Bitter Oath (New Atlantis)

chapter ONE


Spring 2330, New Atlantis GAIAN CONFEDERACY

The brilliant light of the Portal illuminated the already brightly lit cavern of Start Point. The hum echoed hollowly off the roughly hewn stone walls that were covered in threads of rippling light. From the massive sandstone doorway stepped an ancient man dressed in nothing but a loin cloth and beads. His long white hair was drawn back and tied with a strip of leather, and there was a turkey tail-feather bound into a plait hanging down from the side of his skeletal, dark-leather face.

‘Well met, Rene York, welcome home,’ greeted a rather stunned technician who moved out to meet him from behind his computer terminal, one of many that radiated out from the ancient stone dais on which the Portal stood.

‘Well met Anders, it’s been a long time. You have not changed a bit,’ the old man replied with a toothless grin, as he hobbled down the four stone stairs that led up to the dais.

The middle-aged technician tried to keep the shock from his expression. He had worked at Start Point for over sixty years, being one of the first to join the Time Travel team. The number of Jumps he’d witnessed was in the thousands. Yet, when one of the long-term researchers went out and came back, it was always disorientating and somewhat frightening.

Only a half a minute ago, Rene York had entered the shower of sparks that filled the stone doorway as a handsome young man. His blue-black hair had been grown long and straight like a New Atlantean woman’s. His tanned, muscular upper body had been naked, and his thighs covered by a leather loin cloth. His only ornament had been a large leather medicine pouch he wore around his neck that contained his PA, Portal Activator.

The ancient, white haired man who stepped back out of the Portal, only seconds after he had stepped in, was so different as to be a stranger. And yet, the old man knew him by name, and joked about the time lapse he had experienced. How long had it been? From the look of him, and from Rene’s habits of the past, it would have been close to his limit. Possibly ninety years. What would it be like to live a whole lifetime in-situ?

As the old man made his slow way down toward the end of the cavern, where the lifts to the surface were located, Anders shook his head. Why would anyone let their body get to that painful state? Certainly, Rene was passionate about his ecological research, and this was his last clone, having reached his nine life limit. But surely that was reason to want to spend the remaining years of his life in comfort.

Anders was on his eighth and last clone too, so he understood the sense of finality that came with that ninth life. If he’d known back in the early years after the Last Great Plague that there was a limit on the number of clone bodies he could get, he wouldn’t have been so wasteful with them. He’d taken up new clones as soon as each started to age. This was the first time he’d ever reached middle-age in a body, and it irked him. The idea of being in a body as old as Rene’s was unimaginable.

The lift had arrived at the other end. Jac Ulster and his new Bonded Mate, Cara Westchester, a Newcomer who had recently been made a Retriever, stepped out into the cavern and nodded a greeting at the old Indian man. Jac looked tense and jittery, and was pulling at the lock of red-brown hair that fell across his forehead. He appeared to be a man who, having only recently made the transition into his final clone body, looked no more than twenty years old. Anders knew he was well over three hundred years old.

Cara strode along beside her Bonded, dressed as oddly as the Indian who had just left. Unlike Jac and the rest of the technicians in the cavern, who wore white, toga-like tunics, she was wearing a short skirt and floral blouse that befitted her Jump to Australia in 2009. Her pretty young face was pale with worry, and she kept casting Jac guilty looks out of the corner of her eye. This was only her second Jump, and there had been a lot of unrest amongst the Retrievers and Researchers since Hakon’s death in-situ yesterday. Maybe she was scared to go on this Jump?

The Portal had been empty for several minutes since Rene’s return. As Cara made her way slowly up the dais stairs, the doorway came alive with showering sparks once more, and the hum returned in earnest.

With a last worried glance back at her Bonded, who had turned his back on her, Cara stepped into the Portal. A second later, the shower dissolved.

Time seemed to warp strangely then, for Anders. What should have been only a few seconds before the Portal reactivated had, instead, become an extended period. There shouldn’t be this kind of gap. No matter how long the Jumper was at the other end, at Start Point they were programmed to return immediately after leaving.

However, it was much longer than that now. Which meant only one thing – Cara was in trouble.

And Jac knew it.

‘Give me a PA, I’m going in,’ Jac barked at him. For a moment, Anders could do nothing but stare at the banned Jumper in stunned horror.

