Cid was back when Corson came out of the water. He found an excuse to get rid of Antonella and described his plan. The general outline fitted together, but certain details remained unclear: the collar, for instance, which he still did not know how to take off. Maybe he would find out at Aergistal. or during a journey into the future. But for the moment it represented only a minor inconvenience.
Arranging the escape would be quite easy. Veran himself had given Corson a whole range of weapons after he had been fitted with the collar; assuming he had no more to fear from that quarter, he concluded that every available man was indispensable in time of war.
One of the weapons created the light-inhibiting field. By modifying it Corson thought he could increase its range at the cost of exhausting its power pack in a few minutes. Its corollary was an ultrasound projector which enabled you to find your way about in the dark; he also had one of those. The ration bag he would leave on the mausoleum planet formed part of the equipment of his pegasone. There remained the two suits he would give to Antonella and the other Corson, but he expected to pick those up without much difficulty during the confusion caused by his arrival.
Contrary to his expectations, Cid did not react when he came to the most delicate aspect of his plan: the reanimation of the undead girls. The man was either incapable of emotion or very strong-willed. Corson thought the former more likely.
“I have some knowledge of reanimation techniques and synthetic personality implantation,” Corson said. “It was being tested on casualties during the Earth-Uria war. But I’ll need equipment and perhaps technical assistance.”
“I suspect you will find all you need on the mausoleum world,” Cid answered. “These sadistic collectors of yours will certainly have prepared for all eventualities. And if you need advice, get in touch with Aergistal.”
“How? By shouting at the top of my voice? Do they always keep an eye on me?”
Cid smiled faintly. “Probably. But that’s not the way. Didn’t you know you can reach them through the pegasone? You’ve been to Aergistal. The route is indelibly imprinted on your nervous system. Besides, it’s not so much a route as a way of seeing things. Aergistal occupies the surface of the universe, which implies that it’s everywhere. The surface of a hypervolume is a volume with one dimension less. That’s not exact, because the number of dimensions in this universe is probably irrational and may even be transfinite, but for practical purposes it’s all you need to know.”
“But what do I have to do?” Corson asked in perplexity.
“I don’t know pegasones as well as you do, and I’ve never been to
Aergistal, but I assume it will suffice to establish your usual empathy relation with it and then call your journey back to mind. The pegasone will instinctively make any necessary corrections. Don’t forget it can reach quite deep into your subconscious.”
Cid stroked his chin. “You see,” he went on, “it all began with pegasones, on this planet at any rate. In the old days they were unknown on Uria. Into this probability line, or another adjacent”— with a sad smile—“you introduced the first pegasone. Urian scientists studied its offspring. They managed to work out how they jumped through time. Then they contrived to endow humans with the same talent, at first on a very small scale. I told you, it’s less a question of a talent than a way of looking at things. The human nervous system has no special powers, but it does have the ability to acquire them, which is perhaps even better. A few centuries ago, at the beginning of our period of responsibility, the humans on Uria were only capable of cogging a few seconds of their future. For some reason the Old Race, the avians, had even more trouble.”
“A good thing too,” Corson grunted, remembering Ngal R’nda. “But the people I met on my arrival had the power, and the study of pegasones must have happened later.”
Cid smiled again, this time with genuine amusement. “How many people did you actually meet?”
Corson searched his memory. “Only two—Floria Van Nelle, and Antonella.”
“They came from your future,” explained Cid. “Later on the most advanced or the most gifted entered communion with Aergistal. Everything has become much easier. At least, in a manner of speaking.”
He straightened and filled his lungs.
“Now we have begun to move through time without pegasones or machines. We do still need a little device, a memory-jogger, as it were. But soon we’ll be able to do without that, too.”
“Soon?”
“Tomorrow, or in a hundred years. It makes no difference. Time counts little for those who have mastered it.”
“Many will die between now and then.”
“You’ve already died once, haven’t you, Corson? And that isn’t preventing you from carrying out your mission.”
Corson remained silent awhile, concentrating on his plan. What Cid had told him disposed of two problems: how to get the pegasone to take Antonella and the other Corson to Aergistal, and how to locate the mausoleum world. Because he had been there once, he would know how to get back. Obviously it was impossible for a man to keep track of the billions and billions of celestial bodies in this corner of the universe, let alone follow their relative motions over long periods of time. But he could always retrace a route he had taken once, just as it is not necessary to have read every book in order to know how to read a few.
