THE SYNCHRONIST

 

FRAN WILDE

 

IT’S BEEN TWENTY years since I’ve seen him. It’s been thirty days. And nearly two parsecs. And six point five light years. It has been four months outbound and six months inbound. It’s been five rotations.

All of this is simultaneously true.

And there’s not one rotation or day or second or trajectory along which I’ve missed his sorry ass.

And yet.

When Galen Sand disembarks the tradeship Verdant Nine, his expression slips from hero-returns to something-is-wrong in microseconds. Only I notice.

He’s expecting a payoff for the moments he’s saved in transit. He’d told me years ago that the first tradeship to arrive always left with the most rewards. He doesn’t understand until this exact point that he’s been cashed out.

He doesn’t yet know it was me that did it.

I measure the moments between his loss and betrayal. I wonder if he’ll be proud of me anyway.

“Hi, Dad,” I say, though I’m older than he is now.

 

 

~ Spiral Arm Prime Axis Museum, Galactic Center ~

 

Honored Chronometrist. Breaker of Losses. Momentist. Degenerate. The Horologist B.V. (Beneficence Valorous) Sand’s titles vary according to the proximity of Sol and the Terran planets. However, her impact on how the Spiral Arm uses microseconds, from payment to salvage, is as constant as time itself.

 

 

I HEAR GALEN telling the new crew “Beneficence won’t be a bother,” and I smile, my ear cupped against the door to the navigation room. I am eight. I want to skip, just once, down the metal passageway of the Verdant Nine, but my boots are magnetized to grab the floor.

The new engineer murmurs another question about the motherless child stomping the gangways in tiny mag boots. Galen’s smooth voice echoes. “Don’t worry. I teach her myself. She’s immaculate.”

Over the years, new engineers, stevedores, nannies, and galley staff on the Verdant Nine have learned that means I’ll stay out of the way, mostly, that I won’t paint the gangways with Venusian phosphors or ask too many questions. Mostly, I’m learning to steer the ship. It’s going to be mine someday. Galen’s promised.

He buys wind-up rocket toys from Phobos, bio-luminescent clock kits from Ganymede, the same place he bought my egg long ago.

He ships parts for navigational modifications with the toys, technology to help the ship go faster and recorders to cover that up. “It’s a game I have with Terran officials,” he says, showing me how to play. “The game is primarily set between the Jovian planets and the galaxy’s greater spiral arm, which is opening up to traders and freight. That means more ships are foldjumping, and everyone must measure where an object in orbit will be at a given moment in relation to all other objects in motion. Time is part of that measurement. That’s what the Consistency’s trying to control—especially as wide-open local spaces became cluttered with objects, all in motion. But their clocks aren’t perfect. In a foldjump, navigation tells you how fast you can go, but not how much time you’ll lose when you pass through a gravity well. Those are very small. The chronometers slow a little with each transit. More moments go missing. Those errors are small too. But, Beneficence, even a tiny loss in a billion-kilometer journey can create an error that is not so small—one percent of a billion kilometers is still a lot of room for things to go wrong.”

I nod, squinting, trying to see what he means. “But how is that a game?”

He smiles. “It’s a game because there’s also a lot of room for things to go right. We just need to time things to our advantage, until there’s a better clock available.”

“Okay,” I agree. Though I’m still hazy on the details. Even at eight, I know that a percent of a billion kilometers is a scary span of space.

Galen special orders more mag boots to arrive at our next port of call when it looks like I’m growing out of mine. “There’s nothing that tells time better than a child,” he laughs at a rare crew dinner. My tenth birthday. The crew laughs with him.

Do I mind being a kit-kid? My egg selected from a catalog for intellect, math especially? Delivered by drone, according to Galen? Various nannies who come and go on their transits seem to think it’s normal, so if Galen doesn’t mind, I don’t either. He’s preparing me for greatness; says he didn’t want any interference. That’s why I don’t have siblings and Galen doesn’t have iterations. The whole ship is mine.

“Watch and learn,” Galen ends a navigation lesson, “and you’ll bring fame to the Verdant Nine. I can only bring us wealth.” His brown eyes glitter with screenlight. The calculations for a high-speed transit from Io to Europa span three panels before us. The ship’s already underway. The real-time numbers change with their trajectory.

Time and distance equal speed: my first variables.

The patterns they make, my first toys.

As we plot the arc that we need to swing for the fastest route, he adds, “You will bring us glory.”

But I’m still worried. “What if we get lost, like the Anathremon Six?” Somewhere out there in the vast space between moments.

