Murderous rage possessed Corson for a moment. His jaw lumped, his fists doubled, his vision went dark. He drew in on himself as adrenalin poured through his veins. Then the fit passed, and he simply stood there trembling. Was this the way of the universe, that violence should evermore breed violence? Was the true visage of humanity a mask of blood? Did a grinning demon ride the back of these upstart monkeys, the specter of desolation and death? Was there any means of getting rid of it and becoming something else, something better?
Well . . . Dyoto. He thought of that utopia founded on the wreckage of war, of that world which knew nothing of compulsion and enjoyed a government so stable over six centuries that it did not require an army. That evil aspect of mankind had to be done away with, but not at the cost of violence. How, though, to ban violence without using it? How to escape the fetters of “just wars”?
Antonella had hunkered down in the middle of the aisle, and she was weeping. All the suppressed anger he had felt since she played that trick on him aboard the floater broke away from his mind like a chunk of ice falling from a roof. She was, after all, a human being like himself. He helped her to her feet and took her in his arms, hiding from her the sight of those sinister cells. He heard her sob, and wordlessly thanked her for it
Corson was hungry. He headed mechanically toward the door, as though merely going outside amounted to approaching a solution. Of course, there was a solution, and he was only too well aware of the fact If he had been alone he might even have considered it. Sol-
diers in battle were taught to feed on anything rather than die of hunger. If they didn’t learn the lesson well, they didn’t last very long. And training, rather than instinct, reminded him that they were surrounded by a vast stock of protein. But he could imagine the unspeakable horror he would see in Antonella’s eyes if he explained the price they might have to pay for their ultimate survival.
Back in legendary times there had been a name for those who devoured corpses from a graveyard.
Ghouls.
And it was a matter of historical record that people had done such things, not only during a famine. Corson wondered if the overlords of war might not be cannibals rather than necrophiles. On occasion Mongol conquerors used to dish up the most beautiful of their concubines, with their heads displayed on a golden platter, so that all might see they were not miserly. What one man could think of doing, another might do again.
The door lifted to reveal the green plain, the grass spread out like a bitter carpet, crossed by the straight blue road, and the indistinct shape of the pegasone, contentedly grazing. Corson envied the beast.
Then he spotted something lying on the road, not far away. A bag. Laid on top of it, a metal plate glinted in the milky light which filtered through the clouds. In three steps he reached it. He looked it over closely, without touching it. While they were shut inside the building someone had left these here, intending them to be seen.
The plate bore a message.
For one moment the letters danced before his eyes, and he read:
CORSON, THIS BAG CONTAINS VICTUALS. EVEN EMPTY WRAPPINGS CAN STILL BE USEFUL. THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO MAKE WAR. REMEMBER THAT. YOU MUST GO TO AERGISTAL. IT IS THERE THAT CRIMES ARE JUDGED AND SOMETIMES PARDONED. SHOUT AERGISTAL. THE PEGASONE WILL UNDERSTAND.
Someone was playing a game with them. Escaping, being stranded here—now the bag and the message. If the unknown meddler was an ally, why did he not show himself? And if he was an enemy, why hadn’t he killed them?
He weighed the bag in his hand, then opened it. Inside were a score of combat rations. Mechanically he slung it over his shoulder and reentered the mausoleum.
Antonella was standing there with her arms slack at her sides, her cheeks hollow, her eyes dark-ringed, plainly in a state of shock. But she seemed to have recovered from her bout of misery. The tears had dried on her face.
“We won't die of starvation,” Corson said, handing her the bag. “Someone has thrown us a bit of birdseed.”
Before helping himself, he watched her open one of the ration packs. Apparently she was in normal control of herself again. She tore a water capsule at the proper place, the way he had shown her, and offered it to him. He shook his head, and when she tried to insist pointed out that there were plenty more.
Finally she consented to drink, and he watched her swallow, seeing how greedily her Adam’s apple rose and fell under her delicate skin. Then, sitting on the floor, he too began to eat, drinking in sips and chewing carefully. He pondered as he did so.
According to the message, I have to go to Aergistal—where “crimes are judged and sometimes pardoned.” Could I be released, at Aergistal, from the doom hanging over me?
On the other hand, it had been or would become a battlefield. Not the sort of place he wanted to take Antonella to. But he couldn’t abandon her here. And he did not know in this new universe any safe place where he could leave her.
When they had finished, he collected up the scraps that were left over and looked for a way to dispose of them. Eventually he located a little trapdoor, raised it, and found below a black space from which rose the sound of running water. At least they would not leave a visible sign of their passage here—though his precautions would prove childish if the building were full of bugs, as it might be for all he knew.
Then he made up his mind.
“We’re going to Aergistal,” he told Antonella, showing her the message. “I don’t know what’s in store for us there. I’m not even sure if we’ll reach it.”
He expected to see alarm in her face. But she remained quite calm. It seemed that she had developed absolute trust in him, and—as he told himself sourly—that was the worst of his problems.
He kissed her lightly and led her out of the building and toward the pegasone. Having strapped her in place, he donned his own harness. He hesitated a moment, because it seemed so absurd to shout “Aergistal” as though giving an address to the computer of a city cab. He had to clear his throat. Then, in a voice that still quavered, he called it out.
“Aergistal!”
And the world around them once again became a place of crazy shapes and colors.
They emerged above a broad plain tufted with smoke. The sky was pinkish and across it ran palpitating veins, so unlike anything Corson had ever seen that he shivered. On the horizon, beyond a low but sharply defined mountain range, rose three pillars of mingled fire and ash.
They were descending rapidly. Below, what looked like sparkling insects darted and whirled. Astonished, he recognized armored knights on gaily caparisoned horses. Out of tall grass they charged with lances at the ready. A movement in undergrowth . . . and Red Indians stood up uttering wild cries, letting fly a volley of arrows at the order of their feather-bedecked chief. Some of the horses reared up, and a melee broke out—but already the pegasone’s slanting course had carried them past.
The almost invisible beam of a blazer tore the air. The pegasone shied away from it through time and space. The mountains were in a slightly different position. The plain was barren now and sown with craters.. Dull rumblings arose from it, as solid-seeming as hills of pure sound. But the sky looked just the same.
A movement attracted Corson’s attention. A few hundred meters away a monstrous mass was shifting very slowly across country. Only its geometrical form betrayed its mechanical nature. A tank? If so, it was infinitely the largest Corson had ever seen. A crater like those stamped into the ground seemed to open right in the middle of its near side, but that was illusory, due to a reflection. Corson thought it must be heading toward a low hill nearby, which might conceal a fortress or might itself be a still vaster machine. Hanging on the pegasone’s flank, he felt dreadfully exposed. He would rather have landed and sought a hiding place in this blasted terrain.
Something black and lens-shaped, with a scythe-sharp edge, came spinning from the hill toward the tank, flying a complex curve. It struck the side of the tank as though it were the blade of a circular saw. Huge sparks flashed out. Then it blew up, causing no apparent harm to the target. A bright square patch of bare metal was the only trace of the attack. The tank rumbled onward, impregnably.
Then, without warning, the rough ground opened, giving way like a pitfall under the tank’s weight. Tilting, it spat out forward extensions that struggled for purchase on the far side of the crevasse. But in vain. It tried to go into reverse, slithered, slid inexorably toward the pit. Irises opened on its sides and vomited men, in good order, wearing camouflage netting which changed color to match that of the ground and rendered them almost invisible. They hurled grenades into the pit. Flames and black smoke burst upward. The trap subsided a little farther yet, then was immobilized. But the slope was already too steep and the surface too slippery for the tank to climb out again. Finally it skidded, teetered on the very brink of the pit, and toppled forward, jamming there almost vertically. Its engines, hitherto silent, roared desperately, and quit. A few more men abandoned it and joined the others who were taking cover. A salvo of missiles darted from the hill and wiped out everything in its vicinity, making a solid layer of flame in which men were instantly consumed. The few who did escape vanished into the rugged landscape.
The whole thing could have lasted only half a minute. The pegasone had already left the fortified hill to its left. It flew so low that it had to swoop upward to avoid one outcropping hillock after another as the earth shifted in response to vast unseen forces. At last it landed in the shelter of a crag that seemed relatively stable.
Corson hesitated. He was unable to control the pegasone. So he had to rely on the creature’s instinct of self-preservation and assume that for the moment it had brought them to a place which was safe from attack either through time or in space. Of course, the pegasone might have a very different notion of what constituted an attack than did its riders. It might not bother to dodge an acid gas cloud that could dissolve their space suits. Or it might wander off by itself.
Still, Corson decided, it was worth taking advantage of this respite. He undid his straps and helped Antonella down.
He looked the scene over. Some rocks had tumbled down the hillside and offered precarious shelter at its foot. Taking Antonella’s hand, he urged her to a run. Halfway to their goal he noticed a red flower bloom on the plain. He flung himself to the ground, dragging her with him, and by rolling over and over they reached a hollow between the foot of the hill and the pile of rocks. A missile struck the hillside with a gigantic hammer blow. When the dust settled, he saw that the pegasone had vanished.
“At least that warhead wasn’t nuclear,” he said dryly.
He risked a glance over the surrounding country.
“So this is Aergistal! It looks like one vast battlefield—the father and mother of all battlefields.”
Antonella wiped dust from her faceplate. “But who’s fighting? And against whom?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Corson said. “To me the whole thing looks absolutely crazy.”
You could call this total war and mean it—or so it appeared. An ordinary war implied two sides more or less clearly opposed to each other, a shared or maybe two comparable technologies. Here, everybody seemed to be fighting everybody else. Why should armored knights be charging a tribe of Red Indians? Where could you hide the cities, the empires, which you would need to support such forces and which must constitute the stakes that they fought for? What was the nature of this pinkish and rather repulsive sky, featureless, boasting neither sun nor moon? Even the horizon looked somehow wrong, infinitely far away as though the whole of Aergistal were nothing but an endless plain. But if this was a giant planet, why should its gravity be normal or nearly so?
“The air seems to be okay,” he announced after glancing at the gauges on his sleeve. That too was a mystery, given the amount of dust and probably radiation that these ceaseless explosions must be hurling into the sky. Still, the gauges were definitely working. He took off his helmet and filled his lungs. The air was cool and odorless. A breeze brushed his face.
Once again he risked peering out from the shelter of the rocks* Clear to the slopes of the distant mountains the plain seemed to be uniformly deserted. There were puffs of smoke here and there.
A flash caught his eye and by reflex he dived to the bottom of the hollow. In front of them there was nowhere worth making for.
“We’ll have to get over the hill,” he said. “Maybe on the far side we’ll find . . . something.”
There was no hope of locating an ally, and probably not even a rational being. They were trapped in this war—this inconceivable war.
A black dot had just appeared overhead. It left a line of smoke and with it was tracing signs in the sky. The first group meant nothing to Corson. In the second he thought he detected a vague likeness to Cyrillic, used on a world he had never visited. The third was just a String of dashes. But he didn’t have to wait for the craft to complete its mission before reading the last
“Welcome to Aergistal!”
