FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Save Point: Temporal Dislocation

"Good news. I have finally figured out exactly where we are!" concludes Terrowne, hopping into their bed beside her and snuggling up close. It's cold out in the night air and a big warm lioness is great to cuddle up to, but now he's making her cold until they even out.

"I was under the possibly mistaken impression that we already knew that."

"Well, 'when' rather... please don't spoil my fun, it took a lot of calculations to get something that was actually human-useful, rather than, you know, dragonish intuitions. So now I want to boast all about how clever I am."

"Oh, okay, alright. But I will totally interrupt you if you start to tell me stuff I already know about."

"You probably do know most of this, it's just that now I have numbers and they are interesting."

"Get on with it!" she feigns a shiver.

"Right. So, background. The Empire of Azatlan was founded around about the time when the axis of precession of the Earths rotation transited from the constellation of Virgo into the constellation of Leo. This was just after and during a period of deglaciation, when lots of habitable land became available and the sea level gradually rose by an enormous amount, which forced settled primitive cultures from their usual long-established places, resulting in migrations, movement, conflict and building of new cities and infrastructure. In short, everything you could possibly need to generate a glorious new maritime empire. They probably taught you all of this in school."

"They did. It was very patriotic. I was even awake for most of it."

"So, when exactly the transition should be is subject to considerable debate, but if you divide the entire wheel of twelve constellations into exactly twelve pieces, and try to center each of them in an optimal manner over the major first-order stars, you get a decent approximation. The first one, between Virgo and Leo, was commonly known as the First Sun because, well, all of the ice melted and stuff happened, and people noticed. You have this association with sun and fire."

"I totally do. Are you warm yet?"

"Not you, the constellation. Anyway, by logical extension this made the next transition the Second Sun, and then so on and so forth. Which is interesting but only matters over absurdly long periods of time. At about the same time as you were catching fire and I was diving off a cliff, it was roughly the Second Sun or thereabouts, to within a couple of centuries. Subject, as I said, to considerable debate. The next constellation should have been the Great Crab."

"I'm guessing here that it wasn't?"

"Oh, it definitely wasn't. You weren't awake for it, but once I got free of the undertow a couple of centuries later, I made a point of asking around and there were slightly second-hand stories about how the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the people in the new timeline, as distinct from those of us who made it through, had seen the stars themselves revolve in the heavens, and the sun had risen in the wrong place. As you can imagine this made something of an impression."

"Wouldn't that mess up the entire planetary surface?"

"We got frame-shifted. The whole earth and all of its surroundings got moved with respect to the rest of the universe. Like picking up the table and moving it to a different room. From the point of view of the people from the new timeline, no or very little time elapsed during the transition."

"Okay... I kind of have trouble wrapping my head around that one, but I'll take your word for it."

"So, that was the dragonish intuitive bit. To get decent numbers, I had to record the movement of the stars a whole bunch and do lots of calculations, but the results are fairly definitive. We're now almost exactly two and a half constellations ahead of where we should be."

"What, we're in our own future?"

Cleo is good at math and she knows some of the numbers relating to what he's talking about. The precessional cycle is just under 26,000 years, so two and a half constellations is about 5,400 years or so. That's a pretty substantial length of time they've just skipped over.

"Not precisely. It's the subjective future of this timeline, and there was no noticeable interruption of continuity for anyone already in it. Just that suddenly one day the stars tilted in the heavens. To them we suddenly appeared and had always been there, along with occasional cities and ruins in places that avoided the wake or were anchored by the right sort of presence."

"That is just really weird."

"Yeah, pretty much. We're now in the middle of the Age of Taurus somewhere and everyone is all very excited about making bronze, which doesn't seem to have been a thing until we reintroduced the idea suddenly by showing up. Coming out of Uruk we currently have all sorts of developments which have appeared as if from nowhere and are being eagerly embraced as divine gifts."

"Well, I mean, from what I remember, bronze-making requires lots of organized co-operation and wide-scale trading, so I doubt it'll get them into too much trouble."

"Yes, well, unfortunately it's encouraged the same lot that were eagerly hanging on promises of a glorious organized rule for all eternity from Kilseth's wasp-paper pyramid. Gilgamesh has mostly been keeping them in check, but his own longevity is a provocation, and he has no more supplies. I mean, yes, we gave him some truly killer weed, and that'll help, but soon he'll have to retire from the throne and whoever replaces him won't have anywhere near the experience."

"Well, I suppose it's up to us how much we meddle... I for one would like to have a technological civilization again, preferably in less than another two and half constellations."

"You just gave me a really nasty thought."

"Well, I am sort of that kind of mood... wanna give it a try?"

"Not that sort of nasty. We might have only seen one half of what happened, on this side. In which case there would have been an accompanying but opposite motion of two and half constellations with respect to everything else. Like whipping out one of those climbing chains of yours, half goes up and half goes down. Or grabbing the chain at two points and then crossing your arms."

"How is that nasty?"

"It might explain why there aren't sethura all over the place who have_already_ been ruling things ever since the fall of Azatlan. They probably desynchronized themselves from this timeline when they set off their little toy, like placing a whipped chain next to a straight one. We're the steep bit, the upward angled sine wave in the middle, and they're the straight bit laid out next to it. We have lots of time passing on our side and they don't have very much. In which case they won't be much of a threat to anyone for another two and a half constellations, until it evens up again."

"It would really depend on what sort of kink they put into it," observes Cleo, trying to visualize his idea of timelines like waves. "If it's very smooth they could still show up at long intervals, but if it was sort of more crisp and snappy, like a soliton, they'd only be able to visit near the end after it started to sync up again. That would be, what, the Fifth Sun?"

She makes hand gestures as a sort of kinesthetic aid, casting out imaginary grapnel chains to feel their unseen weight and letting the cold in. The idea seems to intrigue her.

"Yeah. It's probably not really an issue though. I mean, we'd have to get all through Taurus, Aries, Pisces and then reach Aquarius before there was even be the possibility of testing the idea. That's a really vastly long time by human standards."

"Well, it's not like we'd necessarily actually be there," clarifies Cleo. "But we could make sure that we tell people about precessional movement, and how they need to keep track of it, and be alert for engineered disasters. If we tell enough of the people across enough generations, it might stick and become a legend of sorts. At least we'd be preventing the same mistake."

Terrowne thinks about it. Random things happen. The Dragon is resilient but quite distractable. Whether they personally could last out that time, well, it seems unlikely, but not really impossible even from the point of view of an non-enhanced human. If some ancient person can live to be a century, then that would be fifty or sixty lifetimes. It's too far to see into, even with Dragon vision, but he can in fact imagine it.

Still, it would be better to err on the side of error. Starting a persistent legend might help people, even if they themselves are caught in some unexpectedly unsurvivable event of the sort he seems to inadvertently attract. To try and plan for fifty or sixty lifetimes out, based on a threat that may not even exist, would be foolish.

"Your plan is a good plan," he encourages her, and kisses her on the forehead between her brow ridges where they crease in the center, holding their faces close together for a moment and feeling hardened bone like armour somewhere beneath her under warm sweaty fur.

"Can we do something nasty now?" she interjects eagerly.

"I have a few ideas," he playfully suggests.