By the time he could find words, Benjamin Kent, the Start Point Manager had answered. ‘You cannot go dressed like that, Jac. Go to wardrobe. I will get the rest of your equipment organised.’ The short, slightly portly man had risen from his console and come to stand at Jac’s side.

‘I can’t wait… I…’

‘Jac, do you want to find her? Do you want to bring her safely back?’ The man’s patient voice was in total contrast to Jac’s panicked tones.

Jac nodded. Words had deserted him.

‘Then get organised. I should send someone else, but I can see you would fight me on this. So, if you want to go after her, Jac, get your head in the game. Get dressed, review her Target’s dossier and the Set Down details. If you go in with your mind in chaos, you will be useless to her. Do you understand me?’

Jac nodded again, but his face took on a fierceness that was uncharacteristic, not only for him, but for their whole populace. No one showed this level of emotion. Ever.

As Anders watched Jac hurry away, he again felt the fear that Rene’s return had instilled in him. It was his own mortality calling out, warning him that time was running out for him, just as it was running out for these other citizens of New Atlantis. Their unchanging, peaceful world seemed suddenly off-kilter somehow, like a spinning top that had hit a stone. It wobbled and slowed, as it tried to find its centre once more. Anders had a feeling it would never find that same centre again.



Rene stood under the shower set for waterfall, as the water bombarded his old, filthy body. It always felt strange to be back here in this unchanging world after being away for a lifetime. Sometimes, when he lay on the hard ground beneath the stars that stretched across the sky like the tiny Christmas lights of his childhood, he wondered if this world was real at all. Sometimes, he felt as if it was simply a dream he had dreamed many times, that had taken on a reality of its own.

Then, when he came back here, it was as if that other life was nothing more than a dream, and this gentle, cultured place was the only reality. But if that were so, how was it that the body that had stood beneath this shower last had been young and fit – his skin only the light brown of weak tea. Yet now, it was old and wasted. And his skin was now as brown as a hazel nut, and wrinkled, thin and dry as vellum.

No, both worlds were real. And he crossed between them relentlessly, for his cause – the resurrection of their barely surviving planet.

Rene had never been a carefree child. From his earliest memories, the weight of the destruction to the Great Spirit’s natural world had been his heavy burden. His mother, an Obejwe of the First People in Canada and a fierce ecowarrior, had laid that burden on him. And his father, a French Canadian from Montreal, who had met his mother on one of her campaigns, and joined her as she fought to save what was left of the Canadian wilderness, was just as purposeful.

She had taught him Mide, the Medicine of the first people, and he had adopted Animism more readily than his father’s Roman Catholicism. When he was old enough, he went to University and became a Naturalist. His cause was an impossible one, by that stage. Everyone knew the planet had already been destroyed by man. But he’d been determined to go down fighting, just as his parents would.

He still remembered the day he’d woken up to find himself alone in the world. The winter expedition, of which he was an insignificant part as a graduate student of twenty five, had been in the heart of what was left of the northern wilderness of Quebec. They’d been looking to track the endangered snow owls.

Everyone had been sick. They’d all blamed it on food poisoning, when they turned in early that night. By morning – was it the next day or the one following – he was never quite sure, he woke to find every last person of their eight-man team dead.

And, as he hiked out to their vehicles, and made his way along the rough tracks back to civilization, he found no one else alive but him. By the time he reached the bigger towns, his growing terror that he was the only person in the world left alive, was out of control.

If he hadn’t seen a flash of colour on the roadside just out of La Tuque, he would certainly have gone mad. But he had seen it, and chased after it, until he found the teenage girl. She had been crazed with loneliness, too, just like him. But she’d also been terrified of the stranger that he was. It had taken him days to calm her down; days to convince her he meant her no harm.

Saidie had travelled with him in search of others. By the time the military patrol had found them, they numbered ten. He’d wanted to go home to Toronto, to see if his parents had survived. They were strong, he’d told the military, and they would have made it, if he had. Of course, he’d been wrong. Strength had nothing to do with surviving the Last Great Plague. No one had ever found out what the survivors had in common that made them each the one-in-a-thousand who went on.

But the armed force had their orders – no one was allowed to return to the once-populated areas. The threat of further disease from the decomposing corpses was too great.

Before he knew it, he was at a holding camp. His wasted, sick body had been traded for a healthy, new one. Then, because of his skills and knowledge, he was redeployed to New Atlantis.