Then the black dot made off at high speed over the crest of their hill, while the symbols and letters drifted lazily toward the mountains.
With a shrug, Corson said, “Well, we might as well move on as stay here.”
As quickly as they could they scaled the steep slope. When they reached the top, he cautiously poked his head over, all his back muscles knotting at the idea of the fine target they would make if someone had a scope or an automissile trained on this spot.
What he saw astonished him so much he nearly lost his footing. The far side of the hill slanted gently down to a beach so straight it might have been drawn with a ruler. A blue and perfectly calm sea stretched away to infinity. A few cable lengths from shore a dozen sailing ships were swapping cannonballs, and a dismasted hulk was on fire. On the beach, only a few hundred meters away, two military encampments faced each other. The tents of one were blue and of the other red. Banners saluted a rising wind. Between the two camps soldiers dressed in bright colors, drawn up as though on parade, were firing at each other turn by turn. Although he was too far away to be sure, Corson thought he saw men falling now and then. He heard rolling musket volleys, the sharp cries of the officers, the sound of trumpets, and from time to time the deep boom of the ships’ cannon.
Glancing inland, he saw bulging from a hollow which hid it from the view of both armies something huge, gray, soft, and almost round. A stranded whale?
But much closer to them, at most a hundred meters distant, at the rear of the blue camp, a man was sitting quietly writing at a wooden table. He wore a blue cocked hat with a white cockade, a peculiar frock coat in white and sky blue with gold braid and epaulettes, and from his belt the scabbard of a large saber hung down to touch the ground.
Corson climbed over the hilltop and led the way toward this extraordinary scribe. When they were only a few paces from him, the latter turned his head and said without displaying either surprise or alarm, “Want to join up, young fellers? We just increased our prize money, you know. I can give you a bonus of five crowns even before you put on our fine uniform.”
“I haven’t—” Corson began.
“Ah, I can tell you’re dying to serve under Good King Victor— ‘Old Whiskers,' as we call him, you know. Conditions are good and promotion comes quickly. The war will last a century or two and you can look forward to winding up as a field marshal. As for the lady, she’ll get on fine with our jolly boys and I predict she’ll make her fortune in next to no time.”
“All I’d like to know,” Corson said, “is where the nearest town is.” “I believe Minor is the nearest,” said the man. “Directly ahead of Us, only twenty or thirty leagues away. We’re going to take it as soon as we’ve dealt with these clowns in red. I admit I’ve never been there, but there’s nothing odd about that, for the good and sufficient reason that it’s in enemy hands. Still, the trip there will be worth it. Come on, sign here—if you know how to write—so that everything is done according to the book.”
And he jingled some discs of yellow metal that awoke a vague memory in Corson. He guessed they must be cash—no, what was the word? Coik? Coins! On the table in front of the man, on either side of a big ledger, lay two peculiar hand weapons which he would have liked to examine more closely. But Antonella was squeezing his arm hard, and he felt her trembling.
“What about those ships?” he demanded, pointing out to sea.
"That, my friend, has nothing to do with us. Everybody here gets on with his own war, without worrying about what his neighbors are up to. That is, until you’ve got rid of the current opposition. Then you sign up the survivors and go looking for someone else to take on. You’re on the run yourselves, aren’t you? I never saw uniforms like yours before, at any rate.”
“We don’t want to join up,” Corson said firmly. “We only want to —well, find work somewhere.”
“Then I’ll have to persuade you, my friends,” the man said. “That’s both my vocation and my avocation.”
He seized his weapons and pointed them at Corson.
“Kindly sign your name here before I get annoyed and withdraw the offer of your recruiting fee!”
Corson flung Antonella to the ground and leaped at the table, kicking it over. But his opponent, forewarned, dodged back and pulled both his triggers. A bang deafened Corson in the same moment as he felt a violent blow on his left arm. Almost at once he also heard a sort of fizzing noise. One of the pistols had not gone off properly.
He hurled himself forward into thick smoke. The man in the cocked hat had dropped his guns and was frantically drawing his sword. This time Corson was the faster. Jumping the overturned table, he kicked him in the guts and then punched him on the temple. Not too hard. He didn’t want to kill him.
The man keeled over, clutching his belly with both hands.
Corson felt his left biceps, expecting to find that he was bleeding. But the suit had been tough enough to stop the bullet. He almost laughed aloud; he was going to escape with no more than a gigantic bruise. When he turned, though, his smile froze on his face. The explosion had attracted attention, and from the camp a small squad of men was hurrying toward them.
Corson dragged Antonella to her feet, and—pausing only to possess himself of the fallen saber—broke into a run, forcing her to keep pace. There was only one way open to them. The sole escape route led toward the hollow where they had seen what he imagined to be the body of a whale.
Explosions sent bullets whistling past their ears. Luckily, either their pursuers weren’t taking the time to aim properly or they merely wanted to scare them off. It was obvious that their guns were not self-sighting, and when the fusillade broke off, Corson realized with amazement that they did not even reload automatically. It took quite a while for them to be charged again.
Panting, they scrambled up the outer slope of the hollow. Breasting the top of the rise, they saw it was an old crater, far deeper and wider than they had expected. And the “whale” was a colossal ball of rubberized cloth, enclosed by a net. It floated in midair, tethered to a thick rope that moored it to a boulder. A wicker gondola, half in contact with the ground, hung beneath it. A man in red trousers and tunic, with a sort of turban on his head, was busy making adjustments to a whole collection of valves. His skin was a magnificent black.
He grinned on seeing Corson and Antonella approaching. The grin vanished when he noticed the saber. He reached for a gun, whose muzzle jutted over the edge of the gondola, but Corson checked him with the flat of the sword.
“We’re being chased,” he said. “Can this thing of yours carry three?”
“The regulations don’t allow—” the black man began, casting an anxious glance at Corson. Then he looked further, and saw how at the rim of the hollow heads topped with cocked hats were starting to appear.
“I think it might be a good idea to get away from here,” he finished.
Followed by Corson and Antonella, he jumped into the gondola and hastily began to tip sandbags overboard. The gondola left the ground and began to sway dangerously.
“Lie down on the bottom!” Corson shouted at Antonella. Then, seeing that the black man was wasting precious time on undoing the mooring rope, he slashed at it. A few strands parted. A second cut severed the core of the cable and a gust of wind did the rest. Suddenly released, the balloon took off like a rocket. Shots rang out, but the bullets passed beneath them. By the time the guns had been reloaded the runaways would have made too much height to be hit by the inaccurate fire of Good King Victor’s bullyboys.
Corson, clutching the rim of the gondola, pulled himself up. The abruptness of the ascent had thrown him to the wicker floor, which creaked alarmingly. He glanced at the black man, who was hanging on to the suspension ropes with both hands, and set down his saber before helping Antonella to her feet.
“Whoever’s side you’re on,” he said to the stranger, “I’m glad we ran into you. My name is Corson, and I belong to the crew of the . . ."
The words tailed away. How ridiculous to speak here of the Archimedes, a battle cruiser involved in the interstellar war between Earth and Uria! Now he really was a soldier with neither an army nor a cause to fight for, a soldier lost. And if it had not been for the enormous battlefield of Aergistal, he might well have forgotten that he was a soldier.
“My name is Touray,” said the black. “I’m a Zouave. Provost marshal and pro tem balloonist with a communications regiment. Originally this balloon of mine was supposed to be captive, but a lucky shot—or maybe an unlucky one—turned it loose.” With a wry smile. “Also I’m a qualified medical orderly, and . .
He hesitated. “And—?” Corson prompted.
“Your uniforms made me remember something. I wasn’t always a balloonist. I was an engineer. And a helicopter pilot. That’s why they wished this balloon on me.”
He started to laugh. “You see, I told them I knew a bit about flying. It seemed better to be above the battle than mixed up in the middle of it. . . And what about you? What war do you hail from?” It was Corson’s turn to hesitate.
“From a war between planets,” he said after a moment. “But I didn’t come direct from there to here.”
“A war between planets,” Touray said thoughtfully. “So you must come from a much later period than me. In my day we were just getting interested in space travel. I can still recall the day the first man landed on Mars. Quite an event!”
He jerked his thumb toward Antonella.
“What about her? Is she from the same war as you?”
Corson shook his head. “No, she comes from . . . from a period of peace.”
The black face froze. “Then she ought not to be here!”
“Why do you say that?”
“In this world there’s nobody but soldiers, warriors, people who for one reason or another have been declared war criminals. Me, I fired rockets at a village where there were only civilians, somewhere in Europe, on an island that I still remember was called Sicily. I won’t say I realized what I was doing, but I can’t claim that I didn’t know, either. That’s war for you, I’m afraid.”
A question sprang to Corson’s mind.
“You’re talking Pangal. I thought that wasn’t developed until after the invention of star travel.”
“Oh, it isn’t my mother tongue. I learned it here. Everyone at Aergistal speaks Pangal, with some local differences. Dialects, I suppose you’d call them.”
“So what was your mother tongue?”
“It was a language called French.”
“I see,” Corson said. But he didn’t; the word meant nothing to him.
His mind was swarming with insoluble mysteries. Those, though, would have to wait for an answer. So far the balloon had been drifting along the shoreline, but it was showing a disturbing tendency to wander out to sea, and that level ocean seemed to reach to infinity.
They floated over a group of galleys that were madly trying to ram each other but were hindered by the slackness of the wind and only making progress by the use of slow oars. A little farther on, they spotted some honeycomb-shaped structures that a crowd of spiderlike creatures were fighting for. There were not only humans at Aergistal, then, although in the region they had so far explored humans appeared to be in the majority. Once or twice they discerned great shadows beneath the sea.
The balloon moved farther and farther from the coast, but remained in sight of it.
“Well, it’s no good starving, is it?” Touray said, and turned to open a wicker basket that took up part of the space within the gondola.
Automatically Corson felt on his shoulder for the sling of his ration bag. It wasn’t there. He must have dropped it during his struggle with the recruiting officer.
“There’s some sausage,” the Negro said. “And some bread that’s still fairly fresh, and some red wine.”
From his loose-fitting trousers he produced a huge pocket knife and set about carving up the bread and sausage. Then he uncorked the bottle of wine and offered it to Antonella. Corson watched him with fascination.
“Never seen anything like it, hm?” Touray said, noticing his amazement. “I bet in your time you lived off pills and chemicals! But this isn’t too bad, you know. When at war you make the best of what you’ve got.”
The wine, Corson found, was warming and comforting. He bit into a chunk of bread and decided that it was time to ask a few questions. After all, here was a man who had had far more experience of this weird world.
“What surprises me,” he said cautiously, “is that the sky is practically empty. You’d expect aerial warfare to spread all over the place.” “There are regulations,” Touray said. “At least, I assume there are. In this sector of Aergistal there are no planes, no rockets and no copters. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t dogfights going on somewhere else. In fact I’d be rather surprised if there weren’t.” “Regulations,” Corson repeated thoughtfully.
“You must have noticed something right away,” Touray went on. “Nobody around here is using nuclear bombs, right? I imagine that puzzles you. But on the other side of those mountains atom bombs do go off now and then. Big ones at that!”
