The Second Side of Life
Caroline Infante-Sheridan had a dream when she was fourteen years old. It started out like any other dream: silly, not quite real. But it started to build up coherence. She was on a planet. It looked like Earth. A man walked up to her.
"Come with me," he said. He spoke a language that she didn't recognize, but that she somehow understood perfectly. He picked up her hand as if to lead her, and she saw him do this. It is said that looking at your hands in a dream will make the dream lucid. It did and as she gained self- consciousness, she lost the dream. It was like dream limbo--after one dream but before the next.
The man was still there, and he led her into the gray fog. He led her into another dream. She reentered the place she had just seen. This time is was dusty, barely inhabitable, sad.
"I want to show you what we're building here," the man said. "It's not all lost."
Then she awoke. Each dream you ever have has an emotion unique to that night, and you never experience it again after that day. There was something sad about this dream, but with an undercurrent of enjoyability. Caroline rolled over, and fell back asleep. To her surprise, the dream returned.
"It was a beautiful city, once, wasn't it?" the man asked. She nodded, not knowing what she was agreeing with. He led her into a settlement of ruined buildings, tents, and shacks that looked like they had been hastily built a long time ago. He turned around.
"Don't you remember?" he asked her.
Far back in her dream memory, she remembered. The feeling of sadness changed form. It was a feeling of the thirst of homesickness being quenched. That was her dream memory, not her real-life memory. In real life she didn't recognize the place in the slightest.
Three young children ran up to her.
"Ms. Ivanova! Is there going to be school tomorrow?" one of them asked. Funny that they would call her that. It was a dream reality, after all.
She blinked. "I don't know," she said dumbly.
She walked off, the man still beside her. She couldn't tell where she was going, but the dream drew her to a cabin. The door was open. She went in.
"I'm really tired," she told him.
She lay down on the mattress. Surprisingly, he lay down beside her. She fell asleep within the dream.
When she awoke, sunlight was streaming in through the window, and she knew it was the next day. She rolled over and stretched, looking at the ceiling through half-closed eyes.
"I don't want to go to school today," she grumbled, but kicked off her covers.
"You'll really disappoint the kids, Susan."
"What!" She focused on her surroundings. She was still in the cabin from the dream.
"It's the first day of school. I'll assume that the teacher has to be there the first day."
Unlike the fuzzy dream, this cabin was real. She could feel the roughness of the mattress, the hard of the wall next to her, the sun on her face, and she could feel the dust in her lungs. There was a cracked mirror hanging on the wall across the room. She ran over to it.
All of one's life, one looks in the mirror to see the same person. The woman that looked back at Caroline was not herself. It was so shockingly alien, but she knew the face that she saw.
She was not fourteen anymore. She looked mid-thirties. She was brown haired, gray-eyed, and not so tall. The clothes she wore were faded and thin. The dirt had been beaten out of them hundreds of times over. Like everything, she was fairly dusty. Like Narn after the Centauri occupation: dusty but dignified.
She recognized the face instantly but not the surroundings in the slightest.
"You know," she said, "I'm all screwed up this morning. When does school start?"
"When the sun comes up over the building across the street."
"You mean just whenever the sun happens to come up over the top of the building? That changes year round. Doesn't anyone have a clock or something around here?"
"A clock! Are you dreaming again?" the man exclaimed. "Sure I have a clock!" He pulled a watch out of a dresser drawer. "Here's a clock." He tossed it to her.
"This thing's broken."
"What do you expect? Everything's broken around here! I'd think the time would be the least of your concerns."
"What happened here?" she sighed.
The man snorted. "Tell me about it."
"That was a question."
"Come on Susan just forget about it. Breakfast's almost done."
Breakfast was a strange thing that looked like a cross between a loaf of bread and a sponge. She ate it without complaint.
"I want to know what happened here," she said again.
"You want my philosophical view?"
She gave him a hard look.
"We were damn stupid idiots to even go into space. Now look where it's got us."
She sighed. No sense. No sense at all.
She got up and looked outside.
"Well I think the sun's pretty much over the building. I gotta get going."
"Bye," he said, "Good luck with the kids."
She stepped outside. A boy was walking past. She ran over to him.
"You going to school?" she asked casually.
"Yep!"
"Mind if I walk with you?" Mind if I follow to see where you go, more like it.