“That captain got sloppy,” Galen says. “And the Consistency refused to calibrate the Anathremon’s chronometers. They’ve made themselves the standard keepers for system navigation, for safety’s sake. But it’s also another way to control us. We keep track of our own instruments better than the Consistency can. Better than the Anathremon. I make sure our timing doesn’t slip, no matter what. The Consistency doesn’t like it, but I don’t care. You understand? That won’t happen to us. Okay?”

I nod again and Galen shows me how he calibrates the Verdant Nine’s navigation, then lets me try it myself. The screens seem to gleam with his trust and my data as Galen feeds my calculations to the navigator, then snaps his fingers and lifts me in the air.

The enormous ship seems to move on my say-so.

Happy in this moment, I hum a nanny song about the sun. But Galen raises an eyebrow.

That quiets me to a single word. “Okay.” My voice as serious as I can make it. The tick-tock syllables sound like the ancient clock Galen bought for my berth as a gift. A wooden pendulum, the case painted black and gold.

But when we arrive on Europa, a gang of Consistency drones meets us at the dock.

Galen orders the crew to quarters, all but me. I scrunch closer to his side as the drones buzz loudly. Their carapaces bump Galen. Their sonorous chorus echoes displeasure. “We’ve received complaints that your clocks are running fast, Captain Sand. We’ve watched. You are running fast. The dock was not ready for you.”

Galen only shrugs. “I was teaching Beneficence how to steer.” He gestures at me. “It won’t happen again.”

The Consistency doesn’t acknowledge a child when it has better prey. “We think you’re playing the margins on early arrivals. Beating your competition, perhaps through illegal means? We’ve refused to synchronize ship chronometers for less. Licensed, standardized System navigation requires standardized clocks. For everyone’s benefit. You could be lost in space without us.”

Galen makes his denials and, unable to prove anything, the Consistency turns to go.

“Dad,” I whisper too loudly, “you said it was a game.” His hand squeezes mine hard as the swarm slows. “Okay.” I laugh and hum a sun-song to cover up my error.

Galen smiles, lips pressed tight. The Consistency moves away, murmuring threats in their wake. “Like you’re not also gambling over microseconds,” Galen mutters to the retreating swarm.

When they’re gone, he turns and I swallow hard. I’ll always remember how fierce his eyes, unblinking on mine, how he grips my shoulders with his strong fingers. “Time is an advantage, B.V. One that the Consistency and Terran planets control. They’ll do a lot to keep hold of that power. Don’t accept that. Don’t give up. There are people in the Spiral Arm searching for ways to make time better.”

“Okay,” I say again. It seems the safest word.

A few moments ago, a lifetime ago, I’d been worried that the Verdant Nine’s engineer would report catching me taking apart a shuttle’s timing device to see how it worked. The mess I’d made, far from immaculate. The engineer had let me help put the shuttle back together, so I’d hoped I was safe. But now I forget that worry, because his eyes are so fierce. I worry about the Consistency instead.

Galen turns to watch the Ionians offload our shipment of ore. The Verdant Nine made good money on the run, because we got here first. But he drags his fingers through his curly hair. “Let’s go,” he says. “We’ll restock at the next port.” His voice hitches on the word “next.”

We don’t get my mag boots.

He’s scared. The Consistency rattled him somehow.

We don’t go to Jupiter Main as I’d charted, either. He lands at Ganymede North instead—calls my unsuspecting egg-mother to come get me.

Exchanges me for a hold full of fabric and instrumentation.

“Work hard, and I’ll be back. Won’t be a moment.” Galen hangs a delicate Venusian cloud-clock on a chain around my neck before disappearing into his ship. Before I can find a word of protest. His boots don’t make a sound.

The doors slip shut, shadows lengthen in the port warehouse, and he doesn’t come back out.

When the light fades, then Verdant Nine takes off. Fast. He leaves me sitting on a lightcargo trunk I’ve decorated with stickers of all the moons and planets where we’ve called: Neptune, Jupiter, Europa, the outer Oorts.

My mag boots bang the plastic case, too high to touch the ground. Crew from other ships bustle by, carefully not looking at me, as if I might be catching.

“Okay,” I finally whisper. I stop staring at the place the Verdant Nine was. I scan the docks, the mist rising cool against the shelter. My eyes begin to ache. Maybe my mother’s face will look familiar, a mirror. I swallow back tears.

I am immaculate when my mother arrives.

“All right,” the woman whispers, taking my hand. We look nothing alike, except she has brown eyes too. So does Galen. She pricks my finger to check the match, then smiles. It’s almost enough. “Okay. Just for a little while.”

