposeful.

She had taught him Mide, the Medicine of the first people, and he had adopted Animism more readily than his father’s Roman Catholicism. When he was old enough, he went to University and became a Naturalist. His cause was an impossible one, by that stage. Everyone knew the planet had already been destroyed by man. But he’d been determined to go down fighting, just as his parents would.

He still remembered the day he’d woken up to find himself alone in the world. The winter expedition, of which he was an insignificant part as a graduate student of twenty five, had been in the heart of what was left of the northern wilderness of Quebec. They’d been looking to track the endangered snow owls.

Everyone had been sick. They’d all blamed it on food poisoning, when they turned in early that night. By morning – was it the next day or the one following – he was never quite sure, he woke to find every last person of their eight-man team dead.

And, as he hiked out to their vehicles, and made his way along the rough tracks back to civilization, he found no one else alive but him. By the time he reached the bigger towns, his growing terror that he was the only person in the world left alive, was out of control.

If he hadn’t seen a flash of colour on the roadside just out of La Tuque, he would certainly have gone mad. But he had seen it, and chased after it, until he found the teenage girl. She had been crazed with loneliness, too, just like him. But she’d also been terrified of the stranger that he was. It had taken him days to calm her down; days to convince her he meant her no harm.

Saidie had travelled with him in search of others. By the time the military patrol had found them, they numbered ten. He’d wanted to go home to Toronto, to see if his parents had survived. They were strong, he’d told the military, and they would have made it, if he had. Of course, he’d been wrong. Strength had nothing to do with surviving the Last Great Plague. No one had ever found out what the survivors had in common that made them each the one-in-a-thousand who went on.

But the armed force had their orders – no one was allowed to return to the once-populated areas. The threat of further disease from the decomposing corpses was too great.

Before he knew it, he was at a holding camp. His wasted, sick body had been traded for a healthy, new one. Then, because of his skills and knowledge, he was redeployed to New Atlantis.

Here, he’d worked as a curator in the Knowledge Centre for one hundred and fifty years. Then Time Travel was perfected, and he was able to volunteer as a Researcher. His job since that time had been to Jump back to the past and collect primary, ecological data on all that they had lost.

He had been fifty years into his second clone body when he Jumped for the first time. That Jump had lasted forty years. The only reason he’d come back was because his body was wearing out. For the next ten years, until he was forced to integrate with his next clone, he spent his time collating his findings from that first Jump. This became his pattern over the period: Jump to pre-industrial societies, usually in Northern America, research their ecology for ninety years, return to Start Point, and spent the last of the hundred years of each clone’s life collating his findings. Then he’d transition into a new clone, so he could Jump again.

But this had been his last Jump. He was on his eighth and last clone, and his ninth life. No Consciousness could be integrated into a tenth body. He’d been told this just before going in, this time. So he’d left his return until the very last moment, because he wanting to make the most of his final time in-situ.

And that last gem of knowledge seemed to be the central jewel of his impressive crown. A possible sighting of the larger cousin of the extinct giant Palouse earthworm (Driloleirus Americanus), a species that had only been found in the Columbia River Drainages of eastern Washington and Northern Idaho.

There had been over 2,700 varieties of earthworms identified by the beginning of the 21st Century. By the end of that century, there’d been only a handful left. Without their ability to convert decaying litter into nutrient, the planet’s food sources disappeared. The soil began to die.

For most of the last years, before the end of the Second Dark Age, scientists had begun to believe that the Holy Grail for saving the ecology of their dying planet was earth worms. Some were more valued than others, particularly those that survived in dry, hot and arid eco systems.