Part Four
A Swiftly Tilting Galaxy


	"When? When do we leave?" Ryohko asked.

	"When? What are you talking about?" Achika asked, shocked. "We leave 
tomorrow, of course. Why do you think we divided up into groups?"

	"Eh?" both Ryohko and Aeka said as Achika left, carrying a tray. They 
exchanged glances that were at once both significant and hostile.

	Both of them were still remembering how, just before dinner, Ryohko had 
come back from her flight and smirked about how she had been seeing how 
Tenchi and the others had set up their campsite.

	Aeka had, of course, immediately taken offense, and the two had gone out 
into the front yard and started fighting.

	"Dinner!" Achika had called.

	Of course, neither of the two of them had paid attention.

	Achika had come out to the front door and repeated "Dinner!"

	Another of Ryohko's energy attacks had been splashed into Aeka's wards.

	Achika had run out between them, kicked both girls' feet out from under 
them before they had time to react, and said apologetically, "I'm very 
sorry, but it's time for dinner."

	The dumbfounded rivals had followed her in.


	In another house, not so very far away, downright close in global terms, 
Nobuyuki was sitting on the floor of his room beneath his Beatles poster, 
packing for the trip. He held a camera up to his eye for a moment, 
imagining taking a film of something so exciting, so breathtaking, that 
it would win him worldwide renown. Either that or make Achika-chan proud 
of him.

	Atchan... he had not yet dared call her by the intimately shortened 
name, but she was already the subject of a thousand thousand dreams and 
fantasies of his. Wild images of rescuing her from a burning building -- 
of building her a great home that would set off her beauty like a jewel 
setting -- of winning whatever that famous prize for picture-taking was 
and laying it at her feet, like one of those European knights in books -- 
of Achika-chan, filled with gratitude and pleasure, yes, and love, 
winding her arms about his neck and raising her lips to his...

	He sighed, lost in a world of dreams that still somehow managed to stay 
on the family side of the ratings line.


	Twenty-six years into the future, Washuu was talking to the two members 
of her interdimensional chat room who were present and waiting for the 
timer to go off on her chronometric regulator.

	"..so would you believe," Washuu-chan dai'ni told the other two, "they 
*never paid me any more money* for the development of the Web?"

	"No!" the lavender-haired girl said, shocked.

	"So what did you do?" Washuu Prime asked, the corner of her mouth 
quirking up.

	"Well," the second of her doubles to be discovered began, "I put my 
inventor's genius to work on a stink bomb." An evil grin began to creep 
across her face. "I bought the makings of about an entire smorgasbord, 
and enough stuff to make twelve chirashi de luxes, dumped it all in one 
of those cheap cloth bags you could buy in the market then, went to work 
on my last day, put a chair on top of a table, climbed up, and *lifted 
one of the cardboard ceiling panels* ... "

	A matching grin was on Washuu's face as she listened to the diminutive 
woman who might even be the greatest of her 'compatibles' detail her 
revenge.

	" ... stuck the bag in, replaced the panel, and left. I heard it took 
them *months* to figure out where the smell was coming from; they tore up 
the walls and the floor a couple of times, but nobody EVER thinks of the 
ceiling."

	"Most people tend not to expect things from above," the chat room's 
protegee observed calmly. "Part of why I was so devastating, before I was 
freed."

	"At least the team I was with in Japan paid well when they dissolved," 
Washuu-chan dai'ni continued. "I found myself at a loose end, so I 
decided to teach science for a while, maybe discover a genius being 
stifled by the Japanese school system. Hah. My brightest student's in 
third grade, and all that's stifling her is an overachiever mother and a 
broken home. Misao-chan doesn't need a teacher, she needs a practical 
psychologist and better parents. I can't be the second, and I've never 
been good enough with feelings to be the first."

	"Yeah, that's more of Tsunami's department," Washuu agreed.

	Her double looked at her curiously. "As for the second... what's it like 
to be a mother? Ryohko's enough of a headache as a student; I can't 
imagine what it would be like to have her as a daughter."