 

 

~ Ganymedian Sand Workshop Preserve ~

 

In the Galactic Center planets, B.V. Sand is often pictured holding the final Quantum Degeneracy Chronometer (QD3) as a gold orb in her right hand, her calculations in her left. Sometimes, a ticking sound accentuates the immediacy of her accomplishment. These theatrical touches are inaccurate and here, at her home museum, we strive for as much accuracy as possible.

For instance, the Sand QD3 chronometer is not a gold orb, and it was partly concealed within the deck of the Horologist’s rental ship. Composed of a cooling system and crystal lattice, the archaic structure also contained a series of anti-gravitational meshes, and two unique mechanisms of Sand’s own design. The recording device she truly held is neither spherical nor golden. We can assure you, also, that her calculations were projected before her on her screens. All other “traditional” renderings are inaccurate.

At the time of the Synchronist’s Challenge, B.V. Sand was two and a half Jovian years of age. Her ship, the Rael, was under Neptunian flag for thirty years, and a Terran-orbit shuttle before that for at least forty years. The Anathremon Sixhad been missing for twenty-two years, the Verdant Nine for almost as long, and the Synchronist’s Challenge had gone unclaimed for twenty Terran cycles.

Sand’s characteristic off-white tunic and multi-pocket duster, plus her ship-issued and ill-fitting mag boots, made her look like a landsider, especially among the ship’s wiry crew. Her hair, cropped, was bleached to match the duster. The look on her face, unlike the smile in many images, is grim.

Details, especially of this moment, are important. Witness the threedee here:

“You should leave with us,” her engineer Enric2 pleads before they take a shuttle back to Triton. “Warre Unkling’s got this wrapped up for Terra. Bookmakers have you at terrible odds. Don’t take our reputations down with you, chasing a ghost.”

“I will continue,” she replies. “Alone.”

This is the moment onboard the lightship d-sonnit Raelwhere B.V. Sand—who has lost two time trials already, and both of her own iterations; who is nearly broke; whose collaborators are leaving the ship before it commences its trial—gives up hope and latches on to belief.

We’ve preserved the seconds in threedee and made shelf-size copies for those who would like to replay the inspiring transformation at home.

The next moment—one of the seminal points in temporal history—where B.V. Sand discovers her chronometer not only confounds gravity wells, allows for multiple entanglements, and creates a much more exact frequency and distance ratio than traditional methods, but also has the unusual side effect of being able to save and store time—is only available at the Ganymede museum store for an admission fee of twenty-two seconds.

 

 

ON GANYMEDE, IT is six months, then it is two years.

It is point five parsecs.

It is one-half light year and gaining—I track the Verdant Nine’s arcs and foldjumps on panels in my Ganymede study—until these disappear.

The bright spot where they were, the ship’s velocity as it prepared to head for the outer arm forming a smooth arc. Then nothing. They don’t reappear. Did they calculate a jump wrong? Emerge with their bow in a meteor instead of open space? I shiver.

It is an infinite span of time before I open my eyes and look again. Still nothing.

Another ten days of sitting blankly through Ganymede history lessons in my mother’s co-op below the ice. Then I receive an incoming message, time stamped twelve days previous. “Work hard, I’ll be back in a moment.”

My reply message, and all those after, disappear into silence. Lost.

My mother, Bellaire, who loves mathematics, has a bright laugh, and five iterations—including two fellow mathematicians at the university who come by to distract me with equations and puzzles—eventually looks into my study and clears her throat. “You all right?”

“I will be,” I answer. “I have to work hard.” Galen told me so.

I am twelve. I say the same thing when I’m twelve and a half and Bellaire keeps asking.

I don’t mind her asking.

Then Bellaire brings home a lightcrate from the port. “Someone sent you clock parts.”

I tear into the box, looking for a message. There isn’t anything but parts and the spaces between the parts.

Bellaire shakes her head at the cables and lattices, the cooling systems. “Where will you put these?” She likes the elegance of math. She hates clutter. She’s said that’s why she didn’t want a child, though the idea of some distant immortality beyond iterations charmed her. She didn’t expect the return on her investment, but handles it, and me, with care.

We’ve established an easy agreement: I don’t make messes.

Talking with her is like talking with the nannies or the Verdant Nine’s engineer, but better. I like it. She sings sometimes. She lets me study anything I want.

I study time.

Moments, seconds, microseconds. The more I learn about them, the more I know this is how to find Galen, or at least how to make good on my promise to him, to make time better. To make him proud.

