The Heart of Time

THE HEART OF TIME

by Zez Wyatt

I slide the long, glass knife through the soft layers of velvet and skin and puncture the arch of his heart. He takes a horrible, stuttering breath. His body twitches, as if to take a step back, then chooses instead to collapse against me. 

“What did you see?” he whispers into my chest. “What did you choose?”

He raises his hand—his hand I have known; his blood on my chest—and caresses the skin of my cheek. Then he slumps. Then he falls.

•••

I am Prince Lysander of the Waiting Moon, and I carry the weight of my people’s future in the neurons of my brain. When I am born, the Oracles look into the Heart of Time at the core of our moon and tell my anxious parents I am destined to stand before the nexus of truth and kill the heir of our enemy. 

My parents are anxious because they see, in one future among many, my death in just three days due to failure to integrate the Looking Glass into my infant brain. Each subject of the Waiting Moon carries a Looking Glass inside their mind, providing insight into the branching pathways of the future. It is easy to interpret, but the Looking Glass does not deliver the truth of the Divine Path like the Heart of Time. It only shows possibilities. 

When my parents hear the news of the Oracles, they sigh in relief. They assume that because an infant cannot kill the heir of the enemy, I must not die in the next three days. 

Assured of my survival, they cut open my infant skull and implant a Looking Glass more extensive and complex than any that has been constructed before. The procedure is a complete success. 

•••

When my parents tell me that the future I am promised is one of violence and death, I tear the royal robes from my body and run away from the compound. I live in a small ice mining colony in the dusty shadow of the moon’s north pole. I use my Looking Glass to help the colony find new water veins and learn how to cook and sew and make lichen tea. I marry a young woman. She bears me two new futures.

No, I’m sorry. I don’t think this one really happens.

•••

I’m in his room. He’s asleep next to me. My hands hover over his naked body. If I were to strike now, his self-suit would block my blow with plates of hardened skin—but I do not let myself think about this. 

Instead, I choose to think about the gentle rise and fall of his chest. I bury myself in the future, the immediate future. I touch his thigh, and his lips unfurl into a smile that spreads across his face even before the rest of him wakes. I touch his chest, and he wakes with a jolt of panic that fades when he sees me lying beside him. He reaches for my hand, holding it against his beating heart. 

I caress his cheek, and he does not wake at all. I watch him breathe. 

This is one of a thousand moments where I change my mind.

•••

The War has gone on for so many generations that its origins are long-forgotten, but the righteousness of our cause has never faded. The denizens of the Chosen Moon hide themselves behind costumes and lies. They do not believe in the Divine Path of Time. They believe that what matters is not what is promised but rather what is chosen, and they wear their heresy in technology that warps body and soul into something monstrous. A self-suit can make its wearer as large as a city or as small as a computing chip. It can generate armour strong as titanium or enhance the muscles to run as fast as a moon’s orbit. It can deflect the strike of weapons. It can deflect the strike of long, glass knives. It can heal a wound to the aortic arch. It can prevent the loss of blood. 

•••

The Prince that I kill is named Anjel. We meet for the first time on an asteroid designated as neutral territory, all formality. His self-suit is set to its maximum defense, and our Oracles concur that there is no version of our meeting that ends in my death. He appears three times my size, his head the shape of a roaring tunnel-lion erupting into a twisted crown of jewelled, glittering teeth. I wear my holy robes. My head is freshly shaven, and the flickering lights of my Looking Glass are visible beneath the pale skin of my forehead. We are both thirteen years old. A crowd surrounds us. We talk about War.

At the end of the meeting, I slip on the lens of the future. Through the prism of my Looking Glass I follow Anjel behind an outcropping of rock, where he is smoking a small cigarette out of his roaring lion-mouth. We are out of the sight of the crowd. He is surprised to see me, and drops his cigarette. 

He says: “Don’t you wish things could be different?” 

I pull back to the present, to the crowd. I let him slip away behind the stones. 