Corson recalled the pillars of fire and mushrooms of smoke which they had seen beyond the mountains. He nodded.
“And who makes sure the rules are obeyed?”
“If only I knew, I’d file a polite request for him to get me out of here! Oh, probably a god—or a devil!”
“Do you really think we might be in hell?”
Corson used the word readily enough, but it had little personal meaning for him. By his time, in an age dominated by cold and calculating pragmatism, its only referent was half-forgotten mythologies. And the nearest term available to match it in the galactic tongue meant no more than somewhere especially unpleasant.
Still, Touray took his point. “I’ve been wondering a lot about that,” he admitted. “But this strikes me as a pretty material kind of hell, if it is one. I managed to make some sightings on the sky as I went up and down with this balloon, and I’m convinced the ceiling is only about ten or twelve kilometers above us. Of course, even if it is made of ordinary matter, this place doesn’t look much like a natural planet. No horizon, an absolutely level surface ... Or if the planet were big enough to give this impression, we ought to have been squashed flat by the gravity in the first minute.”
Corson agreed, surprised that this man from a period so long before his own should know so much.
“I don’t think we’re in normal space at all,” Antonella said. “I can’t cog anything—not a thing. At first I wasn’t worried because our foresight does fade away now and then. But never so completely. Here it’s as though I were . . . well, as though I were blind.”
Corson stared at her. “When does your talent let you down?”
She flushed. “For a few days every month, that’s one thing. But that’s not what’s happening at the moment. And during a space flight, but I haven’t flown space very often. And when I’ve just made a jump across time, but that never lasts for long. And lastly when the probabilities in favor of several different outcomes are almost exactly balanced. But I always retain at least the ghost of the power. Here, there’s nothing at all.”
“What power is she talking about?” Touray demanded.
“Antonella’s people have a certain ability to see into the future. They call it ‘cogging’, from precognition. They can foretell events before they happen, usually a couple of minutes ahead.”
“I see. It must be like having a periscope capable of breaking through the surface of the present. But it sounds like a pretty shortsighted kind of periscope. Two minutes—that isn’t very long.”
Corson sought to organize what Antonella had told him into a pattern that would make sense. He knew that if prescience were possible—and it was—it must be dependent in some way on Mach’s cosmogonic principle, the uniqueness of each point in the universe in relation to the whole. Would a total breakdown of the power imply that they were no longer in the universe to which Antonella’s nervous system was attuned? Were they in fact dead, without remembering that they had been killed?
“You know, it’s very funny,” Touray said. “In Africa, long before I was born, there were witch doctors who claimed they could foresee the future. Nobody believed that any longer, in my day. Yet that wasn’t in the past; it was in the future they claimed they could look into!”
“What about this bread?” Corson asked, brandishing the remains of his sandwich. “Where does it come from?”
“Oh, from whoever runs this place. Now you mention it, I must say I haven’t seen plowed land anywhere, let alone factories or bakeries. But it’s always like that in wartime, isn’t it? Guns, uniforms, medicines, rations, all come from far, far away, in what might as well be a mythical country. If the war lasts long enough, you just stop wondering about that sort of thing. The only fields you see are the ones you bum over because they’re in enemy hands.”
“Where are the high command? Why do they carry on with these crazy battles?”
“Oh, they’re a long way up the ladder from you. A long, long way. In the normal course of events you’ll never see them.”
“But what if they get killed?”
“They’re replaced,” Touray said. “By those who come next in line. You see, in a really all-out war you go on fighting because for one thing there’s the enemy and for another you don’t have any alternative. Maybe the brass hats have reasons of their own, but those must be—well, brass-type.”
Corson drew a deep breath.
“But where the hell are we?” he shouted.
Touray gave him a steady stare. “I could say we’re in a balloon above a calm ocean. But that might be a delusion. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I can only offer three possible explanations. See which you prefer, or come up with another.”
“What are they?”
“First off, then: we’re good and dead and we’ve arrived in some kind of hell or purgatory, and we’re stuck here for goodness knows how long, maybe for all eternity, with no hope of escape even by getting killed. The Breathers take care of that.”
“The Breathers?”
“You haven’t been through one of those yet? No, of course you haven’t—you only just got here. I’ll tell you about those later, then. My second theory is that we don’t actually exist. We just have the illusion of existence. We may be nothing more than data, tape perforations or punched cards or electrons whizzing around in some gigantic machine, and someone’s playing a war game with us, or a Kriegsspiel, or whatever they call it where you come from, trying to find out what went on in such-and-such a battle. Or maybe what would happen if all the wars in the universe took place at once. In that case we’d simply be tin soldiers, if you get me.”
“I get you,” Corson said from a dry mouth.
“A variant of that notion would be that we do exist, but not in this world. Maybe we’re all stacked up in a vault somewhere, wired into a machine, and just imagine that we’re alive here. It could be a sort of therapy, to make us sick of the very idea of war, or it could be a show put on for somebody, or it could be an experiment.”
“How about your third theory?”
“That this universe is in fact real. Weird, by our standards, but genuine enough. And built by someone, possibly by humans—though I doubt it—to serve some purpose I daren’t even guess at. That’s the theory I prefer. Because if it’s correct, there might be a way of escaping and still being yourself.”
“There’s one thing in common between your three theories,” Corson said. “They could equally well apply to the worlds we’ve left behind.”
“The ones we remember,” Touray corrected. “Not necessarily the same thing. Are you sure we both come from the same universe? Besides, something else holds good for this world as well as the others. We have the same feeling of free will, and we’re just as incapable as we were back there of running our lives the way we’d like to.”
There was a short silence.
“How did you get here?” Corson asked at length.
“I’d rather ask you the same question. Don’t you think I’ve been talking too much?”
“Well, I don’t know whether you’d believe me.”
The black man said wryly, “Oh, I’ve learned to believe six impossible things before breakfast.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Go on.”
So Corson briefly recounted their wanderings since leaving Veran’s camp, although he offered no details of the mausoleum world.
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring you here,” Touray decided. “One of them, probably. It fits my third theory best, doesn’t it?”
And he added, “This is the first I’ve heard about—did you call them pegasones? The animals that can move through time, I mean. But I’d certainly begun to suspect that there must be a means of jumping from one century to another.”
“What about you?”
The black man leaned over the gondola and spat into the sea. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t recall very clearly. I’ve been through four, five, maybe ten Breathers since.” The capital letter could be heard in his voice. “I was gunning down everything I could see from my old Gadfly Five, when I felt a blast of heat and blacked out. And here I was, still in the copter, over what looked like the same sort of country. I didn’t notice the differences until I landed and realized I didn’t know anybody at the base. I said so. They took me to the M.O., and he said something about shock and gave me a needle and sent me back into action. After a while I gave up trying to be certain about anything. I simply decided to stay alive.”
“One thing puzzles the hell out of me,” Corson said. “The body count must be terrible in these wars. Why don’t they stop because they’ve run out of manpower? Or does a fresh supply of soldiers keep pouring in non-stop from all time and all space?”
Touray shook his head. “I told you. There are Breathers. The dead come back.”
“Somebody revives them?”
“No. But when a Breather is in the offing, the sky goes dark. Everything becomes sort of numb, time runs slower and slower, any kind of light burns dim—flames, electric lamps, anything. You feel as though you’re turning to stone. For a second or two you find yourself in an awful silence. Then everything starts over. Sometimes you’re still where you were before the Breather, but that’s not common. Usually you’re in another army doing another job. You don’t recall very clearly what was happening before the Breather; it’s as though someone started telling another story, or—or changed the record! That’s what led me to my second theory. And the dead come back and take on new roles. But they never remember having been killed. As far as they’re concerned the Breather began just before
they died. So maybe the Breathers are purely individual events. But I don’t really believe that. You get the impression that they involve the entire universe. I’m sure that the people who run this place, or manage it, must know how to travel in time and simply go back and collect the people who are about to die. Nothing supernatural about it.”
“No, of course not,” Corson said.
His beard had begun to grow out. Tugging at it, he reflected on the amazing fact that this man, this primitive soldier from the very dawn of the space age, was quite prepared to accept the idea of time travel. Still, he himself had made a pretty quick adjustment to Dyoto. And what would you expect of a soldier who was accustomed to being tossed from one theater of war to another for reasons the high brass didn’t condescend to explain? If you didn’t adapt, you didn’t last.
He was about to ask for more information about the Breathers when a vast explosion slammed at his eardrums, fiercer than any thunderclap, like two dagger points driven into his head. It was as though the universe were breaking apart.
On unseen rails the balloon swerved across the mirror-smooth sea beneath that improbable but unchanging sky. The breeze was at most fresh. But the explosion went on, grew louder, evolved through a dull rumbling into a vibration which made the suspension ropes twang, and then seemed to divide into two pure notes like a tree trunk being split by lightning: one climbed into the treble, racing up the octaves—a thousand hertz, two thousand, five, ten, and at last into the ultrasonic, still so loud it seemed to be drilling into their skulls—while another deepened, as though a giant had clutched at them, and became a hammering, then a panting noise, like the breathing of a tortured god.
The ocean . . . wrinkled. Touray shouted something, but the desperate movements of his lips were like the mouthings of someone struck deaf and dumb. Antonella clapped her hands over her ears, frightened and in pain. Corson felt tears start to his eyes, as though pressed from his very brain by the vise of the twin vibrations.
A squall grabbed at the balloon. It climbed several hundred meters and the ambient pressure diminished cruelly. The gondola tossed like a cork. Corson caught hold of Antonella and pressed her against the suspension ropes, which he clung to with both hands. The wicker creaked. The wind was so fierce now, it flattened one side of the balloon as though a giant hand were pushing it along.
Touray caught the end of a rope and lashed himself as firmly as he could. Bending double, he managed to pass the other end to Corson, who secured Antonella and himself as best he could. This was worse than riding a pegasone, he thought, fumbling to tie the knots.
Above the roar of the storm he screamed, “Is this the beginning of a Breather?”
Touray shook his head. Ashen-faced, he called back, “I—never— saw—anything like it!”
The squalls gave over, but the wind blew on. Now it was steadier, but it grew stronger by the minute, pressing Corson against Antonella; he heard—or felt—her panting. He himself was breathing quicker and deeper than usual. It was owing to lack of air. The atmospheric pressure had dropped still further.
He signaled to Touray, pointing first at the balloon, then at the ocean. The black man understood and turned his valves. The balloon dropped several hundred meters, but without the air becoming perceptibly more dense. Below, long white crests embroidered the tops of waves laden with wrecked ships. A halo of oil spread on the sea created an unlikely oasis of calm.
Hours went by. The balloon sped onward. Corson and Touray agreed that they must be traveling at a good thousand k.p.h. if the latter had correctly estimated the height of the pulsating veins that served not so much as landmarks but as skymarks. Tumbled together in the bottom of the gondola, all three of them drowsed, half suffocated.