In Bellaire’s home, the blue skydome has day and night effects and I can see the stars just like on Galen’s ship. I show my mother the clocks I’ve built from the crate. They keep even time, beating like tiny hearts. Mirroring the Venusian cloud clock around my neck. All synchronized.

“Hear the spaces between beats? Those are where things fall through.” My father taught me that by disappearing. “I want to keep ships from falling through. Better clocks, better time.”

“Explain it to me,” Bellaire says.

“You never wanted a child,” I whisper, suddenly reluctant to show her more.

Bellaire gathers me up in her arms and I’m shocked by the fierceness of this hug, over all the quick hugs we’ve shared in passing. “That was concept. This is real.”

A few beats of breath. A moment where I close my eyes and listen to my heartbeat, hers. Then I try to show Bellaire how to synchronize time.

I entangle two of the quark clocks, then set one at the end of the settlement, and put another on a co-op lightship. “Any two related objects are impacted by time, and driven to separation.”

My mother smiles, nodding, ignoring the squawk from the co-op owner about the depletion of quantum supplies. “That’s a somewhat old idea.”

“I agree.” She wins me over by not babying me. Galen never did either. But she doesn’t gleam with pride. What Bellaire offers is warm and constant, but soft.

I ignore the clocks and do my chores without being asked for a month, basking in the softness. Then, one day beneath the icelight, she asks, “Finish your explanation?” She holds a recorder.

I decide to see if I can make Bellaire proud. I retrieve the data from the outbound ship and pair it with the chronometer that remained on Ganymede. “These two are like modern chronometers that the Consistency provides ships. When they travel, different events impact them, and the clocks return subtly different. The other one will have scrapes where it got banged up in a hold. This one will have weather damage from the ice.” I run my fingers across my ship-regulation short hair, thinking. “Chronometers start off synchronized but after many years, transit-wise, exposure to different gravities, different environments, even crystal lattice clocks need a tune up. And they’ve been going out of synch the whole time, by picoseconds.” I pause and look at the clock data. “At least, that’s how Galen explained it to me.”

And now Galen and I are traveling apart.

I send the landbound entangled clock to the recycler.

Bellaire pulls it from the garbage and sends it, along with my presentation, to her university’s science department. I gain a small grant to study navigation. When I graduate, her eyes meet and hold mine, still soft and warm. “You worked so hard.”

I can bask in the warmth. But it’s not enough.

 

 

~ Ganymedian Sand Workshop Preserve ~

 

This museum and preserve, two and a half kilometers below the ice, on the shores of sub-glacial lake 17, next to Sand’s mother’s home contains: Two ancient atomic clocks, cooled with lake emissions. One Venetian cloud chronometer (its motions broken during transport and never successfully fixed). A piece of wood supposedly from the original Terran, H4 Marine Chronometer. A Gas Storm Timepiece from one of Jupiter’s stormtribes. (Sand quite likes that one though she cannot get it working consistently.) Sixteen versions of Quantum Degeneracy clock attempts, plus one brass orb model of the final clock, created by Domain Fabergé as a memorial. A threedee depiction of stolen time, developed by the museum. A copy of the original Synchronist’s Challenge, hand-lettered on a commemorative pin. A crystal memorial of Je Yun’s original Galactic Chronometer, and a loop of one of Sand’s iconic personas.

The last one’s not what you’d expect. Not quite a loop. Not quite a recording. More a place where someone might slip through.

 

 

ONLY ONCE DOES my mother frown about my work, over coffee when I am fourteen. A Lunar navigational and temporal studies conference has turned down my paper on the theories of time among Oort Cloud drifters who had “evolved past a sense of time” and claimed to be able to find lost ships. (Which was why no one would hire them for shipping, as they were always late, Galen used to say. I’d left that out of my paper.)

“Your own legacy, Bene, that’s more important than his.”

“You didn’t hear the Consistency. You didn’t see them threaten him. Landbound can’t know how much advantage the Consistency holds out there. Because time isn’t as good as it can be yet. Galen left me here to learn how to try. So I wouldn’t be lost too.”

“Can he really be as much a hero as you think?” she risks.

I slam out of the kitchen and back to my studies. Very carefully, in the quiet of my room, I remove the delicate cloud clock from around my neck. I take it apart. Pieces spread across my workbench. I cannot put it back together. The mist smells like phosphorous and tears.

I don’t speak to my mother again until Bellaire slips two files through to my screen. One’s titled “The Synchronist’s Challenge.”

Someone’s offering a lot of money to build an improved chronometer. One that could have saved the Anathremon Six. And Galen, I think.