"Sure."
"And your name is..."
"Yevgine. You remember me from last year, don't you?" he demanded.
"Oh yeah," she nodded, trying to act like she knew him.
She was still trying to figure out what was going on. This was real. People spoke in words, not dream suggestions. She remembered being Susan Ivanova a long time ago, but she had never lived here, not in this city of ruins. From how old she looked, she supposed she was supposed to be in her mid-thirties, and that would make it the early 2260's.
In the early 60's, she had been fighting the Shadow, Earth, and telepath wars, so this couldn't be real. In her memory, she had been an Earthforce officer on Babylon 5, with Captain Sheridan, Chief Garibaldi, Doctor Franklin, Minbari Ambassador Delenn, that bunch.
"Oh Ms. Ivanova! My grandma gave this to me. It's a real history textbook, but you can have it. I can't read it. It's in English." He handed her a large book. She opened it up.
"I studied English in school." More than you could imagine, Yevgine. More than you could imagine.
"Thanks," she said.
The boy ran into a rebuilt ruin that had the word "School" on it, written in Russian. She followed him in. Several other children were already seated behind wooden planks that served as desks. She walked up to the front of the classroom. She had often wanted to teach a class. Not students teaching teachers day, but to really have control. Now she wasn't quite sure what to do. She was only in the Minbari equivalent of ninth grade, after all.
Soon the room was full. Everyone was quiet. She was startled. They were so eager to learn that they wanted to get going as soon as possible.
On the one real piece of furniture in the room, a big desk, Caroline found a stack of dusty papers. One of them was a handwritten class roster on thick, handmade paper. She put the text book down and turned to the class.
"Well, I'm glad that you could come today. I'll do roll call and see who's here."
She began to read off the list of names.
Some of the children looked as little as kindergarten, while others could have been as old as herself (as Caroline, not as Susan).
She marked off each child with a piece of crumbly coal. She had rummaged around in the desk and found no pencils, no pens, nothing to write with except a stick of wood burnt until it was shiny and black.
Apparently she had written the date at the top of the paper. September 10, 2259. Alright, she had the time, but not the slightest idea of where she was. Perhaps she had been doing a past-life exploration session and somehow skewed into a world of her own imagination? Unlikely. Her sessions were nothing like this, never becoming more than a clear memory. They were never physical like this.
She looked out onto the faces of the children--the children that she was supposed to be one of--until yesterday, it seemed. They were all dressed like her. Their clothes were simple. Here and there one of them wore a piece of tarnished jewelry that seemed to glisten out of days long gone past. Of a better time? She saw in their eyes nothing of this. This life was all that they knew.
She managed to wing it through the whole day, and gave a huge sigh of relief was the children ran out of school. She would have to think of something to do with them tomorrow. But for now, she put the history book and the papers into the desk and walked out. She found her way back to the house, memorizing each dirt street in case she didn't wake up back in her real home the next day.
She looked around the one room. There was nothing. The man wasn't home. This was her chance. She opened up the top drawer of the dresser, which had a lot of personal items. She rummaged around. Like an archeologist, she tried to piece together what this life was all about.
She found a pencil, and she would bring it to the class the next day. She picked up an identicard. It was Susan's (her own?), but the photo was outdated by at least fifteen years. Farther back in the drawer, she found another card. "Gari Delianov." It was the man, but he too in the photo was a late teenager. There was more stuff in the drawer--the kind of junk that only a person with few possessions would keep. Several paper clips, a pocket computer (she tested it, power source long since run out), a college application pamphlet, a couple of hair ties (not so stretchy anymore), a small picture book with a bookplate that identified itself in a child's handwriting as owned by Olga Sakharova, several odd-shaped rocks, the watch that she had seen earlier, and a photo of a golden hamster with "If" written on the back of it. She couldn't guess whether the hamster's name was If or someone had began to write a sentence but only wrote the first word.
Caroline wondered where Gari had gone. She supposed it was a simple errand somewhere, or work, but that didn't give her any clues to where he was or when he was coming back.
In the second drawer were clothes. Third drawer: more clothes. In the bottom drawer were several transparency sheets with lists of names and age/sex stats on them. She scanned the names and found that majority of people on it were teenagers and people in their early twenties, people in the prime of their lives, but there were also a good number of children and older people. There were many typos and missing information as if the list had been hastily drawn up.