Corson was vaguely aware that if they had been on Earth they would already have been blown a quarter of the way around it. Still the wind was not dropping. Now, it was pushing before it mountains of water so high and so solid that they might have been carved out of glass. It was insane, as crazy as everything that had gone before. They might sail on forever above this boundless ocean. They might starve to death, die of thirst or exhaustion in the gondola, but their bodies would continue on their mad career unless the suspension ropes broke and ditched them in the sea, or the balloon, leaking its hydrogen—helium—whatever—lost so much height that it stuck like a wart to the side of a rolling dune of water . . .
The gondola leaped wildly: a cable giving way. It almost pitched Corson overside, but the rope he had lashed around him saved his life. He caught a glimpse of the horizon, and uttered such a tremendous cry that for a brief moment it outdid the roaring of the wind.
There was a horizon on this planet after all. But not a mere skyline. A black streak, swiftly widening, into a band, into a wall! Its darkness was absolute, the darkness of empty space. And, incredibly, the parallel edges of this wall of shadow, instead of being curved to follow a planetary surface, were—for all any human eye could tell —perfect and unqualified straight lines.
That was where the universe came to an end.
This universe, at any rate.
And they were being hurled toward that black gulf. . .
The wind had lost a little of its violence, but the waves grew higher and ever higher as though, somewhere ahead, they were breaking against an unseen obstacle. They hollowed now into glaucous valleys hundreds of meters deep.
At the horizon the ocean stopped dead, like the edge of a table. Beyond lay the. abyss, filling the space between the sky and the sea.
“There’s only one chance left,” Touray said. “And that’s a slim one! If a Breather comes along before . . ."
There was no need for him to finish. They stared, fascinated, at the edge of the world.
“Unless the wind drops,” Corson said.
Touray shrugged. “It won’t. That’s vacuum pulling us along. This whole world is going to go the same way.”
“But why?”
“Oh, something must have broken in the big machine!”
As they drew closer, the black space became populated with lights, shining motionless points which, from time to time, winked out and reappeared as though some dark object had passed in front of them. The balloon seemed to be heading toward a patch of black even more total, even more absolute, than the rest of the wall. It was haloed by bright lines that spread in all directions like forked lightning.
What it reminded Corson of was a broken window.
And that, he realized a second later, was exactly what he was looking at. A window, shattered by something dashed against it. The moveless lights were stars. That patch of blacker-than-black was a hole through which Aergistal—or at least that section of Aergistal that included the balloon—was being sucked into the void.
A colossal whirlpool bit into the surface of the sea, near the interface. The water likewise was being emptied out into nowhere.
Corson wondered whether this space was infinite, whether the whole of Aergistal with its lunatic wars, its legions and fleets and pitiable heroes, its generals and its nuclear mushrooms, would all find peace at last among those stars. Were not the creators, or the operators, of Aergistal going to step in? Was this accident beyond their powers to cope with? Or . . . were they simply emptying a test tube? Had Touray been right to talk about model soldiers? Could it be that after all Aergistal was nothing but an artificial world, huge but not boundless, floating in space and in the course of being drained owing to damage or by deliberate decision? What would happen if, along the fissures he could see, the “glass” shattered all of a sudden? Would the sky and the land join up again? Or would the structure of this senseless world—senseless in human terms, at least —survive forever, preserved in uncorrupting vacuum?
As the balloon approached the hole, the temperature dropped and the air grew ever thinner. Oddly, however, the gap seemed to grow narrower. A moment ago it had yawned kilometer-wide. Now, at its broadest, it was only a few hundred meters across. It was repairing itself, and swiftly at that. The balloon was so close that Corson could see circular ripples cross the interface, dying at the edges of the hole.
The sea was disappearing under an icepack which drew a white line along the straight underside of that wall of space. Not a window, then! Not a wall, even—but a force screen capable of mending itself, overloaded by an inconceivable shock.
“We’re going throughl” Touray gasped. “If it doesn’t close up too fast!”
Antonella hid her face against Corson’s shoulder. He himself, panting for breath, found energy to point toward the hole. The wreck of a vast spaceship floated in the void, a little below the level of the ocean. It might have been spindle-shaped; at any rate that was the form suggested by the stem section, which seemed to be stuck to the transparent wall. In repairing itself, the force field had trapped it.
What amazed Corson was the biological slowness of the repair process. One might better term it “healing.” He only recalled force fields which, as far as human perceptions were concerned, propagated instantly over short distances. Then he reminded himself that here the energies involved were so immense that time itself could be deformed by them. The mass equivalent of that barrier must be fantastic. Long before his own day, relativity theory had shown that time at the surface of a giant star would pass more slowly than in free space.
Even more surprising was that this time-dilation effect did not apparently extend into the space surrounding the barrier. If this was indeed a field in which time was slowed, it must have immense gravitational potential. One would have expected the balloon to be hurled toward the screen so fast that it would have burned up from friction even before it crashed.
Corson found himself able to hope again. There were only a few hundred meters to go. The healing was becoming more rapid, the fissures were vanishing. The blank black patch was shrinking. All around space seemed to glisten as though newly varnished, no doubt from a side effect of the field.
Any second now! Corson reached out to protect Antonella. Crash. Bounce! The universe spun giddily. The rope he had tied around him sawed into his ribs. He rocked, fell forward. His head struck the rim of the gondola. A steep angle. He could still hear a soft noise. The balloon smashed against the barrier, the gondola rocked. Crash. Bounce. Not so fiercely now. Something resilient in the way.
Fainted.
Coolness on his forehead. He awoke. Almost at once—maybe. His head was resting on Antonella’s knees and she was wiping his face with a rag dipped in wine. He brought his hand up to his right eyebrow, which was painful, and saw blood when he withdrew it. Then he met the worried gaze of Touray.
Giddy, he sat up, and with a great effort managed to stand.
“The balloon has plugged the hole,” Touray explained.
Indeed, the gasbag was half sunk in the barrier, a good kilometer above the water, which had ceased to seethe. The underwater breach must have healed as well. The air pressure was returning rapidly to normal. Corson’s ears hurt; he pinched his nose and blew hard.
Then he leaned over the side of the gondola and stared, fascinated, into the void. Above them the sky, below them the ocean, stopped as cleanly as though they had been cut with a knife. The barrier was almost within arm’s reach. Leaning dangerously outboard, he stretched his hand toward it, but without managing to make contact. All he felt was a slight tingling which could simply have been imaginary.
Beyond was free space. But not empty space. There were stars, thousands and thousands of them in unfamiliar constellations, the sort of multicolored stars you only saw in vacuum, through a ship’s
viewport or a space-suit helmet. A red splotch shone out which might be a whole galaxy very far away. And there were not only stars and galaxies to be seen.
Among and sometimes in front of them colossal battle cruisers prowled. Naturally, in spite of their size, Corson could not perceive them directly, but they made the stars twinkle, or rather distorted the path of their light. Mass and energy, he thought. A photon being such a tiny thing, so easily turned aside . . . Under his trained eyes the mad dance of the stars took on a pattern that made sense. Out there two fleets were engaged in desperate combat. In the course of a skirmish one of the cruisers had been disabled and slammed into the barrier so violently that it caused major damage. Doubtless unaware of this cosmic accident, the others kept on with the fight, all-important to them, but reduced on this side of the barrier to a mere abstract weaving back and forth, a shaking of space that made the stars waver like reflections on a rough sea.
Vast greenish lumps were drifting on the other side of the force field. It took Corson a while to identify them. Ice! Bergs of space, the remains of however many millions of tons of water had poured through the breach.
He was aware that he was seeing hardly anything of the battle; it must go on for light-years, and all he was watching was a local dogfight. But the violence of this clash was enough to tell him something important about the nature of this space.
It was not beyond the border of Aergistal. It formed part of Aergistal. That fitted. Space wars too must have their place at Aergistal, along with air wars, sea wars, land wars. A special environment was required, so it had been provided. The model, if this universe was a model, was nearly perfect.
So who could be fighting out there in space? Humans, aliens, humans versus aliens? The wreck of the cruiser against the barrier was nothing like any vessel he was acquainted with, and for all he could tell—distances and sizes being so deceptive in space—might be a kilometer long, or many kilometers. The intact ship must have been at least three times as big. He thought he spotted a human form drifting among the debris like a fetus. But it was so far away that it might easily have been a chunk of metal.
Touray cleared his throat. The vibrations had faded. The air was calm as a stagnant pool. It was no longer necessary to shout to make oneself heard, even though a ghostly rambling continued in their battered ears.
“We’re in a bit of a mess,” the black man said.
“I’m afraid we are,” Corson admitted. He had already reviewed and rejected every possibility open to them. The suspension ropes were not long enough for them to reach the water. If they cut up the gasbag and tried to make parachutes, they might loosen it from the barrier and sink under the waves after a kilometer-long fall. There was almost no chance of the balloon breaking free by itself. And even if somehow they did manage to get down, he had no idea how they might return to solid land, after flying thousands of kilometers at incalculable speed. So here they were, stuck like flies on a wall smeared with glue.
If only one of these Breathers would occur!
At first, when Touray talked about Breathers—a name doubly apt, implying both a respite and a chance for the dead to “get their breath back”I—he had been filled with a confused, animal fear. To go through a Breather must be like dying, or witnessing the end of the world. Now here he was praying for one. But that was pointless. They Could never hope to influence the decisions of the unseen gods who had created—or were administering—this universe.
Another thing that Touray had said came back to his mind. But he was reluctant to draw all the conclusions that it implied.
Yonder in space he saw the darkness break into a kind of foam. The depths seemed to come alive, not with the random agitation of the stars, but as though—very close—a swarm of bees had appeared . . . or rather mosquitoes, flying about in no perceptible pattern. And, like mosquitoes, they were pestering the nearest of the starships, which were becoming directly visible. They dodged the ships’ fire with devilish skill. One cruiser exploded, then another. The two blasts of light briefly blinded Corson, although he had taken the precaution of shading his eyes. He wondered what would happen if a ship were blown up right against the barrier. Presumably it would withstand the shock, if the repair mechanism had functioned properly, but would it screen enough of the radiation?
Mosquitoes?
All of a sudden Corson realized what they were. Pegasones! His last doubts vanished when one of them materialized just the other side of the barrier. He recognized that girdle of lidless eyes, those six clawed feet spreadeagled on nothing, the mane of tendrils floating like the tentacles of a sea anemone, the harness, and—when the Monster turned around—the uniform which Veran’s forces wore.
Beyond the barrier the rider gave an unheard cry of surprise on spotting the gondola and its occupants. His lips could be seen moving inside his helmet. A moment later a cloud of pegasones pressed against the barrier . . . and vanished . . .
And reappeared the other side. Without apparent effort they had penetrated the force field. Encircling the balloon they waited, their guns trained on the gondola. Antonella clutched at Corson’s arm. Touray, wiping his sweaty forehead, demanded, “What the hell is going on?”
There was no time to answer. The idea which had just taken root in Corson’s mind grew into a decision. They could not expect mercy from Veran. But he might try to take them alive. With a woman like Antonella his men could have a lot of fun.
