Chapter 32

Earth time: Saturday, March 19, 2033 6:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (29 minutes to sunset)

Aina time: 5:15 AM, day 216 of 1436 H.E. (53 minutes to sunrise, morning of the first day of spring and the Red Bird Festival)

"Visual image locked?"

I nodded. A'moth and I were in a tight embrace, staring into each other's eyes. I linked with her mind, she join the lock of my mind's eye on my target destination ten feet away. An instant later we were both there.

"Excellent Gary! You needed almost no boost at all that time. You are so close to teleporting on your own! I don't understand why you're not solo jumping now."

"You think so? How close?"

A'moth was thoughtful for a moment. "Let me think. It's been five thousand years... From where you were in ability five days ago, to my first jump, I did it in less than an hour..."

"Yikes! Maybe my mind just can't do it."

"Oh, don't think that way! A key part of jumping is the confidence." We walked back ten feet. "Try again. Lock the image, and then link to my mind..."

A'moth and I would practice for another half hour, till sundown. We were working out about a kilometer from our home base, on top of a narrow ridgeline in an incredibly twisty maze of passages in a box canyon in West Virginia.

We have our base camp in a cave whose only entrance is at the back of a deep crack in a sheer vertical wall of granite, over fifty meters from the canyon floor. The slit entrance is invisible unless you're right next to it, and it opens to a small limestone cave, high enough for me to stand in and about ten meters deep. It's nice, cozy, dry inside even when it rains, which is often. There's a flat part at the back where we sleep. It's so wonderful to be with A'moth again! These last three months have been the most amazing in my life...

I spent two months on Antelope Freeway, relaxing and healing from my years of separation from my family. Reconnecting with Isabelle was indescribable. And getting to know Jim and Cindy was wonderful too. They are two of the nicest and smartest people I've ever met. And determined...

It took Cindy four years to learn how to dream herself into an owl, Jim five. Isabelle learned to do it in less than six months. Jim and Cindy still wonder if that means a child finds it easier to keep the dream connection to the quantum shadow channel. Personally, I think it's just Issie...

There is an opening of the classical channel next month, near the end of April. From studying the Hopewell history books, Jim, Cindy, and Isabelle are firmly convinced this is the time we should try to alter history, push our current time-loop into a new branch of reality. A'moth and I agree. The last 1436 Aina expedition was a complete disaster for the Hopewell. It sealed their doom in the future openings. Our time to make a stand is fast approaching...

Jim is still unsure how much control over the quantum interfaces to Earth and Aina he'll be able to have, but he's pretty confident we still haven't left the last loop's timeline. One indication is that a man got trapped in the classical channel during the opening to Aina in 1418, when A'moth was bringing me to the Freeway. It was a guy by the name of Leon. Just as he was starting the trip from Aina to Earth, A'moth jumped me in the shadow channel in Nebraska, and Jim thinks our entry caused the classical channel to collapse, well before it was supposed to.

I guess all this makes sense. How we can still have free-will and be doing the same things exactly as we did in the last time loop, I don't know. Jim and Isabelle kept telling me that was not the right way to think about it...

Jim, Cindy and Isabelle... They certainly have guts. They studied the original plans of the 1436 expedition from the history book. Their idea was to split up, fly one owl above each of the three teams heading to Davis, Parsons, and Harman, just try to find some way to warn the people what a horror Earth has become without revealing the existence of Antelope Freeway.

That's the key. Jim is sure the Aina people have to lose their Blue Ring to the WFM. The completion of the time loop pivots around that fact. Jim is deathly afraid if the Hopewell had the power of the shadow channel, they'd try to stop the gendercide on Earth, try to make a stand against the WFM. It would be a cosmic disaster, something Jim calls a type 1-A causality violation.

I don't know. Trying to follow the logic of this makes my head spin. But Jim's an incredibly bright guy. I've decided to accept his judgment.

The arrival of A'moth and me changed everything. A'moth's ability to teleport opened up a huge number of options for how to support the expedition. Our tentative plan is for A'moth to be jumping around, keeping track of all three groups. Jim will fly with Leon, Mayoni and Amy to Parsons, Isabelle and Cindy will fly together south to Harman with Kara, Lois, and Mahi. If needed, A'moth can jump an owl to track the team heading north to Davis... And me? I'm the wildcard in the deck. I can be a huge asset if I can learn to teleport in time. If!

A'moth... My dear wife... She left for Earth a week after we reached Antelope Freeway, just before Christmas. We had a little time to cuddle, but never got very sexy with each other. I did feed her just before she left. The plan was for her to scout all the jump sites she might need, all over Tucker County. About a month ago, near the end of February, I joined her. The arctic island can pick up radio waves from Earth. A'moth sent a signal, and I just walked south and met her. Man was I cold! The North Pole in February is nothing to mess with...

"What was that?" A'moth asked. She interrupted our lesson and walked to the edge of the ridgeline. She screamed as she lost her footing on the ledge and started to fall over. She was in my arms a second later, ten feet from the edge, my mind buzzing with a headache and my heart beating a mile a minute...