It all meant nothing to Caroline. She couldn't imagine what the list was for. It seemed very important, but important to whom? This was all too annoying. How was she supposed to function here if she didn't have a clue as to what was going on?
She took the picture book out of top drawer and sat down on the mattress. She sat there for a long time, thinking, not really reading it, until she heard Gari's footsteps and he appeared pushed the door open.
"Hey Susan, how'd the first day of school go?"
"Fine."
"Oh that's good. You know I was just over talking to the Prozorovskys. You must know that Feodor wasn't in school today. He said he wasn't feeling well. Seemed fine to me. Anyway, they've heard that a Ranger is coming sometime soon from western Europe."
"Ranger?"
"Yeah, you know the transcontinental messengers."
"Oh. Yes. Of course," she stammered. Really, to pick that title.
Gari sat down next to her.
"Olga was a cute kid wasn't she?"
Caroline said nothing.
"I wish we could have cared for her better after she realized that her parents hadn't gotten onto the list."
"List," she said. It wasn't a question, or an answer, just an acknowledgement.
"That's why you went into teaching? I mean these kids. They don't know any world other than this. They have parents. They're more fortunate than us, Susan."
"I had my father until I was an adult," she said, digging into her shadowy memory of Susan Ivanova's life, hoping it was the same here, wherever here was.
"I wouldn't call seventeen an adult, Susan."
"Seventeen?"
"You told me that your mother and brother died and your father didn't make it underground before..." It was something almost too painful to speak, but everyone was expected to know what it was. "... before the boneheads broke the Line."
Old St. Petersburg was a cold place in the wintertime. Gatherings of people built huge fires in the halls of the rebuilt old buildings, and celebrated the holidays. On new year's eve there was a large party which nearly the whole population of Old St. Petersburg attended. This added up to nearly four hundred people. Caroline watched this with silent wonderment. A city formerly with a population of millions was now a town of 400. It was amazing. All of these people were many of the few survivors of a planet-wide Armageddon. A time line which everyone had expected, but which never happened.
Gari ran up to her and grabbed her wrists.
"Come on, dance with me!" he said excitedly. He pulled her closer to the fire as people began singing a fast song.
"Oh come on I can't dance," she said as he pulled her around in a circle.
"Dance like you did on our wedding day," he shouted over the fast song.
She wasn't sure how good a dancer this Susan was supposed to be but Caroline knew that she herself wasn't good. When she had been little, she had tripped over every little thing, but now she couldn't blame certain events in her past lives for just being a clumsy person.
It didn't surprise her that Susan and Gari were married. They didn't wear rings, but they didn't own too much fancy stuff at all for that matter. The topic had never come up, and it had remained a slight mystery even after four years. Would she marry him if it were up to her? He was fun and thoughtful, but she was just a teenager in her mind. It would be years before she finally caught up with what people expected of a grown woman. She had worked hard to act grown up.
What had she seen in these past four years? A voice from a dream that seemed so long ago now came back to her: "It's not all lost." And indeed she saw that all was not lost. These people lived as their ancestors did centuries ago, but with a flair for knowledge and the remembrance of a more technologically advanced time. There were things to be rediscovered--but people knew where and how to look already. She could even say they were enjoying life more, if it weren't the sadness and guilt of living while billions died. But where there wasn't guilt there was pride. The pride of carrying on the legacy of the human race. She saw the children, and she realized that they must not forget when their parents weren't there to remember for them.
*Too late for any chance but one lying on a dead man!* something screamed in her mind. *Too late for anything or anyone but Jeffrey Sinclair!* Even in the fun, excited atmosphere of the hall, something allowed her mind one last scream of *Too late to save Ganya Ivanov! Too late for the Human race!*
Caroline managed to break away from Gari, and she walked outside. She sat on one of the fallen trees. Could she still think of herself as Caroline after four years as Susan? Yes. She could never forget who she used to be.
Feodor Prozorovsky walked up and sat next to her.
"Susan, I'm worried."
"What about?" she asked. He grunted, as if he was trying to decide what to say.
"Susan, I have to tell you something. I have to say it because... well... I love you Susan."
She was startled. He was twelve years old.
"For how long?" she asked.
"Longer than you could... ever imagine. You were always so much older than me."