Corson ground his teeth. There was suddenly a taste of blood in his mouth. He looked up at the gasbag. Did it contain hydrogen or helium? There was no time to inquire of Touray. Well, it was a fifty-fifty chance. Hydrogen in contact with air would explode readily, though the temperature of his gun beam was not nearly high enough to initiate a fusion reaction.
Drawing the gun from the holster hidden in his suit, he calmly fired. He had time to see the gasbag rip open and a flame lick up. Then he felt fire engulfing him, and his eyes no longer saw the darkness of space, but an ineffable brilliance. He felt his hands burn, his face, his skin. His broken eardrums spared him the sound of the others screaming—and himself with them.
All he could think was: Yes, hydrogen . . .
He fell, and felt Antonella’s body against him even though he was no longer corporeal. Oddly, he was not dead. He did not even have the impression of dying. But the light was fading, even as a huge flame rushed toward him. The sky turned purple, then black. As though in the negative of a black-and-white photograph, he could make out pegasones and even their riders, frozen into expressions of amazement like comical statues. He too was struck motionless. The flame ceased to spread a few centimeters from his face ... except that he had no face any longer. He felt as though this moment of stasis was universal and would last for ever.
Then the flame went out.
The Breather ended as quickly as it had begun. Corson, who had no recollection of opening his eyes, floated in a universe of purple light, where huge tangled tubes without visible openings throbbed, stretched, bulged, and suddenly split apart into rootlets which in their turn started to grow. There was neither up nor down. Even though he had nothing to judge size and distance by, Corson felt a sensation of vastness.
I’ve gone through the roof, he thought. I’ve gone to heaven.
His limbs would not obey him, but he felt no pain: more, vague curiosity. Memories came back to him little by little. Gaps remained, but a slow process of reassembly at the border of consciousness, perhaps not too trustworthy, was filling them in.
That was how he knew that he was marooned in a very strange place. Typically, at Aergistal, one reawoke in the middle of a battle. So he must have left there. He was sure he must be on the other side of the sky. Was this another hell, a place where creatures inconceivable to man fought one another? Or had he been removed from the game because he ought not to have been in it, or because something else was in store for him?
He was alone. He knew that, even though he could not turn his head.
And then a voice broke the silence like a string of bubbles in clear water. At first he perceived it as pure music, and took a while to realize that it was addressing him. But the words remained graven on his memory as though it had been washed, made new, and was eager to be filled with knowledge.
“So you’re a war criminal, then!”
After a moment’s consideration, he answered, “And you’re a god.”
The voice started to laugh. It sounded almost childlike, but also as though among an infinity of echoes, overlapping so that one could hardly be distinguished from the next, he was hearing only the nearest and most comprehensible to him. And among that maze of sound other voices were concealed, some of them very horrible.
Yes, the voice was much like a child’s. But it could also be that of a lizard, or a spider, the fiery siren call of a star, the squeak of a rat, the stridulation of wing cases rubbed together, the whistle of the wind endowed with speech.
“We have more powers than any gods you can imagine.”
Corson hesitated. This conversation had begun very strangely. Surely he could not have been brought here for a theological argument? Or maybe that was the custom, here in heaven. He wanted to change the subject, yet at the same time he felt drawn along by the natural course of the dialogue.
I’ve been drugged, he thought, as though that accounted for everything. Then he realized what a thin explanation it was.
Curiosity, and also an urge to challenge the unknown, made him continue.
“Gods are all-powerful,” he said.
“All-powerful?” the voice repeated. “That’s just a word, an empty word. You can only endow them with powers you are capable of defining, and hence of acquiring.”
Corson pondered again. The statement did seem to make a weird kind of sense. He decided, “You’re immortal.”
Once again the voice seemed to be amused.
“Yes and no. You make no distinction between what is infinite and what is boundless. We are not immortal if you mean that our lives are infinite. Nothing is infinite in that sense, not even the universe, not even what includes the universe. But our lives are boundless.”
“Boundless?” The concept escaped him.
“We can take them back, relive them differently, modify their course. Nothing which happens during our lives is outside our control.”
“I see,” Corson said, and this time he did. Existence, for these beings, was not a fixed form cast like bronze in the mold of the past and blindly stretching ahead into the mists of the future. From end to end their existence was a malleable continuum, capable of being reshaped. They could know nothing of “before” and “after.” Their lives would have no “length.” And in fact, he asked himself, what is the “width” of a human life, or its “thickness”? These beings would view their lives as a unity, coherent and susceptible of being altered. As a result of the consequences they would change the causes. For them the present would be only a particular point of view. Therefore they must control time. Their power must stem from that ability. Just as human beings, for ages imprisoned by the limits of the distance they could cover on foot, petty even given a lifetime of a century, had conquered space and flown to the stars, so these beings had conquered time. For them men must be no more than pitiable hobbled creatures, crippled, to be regarded much as Corson himself regarded those of his ancestors who had been confined to one narrow patch of ground.
That’s a fearful power, Corson thought, and then—as though someone had offered him the chance—I’m not ready to exercise it.
“You can’t be human,” he said.
Who are they to gamble with our lives? Invaders from another galaxy, or another dimension? Pure mind, our creators, the deities of mythology?
“You will be as we are,” the voice declared.
Is that a promise or a statement of fact? How can I become like you and still remain myself when I can’t even imagine how to use a power like yours? Or could these be the distant descendants of mankind? The talent Antonella’s people have: could that foreshadow the master power? How many billions of years lie between the primitive being Corson and this unheard-of posterity which judges him?
“Did you appear—after us?” he asked.
The amusement in the voice this time calmed him instead of irritating him.
“We did not appear ‘after’ you,” it said. “We are in the same time as you because we fill the whole of duration. Our two existences are coextensive, as you might say. But in a very special sense, if it will comfort you—yes, we did come after you. We were born from you.”
So they are our descendants. And at the same time far, far older than us. From that point in the future where their branch and ours separated, they have invaded the whole of the universe of which we occupy a petty little corner. They were born of us, yet they have been there since our beginning.
“What about other species—the Urians, for example?”
“There is no difference,” said the voice.
No difference! That was a categorical answer. And it’s too soon to ask for an answer to the answer.
“Where are we?” Corson asked diffidently.
“Outside the universe, on its surface, on its skin. One must step outside a totality before one can comprehend and alter it.”
The crust of the universe. Is that why ordinary laws of physics don’t apply at Aergistal, why these beings can do whatever they choose? And what lies beyond?
He posed the question. The voice replied, “The universe in its own right. Something which has nothing to do with time or space. The exterior never influences the interior and therefore is not directly knowable.”
Dead end. Is there a limit to the power of these beings, or does the only limit lie in the poverty of the concepts I have at my disposal?
Corson decided to return to the subject of his predicament.
“Are you going to sentence me?”
“You have already been sentenced.”
“I’m no criminal!” Corson protested with sudden impatience. “I never had any choice—”
“But you will have the choice. You will have the chance to undo what you did, to break the chain of violence, cancel out a series of wars. You are going back to Uria. There you will be cured of war.”
“Why do you need me? Why can’t you use your own powers to suppress all wars?”
“War is part of the history of this universe,” the voice said. “In one sense, we too were born of war. We want to wipe out war, and we shall succeed—we have succeeded—with the help of those who wage it, in their own interest, in order to become what they could be. But we cannot share our powers with beings who have not overcome war. Perhaps in the ultimate analysis we could suppress war by using our powers, by using force. But that would be a contradiction in terms, for we would be struggling against ourselves. We have undertaken to remake this universe. A universe is remade with what it is made of. Aergistal is a means to an end. It has three functions. The first is to eliminate war. Aergistal breeds, sooner or later, dedicated devotees of peace. To eliminate war you must comprehend it, so Aergistal contains an immense number of battlefields. Conflicts between empires, worlds, or species do not exist at Aergistal except as background, as far-off motivations. For we know that war is not only kept going by actual conflict of interest, but spreads and perpetuates itself of its own accord, even when the proximate causes have disappeared, and well beyond what is justified by the stakes. War possesses a structure whose aspects are manifold, but only its aspects. The test tubes of Aergistal enable us to comprehend war and make those who fight comprehend it too.”
War as an organism! Something endowed with a modicum of autonomy, bom perhaps at the moment of actual combat but feeding thereafter on the substance and energy of those involved!
Corson seized on the idea because it would explain so much, even though not without some residual confusion. For example, it accounted for the fact that—before Corson’s day—there had been wars in every period of human history, under no matter what type of government. Regularly, a group of people would undertake to abolish war and never achieve it. At most they would manage to damp it down, create an oasis of peace lasting a century or so, rarely a millennium, between conflagrations. And usually their followers undertook to enforce peace by means of war.
Why was that war raging between the Solar Powers and the Empire of Uria? For economic reasons? Because of the ambitions of the high command? Or the fear of the populace? All those reasons had some weight, but there had to be another to potentiate them. The Urian war had been a surrogate for one which threatened to break out between the human planets, whose origin could be traced back to treaties badly drafted long ago that in their turn were the outcome of still more ancient wars. Doubtless from there one could go back and back clear to the war which had laid Earth waste, millennia before Corson was born, and impelled men to the conquest of the stars by condemning them to temporary exile. And further back yet, to the first battle of all, when one pithecanthropus raised a rock to strike another.
And it had been the same in the history of other species. Or al-
most all of them. All those at any rate which were represented at Aergistal.
We’ve often wondered what we were fighting for, Corson thought. But never, or not often enough, why we were making war. History is diseased. We are ants struggling one against another for reasons which we imagine to be obvious but which mask a gigantic mystery, an absolute lack of knowledge. And Aergistal is a laboratory . . . or an array of culture dishes.
"The third purpose of Aergistal,” the voice said, “is to preserve war. War is one of the activities of life. It’s part of our heritage. It could be that we shall need its techniques. Something might emerge on the exterior of the universe. Aergistal is a frontier, and a rampart too.”
The voice had suddenly become strained, or perhaps touched with sadness. Corson tried to imagine the Outside, but that total abstraction defeated him. Utter blackness. Untime. Unspace. Nothing, yet perhaps something else. If I were a number, Corson thought, say, the number one, how could I imagine the number of numbers, the last number of all?
“To eliminate war,” the voice said. “To comprehend war. To preserve war. The choice will be granted you. You will be sent back to Uria to solve a problem. If you fail, you will come here again. If you succeed, you will be free. In your own time you will no longer be a war criminal. But above all you will have made a step forward.”
The air around Corson grew thick. Walls materialized on all sides of him. He found himself stretched out in a long box of metallic appearance. It resembled a coffin.
Or a tin can.
“Hey!” Corson shouted. “Give me weapons—give me something!”
“You have a brain,” the voice said with finality. “And you will get what help you need.”
“The Security Office—” Corson began.
“We have nothing to do with them,” the voice said. “All they deal with is the Epoch of the Triple Swarm, and what’s more in only a single galaxy.'’
In sum, Corson said to himself before he Sank into darkness, a pinch of dust. . .
Minos, the fabled judge of the dead. A tribunal from which there was no appeal . . . Corson was dreaming, and dimly knew that he was doing so. He pondered what he had heard, and thought now and then of Antonella.