A lot more money than they’d give a child. I ignore it.

The other is a ticket: a paid seat at cross-planetary network discussions on galactic foldspace navigational errors. I attend and take careful notes. On ships like The Ossip, a Jovian series 1 lightflier, and the Anathremon Six. The Ossip arrived at Hydrai 467 three weeks ahead of schedule due to a timing error stemming from a flood around an ancient radio telescope in Bonn, old Terra, which was all they could afford. The variance gave them an unfortunate intersect with a moon. Bad timing means bad navigation. And, according to official records, the Anathremon Six, a Martian ship heading to a new exoplanet, made the first of three foldspace jumps after having clocks synchronized by the Consistency, and arrived in safe orbit around a new gas giant. They radioed home that various instruments seemed to be lagging within the giant’s gravity well, but seemed fine underway afterward. They took their readings and left for jump two, but never signaled again.

No one mentions the Verdant Nine.

“What’s the commonality?” I message the network. No one answers. I answer myself. “Gravitational distortion.”

“That old argument,” Warre Unkling, the Venusian lightship pilot who’s made several foldjumps on his own already, replies, and I nearly drop my tablet in shock. When I re-gather the threads of the conversation, the network’s moved on to another topic.

“Okay,” I whisper in the quiet of my study. But I won’t give up. I use the network to search for more wrecks. Convinced if I work hard enough that I can save... something.

Interplanetary Transport 17783, emergency thrusters used to avoid ice-meteor in what was supposed to be a clear zone.

Dahlgren47a, a long-haul trader, missing. Unheard from after a foldspace jump.

So many ships, but none of them Galen’s. Relief, always.

Eventually, for an upcoming conference that Warre Unkling will attend, I co-write a paper on the Anathremon Six with a friend from the discussion network: Enric2, an iteration of another engineer. We argue gravitational distortion of time near heavy planetary objects impacting foldjump time measurements. The paper is rejected as trite.

I am eighteen. Rapidly losing ground. I feel I’ll never find the place where the Verdant Nine slipped through, much less patch the hole.

 

 

~ The Synchronist Challenge, inscribed on a Commemorative Pin in the Ganymede Sand Workshop Preserve ~

 

Participants are sought to develop a new kind of chronometer, one not subject to the whims of gravity wells and space folds, one that reorients time on the galactic center, exact to the microsecond, even in deep space.

The reward: a lifetime honorarium from the Astrological Center Society.

The first to arrive in a documented time-trial exactly when and where stipulated, to the microsecond, after a foldjump, will be named First Synchronist for the Galactic Center.

 

 

“THERE’S ONLY SO much theory can do,” my mother says at breakfast when I explain. She’s drinking something green that smells like ozone. “Get out and make something. One of your clocks.”

She waves her hand and the Synchronist’s Challenge appears on my screen again. “Anyone can enter.”

“I don’t have the funds for that.”

“Yes, you do.” She taps my credit marker, which takes up a corner of the screen. The accounts where Galen stowed some money before he disappeared.

“Saving that.” I’m oddly protective of those funds. Galen made them gambling on the gap between when his ship would arrive and when his competitors would. He used my calculations sometimes. It was our game. The interest helps pay Bellaire for my space here, as I wait for Galen’s return.

My mother taps the funds. “You don’t need to save them for me. Think of all the clocks you’ve taken apart and pieced back together, Bene. Do it for them.”

I give in and take enough money to commission two iterations to help with the build work. Enric2 collaborates with me. So do other underemployed researchers from the discussion network. We build clocks again. New kinds. I hire time on lightships and test, rework, and test again. The first time trial for the challenge is in two years.

We’re not nearly ready.

The second trial is in four.

Finally, I file paperwork for the third challenge. In the amount of time it takes for a wave to travel from Ganymede to Mars, plus some ten seconds, our entry is accepted.

My first ship, one of my iterations is lost. The timing is right, but the navigation calculations are overwritten by the ship’s captain and my own iteration. They don’t take into account Newtonian acceleration and how their trajectory works in and out of a nearby star’s gravitational field while in foldspace. The incremental time changes to energy due to modified Heisenberg effects and the ship emerges in the wrong place. I’m not responsible but still feel it. My collaborators start to drift away.

A second ship isn’t lost, but is badly damaged by a too-close pass with a large orbital body.

My credit marker shrinks on my screen from a small moon on to a meteor. Even in Ganymede’s economy, I’m running out of time. But I won’t give up.

The third trial is twenty years almost to the day Galen left me on the ice-dock at Ganymede North.