"In Valen's name," she murmured quietly to herself. It was a comfort to say that, so far away from Minbar.
Feodor looked up. There was a look of bewilderment on his face.
"Valen," he repeated. "That's what I'm worried about."
"What?"
The young man leaped up from where he sat.
"Valen!" He stared at her. "We failed, Susan, we failed!"
"Failed? Failed in what?"
"Susan!" Feodor paced like a madman. "You know what I'm talking about. In Valen's name I know you know!" Then, as an afterthought, he added, "Caroline?"
She stared into his reddish-brown eyes and saw the earnest look on his freckled face and the red birthmarks on his temples.
"Unless we do something," he said, "We're doomed to live in this world."
"Yea," she said, "G'Kem, I know."
They walked over to the side of the building where someone had hung a working clock for the new year.
"A long year 2264 was," she sighed.
"It wasn't all bad. The year brought the end of the war, and I met you. Well, I met Susan."
"I suppose so."
Suddenly, G'Kem gasped and pointed into the starry heavens. "The other part of the time line! The other part! It's as predicted!" he hollered. She looked to where he was pointing.
She saw one, then three, then a hundred ships flying overhead, bringing a pattern to the sky that wasn't there in the foggy, starless night. The arms of hundreds of ships interlaced in the sky, forming a web of terror over the town. She heard a scream in her mind. The Shadows had come for Earth at last.
Time ran slowly, every moment filled with terror, in every mind a scream of a Shadow ship, worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. The ships fired upon the ground and buildings erupted into flames. G'Kem pressed his arm around her back and pushed her to the ground, as if that would help.
How many times had she hit the ground like this?
How many times had she fallen when she was little?
How many times had she remembered the ceiling falling and crushing Susan on the White Star?
Many times.
How many times had she recalled falling helplessly to the deck of her own ship in a war she should never have been part of? She could almost see it. The injured people, dead people. She could see Susan falling. She was there. On the ship.
She was aware of people grabbing her, one on each arm and one with his arms over her shoulders. One of them pushed her arms together roughly and slapped handcuffs on.
"You're coming with us, you damn telekinetic. You're coming with us right now and don't try anything else."
She had no heart to respond when she realized they were talking to her.
Caroline Infante-Sheridan had a dream when she was fourteen years old. It started out like any other dream: silly, not quite real. But it started to build up coherence. She was on a planet. It looked like Earth. A man walked up to her.
"Come with me," he said. He spoke a language that she didn't recognize, but that she somehow understood perfectly. He picked up her hand as if to lead her, and she saw him do this. It is said that looking at your hands in a dream will make the dream lucid. It did and as she gained self- consciousness, she lost the dream. It was like dream limbo--after one dream but before the next.
The man was still there, and he led her into the gray fog. He led her into another dream. She reentered the place she had just seen. This time is was dusty, barely inhabitable, sad.
"I want to show you what we're building here," the man said. "It's not all lost."
Then she awoke. Each dream you ever have has an emotion unique to that night, and you never experience it again after that day. There was something sad about this dream, but with an undercurrent of enjoyability. Caroline rolled over, and fell back asleep. To her surprise, the dream returned.
"It was a beautiful city, once, wasn't it?" the man asked. She nodded, not knowing what she was agreeing with. He led her into a settlement of ruined buildings, tents, and shacks that looked like they had been hastily built a long time ago. He turned around.
"Don't you remember?" he asked her.
Far back in her dream memory, she remembered. The feeling of sadness changed form. It was a feeling of the thirst of homesickness being quenched. That was her dream memory, not her real-life memory. In real life she didn't recognize the place in the slightest.
Three young children ran up to her.
"Ms. Ivanova! Is there going to be school tomorrow?" one of them asked. Funny that they would call her that. It was a dream reality, after all.
She blinked. "I don't know," she said dumbly.
She walked off, the man still beside her. She couldn't tell where she was going, but the dream drew her to a cabin. The door was open. She went in.
"I'm really tired," she told him.
She lay down on the mattress. Surprisingly, he lay down beside her. She fell asleep within the dream.
When she awoke, sunlight was streaming in through the window, and she knew it was the next day. She rolled over and stretched, looking at the ceiling through half-closed eyes.
"I don't want to go to school today," she grumbled, but kicked off her covers.
"You'll really disappoint the kids, Susan."