•••

A self-suit embeds itself into its wearer, long tendrils of microscopic machines burying themselves between the cells of the body. This is one of many things I learn from Anjel. I peer into futures where I ask him questions and memorize his answers, although I rarely say them aloud on the Divine Path. Even at this stage, I do not want him to know that sometimes I think of hurting him.

Anjel’s trust in me grows. I learn that the machines are so difficult to make that they are reused after death, and so every denizen of the Chosen Moon is wearing the skin of a dead man a hundred times over. Through my slow understanding of the delicate system, I theorize that the careful application of electricity can create a null zone, a place of necrosis that the self-suit is unaware is its responsibility to protect. 

I tell this to our Oracles, and they give me a seam ripper. 

•••

We are sitting on the edge of a vast domed spire and talking about religion. I am trying, halfheartedly, to convince him of the holiness at the core of the Waiting Moon.

I say: a Looking Glass can show you many versions of the truth, but it is limited in scope and distance. The further out on its branching timelines you explore, the blurrier the world becomes. 

Think of an image, I say. Are you certain of it? 

He nods. 

I tell him to take a breath and then tell me the image. I want to show him how I can predict him. He pauses, and I slip into the future to hear his answer. But in every branch I peer into, he says nothing at all. I return to the present and ask him what is wrong. 

My choices matter, he says. They need to matter. 

I am hurt. I tell him that only the Heart of Time can choose, that he and everyone else only act out the script of the Divine Path. 

He asks what would happen if we could see the Divine Path, but we did not like where it led us. 

I frown. We are the future’s ordained adherents, I say. We have faith that the way it has laid out for us is a blessed one.

But what if it ends in your deaths, he insists. What if it ends in total annihilation, of you and us and everyone. What if the worst thing that could happen is the thing that is going to happen. Would you fight it then? 

He looks into my eyes. Would you fight it?

•••

The first night we spend together, as he lies dreaming beside me, I slip the seam ripper onto my finger and unpick one stitch of his self-suit. Right above his heart. 

•••

Long before we first speak alone on the Divine Path, I see him from across a battlefield. There are thousands of casualties. Most of them are from my army, but this is not unusual. To kill a beast wearing a self-suit takes immense firepower, a force so great the machines embedded in their skin cannot regenerate before their energy source dies. 

Even with a Looking Glass to guide their choices, my soldiers fall so easily. 

We know little of the Divine Path on this day. But we are masters at interpreting potentialities, and through our Looking Glasses we learn that every possible outcome, though bloody, advances our strategic position.  

Of course, we do not engage in battles if this is not true. 

Both Anjel and I are too important to fight as footsoldiers, and the battle is long over when we set foot on the field of war. We are here only to collect our dead. 

I perform the Last Rites for each fallen warrior and console the living. Nearly all of my dead went to battle knowing they were going to die, and were proud to take their ordained place along the Divine Path. We are bloodstained but jubilant. 

Anjel has the harder job. All of his dead hoped they were going to live. 

I see him in the far distance, clambering over the corpses of his monstrosities. His hands are climbing axes, his body moving with an inhuman lightness. He is gathering up the remnants of the dead’s self-suits for a funereal ritual. They sit, bulbous, in a sack of flesh at his back. 

As I watch, owl wings sprout from his shoulders and he glides from the spine of one soldier to another. I look into the fractal prism of the future, following the path where I abandon my retainers and walk towards him. 

It takes me hours to pick my way through the battlefield, but he is still sitting against the great leg of one of his fallen soldiers when I arrive, his wings wrapped around him like a shroud. He is weeping. His body is stained with blood. I know he is unhurt, and yet the blood seems to pour out of him unceasingly.

He looks at me. His eyes are not lion’s-eyes or owl’s eyes or even soldier’s eyes. His eyes are my eyes. 

I stagger back in shock. I feel his tears running down my face. 

He says: “Don’t you wish things could be different?” 