	Washuu looked at the two other members of her chat room seriously. 
"Hard. We expect children to be small versions of ourselves, and are 
surprised when they turn out to be their own people. You want to take all 
her burdens on yourself, and you know that that wouldn't be good for her 
-- she wouldn't even appreciate it! You try to do all the traditional 
mother-daughter things, and watch them tossed in your face. You catch 
yourself watching her when nobody's looking with a longing so intense you 
can barely breathe -- if only, just once, she'd turn and say, 'Mother, I 
love you.' 

	"And then you find that you crafted better than you knew when you made 
her companion -- what you thought to be a protector/defender/assistant is 
in effect a forever-younger sister. And as your daughter's sister, you 
have responsibilities to her, whether or not you choose to name her your 
daughter as well. Now and then, when everyone sensible and not-so is in 
bed asleep, I'll get up and read to Ryoh-oh-ki; mostly books about 
carrots." She smiled wryly. "I wish my relationship with my daughter went 
*half* as well as the one with you."

	The lavender-haired android looked at the other two women. "I'm just 
grateful," she said, "that you started talking with me while I'm in this 
stasis. I can't just shut down because then I'd need to be recharged to 
wake, and if you hadn't begun to speak with me I might have gone mad from 
boredom."

	"Remind me when this is over," Washuu said, "and I'll punch through a 
viewer to your modernized Ayel'chad Tsarrdh and pipe in to you what's 
happening with all your friends."

	"They call it El-Hazard now," the android corrected.

	"Whatever," Washuu said. "It's the place where I worked on one of my 
greatest pre-*Sohja* inventions. I even met one of your cheap 'clones'; 
they had her as protection for the conference. She was friendly with our 
gofer, Diane Vesper."

	"Diane Vesper?" Washuu-chan dai'ni said. "Wasn't that the one... "

	"Yes," Washuu said. "My opposite number encoded the activation and 
command codes for our biggest invention into her DNA once it turned out 
that they planned to turn it into a weapon, and detailed Ifrina-17 as her 
personal bodyguard. He did a pretty good job, actually," a craftsman's 
appreciation for a job well done in her voice, "looping the block of data 
recessively so that while it would reproduce itself like normal DNA, it 
would need to be doubled to activate the Divinely Punishing Dimensional 
Warping Beholder."

	The third member of the conversation stared. "Did you just say you were 
one of the scientists who invented *the Eye of God*?!" she near-yelped.

	"I believe that was what I was getting at, Ifritah," Washuu told her.

	The timer went off.


	On the hill above the valley where both the Masaki house and Nobuyuki's 
were located, Tenchi, Sasami, Mihoshi, and Kiyone had set up camp. Across 
the valley, Tenchi could see the roof of the Masaki-jinja as he hung up 
the newly washed clothes to dry. Although none of them could go too near 
that shrine, lest the present Ryohko notice them in her astral body, 
Tenchi liked to look at it. That had been, really, where the whole thing 
had started.

	Sasami tended to the dinner. She hadn't slept well the past night; she'd 
had one of *those* dreams again. That one scary lady, the one she knew in 
her dreams, had been talking at her and laughing. She'd said that genius 
was worth nothing unless you knew how to use it; really, did 'oneesama no 
baka' imagine that Sasami's father was the ONLY galactic ever to be 
charmed by a Chikyuujin woman, or even the first? Had she never wondered 
what recessive traits might lie in those Earth bloodlines that claimed 
descent from kami? Why, such a stupid person probably wouldn't even keep 
track of the children of her own blood!

	Sasami didn't like those dreams. In the dream, she had known who and 
what the scary lady was, and why it was so unfair of her to deliberately 
try to be mean; but she never remembered after she woke up. She had 
shoved the dream aside, and concentrated on the tasks of the day -- such 
as cooking dinner, which was always a pleasure.

	Kiyone was taking a hot bath in an upended oil drum while her partner 
checked something near the base of the improvised tub. "Ah," she sighed, 
luxuriating in the hot water, "gokuraku... "

	"What are we going to do?" Mihoshi asked.

