7

After supper each night there was a social held in the official lounge. All of the travelers were encouraged to attend for psychological well-being, since many, like Renée, suffered the claustrophobic pursuit of a camp stamp in the own modules, although there were usually at least two to three learners per module in the lower security didactics.

Space flight had long tolerated the ingestion of alcoholic beverages, which in the MarsBound was overt acceptance—translated: open bar. A brief temperance experiment in the lounge had failed miserably, creating a black market and even a racketeering of sorts and finally ended by decree of the Cultural Psychology Committee. Just as cruel to some was when the ship steward announced that on Renée’s flight the consumption had outpaced the average consumption per traveler per day; this promised weeks of “dry” space travel toward the end unless the socialites paced themselves better.

This was easy for everyone except Dr. Renée Niemann, because she had been raised on Isle d‘Orleans, where the Big Easy sensibilities regarding alcohol had survived intact even if the levees had not. She vowed to ignore any such rationing, especially if she were to end up in the same social gathering with a person like CO Walsh.

“I’ll drink to that,” Renée would say after scanning the lounge population and discovering him absent each night. “Another Ding,” she said to the bartender.

“What will you do if he shows up, Dr. Niemann?” the bartender asked her as he slid the vodka drink her way.

“I’ll say double Ding time.” He looked confused.

“I wouldn’t know how to double a Ding, Dr. Niemann. It’s pretty much pure vodka already.”

“Take out the ice,” Renée enlightened him. He nodded.

“Got it.”

The MarsBound was a workhorse, having transported thousands of exo-engineers, exo-physicists, xeno-ecologists, xenobiologists, xenolinguists, and a multitude of exo- and xeno-everything else to meet their new home. It had made this trip over six dozen times before, over six dozen tugs and wear and tear of lunar gravity boosts. Titanium proved to be a wonderful thing when making screws, nuts, and bolts.

Graviton pads along walks, floors, and ceilings allowed a six-fold economy of space allocation. Depending on which way she toggled her thumbclip determined which surface would be her floor. Household needs and items were anchored along every surface, each oriented correctly once the right floor was selected. Off-floor items would then recede by way of camouflage or architectural submersion.

In the lounge, however, these G-pads were only on the floor and, presenting only one version of up and down, important when the occupants had been drinking. People meeting others upside down, right-side up, and sideways in the same room did not mix well with alcohol.

The MarsBound’s destination, the station at Mars-Lagrange 1, was large enough that it did not require the same gravitational economy. It held two large rotating habitat wheels, each floor space a square kilometer, one for 1 G, the other for 0.38 G. Any stay there involved a two-phase quartering, thusly making it easier for those coming and going to transition.

Because of the sheer distance between the two planets, Earth needed to be patient. Projects such as Mars were plans that involved dozens if not hundreds of years. But there was one cocklebur of impatience since the discovery of the Sonotomes and the Singing Canyons and that was the Mars Tempconciliation Project, under the auspices of the Temporal Reconciliation Oversight Council. This subgroup of Mars explorers sat idly at the inert Martian ṺberCollider, awaiting their raison d’être. Any fossil, any artifact that could place the time epoch during which native Martians actually existed could signal the go-ahead to begin the temporal reconciliation that would result in the interplanetary handshake the new manifest destiny demanded.

The re-animation of the dormant ferropods and Chantū were some help, as they indicated a time when the temperature and humidity were the same previously, but this only identified a swath of time that included from the Late Hesperian to Early Amazonian time epochs, a period that spanned over a billion years. Even by matching the specific temperatures, Oxygen concentration, and humidity parameters, the scope still extended from an instant to an eon within three million years. Temporal reconciliation required a tighter window.

The xenolinguists competed among themselves to be the first to discover any time reference that narrowed things down better, but the Sonotomes were lacking in any appreciation of timeline, as if purposely. The Electromagnetic Archeologists’ likewise competitive search for a fossil created a gold rush into the field.

It was puzzling that the Sonotomes failed to mention the ferropods, either, leading some to wonder if the notable absence of both the ferropods and temporal references in the Sonotomes were in some way connected. They did, however, sing of the reverence of the body of a deceased, even to decrying cremation.

Yet, no fossils.

So the clock, which the ṺberCollider scientists like Dr. Kubacki claimed they could control, ticked on.

Gavin Atilano and Jay Kubacki were Mars bound on the MarsBound to change that, one way or another.

The Temporal Reconciliation Oversight Council was seldom called that except in legal and official proceedings. The “Chronarchy,” originally used in pejorative connotation, was the colloquialism; it had first been used in a derisive headnews article about it. This article, penned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jeremy Pasternak, claimed this council didn’t oversee anything, but in fact originated, legislated, and pontificated temporal reconciliation with all of the rights and privileges historically seen in Divine Right Authority. The editorial did not approve of this “Chronarchy.”

But the name stuck: Chronarchy. The insult factor weakened to such a degree that the councilmembers themselves used it. Even Gavin Atilano used the term, although he looked forward to one day being in the same room with that smart-ass Pasternak.

