Time Storm by Gordon R. Dickson

Author:Gordon R. Dickson [Dickson, Gordon R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Time Travel, Science Fiction, Social Science, Space and Time, General & Literary Fiction, Modern fiction, Sociology, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780671721480
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1992-12-01T06:00:00+00:00

23

I sat there and cried for a long time; and the Old Man waited me out as he might have waited out a storm, squatting in a cave in the hills. When it was over, I was sane again; or at least as close to sanity as I could expect to be, under the circumstances. Together we went back to the camp, and from then on, he was openly at my side most of the daylight hours.

What he had done, of course, was to crack the protective shell I had grown about myself in reaction to the massive internal effort of controlled power that had been involved in using the monad. In doing that, I had discovered muscles of the inner self that I had not known I owned, and I had also tuned myself up emotionally with a vengeance. In self-defense, with Sunday's death, my mind had closed itself off until it could heal the psychic tearings these stresses had created. Now that I was back in my skull, however, these things were suddenly very obvious to me; and some other things as well. Chief of these was that there was a great deal I needed to do with myself if I wanted to continue my joust with the time storm and the universe.

Meanwhile, I was faced with reentering the world of the living. To my pleasure and to the feeding of a new humbleness inside me, the others had been doing very well without my guiding hand. I found that I was now ruler of what might well be called a small kingdom—and that was only the beginning of the discoveries awaiting me.

A great deal had happened in the year and a half that I had been obsessed with myself. For one thing, the world was a world again. With the interference from the moving time lines ended, short-wave radio communication had tied the continents back together, to the mutual discovery of all us survivors that there were more of us than we had suspected. The North American continent was now a patchwork of relatively small kingdoms, like my own, with the exception of the west coast, from Baja California northward halfway into British Columbia, Canada. That west coast strip, as far east as Denver and in some cases beyond, was now a single sovereignty under a woman who called herself the Empress. The Empress was from the Hawaiian Islands—which appeared to have suffered less than any other part of the world from the moving mistwalls and the time changes of the time storm. The islands had lost no more than two-thirds of their population, as opposed to a figure that must be much closer to ninety-eight or ninety-nine per cent for most of the rest of the world. The Empress was a woman from the island of Hawaii itself, who had seized control there with a ragtag, impromptu army, and then gone on to take over the other islands and the west coast of North America.

England and Ireland, apparently, were nearly deserted.

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