Son of Time - Science Fiction Short Story

Breaching the Clause

Late in the night, at the call of Omiran, the Clock of the World, Misuri Namato entered the shaft at the back of the house, a grim look on his face. Nothing his wife Tarla had said would persuade him against trying. After all, it was his birthright as an Omirion, a half-clock human, to call upon his powers to the disadvantage of his opponent, the Marion breed.

In the dim light filtering through the shaft's old window shutters, a shadow moved rapidly across the wall as he shut the door behind him, then groped for the table, fingers reaching for the switch above it. A petrified expression was beginning to reveal his non-human traits more prominently. The next task would require a kind of precision his human side could never attain, and he couldn't afford to lose to the Marion breed five years in a row, for that meant expulsion from the city for underperformance.

"City of Race Delegates Victors," murmured he, half pained, half sarcastically. "There's no such thing here. We've lost the moment we gambled our clock origins for the sake of novelty. There's no other way."

A faint sound alerted him. His eyes narrowed – two slots of half-revealed clock-irises beneath the thick, grey eyebrows. The wheels inside the mechanism kept track of time. A circuit behind his ears, sloping to the spine, announced an increase in activity. His neural matrix directed more energy into the fingers. Under the flesh, his wrists locked in more tightly to the arms. No shift in leg functioning. His unconscious had selected fight over flight.

He was being monitored. The Race Council? It was a dreadful thought, for he'd be banned from the solar system for breaking Law: alone, in the outer reach, the great out there whence the unwanted never returned.

He turned around slowly, left arm rising in a fist by the stomach, ready to attack. His inner clock mechanism adjusted to give him time-based forward momentum – same movements, half the time. Champions in Bay sometimes achieved motion equivalence in quarter of the time, but he wasn't one of them. He lacked the abilities of the new Omirions, the 05s, born after the Clock of the World had transitioned into its fifth cycle.

An undeniable noise outside. Running steps. He opened the shaft's door. Tarla was standing in the garden, but the noise had come from elsewhere. Tears were streaming down her face.

"Goodbye," she whispered.

A massive light fell upon him from above. They had come.

"Run," she breathed noiselessly.

Inner mechanisms recomposed – arms devitalized, legs innervated, – he launched himself over the fence, into the woods beyond the city, agilely avoiding roots and fallen trees, wind whooshing in his ears, air-shuttle's fantastic light groping for him through the canopies.

17.5 miles NW stretched a heavy-traffic railway track. If he could reach it and get on a train undetected, he had a chance to avoid capture. His family would be arrested. City-scan would read Tarla's lips. She'd be sent to the outer reach. For his mistake. For his doubts. The two kids would be terminated. So much for the equal human treatment they promised us, went through his mind. He leapt over a rock and kept going. The air-shuttle was nearly half a mile somewhere to the right. I'm a coward. He halted and looked back, tears filling the golden wheel-mechanism of his irises.

A second air-shuttle was hovering by the edge of the forest. It was done. They'd taken his family. Why had he run? They might have only arrested him. No future for the static, he recalled reading the propaganda. Aim for better. Become human. The promises of a full life for them, the so-called machines.

Perhaps an adrenaline-triggered reaction, he felt the electric charge around him. The air-shuttle's light was approaching. He was losing his advance. If only he were an 05! Swiftly he turned and bolted upward through the trees, destination KeRima Imperial Railway.

"Fugitive Misuri Namato," called a radio-amplified voice over the tree line, "detain yourself."

Area scans had caught him in space and time simultaneously when he'd stopped. Had he kept running, his clock origins would have helped him elude them by being half-nowhere, as his son, TedArama, used to joke. Humans envy us, that's why they forced us to incorporate their condition, was another instance of illegal talk among them. He knew TedArama would confront the Jury and die first. The Voice of the People was never about Omirions. It was for colonists. As long as he kept running, the best they could determine of his location was a half-mile-radius presence-echo.

Misuri was cutting through the forest at top velocity, yet his joints were accumulating tension. He activated clock-brain prevalence and estimated the speed reduction that enabled him to remain half-nowhere, but also reduce muscle- and joint-strain to avoid system collapse. It wasn't much, but it had to do. He felt sweat across his face and back, the soft wind clearer on his skin. Stitches in his sides. Feet, heavier. Heartbeat, unstable. This human condition was everything but enabling him to live a full life.

Fifteen miles of nowhere-ness now behind, he was slipping, as a Son of Time, past the grip of space-dependent humans' lasso, and ran, ran, leaping across slopes, boots lowering into the moister ground of the bay. The tracks were close. He'd have to run parallel to them and leap onto the first train, hoping the crowd's presence-echo would conceal him.

He heard it.

Acting against logic, he topped his speed again and bolted forward. If only... Rattling sounds below. He leapt and landed on top of a car, air-shuttle's groping light approaching as he opened an upper lid and slipped inside the engine room, then quickly out of the bright column of light. Back against a machine, breathing like an out-of-breath human, he waited for the light to pass, then sealed the compartment.