"What!" She focused on her surroundings. She was still in the cabin from the dream.
"It's the first day of school. I'll assume that the teacher has to be there the first day."
Unlike the fuzzy dream, this cabin was real. She could feel the roughness of the mattress, the hard of the wall next to her, the sun on her face, and she could feel the dust in her lungs. There was a cracked mirror hanging on the wall across the room. She ran over to it.
All of one's life, one looks in the mirror to see the same person. The woman that looked back at Caroline was not herself. It was so shockingly alien, but she knew the face that she saw.
She was not fourteen anymore. She looked mid-thirties. She was brown haired, gray-eyed, and not so tall. The clothes she wore were faded and thin. The dirt had been beaten out of them hundreds of times over. Like everything, she was fairly dusty. Like Narn after the Centauri occupation: dusty but dignified.
She recognized the face instantly but not the surroundings in the slightest.
"You know," she said, "I'm all screwed up this morning. When does school start?"
"When the sun comes up over the building across the street."
"You mean just whenever the sun happens to come up over the top of the building? That changes year round. Doesn't anyone have a clock or something around here?"
"A clock! Are you dreaming again?" the man exclaimed. "Sure I have a clock!" He pulled a watch out of a dresser drawer. "Here's a clock." He tossed it to her.
"This thing's broken."
"What do you expect? Everything's broken around here! I'd think the time would be the least of your concerns."
"What happened here?" she sighed.
The man snorted. "Tell me about it."
"That was a question."
"Come on Susan just forget about it. Breakfast's almost done."
Breakfast was a strange thing that looked like a cross between a loaf of bread and a sponge. She ate it without complaint.
"I want to know what happened here," she said again.
"You want my philosophical view?"
She gave him a hard look.
"We were damn stupid idiots to even go into space. Now look where it's got us."
She sighed. No sense. No sense at all.
She got up and looked outside.
"Well I think the sun's pretty much over the building. I gotta get going."
"Bye," he said, "Good luck with the kids."
She stepped outside. A boy was walking past. She ran over to him.
"You going to school?" she asked casually.
"Yep!"
"Mind if I walk with you?" Mind if I follow to see where you go, more like it.
"Sure."
"And your name is..."
"Yevgine. You remember me from last year, don't you?" he demanded.
"Oh yeah," she nodded, trying to act like she knew him.
She was still trying to figure out what was going on. This was real. People spoke in words, not dream suggestions. She remembered being Susan Ivanova a long time ago, but she had never lived here, not in this city of ruins. From how old she looked, she supposed she was supposed to be in her mid-thirties, and that would make it the early 2260's.
In the early 60's, she had been fighting the Shadow, Earth, and telepath wars, so this couldn't be real. In her memory, she had been an Earthforce officer on Babylon 5, with Captain Sheridan, Chief Garibaldi, Doctor Franklin, Minbari Ambassador Delenn, that bunch.
"Oh Ms. Ivanova! My grandma gave this to me. It's a real history textbook, but you can have it. I can't read it. It's in English." He handed her a large book. She opened it up.
"I studied English in school." More than you could imagine, Yevgine. More than you could imagine.
"Thanks," she said.
The boy ran into a rebuilt ruin that had the word "School" on it, written in Russian. She followed him in. Several other children were already seated behind wooden planks that served as desks. She walked up to the front of the classroom. She had often wanted to teach a class. Not students teaching teachers day, but to really have control. Now she wasn't quite sure what to do. She was only in the Minbari equivalent of ninth grade, after all.
Soon the room was full. Everyone was quiet. She was startled. They were so eager to learn that they wanted to get going as soon as possible.
On the one real piece of furniture in the room, a big desk, Caroline found a stack of dusty papers. One of them was a handwritten class roster on thick, handmade paper. She put the text book down and turned to the class.
"Well, I'm glad that you could come today. I'll do roll call and see who's here."
She began to read off the list of names.
Some of the children looked as little as kindergarten, while others could have been as old as herself (as Caroline, not as Susan).
She marked off each child with a piece of crumbly coal. She had rummaged around in the desk and found no pencils, no pens, nothing to write with except a stick of wood burnt until it was shiny and black.
Apparently she had written the date at the top of the paper. September 10, 2259. Alright, she had the time, but not the slightest idea of where she was. Perhaps she had been doing a past-life exploration session and somehow skewed into a world of her own imagination? Unlikely. Her sessions were nothing like this, never becoming more than a clear memory. They were never physical like this.