Here, he’d worked as a curator in the Knowledge Centre for one hundred and fifty years. Then Time Travel was perfected, and he was able to volunteer as a Researcher. His job since that time had been to Jump back to the past and collect primary, ecological data on all that they had lost.

He had been fifty years into his second clone body when he Jumped for the first time. That Jump had lasted forty years. The only reason he’d come back was because his body was wearing out. For the next ten years, until he was forced to integrate with his next clone, he spent his time collating his findings from that first Jump. This became his pattern over the period: Jump to pre-industrial societies, usually in Northern America, research their ecology for ninety years, return to Start Point, and spent the last of the hundred years of each clone’s life collating his findings. Then he’d transition into a new clone, so he could Jump again.

But this had been his last Jump. He was on his eighth and last clone, and his ninth life. No Consciousness could be integrated into a tenth body. He’d been told this just before going in, this time. So he’d left his return until the very last moment, because he wanting to make the most of his final time in-situ.

And that last gem of knowledge seemed to be the central jewel of his impressive crown. A possible sighting of the larger cousin of the extinct giant Palouse earthworm (Driloleirus Americanus), a species that had only been found in the Columbia River Drainages of eastern Washington and Northern Idaho.

There had been over 2,700 varieties of earthworms identified by the beginning of the 21st Century. By the end of that century, there’d been only a handful left. Without their ability to convert decaying litter into nutrient, the planet’s food sources disappeared. The soil began to die.

For most of the last years, before the end of the Second Dark Age, scientists had begun to believe that the Holy Grail for saving the ecology of their dying planet was earth worms. Some were more valued than others, particularly those that survived in dry, hot and arid eco systems.

There had always been talk of a larger cousin of the Palouse earthworm that could regenerate vast tracts of arid land in a comparatively short time, but no one had ever seen one. They were thought to have become extinct before the arrival of the white man to North America. The natives found them addictively tasty, and even though indigenous tribes treated the land well, on the whole, sometimes their need for food, especially in droughts, became their prime imperative. In that way, they wiped out species that could not be replaced.

But this last piece of information was phenomenal. A white explorer, probably an early Naturalist, had made a drawing of these mythic creatures, and was reputed to have seen them with his own eyes. If Rene could find out where…

He stopped himself abruptly. What would it matter if he did find them? Unlike adult humans, they weren’t allowed to Retrieve flora and fauna from the past. The Confederacy had a policy of maintenance. Because of the damage done by introduced species in the past, and the complexity of ecosystems, it was believed it was better to follow a hands-off policy. This meant allowing the damaged ecosystems to recover as they would.

After all, there’d been five mass extinctions in the past. Theirs was only the most recent. And the ecosystems had always rebuilt themselves, hadn’t they? No one mentioned that it had taken thousands of years for that rebuilding to take place. Or that none of the mass extinctions in the past had occurred as quickly as this last one had. No one knew if the planet would ever heal itself again.

It was Rene’s opinion, as it was of many of the world’s remaining ecologists, that it was their job to rebuild the ecosystems destroyed, by strategic repopulation from the past. Why use time travel to keep the human race going, when it was responsible for most of the destruction caused to the planet, yet refuse to do anything to assist the planet, on which they relied for survival, to heal? It didn’t make sense, and it certainly wasn’t ethical.

It really didn’t matter to him personally anymore. Soon, he would be leaving the struggling, hypocritical human race behind for good. Part of him was glad death was approaching. It had been a long, long life, and a lonely one.

He’d made a point of keeping relationships superficial while in-situ, because death would take those he cared for too soon. And here… well, people kept others at an emotional distance, as a matter of course. And his long absences kept even the acquaintances he had here, at an even greater distance. For them, he was a constant in their lives – an old man, for the most part, buried in his studies. For him, they were strangers he caught up with every ninety years, like a sailor on shore leave.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had sex. In his first one hundred and seventy five years he expected. Before Jumping. Certainly not in-situ, or in the ten years each time he was back. His body, when he came home, was too old for such activities.

Thankfully, clones were undersexed. If not, his life would have been a living hell. As it was, he had been left free to focus all his attention where it was needed most – on his work.

Turning off the shower, he activated the drier, and enjoyed this next pleasure. Most of his lives had been in primitive cultures where such comforts were unheard of. He happily left creature comforts behind for his work. But he couldn’t deny the pleasure coming back to them gave him. His old body would at least be comfortable in his last years.



