Endworlds - Nicholas Read [32]
The current and final round would end at the Northern Hemisphere’s winter solstice of 2012.8
This was called by some, the Line of Judgment.
Were the human race to awaken to its true purpose and prove it could live as the Builders had taught in the beginning—in harmony with nature and each other—humanity as a whole would take its place in a much larger galactic family. In the first Age, a Scepter of immense power had been handed down from the Builders, a tuning fork designed to keep the conduit between heaven and earth open, and grant stability to the several dimensions that called Earth home. Were it to be found still in one piece, still active, and still held by one of suitable qualities in the end as in the beginning, the experiment would be deemed a success and humanity would be entrusted to rise from childhood on a single world to adolescence across many, all part of the pattern Builders had followed for eternities past.
But already three Ages had fallen on this Earth, and the current, last generation looked set to fare no better, despite attempts by the Cassandrans to nudge the Prime world.
The French girl Jax pondered this often. What must it be like to face the end of the world? Did those left on the surface look upon the blue sky of the Prime dimension on their final day, mortals in the mortal plane, then suddenly find themselves in darkness? Or were they immediately shifted to a new heaven and earth, built in situ with the same lands, the same cities and artifacts, yet Elsewhere, no longer Prime, no longer joined to the cosmos at large. This is what the neohistories told her had happened to the Fae’er, and that holding the remnant peoples of past Ages is what the other dimensions were built for.
These archives claimed those who were shunted to a parallel Earth were not ghosts, but experienced their world as physical, made of the same materials and vibrating at the same harmonic frequency as every other particle of matter in that place. Even if two people were to stand in exactly the same footprints in two different dimensions, neither would be aware of the other, except perhaps as a chill up the spine, or a fleeting glimpse of a misty shadow here, a flash of strange light there.
Across dimensions that served as different domains, kingdoms, holding tanks, cells (call them what you will), Earth housed several races at the same time: those who were born, lived and died in the corporeal world of Earth Prime, and those who had been present at the end of the three former Ages, no longer aging, no longer dying, no longer creating new life; separate purgatories made palatable by the fact that existence continued, flora still grew, fauna still roamed, technology still evolved, and the sun still rose and dipped each day. It was life, though a life with limitations.
Those trapped in that twilight of existence may well have felt they’d found their private heaven when the change occurred. The books didn’t say, but Jax pondered in her quiet moments what it must be like to wake in a paradise, think you might be in whatever heaven you had hoped for, and then realize you were still bound to the Earth, neither alive or dead. She wondered how quickly realization would dawn that the river of life had dammed up, the mighty roar of mortality become a muted trickle.
Dammed. Damned. Was it the same thing? How does a person deal with that knowledge?
She wondered also why it was that the membranes that kept these dimensions apart seemed to be breaking down with increasing speed. Some voices in the hallways of the Chimney blamed the physics labs of the world9 as the likely culprits, engaged as they were in energy experiments that chipped away at the dimensional seals. Other voices blamed Earth passing through a cluster of dark matter objects in space10, where an increase in gravitic torque was drawing new eruptions and tsunamis on the ground and solar flares and sunspots11 in the heavens. With so many signs of change in these physically observable systems, who could say how interdimensional