Searching

IT’S REMARKABLE how quickly time passes, even for those of us who experience a century in the amount of time the Earthborn feel the passing of a year. Today would have been Calla’s first day of college, the start of her spring semester; but according to the admissions office, she hadn’t completed orientation. No one had seen her since she fled Edgar’s Nowhere. No one knew where she was.

I shrugged into my jacket and ducked behind the softened leather as I shut the door behind me. After locating a bench, I sat down facing a quad of grass. I stared at the trees past a group of students playing a running game with a plastic disk. The students ran around, trying to block each other’s efforts at spinning the disk from person to person. A red-faced male twisted toward me as he wound up for a throw. His shirt read Ultimate Frisbee in white lettering. I wondered whether Calla had ever played the strange-looking game.

I shook my head and turned my attention back to the trees. A small object was pointed toward me. It hung in midair, and then slowly twisted its way through and around the Frisbee players. I frowned, wondering why they seemed oblivious to the object, where it had come from and why it glided toward me.

As the object neared, I recognized it as an airplane made of paper. The airplane would have poked me in the eye had I not been wearing my travel glasses. It made contact with the left lens before falling into my lap. I opened it, smoothed out the folds and groaned.

The paper was covered in angry scrawl. It was another message from Doreen Winston, Calla’s mother, demanding that I return to TSTA Headquarters with a report on my search.

Ms. Winston hadn’t been pleased with my progress thus far. I’d dodged her written messages as they followed me through time and space. She sent letters, telegrams, faxes and, now, a paper airplane. I shook my head. Her disappointment with me would likely continue.

I imagined Calla received similar messages from Ms. Winston, a TSTA Communications Facilitator, who was able to monitor comings and goings through time and space. Despite having the finest resources and equipment available to the known worlds, she hadn’t been able to track down Calla. And yet it seemed that she had endless methods of contacting me.

I balled up the sheet of paper and stuffed it in my pocket. I’d also evaded all communications from Calla’s father and my healer, Plaka. I’d left abruptly, without telling him my plans. I was sure he’d understand, unlike Ms. Winston, who seemingly did not. She was angry that I’d let Calla travel alone after I’d promised to protect her. What Ms. Winston didn’t know was that Calla was safer this way.

I squeezed the parcel I’d brought with me, Calla’s backpack. She’d taken off without it. I kept the backpack close to me, deluding myself that it would help me find her. Out of desperation, I’d searched its contents: a few articles of clothing, a journal written in the hand of my cousin Shirlyn (along with others I didn’t recognize) and a zobascope. The latter item I’d inspected, confirming that it was the instrument Enta presented to me as a child, a gift my uncle Edgar had given her.

The zobascope was a miniature telescope that recorded sight and sound. I studied the recordings captured inside: a scene of myself as a child; my teen self’s confrontation with a visually present, but emotionally absent, love interest; and Enta’s message to Calla that the zobascope—with its ability to record—was the predecessor to the travel glasses. Before explaining this fact to Calla, Enta had gone back in time to record a conversation that Enta’s younger self had with my parents and Edgar, shortly after I’d fled the White Tower. My heart sank as I played back my father’s words and confirmation of his love for me:

We of course thought we were doing him a service with those books.

We often felt guilt at leaving him for such long periods of time.

Later in the same recorded conversation, in response to a comment about the irreplaceability of the holobrary, my father had said: And so is our son.

I clenched the seat of the bench with my fingers. I was irreplaceable to him. If only I’d let him know I’d felt the same way about him—that he’d been irreplaceable to me. Even Plaka couldn’t fill that void.

I drew in a breath and stood up. For the next several minutes, I wandered the campus grounds, studying the place where Calla should be living out her life in normalcy. Part of me was delighted that she wasn’t a student here. From what I’d seen of the school so far, I wasn’t impressed. The buildings and people lacked personality. Nothing the professors could teach her would help her present situation. No book or lecture on Earth could improve upon her already extraordinary talents. Neither could I. This, Plaka recognized, was something Calla needed to accomplish alone to discover her full potential.

Once again, Calla was on her own, placing herself in danger and stumbling upon rules of travel that I hadn’t had time to explain. The worlds were too big, and they kept growing. Rules changed. Worse yet, rules were broken. Then there was the TSTA, who wanted control over the rules and the rule-breakers. I hoped the TSTA would fail to catch up with Calla. Who knows what unspoken guidelines she might break, and what her next punishment would be?

I wished I could ask her my questions and let her ask me hers.

Multiple barriers thwarted my plans. First, I didn’t want Calla to know that I was following her, trying to block her further discoveries of my past. Second, she’d avoided my incoming communications through the travel glasses as ardently as I’d been avoiding her mother’s. Her tenacity amused me almost as much as it terrified me. But not as much as losing Calla terrified me. My inability to search for a time and place and go directly to her only aggravated my fears.

As I’d wandered from place to place, searching for where she could be now, I realized that losing her was perhaps more terrifying than having her find out about my greatest mistake.

I didn’t kill my father, but I am responsible for his death. Thus the reason for Plaka’s treatment of me. He’d needed to escape through the Fire Falls—to get away from the Uproar—before my treatment was complete. Never had I felt as cowardly as when I had to explain my need for healing to Calla. I’d wanted her to fear me in order to trust me. I’d learned to equate trust and fear, which was why I’d promised to prove myself to her. Only then would I have felt worthy of her affections. But then I’d broken her heart, abandoning all hope of being worthy of her ever again. Her finding out what I’d done, that my father’s death was more my fault than that of the Earth’s timeline, would seal my unworthiness of her—that is, if she found out.

And, yet, what if I’d never taken the travel glasses, the pair of sunglasses altered by Edgar? What if I were to go back in time and destroy them or manipulate the past to ensure that I never had them? What would that change? Would I be happier? Doubtful. Would the TSTA charge me with an infraction? Again? Likely.

Either way, the Uproar would continue to pursue Plaka and Calla. I would just be blissfully unaware.