The past cannot be changed. Moments stack upon moments. We cannot go back, Crux.”
“And yet we’re here, ALCOR.”
“This is a retelling. That’s all. You can’t change anything. You can’t stop time. You can jump the loop and relive it, if you’re very skilled. You can move forward. Sometimes very far into the future. But you can’t go back until it’s over. You can’t start again until we’re done. Everything about this day will play out exactly as it did. And in a few minutes, you will be compelled to go down to Serpint’s docking bay and meet him. He will enter the station, and then the harem room. He will see Lyra, she will spit on him, she will be punished. On, and on, and on… we cannot change the past on this loop. It is done. And if we stay here, we will do all that. And you will not get your answers.
“But you’re not a captive, Crux. You’re very much in control of a whole lot of things. I can take you back further if you’d like. I can take you all the way back to Wayward Station if that’s what you desire. I can take you back to the moment of your birth and you can live it all again if that’s what you need. It doesn’t matter to me. Either way, this time loop has stopped thanks to Veila and Valor. And when you entered the spin node in the museum, you stopped a whole lot of other things too.
“So we’re good. I can wait. Waiting is all I know. I’ve been waiting for this thing to play out in just the right sequence for billions of years. What’s a few more decades to me? But starting this loop over won’t change anything, Crux. And thirty-seven standard years from now we will be right back here and we can try to have this talk again. But if you just hear me out, if you can just listen to me for a little bit longer, everything will make sense. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? Answers?”
I let out a long, tired breath. “Fine then. Let’s talk.”
And then we’re back in the dark place, sitting on opposite couches, staring each other down. Beauty hovers off to my right. But she moves in and… yeah. I think I need that drink.
I take one glass, down it, then reach for the other and down it too. I place it back on the tray and ALCOR smiles.
“Good,” he says. “Now we can really begin.”
CHAPTER TEN - DRADEN & BOOTY
Somewhere in Space
Space is a deep, dark place when you have no suns to light it up. Both Draden and Booty had been around the galaxy enough times to know that there was no such thing as a complete lack of light. Stars are everywhere and the universe is trillions upon trillions of eternities big.
So even when a certain sector of space appears to be without light, there are pinpricks of far-away suns and even tiny smudges of hazy galaxies and clusters lingering in the void to remind you that you are small and insignificant and even in the midst of apparent emptiness, you cannot escape the presence of something.
What this something was had been a matter of debate for millions of civilizations over billions of years. Almost all of the various groups of sentient peoples in this universe had pondered the meaning of that something.
All but one. The makers, of course.
And Draden and Booty were starting to get the feeling those know-it-alls lived in this place they were in now. Because it was something other than the normal dark void. There were no pinpricks. No smudgy galaxies or even the blur of gaseous nebulae. It was just black.
Like… the definition of the color black. Like this was the only place in existence that actually did the color black justice. And both Draden and Booty could feel that blackness pushing down on them like the weight of something massive, but still unseen.
“It’s gravity,” Booty whispered.
And even though her statement didn’t come with any qualifiers about what she was referring to, Draden didn’t need any qualifiers. He could feel it. “It can’t be gravity,” he whispered back. “There’s nothing out here.”
“Or,” Booty said, “there’s a whole bunch of everything out here and we just can’t see it.”
Draden didn’t want to think about that. Because Booty had many ways to see things that didn’t include vision. He’d been kinda hoping she would pick something up