Daughter of Time 1: Reader (30 page)

Then she slit its throat.

So, after searching the past for the most powerful groups of Readers we could find, we followed their signal, landing in the middle of the religious rites of our prehistoric ancestors.

Thinking back on it, it should have been obvious that this would happen. The human mutations that led to our sixth sense occurred tens of thousands of years prior to the age I lived in. In fact, I was to discover many years later that the individual mutations and tissue alterations had already begun in our hominid forebearers before
Homo sapiens
had arisen. What singled us out, what gave us the edge over the other hominids, the wild animals, even nature itself, was the rapid development of that organ in the middle of our brains that allowed us to forecast.

Becoming sensitive to the space-time matrix, seeing the future and the dangers and opportunities it presented, even if only in the vague manner of dreams and visions, was to become the one-eyed species in an ecosystem of the blind. Like the other senses that had conferred tremendous survival advantages in a dangerous universe, being able to Read changed everything. Once again, we were to learn that it was not our grand intelligence—as we so often thought of it—that made us king of the hill. Did you know dolphins are actually smarter than us? Well, they are. No, what truly made us special was a pre-cancerous neural growth.

There is nothing like having a sense that a mountain lion is coming around the bend, or that dangerous weather is approaching, or that food can be found
that way
. Nothing like the sense that mating with so and so seems to produce a better future. When we forecast, when we Read the world, we had a power over it no other living thing did. We
chose
from the strands of possible futures.

And nature selected for this trait very strongly. In a harsher age before we had mastered everything, those who could Read, and Read well, were much less likely to get killed before they passed on their special genes. They were much more likely to survive. Give that several thousand generations, and by the age in which we found ourselves, nearly
every
human present was as strong a Reader as I had ever met from the modern age. Every one of them. No wonder they had produced such a powerful and localized Reader signal. Our technical mastery of the Earth—aided in large part in later ages by the alien races who discovered our Reader abilities—removed that harsh selective pressure. Humans in whom the genes produce no psychic cyst could survive every bit as well as the Readers. Better actually, because the Reader genes extract many prices both physically and psychologically. By the time I was born, Readers were rare. Rare and prized like bluefin tuna, and treated about as well.

Not with the cave folks. They were each bright with it and sensitive. In fact, they even detected our presence. Within seconds of the dying animal’s drowning cry, as the blood poured over some ritualistic rock carved with strange symbols, the entire group become distracted. They stood up, one after the other, and
turned toward
us! I could feel their minds reaching out, the tendrils of our thought matrix like a warm fire that their hands approached cautiously and pulled back from, so that they would not be burned. They knew we were there.
They felt us
.

I don’t know what they thought we were. Something elemental. Divine. The matriarch stood on a rock and held toward us a strange relic—thorned branches of some bush, pruned and adorned with animal bones and rocks. She cried out to the skies with some new chant, and the other women and men knelt down and prostrated themselves, bowing in our direction. It would have sent chills down my spine if I had one.

But what was there to do? With the purest optimism, we tried to interact with them. It was a disaster. Their minds had never encountered something so strong, so abstract or complex. We could give them images of simple things, sensations and conceptions of a life that they had known and understood. These they could grasp without distress. But there was no hope to explain our errand, our need, or what we hoped they might accomplish. All such attempts led at first to frustration, and then fear and even madness in our contacts.

After several days of trying, the group left the cave terrified, conducting ritual after ritual when exiting, marking off the territory with crafted artifacts and drawings in the dirt. It was like some prehistoric occult protection spell from the demonic forces. After several hours, they were gone, and we had no desire to follow them. The most powerful and concentrated Readers in human history were utterly useless to saving humanity.

So, we withdrew from this Earth history having failed completely. Our first efforts, our powerful cohort of human and alien Readers coming off a high in thwarting the attack of the galaxy’s most powerful military, had reached out to the past, to the most powerful Readers in our past, and had nothing to show for it.

Nothing but the distinction of having created a haunted mountain in the depths of humanity’s past.

48

It is very hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. 
—Proverb

Our next attempts were also failures, and for similar reasons, even if the minds and cultures we encountered were more advanced.

It turns out that most, if not all, of the great advancements in human civilization occurred from a coupling of the randomness of genetic recombination and the arbitrariness of human climate, disease, and resource availability. For the world’s great civilizations of India, China, Central and South America, and, finally, the European enlightenments of Greece and Western Europe, prolonged periods of plenty and general lack of disease, along with specific availability of resources (either local or imported), set the foundation. But we also discovered that was not enough.

As we scanned through the past, our community repeatedly discovered that the significant aggregations of Readers were nearly always present at these cultural zeniths. Because mastery of agriculture had reduced the selective pressures for survival, the Reader genes were less significant and could be lost with less impact. Therefore, they became more diffuse in the human population, and only when the genes combined in a lucky fashion to enhance the relative number of Readers did we see the effects.

From my explorations of history in human thought, it had always been somewhat of a mystery why there would suddenly be these epochs of such great cultural and intellectual progress and energy. Historians knew that the resources and stability of the environment had to be there, but that did not explain why some cultures with all they needed went nowhere. Often the explanations were centered on racial theories that had more to do with justifying the superiority of the historian’s race than with facts. And that’s because the critical facts were missing to all of them.