Damned pacifists from the end of time, unable to do their own dirty work. We’re pawns between their fingers, the tyrants! Motionless, I spin and tumble between the meshes of this web of lives, dropped from the palm of a god. Do what you like, the god has decreed, but stop your row, stop these wars which spoil my dreams.
The web was woven of human bodies. Every knot was a man and each held in his hands the ankles of two other men. And so on to infinity. And these men, naked, fought and shouted insults, tried to scratch or pull close enough to bite. From time to time one lost his grip and was at once swallowed up in the abyss. A hole appeared, soon filled in by an incomprehensible slipping of the mesh. And Corson passed between their outspread limbs like an unseen fish.
He dreamed that he woke up. He was wandering in a vast and splendid city. Its towers climbed to the sky, not like masts but more like trees, dividing and forking to comb the wind. Its streets, like lianas, were thrown out over emptiness.
He felt an anguish grip his heart which at first he could not ac-
count for. Then the reason for his presence came back to him. There was a box hanging against his chest on a sling, and that was a machine for traveling in time. On each wrist he had a sort of watch, and those were chronometers built with the uncommon precision required if he were to read and master time. On the crystal of each watch was painted, or maybe engraved, a thin red line radiating from the center and marking an exact hour, minute, second. From the position of the long hand he could tell that barely five minutes remained before it would reach the red line. And on the upper side of the time-travel device, figures were displayed one after another to tell him the same thing, counting minutes and seconds and fractions of a second. He knew the machine was set to throw him into the past —or the future—just before the hand reached the line.
Red. Something terrible was about to happen. Yet in the city all was quiet. No one there guessed what was in store. And as the cause of his anguish grew clearer, as he remembered more of the details, he wondered how he could await the moment of his deliverance without starting to scream.
All quiet in the city. The wind rocked the hanging roads, the tapering branches of the towers, slowly back and forth. A woman played with a polished pendant around her neck. In a garden an artist was carving space. Children were chanting as they tossed into the air colored balls which revolved around each other before falling lazily to the ground. To Corson the dreamer, the city resembled a sculpture, almost immobile overall yet composed of microscopic elements individually in motion.
In less than two minutes the city would be destroyed by nuclear missiles that were already on the way, bellowing in the stratosphere, leaving in their wake the complaint of the space tortured by their drive. The imminence of destruction seemed incredible to the dreamer, yet its exact instant was marked on the crystals of the two watches. He knew that he would escape the destruction and retain only the image of the city at peace. He would not witness the brightness of a thousand suns and the melting of the towers like warm candles and the eruption of lava from the bowels of the earth and the vaporization of bodies before they had time to catch fire and later—much later—the shriek of tortured air. He would know of its destruction only as a distant event, something historical and abstract.
And then he realized something which he did not remember, which his time machine was incapable of sparing him.
It happened abruptly. The city was tranquil. Then the woman started to scream. She tugged so violently at the chain around her neck that she broke it and flung the polished metal plate away from her. The children fled in panic, weeping. A cry that the very city seemed to utter assailed the stranger. It sprang from millions of throats, millions of mouths. It challenged the high pale towers. It sounded nothing like a human voice.
Corson heard the city shriek like a great beast tearing itself apart, bursting into a multitude of frightened cells that no longer shared anything except terror.
He wanted to put his hands over his ears, but could not. Now he remembered. The inhabitants of this city could foretell the future, sense just a few moments ahead, and they knew what was going to happen.
They knew bombs were going to fall. They would scream until the explosions overtook them. They already perceived the fire and the fierce light and the utter darkness.
And he, the stranger, the dreamer, knew there was nothing he could have done, that he had had no chance to warn them. He had not even had time to tell them of their end before they saw it with their inward sight. He was not to see the city die, but he was hearing it scream.
The long hand had nearly reached the fine red line, but it seemed to the stranger, the dreamer, that this final instant was lasting dreadfully long. A frightful thought jolted his mind: suppose the device on his chest was not a time machine? Suppose he was merely one of the inhabitants of the city, doomed like all of them to disappear?
He opened his mouth. The time machine operated. He was saved. Alone. Completely alone.
He was somewhere else and the cry was no longer audible. He tried to recall it. He knew he was dreaming and that he had had this dream before. On his wrists the two infallible chronometers marked an inexorable and identical time. He was the master of time. Before him lay a low and level city furrowed with canals, stretching along the shore of a violet sea.
He began to moan, alone, in silence which was barely disturbed by the song of birds. Someone very far off turned toward him, not understanding.
Darkness and six metal walls that scarcely left him room to move his hands. He was lying on his back. His weight felt about Earth-normal, plus or minus ten percent. He was no longer afraid.
He pushed hard against the lid of the box, but in vain. Then someone or something grazed the metal and a bright line appeared along one of its edges. A moment later the box opened out and Corson, blinded by a strong light, tried to sit up.
The air stank of chlorine. He had fallen into the clutches of the Urians. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he managed to make out three silhouettes leaning over him, vaguely humanoid, but with horny beaks, too-small heads each topped by a crest, long thin necks, scrawny arms, short stocky bodies with prominent sterna.
So he had gone clear around the universe only to wind up as a guinea pig under a Urian scalpel.
He expected it to hurt.
"Do not be afraid, man Corson,” whistled one of the Urians.
Wooden-limbed, Corson managed to force his body into a sitting position and looked about him. The room was vast, hung with silken draperies, windowless and with no visible means of egress. It reminded him pretty much of how Urian interiors had been pictured at the time of the war, back on Earth.
Do the overlords of war make a habit of delivering war criminals into the power of their enemies?
A Urian who seemed to be older than the others was perched on a sort of throne which, to Corson, resembled a hen roost. Urians had evolved along a line very similar to that of Earthly birds. Their appearance suggested the fact, and it had been confirmed by dissection of dead bodies—at least that was the official story—which the humans had got hold of. In their brains the cortex was relatively underdeveloped, but by contrast the cerebellum was very large. Among Earthmen a lot of jokes had circulated about “bird-brained Urians.” But Corson had never fallen for that line. He knew that even on Earth certain birds, even including the common crow, displayed surprising intelligence, and he was only too well aware of the mental acuity of the Princes of Uria. Much of a human brain is devoted to decoding and interpreting sensory data, and a relatively small part to abstract reasoning. In the case of Urians, sensory powers were limited by human standards. Although their sight was generally keener than a man’s, their color perception was far inferior, while their hearing was so poor they had never invented any music apart from simple rhythm. Their sense of touch was handicapped by the structure of their prehensile organs—claws rather than hands—and by the vestigial down covering their bodies. But they displayed a remarkable gift for abstract reasoning and philosophical argument.
“So they have sent us a human,” the old Urian said with obvious distrust.
Corson cautiously tried setting a foot on the floor.
“Before you attempt anything rash,” the old Urian went on, “it would be best for me to advise you of certain facts. Not that we have anything to fear from you”—he pointed, and Corson realized the other three Urians were training weapons on him—“but we paid rather a lot for you, and I should be sorry to see you come to any harm.”
He rose and poured for himself a large mug of some cloudy liquid. Corson knew what it must be: a solution akin to domestic bleach on Earth. The Urians’ taste for ammonia had, in his day, been another popular subject for jokes.
“You’re a war criminal. You cannot leave this world without running the risk of I know not what punishment at the hands of your own kind. On this world, if you were free, you would very quickly learn that this drawback markedly reduces the range of options open to you. Therefore you are obliged to deal with us, and even rely on us. You have no choice.”
He preened himself for a moment, long enough to let what he had said register in Corson’s mind. Then he continued, “For our part, we have need of a specialist in the art of warfare. We purchased you, at a high price as I mentioned, from a go-between you have no need to know about.”
He approached Corson with that waddling gait which made Urians so much resemble giant ducks, gorgeously clad in sumptuous fabrics, but mortally dangerous.
“I am Ngal R’nda. Remember that name, man Corson, for I have no intention of failing in what I plan to accomplish, nor of having to live with the knowledge of defeat, no matter how unlikely that may be. Moreover you are the only human to be acquainted with me in this guise. For the rest of your kind I am a peace-loving old fellow, rather cynical, toying with the arts after the human style, and a part-time historian. As far as those who stand before you are concerned”—he made a grand gesture—“I am the true Ngal R’nda, sole descendant of a long line of Urian Princes, hatched from a blue egg. You can have no idea, man Corson, what a blue shell used to mean in ancient times ... or what it still does mean today to a clawful of loyal initiates. More than six thousand years ago Princes of the Blue Shell ruled Uria. Alas, men came to us bringing lies by the shipload, and soon there was a war. A long and dreadful war, during which more than once Earth came close to perishing beneath the beak of Uria. But nobody won. Only the Princes of Uria lost. Slaughter and exhaustion spawned a bastard peace. Humans and Urians granted one another concessions on their respective planets as a gage of good will. But it turned out that Urians could not live on Earth without wasting away, so they gave up their so-called privileges. In contrast, here on Uria humans flourished, and in a little while those who had been hostages turned into masters. Their offspring outnumbered ours. Above all they showed that they were able to apply their coarse wits, with unbelievable doggedness, to problems beneath the dignity of the Princes of Uria, who were more concerned with higher meditation. Thus it came about that the Princes of Uria lost a war which the Earth people had not won and during which Uria had not tasted defeat Oh, the treachery, the foul treachery of peace!
“And worse was to follow. Shaken by war and undermined by the debasing contact of humans, Urian culture abandoned the tradition of respect for the Blue Egg. False egalitarian myths were sown among us. The Urians lost their pride, vegetated, yielded their world inch by inch to humans without even fighting for it
“Days turned into centuries, then millennia. But the purest down of Uria—let me call it the finest flower, to make it clear for you—has not forgotten. Perhaps the time has come to shake off our yoke. According to what we hear, the Galactic Security Office is in trouble, and will need to give up its meddling for a century or two. That’s more time than we need to rebuild a fleet and take the road of conquest again. But before that we must seize back our own world and cleanse it of humans.”
He darted his gaze toward Corson, who stared back unmoving at those vertical irises between double lids.
“And this is where you come in. We have forgotten the practice of war. Not the theory, because it is our custom to speculate on every kind of subject, but the hard practice. We possess fearful weapons, the very ones which the most farsighted of the Urian Princes hid in the depths of the planet over six thousand years ago. But we need a cunning, stubborn animal like you to tell us when and where to strike. I do not underestimate humans; I merely find them contemptible, which is not the same thing. And during my long nights of meditation I have been saying to myself: use against humans that keenest of weapons, another human.
“Raise no objections, man Corson. Your interest lies with us. You have been judged, condemned, and discarded by your own people. There is no safety for you among them. Whereas if you enter the service of the glorious Blue Egg of Uria you will be free, as free as any Urian, and you will come to lord it over human slaves. If you were to decide to oppose us, man Corson, your will power alone would not prevail. We are expert in forbidden sciences and we have not forgotten the experiments we carried out six thousand years ago on some of your species. I am afraid, though, that afterward you might not be much like yourself.