I book the Rael with the credit I have left. It’s not the fastest ship. Its crew is all iterations, no backgrounds given, and the captain is Enric2’s cousin. With nothing left to risk, I decide to go on the trial myself.

“You’re trying to follow him,” my mother protests. “Don’t give yourself up like that.”

“I’m not thinking of Galen.” I pack a crate of chronometer parts. “I’m thinking of time. How to fix it.”

I’m thinking of the gaps between moments where people and ships fall through.

 

 

~ Jovian Public Broadcast Service Recording, Captain of the Rael, never released, private collection ~

 

“Yes, the Raelwas happy to take her job. She paid fifty-five percent up front, all of her remaining funds. Plus I liked the chronometer. I never hesitated. Never doubted her. Not like the others.

“She took the shuttle up to the orbital at Ganymede North, and actually stood there herself to watch us load the QD3 on board. Demanded to hook it up herself. Even her own assistants left her when she pushed too much. And her face looked grim enough to spook the crew.

“But the trial kicked off as the outer Jovian planets were holding a vote against the inner planets to relocate the Prime Meridian/Prime Axis. They actually had a chance this time. And I admit, the moment felt auspicious. I just don’t know for whom.

“Unkling’s ship was faster, his design was glorious, and everyone was pretty sure the Consistency would cheat, and B.V. was still fiddling with her chronometer as we entered foldspace. Still, I never doubted her for a second.”

 

 

It is twenty years. It is three failed trials. It is lost time and friendships.

Winning the Synchronist’s Challenge would make it all worthwhile. It could gain me fame and lifetime tenure at the Galactic Center. From there, I could more easily search for the Verdant Nine.

Once I win.

There are three horologist ships out on trials, this final day.

Warre Unkling’s entry is a Venusian ship set throughout with magnetic chronomophores. Meant to sense pulsars by distance and class, the ship is blindingly expensive and incredibly beautiful. The media outlets love it so much, they barely notice my nondescript navigation mesh, my handheld data recorder, and my rented lightship.

The Consistency’s entry, a standard-bearing pulse-woven entanglement, plus its pair cannoned into the foldspace ahead of the ship, is the same design they enter each challenge. The repeater-resolution patterns give a sense of a proper map no matter what. It’s meant as a warning not to mess with their standards, and no one’s beaten it yet.

They are elegant solutions compared to mine.

Unkling is determined to take it for Terra. The Consistency, everyone assumes, has an inside track, at least for keeping the prize unearned.

But I’ve promised my father I’d work hard. I’ve promised my mother I wouldn’t give in. And I promised myself I wouldn’t lose.

 

 

~ Ganymedian Sand Workshop Preserve ~

 

In the following threedee recreation of her third space trials for the QD3 chronometer, Horologist B.V. Sand stands aboard the light-freighter D-sonnit Rael, having said, “I will continue.”

Her former collaborators broadcast they’ve abandoned the work as soon as they land on Triton.

Now Sand takes out a small set of tools and parts and adds a recording loop to the QD3. This moment makes the final chronometer hers outright.

On the other side of the Rael, Consistency drones preparing to receive Sand’s time-trial concession stand down. Some of the Rael crew consider putting her out the airlock.

But the ship prepares for its foldjump. The Consistency broadcasts one last note of concern about her design. She argues with the captain about navigation. Then they jump.

First there’s dead silence, then there is cheering.

As their data lights up the navigation screens, Sand’s expression shifts from worried to shocked. She looks at the recorder again. Shakes it. And for a moment, time seems to slow down. The cheering fades and returns.

“Huh,” she says. “That’s unexpected.”

She checks the meters, the gears. The recorder holds the time usually lost in the moments between jumping and arriving.

Unkling lands before she has time to figure it out.

Then a fourth ship appears, just ahead of the Consistency.

 

 

“I WILL CONTINUE,” I say.

The Rael’s captain hesitates. He has questions. “Our calculations put us out this edge of the meteor field after the fold.”

He’s no stranger to what are somewhat romantically known on the ground as foldjumps, but are more realistically mass expenditures of torque around gas-giant gravity wells that shorten transit times. He knows a little time gets lost. Appreciates I’m trying to build a solution.

But he’s nervous. Wants to use his own numbers. I shudder, thinking about the first trial. Stare at the trajectory arcs. “You’ll put us out in the densest part of the field. Run my numbers.” I hand him my tablet, ignore his shock at the impropriety. “They save us several seconds, and—more importantly—we’ll emerge in clear black.”

“The Consistency says you’re wrong.” He glances from his data to mine and chews the sipstraw of caffeine he’s been gnawing on for the three days we’ve been preparing for the trial. “You’d best be right this time,” he says finally.

