Chronica by Paul Levinson Page B

questions!"

    "I give far more in return," Heron said.

    "No, not yet," Porter replied, evenly. "On the matter at hand, what about just waiting a few days or a few weeks, and seeing if Appleton recovers, or least improves enough for me to see him? That would engender no complications, right?"

    A waiter approached to take their order.

    Heron rose and put coins on the table. "Order whatever pleases you," he said to Porter. "You have more than earned it. I'm off to untangle this mess. I will try to alert you to what I do, if it is not already apparent."

Chapter 5

    [Foster Square Facility, Brewster, Massachusetts, 2096 AD]

    A woman sat at a console. Actually, she wasn't a human woman, she was a female android, but few humans could tell the difference.

    Sierra Waters had left her very specific instructions. But she was not bound by them. She had free will. Still, the ethics of her situation required her, as much as an ethical dictate could, to certainly be guided by Sierra's instructions. After all, Sierra was in large part responsible for her very existence.

    Whom should she save? She had reversed the death of Synesius several times, but maybe this was the time to let him rest in peace. She had reversed Max's death in 150 AD on the shore of the Thames, and in 2042 AD in the Parthenon Club in London, along with Synesius then, too. Everyone agreed that reversals or re-sets, every single one of them, risked tearing apart the immensely complex tapestry of time. She had an obligation on that score, too – if not to Sierra Waters, then to humanity, or even existence itself.

    One thing she was sure of: an android's death almost never warranted a re-set. Many humans believed androids were not fully alive. Ironically, many androids agreed with them. She did not, mainly because she felt truly alive inside. But she agreed completely that re-sets should be few and far between, and if ruling out an android's death for a reversal limited the number of re-sets, she was all in favor of that.

    Her thoughts returned to Sierra Waters. She thought she understood this human woman – not surprising, since she had known all along that so much of her own mental architecture, her patterns and penchants of thinking, were based on Sierra.

    Sierra Waters had tried to improve human existence by literally saving some vital parts which been lost in original history – assuming, of course, that the world and the history which Sierra had grown up with was the original, and not the creation of another time traveler such as Heron. Sierra had attempted to save Socrates from the hemlock and the philosopher's own stubborn nature. She had attempted to save some volumes from the flames that at three times different times in history had engulfed parts of the magnificent, ancient Library of Alexandria. Ironically, the ancient Library burned was the very history Sierra had grown up with, but she had come to believe that the conflagrations were the work of Heron.  

    And Sierra Waters had achieved something of both lofty goals, after a fashion, for Socrates and the Library -- though the life of Socrates, after she had saved him, did not amount to very much for the world, and she had managed to save just a fraction of the ancient Library's immense holdings.

    But one of the scrolls Sierra Waters had saved was Heron's Chronica , which he had wanted burned, and now Sierra Waters was out to save the process of time travel itself -- or its recipe, contained in the Chronica -- lest Heron keep it from everyone but himself. Heron wanted to keep the instructions and equations of the Chronica and its usage suggestions about time travel from the world at large, which Sierra might agree was a good thing. But keeping them from Sierra herself was something Sierra would not think was good.

    Why had Sierra entrusted so much responsibility in this quest of hers, this fight to keep humanity on the best course, to an android? Debates raged as to whether the androids were more