When the density of Readers was high enough in a closely knit group, their combined sixth sense kindled their awareness, opened their minds and stimulated exploration and creativity. You could maybe imagine it if you thought of the world’s peoples as being blind but for a few “Seers” who could perceive a blurred fog of the visual spectrum. Just this different and additional stimulus to the neurological structure of the brain set things moving that wouldn’t otherwise have moved. New ideas, new perspectives, faith in a bigger universe beyond simple “sound.” I can tell you as someone who has seen so much more than anyone else, you have no idea of how deep, how multilayered, how
different
reality is than you imagine it without a space-time perceiving organ. It is so obvious in retrospect, but these random concentrations of Readers in the right places at the right times were bound to drive human cultural development.

It also explained the equally strange tendency of cultures to suddenly lose the “spark,” to drift for a few generations, and then for the civilization to become something far less dynamic and creative, or even to fall into decay. Always, there was the sense in these cultures that they could not live up to their forebearers. The reasons were mysterious and usually explained by moralistic historians as being due to lax morals or other aspects of the culture or world events. Sometimes, this was true. Usually, however, it was simply that the Reader genes were bred out, mixed in a way that the individuals with developed organs in their brains became fewer, and critical mass was lost. The culture stagnated.

Of course, the Xix were the first to perceive this and to explain it to us. As alien anthropologists, they dissected the development of our species without the biases that we brought to the process. Once we understood, we became excited. We could almost count on the fact that the locations and times in history where we would find the highest local concentrations of Readers would be in ages where humanity made intellectual and cultural leaps, and, most importantly, where their minds were most open to new ideas. And we had a heck of a message to bring them.

But our enthusiasm was misguided. In tragic encounter after tragic encounter, we dove joyously into these bubbling cultures and sought out the powerful Readers. We communed with them. We explained reality and our terrible plight.

And we flooded them.

What we came to learn after numerous disappointments was that even when open to new ideas, there is only so far the human mind can stretch effectively. In ages where the Earth was the center of the universe, where atoms were unknown, where spirits spoke from stones and souls were reincarnated, our hyper-modern, even alien narrative was composed of too many threads for which their minds were not ready. I say “effectively,” because there were individuals who could accept our message, even spread it, but they tended to be viewed as mystics or madmen, and sometimes we indeed drove them mad with the visions we shared. We were even the stimulus for several human religious and philosophical movements. We triggered suicides. We helped spawn persecutions like the Salem witch trials. We walked with Jesus and Buddha.

All of this was amazing, unexpected, and useless to the only task that mattered. No matter how much we tried to convey the important essence of our story, we failed. People were encouraged to pray for the salvation of humanity, but the idea of altering space-time as we needed them to was too abstract. Their prayers were misguided. Finally, after emotionally and physically draining months of engaging the brightest eras in human history, we gave up.

We then turned to the only other option left: what we couldn’t achieve with the brilliant few of past ages, we would seek to accomplish with the far more dim, but numerous, populations of the modern era. Mediocrity with multiplication would reign supreme.

The final straw was that the Xix had run the numbers. Even if we had managed to get the brightest Readers of the past to understand what we needed them to do, it wasn’t going to be enough. There weren’t any other Ambra Dawns, and even the strongest Readers of the past were not present in sufficient numbers to alter history as we needed.

The equations told a simple tale: only in the modern era, when the world’s population soared to unprecedented levels, stabilizing around ten billion, would there be the number of Readers we required. More than enough, actually. But only if we could get them onboard. Only if our message could reach them effectively. Only if enough of them took action.

And that really was the problem. Even in modern times, after Einstein, after quantum mechanics, when science fiction novels and films had introduced millions, perhaps billions to the ideas of relative time, curved space, multi-universes—in an era where such crazy ideas were not necessarily tied to a religion or dogma but could lead to further scientific thoughts about cause and effect—even then, how to convince them that
this story
was real enough to take that vulnerable plunge? In an age of cynicism, of the loss of previous cultural values and meaning, when church and state had become objects of distrust, how do you reach out from the future and convince people that they had to do something so humbling, so silly as to pray to save humanity—without driving them to madness?

Some of us argued for creating a new religion, convinced that only through the devotion of religious certainty could we focus the minds as we would need. Despite misgivings from many, we made several attempts to achieve this very end. All were spectacular failures. Those people open to the idea of
revelation
also were the least inclined to be rigorous in thought, and often creatively modified our visions to suit their own emotional needs. Cults were formed, even scientific religions, but they all distorted the message, often so severely that it would have been a comedy if it weren’t so tragic. We were especially good at creating doomsday cults.

The idea of creating new religions had failed, and so we moved on. We explored the manipulation of political movements, nation-states, cultural fads, and philosophy. All had certain attractive features to achieving our goals, but all suffered from one or numerous fatal flaws that quickly became apparent. In the end, after we had moved from the best and brightest Readers to the average in order to get the numbers required, we also abandoned the elevated routes of religion, philosophy, and culture. We decided upon the lowest common denominator, the one commonality across cultures that attracted the largest numbers, the greatest resources, and had the longest staying power: entertainment.