She looked out onto the faces of the children--the children that she was supposed to be one of--until yesterday, it seemed. They were all dressed like her. Their clothes were simple. Here and there one of them wore a piece of tarnished jewelry that seemed to glisten out of days long gone past. Of a better time? She saw in their eyes nothing of this. This life was all that they knew.
She managed to wing it through the whole day, and gave a huge sigh of relief was the children ran out of school. She would have to think of something to do with them tomorrow. But for now, she put the history book and the papers into the desk and walked out. She found her way back to the house, memorizing each dirt street in case she didn't wake up back in her real home the next day.
She looked around the one room. There was nothing. The man wasn't home. This was her chance. She opened up the top drawer of the dresser, which had a lot of personal items. She rummaged around. Like an archeologist, she tried to piece together what this life was all about.
She found a pencil, and she would bring it to the class the next day. She picked up an identicard. It was Susan's (her own?), but the photo was outdated by at least fifteen years. Farther back in the drawer, she found another card. "Gari Delianov." It was the man, but he too in the photo was a late teenager. There was more stuff in the drawer--the kind of junk that only a person with few possessions would keep. Several paper clips, a pocket computer (she tested it, power source long since run out), a college application pamphlet, a couple of hair ties (not so stretchy anymore), a small picture book with a bookplate that identified itself in a child's handwriting as owned by Olga Sakharova, several odd-shaped rocks, the watch that she had seen earlier, and a photo of a golden hamster with "If" written on the back of it. She couldn't guess whether the hamster's name was If or someone had began to write a sentence but only wrote the first word.
Caroline wondered where Gari had gone. She supposed it was a simple errand somewhere, or work, but that didn't give her any clues to where he was or when he was coming back.
In the second drawer were clothes. Third drawer: more clothes. In the bottom drawer were several transparency sheets with lists of names and age/sex stats on them. She scanned the names and found that majority of people on it were teenagers and people in their early twenties, people in the prime of their lives, but there were also a good number of children and older people. There were many typos and missing information as if the list had been hastily drawn up.
It all meant nothing to Caroline. She couldn't imagine what the list was for. It seemed very important, but important to whom? This was all too annoying. How was she supposed to function here if she didn't have a clue as to what was going on?
She took the picture book out of top drawer and sat down on the mattress. She sat there for a long time, thinking, not really reading it, until she heard Gari's footsteps and he appeared pushed the door open.
"Hey Susan, how'd the first day of school go?"
"Fine."
"Oh that's good. You know I was just over talking to the Prozorovskys. You must know that Feodor wasn't in school today. He said he wasn't feeling well. Seemed fine to me. Anyway, they've heard that a Ranger is coming sometime soon from western Europe."
"Ranger?"
"Yeah, you know the transcontinental messengers."
"Oh. Yes. Of course," she stammered. Really, to pick that title.
Gari sat down next to her.
"Olga was a cute kid wasn't she?"
Caroline said nothing.
"I wish we could have cared for her better after she realized that her parents hadn't gotten onto the list."
"List," she said. It wasn't a question, or an answer, just an acknowledgement.
"That's why you went into teaching? I mean these kids. They don't know any world other than this. They have parents. They're more fortunate than us, Susan."
"I had my father until I was an adult," she said, digging into her shadowy memory of Susan Ivanova's life, hoping it was the same here, wherever here was.
"I wouldn't call seventeen an adult, Susan."
"Seventeen?"
"You told me that your mother and brother died and your father didn't make it underground before..." It was something almost too painful to speak, but everyone was expected to know what it was. "... before the boneheads broke the Line."
Old St. Petersburg was a cold place in the wintertime. Gatherings of people built huge fires in the halls of the rebuilt old buildings, and celebrated the holidays. On new year's eve there was a large party which nearly the whole population of Old St. Petersburg attended. This added up to nearly four hundred people. Caroline watched this with silent wonderment. A city formerly with a population of millions was now a town of 400. It was amazing. All of these people were many of the few survivors of a planet-wide Armageddon. A time line which everyone had expected, but which never happened.
Gari ran up to her and grabbed her wrists.
"Come on, dance with me!" he said excitedly. He pulled her closer to the fire as people began singing a fast song.
