Chapter 3

It was daylight. Tabatha woke up itching and scratching. The ants had found her during the night. Her whole body was inflamed with their biting. She rose and began to brush the tiny red monsters off her, then saw the thousands that were parading in a foot-wide line in toward where she slept.

"K-rap on this!" she cried.

She ran out of Béla's Ruins (That's what she'd named her new home, since Béla had once lived there and that's where she found Béla's Praetor) and toward the river – the stream beneath the Washington Street Bridge, roughly a mile away. She could wash the ants off there and get a fresh coating of mud to sooth her skin from their bites and protect her from the harsh sunlight.

In less than fifteen minutes, she was sliding down the dried bank of the river. By now, most of the ants clinging to her had been shaken off as she jogged. Still, her skin itched terribly, even though she had been initiated into the 'family' in a wonderfully Sapphic lovemaking session with Béla, several months ago. 'Hundreds of years ago, now, ' she reminded herself with a pang of regret.

Wounds and injuries could regenerate quickly once she and Béla had shared their life-blood with each other. It seemed ironic that she was now exiled on Earth for inadvertently causing the death of the same blood-sister for which she felt such strong affection.

It seemed even stranger that she was now living in her long-dead blood-sister's tumbled-down house. The troubled times and events she'd unconsciously tried to escape from by time-walking into the future had overwhelmed and consumed her entire world. There never had been an escape from those problems. Tabatha realized that, now.

That she should be here doing penance in solitude felt right. It was justice. She understood that, even as the justices sentenced her to exile. She only wished that she could have said goodbye to Jake.

But the Praetor she'd discovered yesterday had taught her how to dream-walk. After she relearned it, she recalled having done it before in some dimly remembered previous existence. Now she could visit Jake whenever they were both asleep.

She was at the stream now. It was dried up. The streambed was still muddy, so she dropped down and wallowed in it, renewing her coating of protective mud. Then she climbed out, slipping on the mud coating the bottoms of her feet.

She wondered where the water had gone, then realized that it had been several days since the last rain. Maybe the stream only ran when it rained, which meant it wasn't really a stream at all, but just some gully that filled with rainwater occasionally.

She looked at the sky. Above her, it was clear, but she couldn't see any horizons from the bottom of the riverbed. She could smell moisture, though, and it wasn't from the drying mud caked on her body. There was a storm coming.

Tabatha walked back the way she had come, across the dried riverbed in the shadow of the great, dead bridge high above her. By the time she'd climbed back up the bank, there was a roiling darkness on the western horizon – an approaching summer storm. It was growing swiftly, racing toward her. She could see the lightning inside the dark clouds and began to run, hoping she remembered the way back to Béla's Ruins. She didn't and was quickly lost.

'Praetor, can you – Aaaiiiieee! My head!' Tabatha screamed, remembering too late that she was not permitted to use telepathy.

'I hear you, Time-walker.'

"Guide me home!" she cried, out loud. "I'm lost!"

Image in her head showing her where she was and where she wanted to be.

Just as the first large drops began to fall, she staggered through the doorway, breathless and hot under her coating of cracked, half-dry mud.

"God! How am I going to keep the rain out?" she asked herself, out loud.

She felt frustrated and ineffectual. Looking around, she grabbed a towel and laid it over the Praetor, knowing somehow that it couldn't be allowed to get wet. It was an electronic device, after all.

"Okay, what now?" she asked herself again. It was starting to pour. Huge drops of icy cold rain were striking with incredible force, almost like hail. Tabatha held her hand out, her shoulders hunched against the onslaught of water pouring down on her. Several large drops splashed into her hand. She was sure she saw ice crystals in the water.

'Time-walker, ' she heard the Praetor say in her mind. 'Almost two hundred years ago, the goddesses of New Eden were practicing how to create force fields in an effort to protect New Eden from stray asteroids. It took a dozen minds working in coordination with each other to surround the entire moon. Then it took three minds, working in shifts, to maintain it. The force field worked, but the physical stress on the hollow moon almost caused it to buckle.'

"Wow! That must have been an incredible amount of force to stress a structure that size," Tabatha replied, shivering in the downpour. She'd found an old rotted blanket and was holding that up against the pouring rain. It was coming apart even as she held it over her. She was really interested in the Praetor's story – it gave her something to think about besides freezing to death in this soaking, cold rain.

'It wasn't the amount of force that almost tore New Eden apart. It was the goddesses' inability to coordinate the timing of the force field across that great a distance.'

"What do you mean 'timing'?" she asked, trying to picture what the Praetor was explaining without triggering that damned monitor in her head. "Was there some sort of gravitational problem with the orbit or something?"

'You are wise beyond your years, child, ' the Praetor responded. 'The force field was created by shifting the object to be shielded backward in time approximately .003 seconds, creating an impenetrable barrier of time around it. The problem was that the shell of the moon kept trying to orbit into itself. The force field had to be uncreated to save New Eden from colliding with itself and being destroyed.'

"How does that help me?" she asked, disgustedly throwing aside the handful of rotted blanket that was left in her hands. She stood sullenly as the heavy rain poured down and washed the mud off her head and shoulders.

'You can shield one room without disrupting the earth's orbit. The earth is too massive to be affected by that small a resistance.'

"Great! How do I do that?" she asked anxiously, her voice shaking as she started to lose control of her shivering, freezing wet body.

'Apply your time-walking abilities to this image, ' the Praetor instructed.

"Wait! I can't!" Tabatha cried. "I have a restriction in my head about creating images that I could use for teleportation!"

'You are not creating the image, time-walker. I am. You are supplying the energy to move it in time. I will guide you. As the supreme lawgiver, my decisions take precedence over your judgment. Your psychic monitor will not trigger.'

"Okay, if you say so," Tabatha nervously agreed, anxious to be out of this awful rain. "It's only one more headache if you're wrong..."

Image of the room in her mind. She gently touches it, surrounds it with her mind, then lets the reality of the room surround her.

A bolt of lightning, attracted by the power she was generating, flooded though the room. Tabatha grabbed it with her mind and added its power to the time-shift she was creating. She heard singing, and a remote part of her mind realized that it was her own voice she heard. Her mind flooded with power, she raised her arms into the freezing, pouring rain and moved backward slightly in time, feeling the room around her move in time with her.

The rain abruptly stopped. Tabatha gazed upward, her arms still raised. She could see the rain pounding against the top of the force field. She laughed in amazement as another bolt of lightning struck directly down and blinded her with its brilliance. The room shook and the lightning bristled, spread, and pounded against the force field, but it didn't get in. The lightning struck several times in rapid succession – nature's attempt to discharge the energy surrounding the time-warped room.

Blinking the dazzle out of her eyes from the lightning's near misses, she reached down, took the soaking wet towel off the Praetor, and tossed it aside. She stood, staring at the alien machine for a few minutes, wondering what else it could teach her.

There were things she was not permitted to do, and there was something in her brain that would prevent her from attempting these things. But the Praetor had already shown her how to dream-walk and how to create a force field. She didn't even remember that these things existed before yesterday.

A flash of light near the door of the ruins distracted her from her thoughts. She looked toward it. There was something trying to get in.

'There's somebody there! Somebody's alive out here!' she realized excitedly.

"Praetor! There's someone outside! How can I let them in?"

'There is no one there, child. You are seeing images from the past that no longer exist. It is a side effect of the force field. That happened on New Eden, also.'