I spoke to him in French, soothed his terror, prevented him from falling down a steep ravine, and returned him to the road where the frantic family were trying to decide how best to search for him.

Ainsi le début du paradoxe.

 

He realized I was not there in person, and called me a ghost. I told him I was a fantome familier, the Family Ghost. Such he's called me all his long life, and does still. He calls me other things as well, most of them French words you will not find in any official French Language or even Canuck dictionary. Inventive man, my dearest Uncle Rogi.

 

So, even if my recent actions had ensured that my own father was never to be born, and therefore I would never be born, I still tended, when I had a sleepless night, to wander mentally and revisit the places from my childhood. 

 

Aaru was quiet this night, Dinah asleep and sated, dreaming a happy dream and not one of the frightening ones she suffers through quite frequently. The night crew were together in the main salon playing poker. Aaru is quite capable of monitoring herself. So I took the opportunity to zap myself up to the deserted Observation Deck. 

 

I left my body there, in  a room full of stars, relaxed in a chair (having asked Aaru to guard it and to keep her mouth shut about my activities), and went extra-curricular back to New Hampshire. 

 

Even projecting my consciousness back to Earth from the further reaches of the Rim was not a strain. The genetics alteration I'd acquired when Dinah became the Heir and she founded her own intergalactic Trading House, and changed her and my genetics forever, had augmented and deepened my own metapsychic abilities as well as providing me, and her, a few additional abilities that we still hadn't found the time to fully explore. We'd been far too busy creating .. well, more on that later.
 

 

I touched down near the town square on a cool night in the spring. It was late enough that most people were safely at home if not in bed. It was a college town, and while classes were in session things were generally quiet, at least during the week.

 

I felt the breeze on my non-existent face, smelled pine and newly mown grass, and the scent of the river not far away. Clouds scudded past a gibbous moon that silvered the duck pond and the green in front of me. I could hear sounds of civilization - a car starting up, the syncopated rattle of a far away train - but I also heard maple leaves rustling in the breeze, and an owl hooting from a nearby pine tree, calling to its mate.

 

I turned and began walking up the main street toward the dilapidated building that housed my Uncle Rogi's disreputable bookstore. Disreputable only because it was not neat and well lit. Instead it was a hole-in-the-wall affair, with shelves that were warped from the weight of books, many of the books with a layer of dust on them (at least the ones in the higher shelves).  You also had to be careful not to step on Rogi's cat, which was, over the years, always a Maine Coon, and often with a foul temper. Needless to say, cat hair was yet another feature of the place. As were overstuffed and over worn chairs and little nooks where you could curl up to read a book or chat with a friend.  It had been (would be?) my retreat when I was a child. All in all, it was the one place in the universe I thought of as Home. 

 

I had this dream. At the time I was floating in deep space dying of, well, a lot of things, despair mostly.  I'd seen a goal I'd been working toward for a time longer than the human race has been existent blow up (literally) in my face. My hopes, my fears, my dreams, my very being, wiped out, and I would never be. An instant. One mistake. And it was all gone. Millennia of careful planning. For nothing. It doesn't really matter how it happened. But it had.   And I was feeling very sorry for myself, and even more tired. So, I let myself sink into the Abyss that has called to me all my life.

 

Tabitha had tried to call me back from there, but in the end she freed me and let me go. And it was then I had the dream. It was bizarre and ridiculous, and it revolved around my need to atone and my sincere desire to right the wrongs I'd done in my life (and believe me when I say those wrongs were wrong indeed). The upshot of the thing was that God and several of his more irritating Angels told me to get my ass back in gear, that I was not to be released quite yet.

 

I was brought up Catholic, so I suppose all that silly training was so ingrained I called for help given God's orders and was saved (not Saved) for my trouble. 

I wonder though if I'd lost my Uncle Rogi when I changed how history would proceed, what I would have done? I suspect I'd have gotten back into my high-tech coffin and suicided for true.  That he still existed was perhaps the most precious gift God could have bestowed on me. 

 

The bookstore was, of course, closed, but when I walked around to the side of the building I saw a light on in the apartment he lived in above it. I could picture him there, slouched in his worn chair by a fire not lit on this pleasant evening, perhaps with the current incarnation of Marcel the cat in his lap.

But I no longer visited Uncle Rogi. Was no longer allowed his presence. Not since the time, just before..  Not since then. I wouldn't ever trouble him again. I'd freed him from his obligations, releasing him from his role as my own personal agent provocateur who had made certain over all the years of his life that events proceeded as they were meant to do. Now...

Now it no longer mattered. I had no agenda, no real Goal. I felt lost a good deal of the time, despite attempting to find solace in Stephen's dreams and in Dinah's.  Even, bon sang, at times I looked to Tabitha's completely nuts prophesying for something to give me a Purpose. Yes, I'm the sort who needs one.