“And you are not the only individual at our disposal, man Corson. These days there is a considerable trade in warriors. On many worlds there are beings who desire to get rid of the overweening Security Office and who are buying mercenaries at a good price. For the most part there is nothing the latter want more than revenge. Hate for their own species multiplies their skills by ten. I hope, man Corson, for your sake and ours, that we have not been misled concerning your talents. For you are committed to a course from which there is only one way out: to win for us!”
“I understand,” Corson said.
Urians had a reputation for being talkative, and this one was no exception. But he had not mentioned what Corson most wanted to know: the date. Had he returned before or after his first visit to Uria? Did this new danger coincide with the other two, the Monster at large in the forest and Veran’s lust for conquest? Was that coincidence not far too great? Was there some compensatory principle which made it possible to delay a catastrophe, but not avoid it?
And that name, Ngal R’nda. Floria Van Nelle had uttered it: “Ngal R’nda is one of my best friends.” Since, at the time, he had attached little importance to it, it was odd that he should now recall it so distinctly.
He realized that asking for a date would be pointless; he had no idea what the year of his first visit was called in the Urian calendar. But there was one landmark he might invoke.
“Has a wild pegasone been reported recently on Uria?”
“You ask peculiar questions, man Corson. But I see no harm in answering that. No wild pegasone has been seen on this world for centuries and perhaps millennia.”
So there are two alternatives. Either all this is happening before I landed on Uria, or else it’s just afterward, while the Monster is hidden in a burrow getting ready to bear its eighteen thousand young. In the second case, the margin of error is reduced to at most six months . . .
“Very well,” Corson said. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll march with you. That is, if you have an army.”
“An army is an unsophisticated means of waging war.”
“What is your means, then?”
“Blackmail—assassination—propaganda."
“Very sophisticated indeed!” Corson said ironically. “But you’re going to need an army as well.”
“We have weapons that do not require operators,” the Urian said. “From this spot I can wipe out anything on the planet from a whole city to a single twig. Or any human being, wherever he may be . . . including you, of course.”
“Then why do you need me?”
“You are to tell us what targets are most suitable for attack, and what rate of escalation should be adopted. Your suggestions will be carefully analyzed before being put into effect. You will also be in charge of negotiations with the humans. After that they will detest you so much you will no longer be tempted to betray us.”
“What conditions are you laying down for their surrender?”
“To begin with, nine out of ten women are to be put to death. Human breeding must be kept within reasonable bounds. To kill men would be pointless, for one man may fertilize many women. But women are the weak spot in your species.”
“They won’t let that be done to them,” Corson said. “They’ll defend themselves like demons. Humans can be very tough if they’re needled too often.”
“They will have no option,” said the Urian. “It will be that, or extermination.”
Corson scowled.
“I’m tired and hungry,” he said. “Are you intending to go to war this minute, or do I have time to rest and refresh myself . . . and think things over?”
“Yes, there is time,” said the Urian.
He gave a signal to the guards, who lowered their guns and closed on Corson.
'Take him away,” the old Urian said. “And treat him gently. He is worth more than his weight in element 164.”
Corson was gently awakened by a Urian whose cropped crest and yellow tunic indicated he was of a low servant caste.
“Man Corson,” the native said, “you must prepare yourself for the ceremony.”
Too sleepy for the moment to ask what ceremony, Corson allowed himself to be led into an ablution room whose fitments were ill designed for humans. The water stank of chlorine and he used it sparingly; nonetheless he managed to wash and even shave. Then the Urian gave him a yellow tunic like the one he himself wore. Although it had obviously been altered specially for Corson’s benefit, the sleeves were too short and the hem dangled around his feet. The Urians’ vaunted knowledge of human anatomy did not extend to the tailor level, it appeared.
Then he was taken to a refreshment room. Human and Urian metabolisms differed so radically that what was food for one was poison for the other, and at first Corson was dubious about what was set before him. However, the giant bird reassured him.
Having sampled the food and found it better than it looked, he inquired what ceremony he was being invited to.
“A Presentation of the Egg, man Corson,” the native answered in a solemn tone.
“What egg?” Corson asked with his mouth full.
He thought the Urian had suddenly been taken ill. Chirping noises issued from his beak, which Corson assumed to be either oaths or some sort of ritual formula.
“The Most Honorable Blue Egg of the Prince!” the servant forced out at last, as though his bill were stuffed with capital letters.
“You don’t say!” Corson exclaimed in surprise.
“No human has ever witnessed a Presentation of the Egg before. You are extraordinarily lucky, and it’s a great honor that Prince R’nda is bestowing on you.”
Corson nodded. “I can believe that.”
“And now,” the Urian said, rising, “it is time to go.”
He escorted Corson to a large elliptical room, devoid of openings apart from its door. Since falling into the clutches of the Urians, Corson had not seen a single opening of any kind giving on to the exterior. This secret base must be buried far below ground.
A hundred or so Urians were crowded into the room, preserving a respectful silence. They parted to let Corson and his guide through to take their station at the front, and he noticed that those present wore tunics of different colors and were grouped by hues. Corson and the Urian servant were the only ones wearing yellow in the foremost rank. All the others were uniformly dressed in violet, shading toward blue. Corson heard a cackling noise around him and had no trouble in guessing that his neighbors must be high-class nobles if they allowed themselves to indulge in such a breach of etiquette. Turning his head, he looked toward the back of the room. Behind those in violet, others wearing red were dutifully waiting; beyond them again were more in orange, and right at the far end were a few in yellow standing with their heads bowed.
Before him, almost at the extremity of the ellipse formed by the walls, an oblong block of metal reared up. Was it a chest, a table, or an altar? A shiver ran down his spine.
I hope I’m not scheduled to be sacrificed, he thought half jokingly. I’d rather not be cast in the role of one of those young virgins you find in historical novels!
In fact he had nothing of the kind to fear. The Urians had never invented the concept of divinities to be placated. They only accorded symbolic honors to their dead. Their world view—if that was the proper term—was founded exclusively on the idea of the clan. That was regarded as immortal, and the individual only as its transitory appendage.
The lights went down. An opening appeared in the wall at the tip of the ellipse, behind the block of steel. It widened, and complete silence fell. Ngal R’nda stepped through. He wore a sumptuous toga of brilliant blue, almost metallic, its folds trailing on the ground. He took his station behind the four-square block, facing the audience, raised his scrawny arms over his head, and declaimed a few words in archaic Urian, to which the crowd uttered a response in a shriller tone.
They are very much like us, Corson thought, in spite of our different origins. Is that pure chance? Or must intelligence always follow more or less the same paths?
Ngal R’nda fixed his yellow eyes on Corson. In a whistling voice he said, “Look, man of Earth, and see what no human has ever seen before!”
The metal block opened and slowly there rose from it an engraved column supporting a huge eggshell mounted on three claws of gold.
Corson almost burst out laughing. So this was the blue egg that Ngal R’nda was so proud of having hatched from! Someone must carefully have collected the pieces and stuck them together. From where he stood he could see the joins, like the sutures of a polished skull. What Ngal R’nda wanted was to put his followers in mind of his inheritance. Showing them the Blue Egg, he evoked the glorious saga of Uria, the long ancestry of their warlike princes. Without this egg Ngal R’nda, regardless of his personal talents, amounted to nothing. The egg was the indisputable sign, the ultimate proof, that he belonged to a family described in legend.
In spite of himself Corson was fascinated by the egg. The scientific part of his mind recalled scraps of history. Before the First Communal Civilization, back on Old Earth, families had played a role comparable—at least superficially—to that of the clans on Uria. In those days it was best to be born into a powerful family. The brutal destruction of the Communal Civilization, brought about by the Coexistence War, and the subsequent dispersion among the stars of mankind fleeing a planet rendered temporarily uninhabitable, had not however restored to families their former importance. Sociologists—at the time of Corson’s “first life,” as he was now coming to call it—claimed that that was because man had passed a threshold of technological achievement whose effects could not be undone. But why then had the Urians reached a comparable level without evolving past the stage of a society based on heredity? In the light of historical science, that smacked of paradox.
The solution, Corson told himself, was under his very nose. The Urians—or their upper caste, at any rate—must have practiced a ruthless system of genetic selection almost since the dawn of their history. They had discovered, possibly by trial and error, that the color of an eggshell had some connection with the intrinsic qualities of the Urian who would hatch from it. And no doubt it was much less emotionally exacting to decline to incubate, or even to smash, a motionless egg than to expose or kill a helpless squalling little creature like a baby . . . though even that had been done by some human societies. Still, the fact that the practice had been institutionalized indicated that humans and Urians were indeed profoundly different.
“Look, man of Earth,” the Urian repeated. “When I die, this egg will be pulverized as were those of my ancestors, and its dust will be mingled with my ashes. Behold the egg I came from, which first was broken by my own beak! Behold the egg which sheltered the last Prince of Uria!”
Uproar broke out at the back of the room. Ngal R’nda made a sign and the egg vanished back into the chest. A yellow-clad Urian who had with difficulty forced a way through the throng pushed Corson aside and bowed before his prince, chirping in an acid-shrill voice.
Ngal R’nda listened, then rounded on Corson and spoke in Pangal.
“A horde of armed humans has taken up a position fifty kilometers from here. They are accompanied by Monsters—that is, by pegasones. They are fortifying a camp. Is this some act of treason on your part?”
Veran!
“Not at all, Prince,” Corson said, trying to hide a smile. “As I told you, you need an army. And it’s just arrived.”
They were walking through the forest.
It was strange to think that at any moment now he was about to fall, along with Antonella, into Veran’s hands. . .
A circle was being closed. Somewhere out yonder he was living his life for the first time, in ignorance, and here he already knew the outcome: the suffering, the camp, the flight in the wake of the masked stranger, the voyage through time, the fruitless stopover on the mausoleum world, the mad leap to the end of the universe, Aergistal, its battles, the balloon, the earthquake, the other side of heaven, the god’s speech, the return to Uria. Here and now.
Yonder he had entered, yonder he was this moment entering, a maze that ran clear around the universe and doubled back so tightly on itself that Corson was no longer separated from his own past by more than the thickness of one of its walls.
Now the maze stretched ahead of him, as completely unfathomable as it had been in the past. But because he knew what was going to happen to the other Corson, this scrap of the maze he was at present passing through took on a little sense. Back then, he had known nothing of the third threat looming over Uria, nor had he known how to cope with the other two. Now a faint idea had come to him. The future would reveal the rest, he was sure of that.
He had an intuition. That man from the mist, that pegasone rider with a mask full of darkness whom Antonella had said resembled him . . . would be him. Therefore he did have a future. The maze would fold back on itself again, and perhaps again and perhaps an infinite number of times, and he would repeatedly brush past himself until finally his selves would meet. And that Corson-to-come would know a new section of the maze because he would have explored it, and perhaps he would be able to grasp the plan and purpose of it, and thus apply the proper touches to change his life.
He recalled what the god had said. In that far distant future they controlled their own existence, and their destiny was no mere thread stretched from birth to death, but a whole fabric, or rather a multidimensional warp and woof outlining a space. The gods, he said to himself, create a universe simply by becoming themselves.