My retainers pull my attention away. All the way across the battlefront, he disappears into a field of red. 

•••

By the time I finally speak to Anjel alone on the Divine Path, I have had hundreds of conversations with him in the branching timelines of my Looking Glass. 

I slip away from my compound and take a jump ship to the Chosen Moon. Even with my precognition I would not be able to bypass the security around his palace, but in the potentialities of the future he has told me how he sneaks out of his home and watches the planet rise from the edge of an ancient crater. He says he does this to remember what he is fighting for. 

I find him there. In the hundreds of conversations I have had with him, I have never seen him look so human, or so small. It is like he is not wearing a self-suit at all. For a long moment I simply watch him, silhouetted by the dying light reflected off of our planet.

His body flares when he finally notices me, weapons forming in twisted tumours out of his skin. Great fleshy claws grow from his fingertips, and he rises two stories in height before I can open my mouth to speak. He could kill me right there, but I know that he won’t. 

I reach out a hand. I say: “Don’t you wish things could be different?” 

•••

The Heart of Time is a pulsing, blinding nexus of pure light that sits at the very core of the Waiting Moon. Oracles stand at its edges, trying to capture a glimpse of the Divine Path. The closer you stand to its core, the clearer the images become—but the energy is difficult to withstand. They say that if you were to survive to the very centre of the Heart of Time, you would see the timeline of the Divine Path laid out with perfect clarity. 

This is only a theory, of course. To fall into the Heart of Time, or to examine a future in which you do so, always has the same result: total annihilation.

•••

We argue. 

Sometimes we are tired of hiding. Sometimes we are tired of fighting. He shouts: you remember versions of me that you never gave me the chance to become. I shout: every variation of you is more in love with the idea of peace than you are in love with me. 

We scream, we cry, we hold each other. None of this matters. In every timeline, we always end up back on the same path. 

•••

Anjel and I are lying in bed together, bodies sweat-soaked and lungs heaving. I tease him that he could expand his breathing capacity with only a thought, that he could shrivel up his sweat glands with a passing whim. He says he likes to feel human every once in a while. In the lull in conversation I explore the future where I start guessing his fantasies and say the ones aloud that he responds the most to. He flushes and hits me with a pillow. 

Then his tongue expands and forks and twists itself around me, and I stop thinking about the future at all. 

•••

The theory of the null zone is wrong. Even if I was stabbed with a long, glass knife into an area of the body my self-suit was unaware of, blood would not flow from the wound unceasingly. The self-suit would simply cauterize and regrow the arteries around the null zone. My body would realize it was dying, even if it was not aware of how, and act accordingly. The amount of blood would be negligible.

•••

We talk about ceasefires. We talk about peace treaties. We talk about how we will change the world when we inherit the War from our parents, how we will end the senseless carnage and blind hatred. Anjel tells me how desperately he wants things to change. Even though I am the one who can see into the endless mires of possibility, Anjel’s vision of our worlds without War is clearer than any future I have seen.

•••

I ask Anjel to run away with me. 

Anjel says no. Anjel says yes. We make a home in an ice mining colony and adopt two children. I make him lichen tea every morning and we grow old watching the planet rise together—then die of snow lung, one after the other. We take a jump ship and leave the twin moons behind forever, finding a new home where we will never be recognized. I forget what my hand feels like around a knife. Years later, our pasts call to us and we return, taking back the mantles of War like we had never left.

Or I never ask at all. 

•••

Anjel and I stand on a viewing platform before the Heart of Time. He hasn’t looked at it yet, because he is only looking at me. The twisting nexus of light is a halo behind his head.

In all the times I have imagined us here, I thought of him in the form of a monstrosity, an abomination. But he looks smaller, more human than I have ever seen him. 

He says that he is so afraid every single day. He is afraid when he sends his army into battle because none of them might come back, and he might have to peel the self-suits from all of their ruined bodies and sew them back together for the next army to die in. He is afraid that the dying might happen forever and be for nothing at all. 