The crew grumbles some more.

I hold the captain’s gaze as if I have no doubts. “The Consistency insists on being the standard. On being right. If they’re not, no one will trust their chronometers. But they’re right because they set the clocks. The old-world ships, the really old ones, wind-driven rather than warp-driven, marked time and speed as essential to finding their way around reefs and shorelines. Even then, errors could wreck a craft. The Consistency has ensured their clocks are standard. But there are still many errors. A better timepiece could change everything, could it not?”

When I stop, there are a few grumbles but not at me. Everyone doubts the Consistency’s pristine intentions. The captain nods slowly.

“I’ll give you sixty-five percent of the split,” I add. Our original deal had been forty. Only then does the captain signal, only then do mag boots sound against the metal deck, barely concealing dark grumbles. The crew swings to faster action.

The Rael nears the jump point.

 

 

~ Notes from B.V. Sand’s Journal, private collection ~

 

Here are some horologic measurements I’ve found during my research:

A finite span: a cannon firing each day at noon to reset inaccurate watches; the pause between each tick of a familiar watch; the chemical signal of atoms in a microwave chamber.

An infinite span: the time between a door opening, someone stepping aboard a ship, and that door closing.

An unending span: the time between the last signal sent and the signal never received.

An empty span: outgoing versus incoming, of lost memories, when you are where time stops, but those you love keep going.

An uneven span: a pendulum onboard an early Terran ship, tossed off kilter by waves, or the movement of atoms closer to and farther away from a gas giant.

A heartbreak span: the moments between arriving a winner and the winner arriving.

 

 

I REFUSE TO risk failure this time.

As I feed my data into the QD3 chronometer for the last time, heart pounding, I set the recorder. Not to cheat, only to catch the clock’s sub-atomic machinations. Something I hadn’t done in earlier trials. Something Galen did on the Verdant Nine often, when he thought the shipboard chronometer was slow.

I keep my face calm, but inside, I’m shaking.

I may have added an extra loop in the recorder’s code. May have told it to capture time between the jump points versus time onboard. May have used the word capture, not measure.

Then, all my models and forecasts, all the tinkering with atomic timing and the quark relays, all my worries about repurposing a theory as old as quantum degeneracy, all fall away as each vibration of each quark becomes a count of moments between periods, each oscillation momentous and minuscule both, while we wink into the fold.

All of this is still so immediate in my memory.

And yet.

When we emerge, the Synchronist’s Challenge in our reach, a ship waits on the other side. Not a competitor’s ship. The Verdant Nine.

It’s been twenty years since I’ve seen Galen. It’s been thirty days. Nearly two parsecs and six point five light years separated us. It is four months outbound and six months inbound. It’s been five rotations and more failures than I can count.

It has been more than a moment.

All of this is simultaneously true.

I’ve always told myself I wasn’t angry.

And yet.

My one goal: closing the gaps between moments, the dangerous ones. The small trap in the recorder I’d built works like a Venusian cloud clock, but for capturing moments, not mist. Our transit swings us close to a gravity well and an atomic beat is skipped. The recorder kicks in. A loop happens. A stitch, so to speak, in time.

An error multiplies by the distance we traveled.

When the Rael emerges, right on target, the recorder unspools, leaking a few ticks, making the ship faster than expected.

We hear the cheering start. “We’re early.” The captain grins.

I squint. “A few seconds.”

Then Warre Unkling pulls alongside. The Consistency, just after. All on time.

Galen boards, watching his display. He wears a Synchronist’s Challenge pin.

This whole time, he hasn’t been lost. He’s been plotting. Now he’s triumphant. A better clock within reach, and him early enough to take it from the Consistency.

But his expression disappears as he realizes something’s off. I’ve taken his game away. I wait for him to realize it.

“You’re early,” he says instead.

It takes a heartbeat for me to understand what Galen means.

“Early.” I’m not on time. I didn’t win.

But Galen is here, found. That is something. Even though he was never lost. He’s staring at my recorder like he recognizes it.

The Consistency boards. A cloud of black hovers above me for a moment, then swarms Galen.

I get the same chill I felt when I was ten.

“Captain Sand,” they murmur. “We told you not to return. Your gambling makes you unwelcome.” They don’t see it yet, as they turn to me. “And you. You thought to fix time,” the Consistency murmurs.

I stand stock-still, the way I’d done as a child on Galen’s ship. Wait as several of the drones nudge closer, bumping the skin of my nose with cool, carbon fiber carapaces. One tickles and I sneeze.