	"Well, " Kiyone said, "for the time being all we can do is go along on 
the trip."

	"I'm scared," Mihoshi confessed, her woebegone face shining with 
anxiety. "What if I lose myself? There are so many people in Tokyo..."

	"Mihoshi," Kiyone said, reason mingled with faint exasperation, 
"officers of the Galaxy Police do not, as you put it, 'lose themselves' 
-- " Kiyone suddenly disappeared from the oil drum, as if she had been 
somehow *sucked* away.

	"Kiyone?" Mihoshi asked, rising and looking around. "Kiyone? Where did 
you go?" She peered into the depths of the makeshift tub. "Did you fall 
asleep?"

	It was so incredibly inconsiderate of Kiyone to vanish like that without 
telling Mihoshi where she was going!


	"YAAAHHHH!" Kiyone yelped as she fell through a dimensional hole to land 
flat on the floor of Washuu's subspace lab.

	"Oh dear," Washuu said, looking the naked police officer over. "Have I 
chosen a bad time to bring you back?"

	Kiyone looked up. "Washuu-san... " she breathed. Hastily, she scrambled 
into a squatting pose, hugging herself to try to conserve warmth. "The 
next time you bring me back," she said icily, "you might tell me 
beforehand."

	"I got it, I got it," Washuu said, raising an arm. A large fluffy towel 
fell from nowhere onto Kiyone, who wrapped it around her dripping body. 
"There's something I want you to check for me."

	"Tell me what it is," Kiyone said, getting to her feet. "I can handle 
it."

	"When I analyzed the energy-signature from the point of Achika-dono's 
disappearance," Washuu told her, "I found a correlation. It matched that 
given off when a sector station and then the Galaxy Police headquarters 
vanished." Displays flickered on the screen.

	"So that means?" Kiyone asked.

	"It's quite simple," Washuu said. To the greatest genius scientist in 
the galaxy, perhaps. "The sector headquarters disappeared right after 
that last, 'Kain' transmission of yours. The Main HQ was then taken out 
in the new timeline just before Mihoshi's birth. There's a connection."

	"Hmm... " Kiyone said. "Can you access Yukinojou and the main database 
on the *Yagami*?"

	"Of *course*, " Washuu said. "I could call up the archives of the Galaxy 
Academy if I wanted to." 

	Argh! The Academy archives! How could the greatest genius scientist in 
the universe have missed such an *obvious* source?!

	Washuu's fingers danced over the keyboard, sending Yukinojou's files 
over to Washuu-chan dai'ni while she split the giant Academy Archives 
into two parts -- one for herself and another for Ifritah. 

	"Kain... Kain..." Kiyone was muttering as she looked over Washuu's 
shoulder. Not that that would help her much; the Academy archives were 
encrypted. (Washuu, having developed the code, could read it without 
having to translate it.) "I'm sure I've seen that name on the super-A-1 
class disasters before... "

	"Look at that!" two voices said in unison. Washuu-chan dai'ni sent what 
she'd discovered up to the main screen.

	"There we are," Washuu told Kiyone. "Look at that. Age, appearance, 
gender... completely blank." She checked the Academy entry for 
"description." One word: 'dark.' 

	"Wonderful," Washuu muttered. "How are you supposed to identify it?"

	Kiyone went on reading Yukinojou's file. "Number 5-7, class A. Reported 
escaped by: unknown person self-identified as 'Tokimi.' Universal Era 
20507. General energy type: NVO. Code name: Kain. Listed as general 
disaster. Destroyed thirteen uninhabited planets and 27, 500 spacecraft, 
mostly drones, before finally apprehended with assistance from anonymous 
Jurai citizen and the Youngling Funaho.

	"Confined in the Galaxy Police Subspace Network. Considered to have the 
power to destroy even large forces of Galaxy Police. Has been confined in 
the subspace chamber of District Station Q-5 for the past thousand 
galactistandard years."