"Oh come on I can't dance," she said as he pulled her around in a circle.
"Dance like you did on our wedding day," he shouted over the fast song.
She wasn't sure how good a dancer this Susan was supposed to be but Caroline knew that she herself wasn't good. When she had been little, she had tripped over every little thing, but now she couldn't blame certain events in her past lives for just being a clumsy person.
It didn't surprise her that Susan and Gari were married. They didn't wear rings, but they didn't own too much fancy stuff at all for that matter. The topic had never come up, and it had remained a slight mystery even after four years. Would she marry him if it were up to her? He was fun and thoughtful, but she was just a teenager in her mind. It would be years before she finally caught up with what people expected of a grown woman. She had worked hard to act grown up.
What had she seen in these past four years? A voice from a dream that seemed so long ago now came back to her: "It's not all lost." And indeed she saw that all was not lost. These people lived as their ancestors did centuries ago, but with a flair for knowledge and the remembrance of a more technologically advanced time. There were things to be rediscovered--but people knew where and how to look already. She could even say they were enjoying life more, if it weren't the sadness and guilt of living while billions died. But where there wasn't guilt there was pride. The pride of carrying on the legacy of the human race. She saw the children, and she realized that they must not forget when their parents weren't there to remember for them.
*Too late for any chance but one lying on a dead man!* something screamed in her mind. *Too late for anything or anyone but Jeffrey Sinclair!* Even in the fun, excited atmosphere of the hall, something allowed her mind one last scream of *Too late to save Ganya Ivanov! Too late for the Human race!*
Caroline managed to break away from Gari, and she walked outside. She sat on one of the fallen trees. Could she still think of herself as Caroline after four years as Susan? Yes. She could never forget who she used to be.
Feodor Prozorovsky walked up and sat next to her.
"Susan, I'm worried."
"What about?" she asked. He grunted, as if he was trying to decide what to say.
"Susan, I have to tell you something. I have to say it because... well... I love you Susan."
She was startled. He was twelve years old.
"For how long?" she asked.
"Longer than you could... ever imagine. You were always so much older than me."
"In Valen's name," she murmured quietly to herself. It was a comfort to say that, so far away from Minbar.
Feodor looked up. There was a look of bewilderment on his face.
"Valen," he repeated. "That's what I'm worried about."
"What?"
The young man leaped up from where he sat.
"Valen!" He stared at her. "We failed, Susan, we failed!"
"Failed? Failed in what?"
"Susan!" Feodor paced like a madman. "You know what I'm talking about. In Valen's name I know you know!" Then, as an afterthought, he added, "Caroline?"
She stared into his reddish-brown eyes and saw the earnest look on his freckled face and the red birthmarks on his temples.
"Unless we do something," he said, "We're doomed to live in this world."
"Yea," she said, "G'Kem, I know."
They walked over to the side of the building where someone had hung a working clock for the new year.
"A long year 2264 was," she sighed.
"It wasn't all bad. The year brought the end of the war, and I met you. Well, I met Susan."
"I suppose so."
Suddenly, G'Kem gasped and pointed into the starry heavens. "The other part of the time line! The other part! It's as predicted!" he hollered. She looked to where he was pointing.
She saw one, then three, then a hundred ships flying overhead, bringing a pattern to the sky that wasn't there in the foggy, starless night. The arms of hundreds of ships interlaced in the sky, forming a web of terror over the town. She heard a scream in her mind. The Shadows had come for Earth at last.
Time ran slowly, every moment filled with terror, in every mind a scream of a Shadow ship, worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. The ships fired upon the ground and buildings erupted into flames. G'Kem pressed his arm around her back and pushed her to the ground, as if that would help.
How many times had she hit the ground like this?
How many times had she fallen when she was little?
How many times had she remembered the ceiling falling and crushing Susan on the White Star?
Many times.
How many times had she recalled falling helplessly to the deck of her own ship in a war she should never have been part of? She could almost see it. The injured people, dead people. She could see Susan falling. She was there. On the ship.
She was aware of people grabbing her, one on each arm and one with his arms over her shoulders. One of them pushed her arms together roughly and slapped handcuffs on.
"You're coming with us, you damn telekinetic. You're coming with us right now and don't try anything else."
She had no heart to respond when she realized they were talking to her.