Summer 2330, New Atlantis GAIAN CONFEDERACY



Over the six weeks since his return, Rene had heard the gossip going around. Now the statement made by the Retrieval Committee was being flashed to all Tablets.



‘The successful integration of a Consciousness past its ninth life, and into a different clone, also brings into question many of our previously held beliefs about the nature of Consciousness, and the part Willpower plays in the process.

‘Where life is static. Where change is tightly controlled, the vitality of life is lost. It is our new hypothesis that a Consciousness loses its will to live when it has exhausted all potential for growth. We have limited that growth in New Atlantis, and thus aided in our own shortened lifespans.

‘It has therefore been decided that new methods of revitalizing our community need to be instigated. We are interested in Cara’s proposal (the Retrieval of children). It has been gathering a great deal of support amongst the rank and file. It would require a great deal of careful planning, but the possibilities are inspiring.’



New Atlantis was agog. Not only were the inhabitants finding out, for the first time, that they had always had a deadline on their lifespan, but they had now discovered that someone had not only broken their nine life limit, but had also defied the rule that no Consciousness could integrate with a cloned body not created from its own DNA.

Jac Ulster had changed their world. And Rene felt the first optimistic stirrings of hope in his long, pessimistic life. Not only did this offer him a chance at continued life, but Retrieving children from the past meant a form of rebirth.

If the Committee could be convinced that change was not only beneficial, but essential to the Confederacy, as the statement implied, then suddenly there was an opening for his plans. If he gathered the right support, enlisted people like Cara and Jac to his side, the possibilities truly were inspiring.

Of course, there was work to be done, and there was no telling whether Jac’s example was just the exception that proved the rule. He would wait before he took the risk. If they were wrong, then he would lose eight years of invaluable prep time.

There was time… and while he waited, and worked, he would research Ser Moolgaaff. The pronunciation would be wrong, as the Obejwe ear did not handle European sounds well. But he was sure he would be able to track down this mysterious white man, and then follow the source. If he had more than his nine lives, then he had all the time in the world to discover their Holy Grail, and bring it back to seed their future. All the time in the world…





Spring 2333, New Atlantis, GAIAN CONFEDERACY



Rene stood on the periphery of the crowd that had formed to support the women and children rescued from the 1942 Death Train. He felt his ancient heart warm at the sight, and tears welled in his half-blind eyes. This, more than any other change that had been wrought in the last three years, gave him hope.

Over to the side, still dressed in drab clothing of the 1940s, drenched to the skin from rain that had fallen somewhere else, somewhen else, stood the harbingers of change. They were three couples – all Bonded Mates – who had wrought this miracle. There was Jac and Cara, each catalysts in their own way. Then there was Faith, who had planned this current miracle. And Luke, her World War 2 Commando who had orchestrated the large scale Retrieval. Lastly, there was Julio and the unsuitable girl from 1968 called Jane, who had become the second person to integrate into a body that was not her own. She had proved that what Jac had done could be replicated.

Rene’s cloudy vision focused on Jane for a moment longer than on each of the others. She was so incredibly beautiful! Her bright, copper-coloured hair shone in the sunlight, even though it was damp and bedraggled after their recent mission.

An odd yearning inside him pulled him up fast. He envied Julio his mate.

Shocked at this random emotion, he considered it closely. When, in the last 773 years had he ever envied a man his woman? Even in his highly sexed Original, he’d never envied a man for such a reason. There had always been plenty of women to go around. His good looks and wildness had assured him of that.

So why now, after all these years? And why Jane?

Her beauty? There were hundreds of beautiful women in this world. And thousands more in the lives he had lived, in-situ. Beauty meant nothing.

Was it that sparkle in her eye that seemed to hint at a willingness to take on any challenge? Yes, that was partly right. But Cara also had that look, and he was not drawn as powerfully to her. Maybe he just liked redheads, he decided at length, when he could analyse his reaction no further.

Whatever the reason, it was an intriguing phenomenon, especially in this aged body. And it was worth following up. Not to muscle in on another’s territory, although that might be fun in a younger body, but just to get to know the girl.

Then images of his long succession of Midews popped into his mind.

Yes, that was it! Those strong, wise women he’d purposely groomed, lifetime after lifetime. They were the holders of the collective wisdom and Medicine of their people. And Jane was one of them – though she didn’t know it.

And she held answers for him, just as the Medicine Women of the past had held answers.

There was still time for more answers …