You’re so certain of everything, he says, tracing a finger down the sleeve of my velvet robe. I see peace on the faces of your soldiers as they lie dying, and I want to die the same way. Certain I have lived a righteous life. 

A thousand words clot in my throat. I flee to my Looking Glass, to potentialities. 

I say: I haven’t been certain of anything since I saw you crying on that battlefield.

I say: every choice I make feels like I’m dying in the War. 

I say: if you turn around and see the way that you die, do you fight it? 

There is a long, glass knife hidden in my sleeve. 

•••

Anjel turns around and looks into the Heart of Time. He sees the way the War ends. 

•••

A self-suit can protect its wearer in radiation, in intense heat and cold. I could survive in the belly of a volcano, in a nuclear fallout, in the engine of a jump ship. I could survive an onslaught of blinding white light. I could survive to the centre of the nexus of truth. 

I wonder if he knows this.

•••

We are on that domed spire, still talking about religion. I tell Anjel that the Divine Path is clouded, and we can only catch glimpses of the truth it offers us. Sometimes it is misinterpreted, but the Heart of Time has never once—in the thousands of years that we have been looking upon it—been wrong.

Anjel says that my understanding is biased, because everyone on the Waiting Moon already believes in the absolute divinity of the Heart of Time. They are inclined to make anything it shows them come to pass. Perhaps, he says with a grin, for him it would be different. Perhaps the Heart of Time would not know how to predict someone who makes their own future.

I allow myself the desperate blasphemy of hoping he is right. 

I make a choice. I ask Anjel if he would like to see the Heart of Time.

He pauses, then clasps my hand. Thank you, he says. Part of me is surprised that he recognizes the weight of my offer; this is, after all, not his god. 

But then he furrows his brow, and when he does not say anything further, I slip on the lens of the future. There’s something I’d like to show you as well, a version of him murmurs. 

Though I look as deeply as I can, there is not a potential timeline in which he tells me what it is. 

•••

Anjel turns around and looks into the Heart of Time. He sees a long, glass knife. 

•••

Anjel turns around, and he is glowing. His hand is so soft against my skin. I close my eyes against the burning light and pull him back to me, tip his head back, and kiss him. The knife slips from my sleeve and is incinerated by the roaring energy below us. I hold him, and I do not let go, do not let go, do not—

No, I’m sorry, this one doesn’t really—

•••

I take the knife from Lysander’s sleeve and raise it between us. His eyes widen in shock. I consider dropping it. I consider throwing it. His face floods with unimaginable grief. But still he reaches for the knife, to take it back, and I see the way the War ends, and I— 

•••

Lysander falls against me, and I stumble back. The ground tips beneath our feet.

•••

I am standing alone in our bedroom in the hours before Lysander takes me to see his god, and I take a deep breath and let my self-suit fall off of me. I leave it folded under my pillow, for the future in which we return together. His god, my god; sacrilege for sacrilege. When he takes me by the hand and leads me to the chamber at the core of his planet, I feel the pulse of his bare skin against mine for the first time.

•••

We collapse into the blinding light, and are obliterated by the Heart of Time. 

As our bodies disintegrate, our lives warp together. We are wrapped around each other in his bed. We are looking at each other from across a battlefield. I have a knife in my hand. I have a knife in my chest. We are running away together. I have his hand in mine, and we are letting go, not letting go, letting go, not letting—

I ask: “Don’t you wish things could be different?” 

Lysander reaches for the knife, to take it back, and I see the way the War ends, and I slide the long, glass knife through the soft layers of velvet and skin and puncture the arch of his heart. He takes a horrible, stuttering breath. His body twitches, as if to take a step back, then chooses instead to collapse against me. 

“What did you see?” he whispers into my chest. “What did you choose?”

He raises his hand—his hand I have known; his blood on my chest—and caresses the skin of my cheek. Then he slumps. Then he falls.