	"Hmm," Washuu said, a note of something Kiyone couldn't quite place in 
her voice. The shorter woman had reacted once, at the mention of this 
"Tokimi" whomever. "Rather out of Ryohko's present class, ne? Kain's more 
on the order of a brand-new collaxar."

	"But even if it escaped the subspace room, how could it go back in time 
and interfere with events there?" Kiyone demanded.

	Washuu looked at Kiyone much the way she had looked at her students 
whenever they had reached halfway with their reasoning and were groping 
for the next hold. "Take it from me," she told the younger woman, "if 
this whatever could *escape* from subspace, affecting the past would be 
child's play.

	"But anyway," she continued, "when we take as a given that Kain is 
traveling to Earth and plans to interfere with Achika in some way, I can 
narrow it to an 87% probability that the disappearance will happen 
sometime between 25 November and 28 November, location -- *Kindler of 
Stars* -- "

	"Tokyo!" both women cried.


	"Do the Galaxy Academy archives have anything more to say?" Kiyone asked 
finally.

	"The two main reasons they include *this* is because your 'anonymous 
Jurai citizen' turned out to be Azusa himself -- of course he wasn't the 
emperor yet," Washuu told her, "and because catching Kain involved both 
his use of his Master Key and your guys' use of the dimensional cannon."

	"The WHAT?" Kiyone said. "That thing can take out a small galaxy!"

	"Yes, it was invented by some friends of mine," Washuu said. "We'd call 
them the Three Complainsters because just about everywhere we went, 
Danaan would say 'Too cold,' Falmienzuteck would add 'Too dry,' and 
Kiraiya would chime in with 'And too damn bright!'" A smile crept across 
her face at the memory.

	"Friends of yours... " Kiyone said. She blinked and shook her head. This 
was no time for reminiscing. "We don't have a Master Key *or* the 
dimensional cannon!"

	"You have ME," Washuu informed her, "not to mention Tenchi-dono, who can 
create three Koh-oh-yoku in a pinch, *and* Mihoshi."

	Kiyone did not look noticeably comforted. "I could have been partners 
with Mitsuki like she wanted," she muttered, "but ohhh no, I had to stick 
with my sworn-kin and be a laughingstock ever afterwards..."

	Washuu glared at her. "You did read your partner's report?"

	"Ye-es..."

	"Considering that *I* created the *Sohja*, Ryoh-oh-ki, a five-planet 
subspace lab, the photon-proton synchrotron, was an instrumental member 
of the cross-dimensional team that developed superweapons such as the Eye 
of God -- we amplified the Three Complainsters' invention to be more 
practical -- and invented numerous other items too many to list here, not 
to mention the shield I whipped up for Ryohko that performs the exact 
same hiding-from-Kagato-me function as Funaho-the-tree did with 
sixty-five roots -- mine is small enough to be embedded in one of my 
daughter's replacement gems -- "

	Kiyone hastily apologized. It was just, she explained, that she was 
scared.

	"The only people who *wouldn't* be scared in this case," Washuu told 
her, "are idiots, crazy, or high."

	Kiyone smiled weakly. Then she looked Washuu directly in the face.

	"The station... they're really all gone?"

	"Everyone who was there at the time."

	"Department Head Nobeyama will never be on our case again... we'll never 
eat at our special booth at T'Liha's Restaurant... never have Kolruu in 
Forensics complain about the mess we've brought in for him *this* time... 
"

	Washuu was silent, giving the dark-haired woman time to come to terms 
with her grief. 

	Finally Kiyone angrily wiped her face with the back of her hand. "We're 
going to get this 'Kain,'" she told Washuu-san. "We're going to 
*obliterate* the bastard."

	Washuu-san nodded. "Kiyone... " she said almost hesitantly.

	"What is it?"

	"Watch out for Ryohko, will you? She still thinks she's immortal."

	Kiyone looked at the greatest genius scientist in the universe. "Part of 
the oath I swore as a cop," she said, "was to protect the civilians and 
help the hopeless."

	Washuu-san's laughter rang in her ears as the time portal opened once 
again.