“I thought to, yes. But I’ve ended up doing something else. Collecting time for later.” The Consistency descends on my instruments, curious.

Warre is boarding the Rael to congratulate me. But I can only see Galen. “You haven’t aged. Where did you go?”

“Out, for a lot longer than I wanted. Working the galactic center on the Challenge. When I returned, you’d already sent your notice of entry. There was no time. Any communication would have been cheating.”

“There’s always time.” I’m not having it. He’d stayed away on purpose. My hands grip the QD3 recorder. If it hadn’t been so sturdy, I would have crushed it. I hear it ticking forward, ticking back.

“We must certify who arrived legitimately,” the Consistency intones. “And how.” The drones turn a slight shade of crimson. They’d come in last.

“Okay,” I say. The safest word. I don’t feel safe at all. My father, here. Me, early.

“I saw Unkling arrive after us,” the Rael’s captain says. “So we were here first. We get the prize.”

“You arrived first, yes. But the timestamp on his ship and yours show Unkling arriving on time,” the Consistency says.

“How?” The captain and then everyone look at the piece of the QD3 in my hands. “I shook it. Time came out.”

The Consistency forces Galen to give Warre Unkling the pin. “The standards of the Challenge require it.” Unkling becomes the Synchronist.

And I, for a moment, feel the weight of all my losses. Then Galen steps closer to me, to the recorder. “That’s mine,” he says.

The drones billow around him as he reaches toward me.

“You gave this up,” I reply.

“I knew you’d be the one to do the job,” he says, reaching a hand out to touch the QD3. It isn’t an answer. “Now show me how you did it. How we did it.”

“You cannot,” the Consistency hisses, its drones piling up into a dark cloud.

Only Galen hears me say, “I will not,” beneath all the noise.

 

 

~ The confession of Galen Sand ~

 

When Beneficence was born, all the clocks were reset.

That’s what I told her.

I didn’t want an iteration. I wanted a child who could see the world in a new way.

I never told her that.

I’m glad I didn’t.

She’d created something entirely new. And it would bring us both glory.

 

 

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream of being trapped beneath the dome on Ganymede.

The ice collapsed. I was frozen in time.

And Galen returned to rescue me, his hand grasping my arm.

Twenty years, and now he’s reaching out to take my chronometer.

“If I give the designs to everyone,” I say with the Synchronist, Warre Unkling, looking on, “time becomes more valuable, not less. Enough of it, saved up? You won’t need speed of light any longer.”

No more gaps. Unkling nods. He understands. The Consistency hums, thinking.

But Galen’s still reaching. “I make my living in those gaps.” His voice has a hard edge to it. He’s gotten over his surprise. He sees my intent. “I’ll make you a partner,” Galen says. “You can guide the family business.” What I’d wanted most. Once.

A shifting span: the time between all of the then and now.

Slowly, a moment to the left, and a moment to the right, I shake my head. No. I step closer to the Synchronist.

And Galen lunges between us, grabbing for the calculations and chronometer.

I have not yet been able to measure the span of the moment I realized my hero was just a man running out of time.

And I refused to give it to him.

 

 

~ Ganymedian B.V. Sand Workshop Preserve ~

 

The technological miracle occurred, officially, at 07000 Neptunian time, when the struggle between the Horologist and her father tripped the recorder and the chronometer respooled. The time stored from the jump and all the space between that time, caught B.V. Sand up, and Galen, until they exist only between moments.

In the period between discovery and disappearance, B.V. Sand paused. Was recorded. She became an iteration, but not. A relic, but not. Someone outside of normal sphere.

Others have gone on to engage their own time retreats and returned. Only the Horologist stays within this gap in time. She’s present in that moment, caught between one heartbeat and the next.

Galen Sand, too, remained caught in time, briefly. But the Consistency had witnessed his use of extreme force multiplied by time. The assault on the first Horologist, and the first example of such. Though accidental, the Consistency found he must be held accountable. Recordings of his confession are available from Jovian Public Radio.

As punishment, the Consistency and the Spiral Arm both refused Galen Sand more time.

As for B.V. Sand, she and the original QD3 were returned to Ganymede. A workshop preserve was built near her mother’s house beneath the ice.

You may buy a moment with her, for a few seconds.

 

 

IT’S BEEN A hundred years. It’s been twelve minutes. It’s been three thousand days.

All of these are simultaneously true. Each moment is synchronized. Each deliberate.

If you bring enough moments, I will exist through them all.

Time in this instance is neither better nor worse. And the space between them is growing smaller.