The Centurion

The disgusting movement of her skin shows me — that, and her strange fascination with clocks. Most of the aliens of the Federation have varying degrees of sentience iridescence, but only centurions have that unusual concern, which almost becomes a concern over time.

The morning after I brought her home, I looked at my sister's boyfriend. I watch her comb her hair in the light of dawn, her fingers swaying in the moving branches she uses as a brush. I watch her watch the clock while my sister sleeps at night, watching her eyes follow the rotation of a small 100-second hand. I watch him scan my light on a glass clock, and I wonder what he is doing as I tie my rope — how many dark thoughts that dreadful mound, behind his scarred eyes.

It is twenty minutes before our shift begins, and Sarah is not yet down. He may have time to prepare himself if he gets up now, and the field ministry authorities punish us for arriving late. I'm going to pick him up when the chief's light changes. Her eyes are shiny, kaleidoscopic, like dust from a supernova. Their color is bright, and then dark brown.

The small hand of the clock slows down, slows down, and moves slowly until it can no longer move.

The chief's eyes met mine in the frozen clock - waiting. Looking at me.

“You dare to fall in love with my sister,” I told her.

"I only wish her happiness."

"If you want to please him go to 2257 and bring back our dead parents." Only a joke, because I'm sure he knew. With his strange time management, I suspect he can do anything.

She smiles politely, but she does not move, and I do not move. We stand tense and wait, and the next minute passing is not one minute, but ten minutes achieved in one. At the end of the dramatic extension of time, when the little hand has reached the 100-second mark, my sister is dripping on the floor, cool and smelling of soap.

"Man would I have slept!" he says. "We have to go!"

My sister packs literature inboxes. Her clothes, usually scattered, are neatly wrapped in piles on her bed. Knickknacks included clothing: brushes, oil paints, genetically modified rabbit feet that won the ceremony at the age of six.

Do not touch the pictures on the mantel, of mom and dad. He wouldn’t have gone forever without taking the memento - at least, that’s what I tell myself.

You need to go. You deserve a better life, away from the deserts of the Occupied Alpha Centauri. He is very bright with the planets of our planet, he is very beautiful, and he deserves a bright and beautiful life like him.

But not with him.

Not like this.

We shake hands. My sister used to be very relaxed, but now she chooses her sentences carefully. The walls of our house are silent. Until that night, as we were finishing dinner when he came across the table to hold my hand.

"I'll go."

"All right."

"In 2307, the work of Alpha Centauri will end."

She looked away. "I asked him - I begged him to let you go, but he said you were not ready to go."

I sit up, sit up, breathing hard. At the time, I remember how we used to wander the old roadblock as a child, with Sarah leading our small group of friends — that when I fell, she didn't see, but she rode unknowingly — leading me, and so on. laughing, he can never look back.

The earth is moving again. I leaned back in my chair, reaching for the mattress. "You forgot mom and dad." The frame softens my hand, cool and heavy, like granite. "If you really did go - if you were willing - you would come with them."

"Carrie ...."

"I wonder how they would have felt if they had known about your boyfriend. Mister Time-Traveling Tentacles - whoever his name is. What would they say if they knew?"

I expect him to cry or his lower lip to tremble, as it did when I was raising our parents. I expect him to say he is not going, no, he would not leave me because of him. Instead, he snatches the frame from my hands - sweetly, as if he's afraid he might sing to her - and puts it back on the disc. Then she smiles at me - a sad, sad smile - and walks back into the room. His voice is heard from above:

"You know, his name actually ..."

I do not hold the name.

I throw the centurion the next day, and I drag him to the edge of the cornfield. He doesn't object but he comes with a limp, although I know he can crush me if he wants. Against his radiant skin, my hand looks torn, trapped by dirt from the fields.

"I want you to go," I said. "Leave Sarah. Go - leave our house - leave us alone. If you do not, I will find my parents' old gun.

She moves, her weak arms flowing out in a way that says "welcome to try". "Sarah will be very happy at Alpha Centauri when the work is over and the Federation has kept its promise to recognize humanity as a race. She will be very happy too if you ever get there."

His arm is out of my grip. For a moment, I stood there confused. When the world makes sense again, I catch my breath, and it is a small image that flips back the road to our house. I wonder - for the second time in a week - how many times I have just lost him and his unnatural time management.

They both left when I woke up the next morning. The note on the table reads, "Come forward." It's not signed, and the writing is dirty, but I can see my sister's hand.

Mom and Dad are still sitting on the blanket. Sarah did not take it. He left their suspicious eyes and hard souls and memories all over me.

Few people care for cornfields. We are shrinking day by day. When each employee is lost, our toil increases. Rumors say the Federation is picking us up one by one, to weaken us and destroy our spirit, but I suspect a different reality. Travelers have a quality for them - the kind of readiness, the kind of hope. They are, bright, taken, and we, bitter, left. We talk a lot, because there is a lot of work to be done, and I don't know what hurts the most — loneliness, or the memory of what we had.

One morning, after hours of skipping, I looked up and saw a foreman staring at me.

I wasted no time. It's been years, maybe more. I have grown up, but he has not yet come. His eyes - the same kaleidoscopic circles like the sands of the desert - follow me in the dust.

I can't even remember talking. One word appears, broken:

"Sarah?"

"She is asleep," he said. "It's a stasis. A resurrection is scheduled for 2307."

I cough up mucus that is choked with dust. She looks at him, silent. Waiting.

"You," I cry. "You have to help me."

I have thought about this hard, under the eyes of my mother and father in the living room, and when I was out in the fields with nothing but my shovel, corn, and endless rubbish to keep me. There has been a lot of time.

"I want to--" The cough takes over. I say the words, my chest trembles. "--I want to go back in time, to 2257, the year the Federation came, the year they killed my parents. Can you do that for me?"

Pause.

“Please,” I said.

"No."

Her eyes are broken.

"We can see the future, a time to bend over to our will, but we are not gods. Time moves in only one direction. The laws of physics restrict the movement of relays."

All my plans have turned into cold philosophies - one thing to mourn, another to hate. I try to suppress the hatred, the hatred, the loving contempt, but I find it useless. Longing.

"Then--" I swallowed. "I want to join my sister."

"Not yet."

He wraps his hand around my forearm. Maybe the dirt is protecting me, maybe my lack of contact with other people can make me weak, but I don’t back down from his skin to mine.

"You are not ready to go," he said. "You're trapped, Caroline. So dig your way out."

He walks away, I stand still, I fold my shovel, tears follow and rust.

One day, maybe, I will pick up the pieces of my broken life and share them with Sarah and others. Until then, I will be working hard with people at Alpha Centauri, as our prices are declining and dust demands our health. I will plow the earth in sorrow until the dust devours my tears until I bury them under the layers of the soil of Alpha Centauri.

One way or another, I will be free.