Dustland by Virginia Hamilton

Author:Virginia Hamilton [Hamilton, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3722-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

10

IT COULD NEVER BE sure it would get back home precisely where it should. It had focused its power-of-being on the chestnut tree. And it imagined the scent of that shade buckeye, where the real, breathing bodies of Dorian, Thomas, Levi and Justice sat beneath its branches, hands joined.

The turbulence of the Crossover between future and past echoed with sighs and whispers of mind-travelers come and gone. Gradually the unit came to know that multi-beings infested the Crossover in mental swarms. The t’beings, as Justice and the others would come to call them, had at one time been individual mind-travelers. But the individual had failed to hold its concentration while completing the mind-jump from one time to another. Trapped in the no-end and no-start between times, it would never again find the way back to its proper moment. An individual found others like itself caught in the Crossover. It and the others cooperated, joined and became multi-beings gathered in base swarms to capture new individual time-travelers. In this way, t’beings intended to become strong enough to fix on some place. Forever without bodies, they could well become power on the loose to cause havoc at any time.

Justice had divined early on that she, Thomas, Levi and Dorian had best become a unit for strength of mind and self-defense. And the unit had been lucky not to have been uncovered by t’being swarms until the return trip on the second time-travel to the future. The unit knew by then not to lose its concentration, nor break connection with the single obsession it had in mind: getting home. And now the unit whirled and dived, dodging the swarms. It massed its psyche on the past and home. The Watcher observed for it in the anti-where of the Crossover, surrounding it with utmost attention and clear purpose. This the Watcher accomplished while the unit held fast and dared not dream. Only once was the Watcher seriously challenged. A foot-wide swarm drove a wedge of ferocious need into the Watcher’s first level of awareness.

I will have you me, warned the swarm, with unflagging force.

The unit streaked and dived. It outmaneuvered the swarm, and felt safe enough to indulge in longing for home. It pondered whether it would arrive in time. It lengthened and shortened its worrying in no time. Laughed inwardly at the confusion words caused itself. It thought it might be losing its mental balance, that perhaps the t’beings had got through the Watcher. It laughed again, this time at how foolish it was to transmit itself through the non-dimension of Crossover. It cried out against the fierce turbulence. It worried that it might not have the strength of mind to set itself free. For an anti-moment it lost faith, it loosened its hold on its proper place and instant in the past. It felt it was doomed.

But the Watcher was true, was power. It guided. The Watcher lit the unit’s way through flights of ideas and awful misconceptions. Through the anti-where of nothing, the Watcher never wavered, never did not know.

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