Pasternak’s famous negative editorial argued that temporal reconciliation was extremely dangerous, with casual or careless use running the risk of temporal paradoxes that were the clichés of sci-fi thrillers and fantasy adventures. The Chronarchy defended itself with two counterpoints:

First, there was discovered the Right of Temporal Imminent Domain, which was a tempconciliation outcome wherein there was only enough time for one time to exist, the path of least temporal resistance predominating. Paradoxes shimmied, then fell apart. A TimePrime established itself and persisted until the process ended.

Tempconciliation could simply be turned off.

Secondly, tempconciliation depended on the production of chronotons, which themselves could only be produced in a machine so costly and so big that such an achievement necessitated contributions from most of the countries on the planet plus help from the liquidity of the biggest international corporations. Such a machine was outside Tucson, Arizona, but it was not an American machine. Any tempconciliation experiments were under the direction of a multinational consensus, hence, the Chronarchy.

Now there were two ṺberColliders. The other one surrounded the New Mars Colony on the Tharsis plains between Arsia Mons and Pavonis Mons.

The chronoton, discovered quite by accident, was noticed at the end of a series of breakthroughs that proceeded along several generations of discovery after the Higgs particle had been identified in the 21st Century. The ṺberCollider in Tucson was built solely to double-down on the Higgs particle excitement and, as was said, to see what happens. At first, the shadowy and fleeting déjà vu and que será será gossamers at the quantum lengths were not noticed, since the excitement was now all about a graviton progeny, the particle called a prisn. The prisn was so strange that in turn its own progeny, the chronoton, was completely missed at first.

The world was misled to think it was all about the prisn, and a Bureau of Prisns and with it an entire science bureaucratic infrastructure was developed. But the prisn, when it turned out to be merely an intermediary, doomed the Bureau of Prisns to obsolescence almost from its inception. Once the particle annihilations were sorted out, there were identified correctly the particles of what-is interacting with the particles for what-is-not, or more disturbingly, what had never been. Chronotons vs. antichronotons. The ṺberCollider, by sheer luck, had performed the first temporal reconciliation of two time periods, albeit at quantum scales.

Luckily, the slight over-abundance of is particles over is-not particles is what explained why everyone hadn’t suddenly ceased to exist or hadn’t never existed.

The collective sigh of relief from the scientific community had been deafening. The official Bureau of Prisns position paper on the crisis had been entitled, “The Favorable Balance of Is vs Is Not Particles and Present Fortuitous Persistence of Existence.” This paper argued that since the chronoton had only been observed at quantum lengths, that like entanglement, the is/is-not risk would have never translated into macroreality. Its next position paper refuted this, though it was described as merely a refinement of the position: better sophistication of the process proved that the chronoton/antichronoton imbalance persisted at lengths at sizes from plants to parsecs:

Temporal Reconciliation on large scales was possible; it was possible to retrieve another time epoch and drag it into our own.

The Bureau of Prisns quickly budded off the Temporal Reconciliation Oversight Committee. This was felt necessary because like the predominance of matter in the universe being due to the slight overabundance of it over antimatter and the resultant interactive annihilation leaving the flotsam of all that we have today, so too the slight hedge of what-is over what-is-not, at the subparticle level, made everyone thank their lucky stars.

The critical headnews editorial which had coined the moniker, “Chronarchy,” upon the Temporal Reconciliation Oversight Committee, had been titled, “Oops! How We Almost Never Were.” The article’s prelude told the story of the original hydrogen bomb, against which some 20th Century scientists had argued, predicting the chain reaction would never stop, consuming the universe and everything in it. Nevertheless humanity had put its finger into the fan hoping it wasn’t on. Now the fan was the ṺberCollider.

In “Oops! How We Almost Never Were,” author Jeremy Pasternak wielded a rapier wit and a wicked sense of humor, coining another sarcastic pejorative. He referred to the is-not particle as s’not, or just snot. The article set off a firestorm of controversy, which led to the entire world legislating to oversee all things that we clearly didn’t know enough about for our own good. The Chronarchy, (née, Temporal Reconciliation Oversight Committee) volunteered its expertise.

The world accepted the offer, which prompted more critical articles. Being the original editorial’s author, Jeremy Pasternak became a bargaining chip toward assuaging public opinion when not only was he appointed the editor-in-chief of the colony’s newsfloater, The Martian Colonist, but was also selected to serve as the historian on Mars for the official dealings of the MCPSC. It seemed that Atilano and Pasternak would indeed soon be in the same room together. Pasternak and Dr. Renée Niemann, each unaware of the other, sailed on the MarsBound together toward their new careers.

The Chronarchy’s first commandment in dealing with time, handed to it by the nations who authorized the new Chronarchy charter, was…Go Slow. Although nothing untoward had occurred with the first temporal feat, it still seemed a good rule. Having the sole authority, the Chronarchy had only itself to fear, since such precious and pricey machinery could only be financed by the Gross Planetary Product, which meant safety from terrorists, separatist states, or even “axis of evil” rogue nations.

One fortuitous or frightening day in the future, depending…there would be the startling discovery that there were actually two natural sources of the chronoton—that elusive particle that regulated time and put past, present, and future into their respective places and which determined what is and what is not, what was and what had never been, what could be and what would never be:

Ferropodia conglobinans and Ares arboreta.

In the Chantū, it would be detected in traces. In the microbiochemistry of the ferropod, chronotons would be discovered to just be pouring out of the little critters.