Before 24 Billion and Counting

Chapter 20 Part 1 An attempt to move on

How long I stayed there, grief stricken, horrified, empty of the will to do anything or think of what to do, I cannot remember.

The rock grunted again, this time beyond the break that had taken Ellen, another avalanche of rock rumbled down the mountain side throwing up a cloud of grey dust. This alerted my anaesthetised brain to do something.

I had to get off this fragile path. I took my phone out and photographed Ellen's body and a horizon shot so she could be located. Although with the black kites still pecking at her body I doubted that there would be anything but bones to recover. I had a fleeting memory of some religion that formally put their dead on a mountain to be dismembered by vultures, thus restoring to nature the essence of their corporeal existence. Maybe this was Ellen's goodbye to earth.

The only way off the path was up. The slope was not as acute as that below but it was still strewn with scree. I climbed crabwise diagonally upward with my heart hammering in case I provoked a landslide which ended by my joining Ellen in death. At that time it didn't seem such an important fate to avoid, and no doubt that led me to take the risk of the climb, which luckily paid off.

I reached the top of the ridge, bare, except for a few large boulders. I found a site in a cleft beside a boulder. The sun was setting, and I watched the same western skies as Ellen and I had seen together a night ago, or was it two, it seemed so distant - another world. A world with promise - struggles, conflicts, yes. But love and companionship too. Now nothing, a void. But there still was something I must do. Something I owed Ellen and the people and loved ones in a timestream.

I unwrapped the bedroll in the gathering cold and as the sun hid its light below the horizon rolled myself in the remnants of Ellen's scents and slept, fitfully and with horror filled dreams of the dismemberment of my so recently found beloved's body by huge black birds.

I woke in the darkest part of the night, before the moon rose high, and shivered as a night wind wailed in the clefts of the rocks, a soulful cry of grief for that which I'd lost.

I couldn't sleep now. I had this vague sense of the validity of the plan that led Ellen and I on this mountain trek, but now doubted why we had been doing it at all. Yes, Kelly had uttered a cry for help. Yes Jacob had wanted me to get the Rosetta data into the world, and overcome the limitations of his Holo projector.

But where were these demands in the context of the larger picture? The one that included Chris' account as given by Lewis of his life in 2145.

Lewis came back to Chris in 1994 to seek help. But it was an instinctive personal plea. 

Had Chris interpreted this as a call for help with an earth-wide political and financial scandal? Perhaps not. Were either I or Chris right in thinking that the future exploitation of Earth's suffering 24 billion was wrong, if somehow, apparently painlessly, the cash could be raised to prevent the end of humanity from its destruction in much the same way as the age of the dinosaurs had been terminated.

I realised at that moment that either I was thinking too clearly or I was in a state of hysteria. I drank some water. It didn't seem to help.

The thoughts ground inexorably on. So you, Charles Berisford, are confronted with a problem of time travel. Not by virtue of some Wellsian machine but by genetics, and probability. So what you have been told, happened in 2145. Suppose you alter today so that it doesn't. But you through Chris Williamson know that it did - will.

So whatever I did now wouldn't make a difference? That was as good an argument for turning over in a snug duvet and ignoring the alarm clock as I'd heard in a long time.

Can't be right. You have to struggle. To carry on with your game plan. Unless we all do this the future will not happen at all. All living things temporarily reverse entropy. If they give up, chaos looms closer and becomes the now.