He also knew that in the future he would meet Antonella again because she recalled having met him. And he would lose her again because she had fallen in love with him and was sorry that—at the time when she had picked him up on the street in Dyoto—he had found out. He told himself that now in his turn he had fallen in love with her and regretted it and nonetheless hoped that at long last the tangled skeins of their lives would knot together. That was a possibility still hidden in the folds of time. There were these two points— fixed, he presumed, and known by his future self—where he would set himself free and where he would meet Antonella, and he hoped that they defined a curve which, somewhere in time, would be shared by both of them.
But for the moment he had to wait for the future to happen. Because the predetermination of those two points depended on what he did. He must carry out his duty well. Who had imposed that duty on him? Perhaps another self, still further away from the present, who had chosen to disperse the clouds shadowing Uria. What more trustworthy ally could he have chosen than himself? So that the man of tomorrow might live, the snares of the past must be avoided by the man of yesterday who knew nothing about them.
He recalled the hesitations of Ngal R’nda as though they were already ancient history, whereas in fact they were only a few hours old. The Prince protested that he had no need of Veran. He distrusted humans and despised them so much that he would only listen to them when he had bought them. The weapons he showed off would be sufficient, in his view: gray balls of metal which could unleash lightning on the other hemisphere, glass cannon as slim as needles which could blast through mountains, and images to be projected on the sky which could afflict a whole army with amnesia. And the whistling voice declared that in the war of six thousand years ago the Urians had been beaten by traitors infiltrating their ranks and not by force. Corson almost believed him. Granted, Earthmen also had shields of terror and lances of nullity. The match might have been an even one. But the outcome of the present was therefore all the more certain. Those humans, and those giant birds, who took the side of peace would last no more than a day.
Corson had said again, “You need an army.”
Stubbornly, and bearing in his mind the image of millions of women dead, millions of men enslaved, he had argued the need to occupy the territory you conquered, and repeated with determination, “You do need an army!”
And he had added, “Tomorrow you will have command of space. You’ll need a fleet, and specialists to man it. How many people can you count on?”
The Urian had seemed to ponder, and Corson pressed his advantage. “How many loyal supporters have you?”
With surprising frankness the Urian had answered, fixing him with those flat yellow eyes, starred with an overbright speck of blue: “Five hundred, possibly a thousand. But the Urians who are now wallowing in human styes, at Dyoto and Sifar and Nulkr and Riden, will fall in behind me under the banner of the Blue Egg.”
“Yes, of course they will. How many of them?”
“Perhaps thirty million.”
“So few!”
He had bitten his lip at that. During the long-ago war, not millions but billions of Urians had threatened the Solar Powers. No doubt, given the opportunity by galactic peace, many had emigrated to other worlds. But Corson could guess at another factor, the story of a race doomed by peace because a taste for war and conquest was inscribed too deeply in their genes. Before him was the rage and cruelty distilled by a long period of decadence.
There were men who owed to their heredity an uncontrollable taste for aggression. They possessed one gene too many. Although physiologically viable, to a certain extent they were monsters. Society, in the old days at any rate, exterminated them or shut them away, gave them a chance to escape their fate. Was it possible that whole species might become, from that point of view, monstrous— with no choice but to fight or wither away? The destiny of men was not all that different; they had just been lucky to have a temperament enabling them to endure peace.
Corson was surprised to find himself thinking: the Urians have no future.
Which implied something else. War has no future.
But right now he was compelled to wage one.
He had said, “You do need an army. There is the question of Occupying forces. Veran is a mercenary. Promise him plenty of battles and an empire afterward. And there’s another thing. I mentioned that wild pegasone. In a short while there are going to be thousands of them ravaging this planet. How are you going to cope with them? How are you going to avoid being threatened on your home world? Check your records. Consult your experts. Pegasones can stand up to your weapons. All they have to do is jump through time. Veran knows how to track them down and wipe them out. He has tame pegasones. Make an alliance with him, then. Liquidate him later. Are you afraid of one old sweat and a few hundred soldiers?”
The Urian closed his twin eyelids.
“You shall go and parley with him, man Corson. You will be escorted by two of my staff. If you try to cheat me, you will die.”
Corson knew he had gained the little leverage he was after.
They were walking through the forest and the dead scales of trees that were nothing like Earthly trees were crunching under Corson’s feet. The Urians went without a sound. Fragile creatures, those. They had inherited hollow bones from their ancestors. He could lay them out, croaking, with two punches. But they were grasping deadly weapons in their talons, and moreover he had need of them.
His first night on the planet, the darkness had been as deep as this. And—just like now—he had eavesdropped on the noises of the forest, trying to make out where the Monster had laired. Now he had to deal with a new monster, a human one called Veran.
They had left their floater behind, far from the camp, hoping that they might approach unnoticed in the confusion caused by the attack, or rather by his and Antonella’s getaway. He consulted his watch. This very instant they must be crossing the camp under the guidance of the unknown who was himself. They were approaching the pegasones. The stranger with a mask of midnight was harnessing one of the beasts. He was helping Corson and Antonella to mount. All three of them, and two pegasones, were going to vanish into the sky, into time.
Any moment now!
His first night on this planet . . . Then he hadn't dared make a
light, either, but this time he was wearing on his corneas contact lenses that enabled him to see in the infrared. The ground, except in patches, looked as black as a starless sky. The tree trunks were reddish. Their scale-like leaves, site of relatively intense energy processes, were orange. Here and there a stone on the ground was giving off stored heat from the daytime and showed as a pale speck. He saw something luminous sneaking silently away between the bushes—a frightened animal.
He could smell burned resin and melted sand. The camp was close.
Is this to be a historic moment? he wondered. So many things hung on it for this planet. Would Veran accept? What would happen if Veran’s men fired on sight, if he was killed? Then the alliance would never ensue, the monsters and the Monsters would continue to roam at liberty.
There would be a war. Maybe two. Between the humans and the natives, and between Uria and the Galactic Council or the Security Office or—whatever you called it, there was bound to be some organization. Something would snap. A crack would propagate across the centuries and shake the future. He was sure of that. There was no other reason for his presence. They had sent him to plug a breach in history without telling him how or why.
A historic moment! A place and a date where several time lines crossed, where he had met himself without knowing it and where now he was avoiding himself by choice. A historic moment! As though anybody would ever remember it! As though history were composed of battles and alliances and treaties signed and torn up. No, the opposite was the case. In the deceptive silence of the forest he understood that what deserved the appellation of “history” was the reverse of war. History was like a fabric. Warfare was so many tears in it, and wars so many thorns bloodstained from ripping that fabric which always healed itself with the persistence of a living creature.
Or, he corrected himself with a worse pang of alarm than any the sight of Veran’s sentries could have evoked in him, has always healed itself... so far!
He, this person Corson, felt himself to be the heir of millions and billions of men born and dead in the past, who with their bodies and their lives had woven the grand tapestry of history. He felt answerable to billions upon billions of men yet to come. He was going to give them a chance and offer a solution to those who were dead.
This potential fight wasn’t even an important war, yet no war anywhere—anywhen—had ever been more important. A battle in which spaceships by the millions clashed against each other, like those of six thousand years before, was no more important than the first squabble between cavemen throwing undressed stones. It was a matter of your point of view.
The curtain of the trees grew thinner. Crazy lights appeared. A fine purple trace, which Corson knew to be deadly, cut across the night in a dotted line broken where tree trunks obscured it. At a sign from him the Urians stopped dead, in perfect silence. He could barely make out their quick shallow breathing.
They had agreed that Corson would go forward by himself and talk alone to Veran until a preliminary agreement was reached, but they had attached a sound pickup to his neck. He did not doubt that Ngal R’nda would be listening.
The dotted line vanished. Corson hesitated.
A calm voice hailed them from the camp: “Corson, I know you’re there!”
It was Veran. Corson strode forward toward the harsh disc of a searchlight, pretending not to notice the weapons trained on his back and now on his chest as well.
“So you’ve come back. And found time to change your clothes, I see!” The voice was tinged with sarcasm rather than anger; Veran knew how to control himself. “And you’ve tucked the woman away in a safe place!”
“But I’m here,” Corson said simply.
“I knew you’d come back. A short reconnaissance into the future told me that. Just as I knew where to find you the first time. After all, it was you who picked this spot for me. I presume you had a good reason for offering me a base to refit after our setback at Aergistal, and it follows that you must have something to tell me.”
“I have a proposition to put to you,” Corson said.
“Come a little closer. I can’t leave a gap in my perimeter indefinitely, you know.”
Corson walked forward. The purple line reappeared behind him. He felt in his bones its characteristic vibration.
“So, Corson, what have you to offer?”
“An alliance. And don’t you need one!”
Veran did not even blink. His gray eyes shone in the glare of the searchlights. He looked like a crude statue, barely outlined. His men were a match for him. Two stood at his back, one on either side, motionless, frozen, but fingers no doubt ready on the triggers of the little guns they held, like tiny cannon with points instead of muzzles; one might have taken them for toys. Six more men formed a rough semicircle at whose center stood Corson. They were just far enough away for him to be unable to reach any of them with a desperate bound, even though it cost him his life, before they had time to fire. These were professionals all right, and in a way that was a comfort. They would not risk shooting on impulse before receiving the order or before being genuinely threatened.
Only Veran held no gun. His hands were out of sight behind his back, right fingers no doubt clutching left wrist; it was a customary stance for colonels. In another life, another age, Corson had often had to deal with colonels.
Veran would not be an easy man to persuade.
“I could kill you,” he said. “I haven’t done so because of that message you sent me. It bailed me out of a nasty jam. I’m waiting for an explanation, though.”
“Naturally,” Corson said.
“It was you who sent the message, was it? Or could it have been someone else?”
“Such as who?” Corson answered in a level voice.
A message signed by him that he didn’t remember sending! Which he would not even have known how to address to Veran. And which, beyond doubt, arranged a meeting place, identified this world, this spot, and this moment, and suggested a means of getting away from Aergistal at a point when the situation grew too hot for comfort. A message which he would send later on. That message might form part of the plan he was beginning to construct. Which suggested that in the future there would be another version of the scheme, more solid, more detailed. A version which he would perhaps evolve himself when he knew—and was able to tackle—a lot more. Already, though, he was uncovering snippets of it.
But if something went wrong, if Veran did not consent to the alliance, would he still be able to send that message? Since he knew of its existence, and without it Veran would not have come to Uria, he would be obliged to send it. But when would that happen? When would he think of it—now, later, when? Would he send it if he was unaware that Veran had received it?
It was no good. Trying to work out a strategy, or even a theory of war, in time was too difficult. First he must make a practical experiment.
“You’re taking a long time to think before you talk,” Veran said. “I don’t like that.”
“I have a great deal to discuss. Out here is not the ideal place.” Veran made a sign. One of his men said, “He’s not carrying a gun. Nor a bomb. He does have a transmitter on his neck, but it’s sound only, no pictures.”
“Fair enough,” Veran said. “Let’s go.”