 

Nothing did give me purpose, not really. But I was very good at faking things, and Dinah saw it as a gift that I abetted and indulged her wilder desires and more intricate plots to reform the Universe. Why not?  Merde alors, I had nothing with which to replace those dreams of hers. And they were worthy ones; they just weren't mine. Selfish bastard, aren't I?
 

 

Such is my life at present. Fabulous some would say. I have a bondmate who adores me, two children who I keep at some distance since I am still a bit wary given how badly I failed at raising my first two, money enough and Time. All the Time in the Universe.

--------

Events following the loss of my world, my self, my history had been far too rapid fire to give me much time for self-reflection.

A lie of course. I've had plenty of time. But, as I've done all my life, sewing the seeds for my own destruction, I've buried the emotions and concentrated on one small, or perhaps medium sized goal after another.  I've purposely avoided considering the personal repercussions of my changing the galaxy's direction.  Yes, I know that sounds as if I have grandiose illusions.  What can I say. My brother was a saint and I killed him.  Yes, my world died because of a sibling rivalry. How ironic is that, or perhaps instead it is perfectly natural.  I suspect Brother Anatoly would have vigorously defended the latter viewpoint had I argued with him regarding it.

Brother Anatoly. Most likely he'd never be born now. Nor would Elizabeth Orme. Nor Cyndia, the only other woman I'd loved besides Dinah, nor mine and Cyndia's children Hagen and Cloud.  Great. Right over into self-serving misery; no wonder I avoid self-reflection. I ruined the lives my children had been given, murdered my wife, and now I have the utter effrontery to mourn their loss.

I zapped away from New Hampshire and went southward to where Ocala still stood. Odd that. It should never have been built and yet it, like I, still existed.  I hovered mentally in the air above the compound, sending my personal code to the alarms and disabling them allowing me to touch down softly and unnoted on a well-shadowed walkway not far from the observatory where the Cerebral Enhancement Rig had been created and used for some thirty years while I searched the stars seeking rescuers for myself and the few allies who'd survived a Rebellion against the known Universe. We'd almost won, too.

I wondered. I sent my farsenses into the core of the place, probing gently, examining. Was it really, I mean exactly,  the compound we'd built in the Pliocene, long before humanity was even a whisper, in an interval I'd learned only recently between its rise and the demise of the Old Ones?  Would I even know.

Odd, I suppose, we'd seen no hint of the Old Ones when we'd arrived. But then I was badly brain-burned at the time and the others half dead either physically or mentally.  And finding ourselves under immediate attack by aliens when we'd thought, as had everyone else, that the only real enemies there would be primitive, and the only inhabitants the few misfits sent through the time gate and Ramapithicus,  well, it had left little opportunity for us to scan the planet for self-aware and operant beings. After all, we hadn't expected any. And, by the time we did think to do so, the Old Ones would have had plenty of time to screen themselves from our cursory mental scans.  And my attention had been almost exclusively on the stars, not on the planet.  I had Plans, you see.

Now I just wonder and wander and put one foot in front of the other, my desire and need for action given over to Dinah's needs and desires. It isn't that I don't like it that way. I do. Which is what scares me. And nothing much scares the Angel of the Abyss.

Alex Manion, one of the greatest metapsychic minds of my time,  would wander down the walkways here deadheading the flowers, sweeping up leaves, dead bugs and birds killed by the shielding, singing Gilbert and Sullivan. I'd outfitted him with a docilator, a device to tame him and reduce his mind to mush until it was removed.  He'd tried to kill me, you see. He'd once been my right hand in the Rebellion.


But as our hopes had flagged at me finding an alien species whose minds ours could mesh with, and rescuing us from our mental exile, Alex and some of the other members of our group had become afraid I'd murder our children. His, mine, those of the rest of the surviving Rebels. He (and they) had every right to worry since the children had grown up with only one desire: to open a time gate back to the world we'd run from and join the Unity we'd deprived them of.

However, many of my fellow rebels feared the Consillium, the body responsible for governing the worlds in the Unity, would send troops for us and capture us and mind-wipe us. It was more than likely they'd come for us, given we'd been the only ones who'd dared to try to destroy their power over all of us, not to mention we'd killed several billion beings doing it.

It was touch and go there for a time, the temptation to just murder the children.  All I really needed was Hagen or Cloud's gene plasm, so their death and that of the remainder of the second generation was well within program parameters.  Thusly, we should add filicide to fratricide, and genocide in my long list of sins since I certainly was tempted to it.  That I didn't choose that option was mere providence. I leave out the murder of my wife Cyndia. Since she had attacked me first. It had been instinctive, although that certainly doesn't absolve me of it.

Sins... My friends here are quick to point out that those particular sins would now never happen, or which were, at least, no longer my responsibility. Right. Just as it was not my fault I'd blown up yet another planet full of beings like me.  I wonder in darker moments just how many billions I've murdered. Reno could start a pool.

I dismissed that line of thought as having no real resolution and instead looked around me. So  why did Ocala still exist?  It was a puzzle and like Melly, puzzles intrigue me.