“We could have given you a certain amount of training,” Cid remarked, burrowing in the sand. “But it would have taken a very long time. And this probability line is rather fragile. It’s better for you to use the pegasone. As for us, we are forcing ourselves to give them up.”
He unearthed an engraved silver-gilt container.
“You must be hungry,” he said.
Corson spent three ten-days on the beach. It was a sort of furlough. But he devoted most of the time to perfecting his plans. From memory he drew on the sand a detailed map of Veran’s encampment. He would have little time to lead the fugitives to the pegasone park and there must be no question of tripping on a tent peg or losing his way in the maze of alleys. He also worked out the principal attributes of the artificial personalities he wanted to give to the reanimated girls. He still did not know how to get them from the mausoleum world to Uria, but there would be time to figure that out when he had dealt with the earlier stages of the scheme.
The rest of the time he spent swimming, chatting, or playing with Antonella, or taking part in the activities of the Council. At first sight they did not appear to be very demanding, but little by little he realized the extent of the responsibilities weighing on Cid, Selma, and the other woman, whose name he now knew to be Ana.
Now and then, for periods of hours or days, they disappeared. Several times Corson saw them come back worn out, incapable of uttering a word. Strangers sometimes sprang from nowhere, demanding advice or bringing information. For long hours, almost every day, one at least of the councillors was in communion with Aergistal. Most often it was one of the women. Were they perhaps more advanced than Cid along the road to mastery of time? Or was it simply that Those of Aergistal preferred them as intermediaries?
Some of the communions seemed to be especially trying. Once he was awakened by screams. Ana was twisting and rolling on the sand as though in an epileptic fit. Before Corson had time to intervene, Cid and Selma had lain down beside her and gone into communion themselves, and in a few minutes Ana’s cries and writhing ceased. The next day Corson did not dare ask what had happened.
Something he did inquire about, on the other hand, was the six-thousand-year history of Uria which he had overleaped. The answers he received, though, were unsatisfying. Six thousand years was an almost unimaginable span of time. Not so long had elapsed between the first space flight from Earth and Corson’s birth. Science must have made incredible progress. A whole gazetteer of new worlds must have swollen the empire of mankind. And had not explorers made contact with the very ancient races legend spoke of, those millions of times more advanced than men? The answer to this last question appeared to be negative, and anyway Corson doubted whether humanity would have withstood the shock. Such races must have attained the Aergistal level, where—as the god had said—“there is no more difference.” If they intervened in human evolution it would not be under the crude guise of aggression or peaceful trade. It would be across time.
What surprised Corson most was the nature of the answers the councillors gave him; one could almost describe them as parochial. They knew a little of the history of Uria and of a few score neighboring star systems, but nothing coherent on the galactic level. Even the concept of galactic history seemed foreign to them.
Corson thought at first that must be because it was too vast for any human mind to grasp. Then he realized their very notion of history differed from his. They viewed it as an assemblage of situations and crises of which none was irreversible and all were obedient to complex laws. They were no more interested in a catalog of all possible crises than an engineer in Corson’s day would have been in an exhaustive tabulation of solutions to technical problems, or a doctor in a list of every cellular change caused by viruses. Principles were known to exist which accounted for the vast majority of actual situations. The rare occurrence of an event which could not be thus explained led, sooner or later, to the formulation of a new principle, or even a whole new system of principles. The only History which they could conceive of, as Corson found out, was the History of the successive sciences of history. None of them was a specialist in that field.
Moreover at any given moment—inasmuch as that phrase meant anything—there could be found on the various human and alien worlds almost the entire imaginable range of situations. Galactic civilization was one of islands. Each island had its own history and customs, and interference between them was relatively rare. Corson came to understand that war had been the principal bond between the worlds which had been baptized the Solar Powers, just as it had been between those of the Empire of Uria and all subsequent empires.
The question remained, how to find out whether Uria was indeed a key world because it had happened to attract the attention of Those of Aergistal. To Cid the question was meaningless. In Ana’s view the Urians were called on to play a special part in the universe because they had been the ones to find a way of conquering time. For Selma, all worlds were equally important and the mastery of time would have been revealed to those species which were sufficiently advanced by Those of Aergistal through means and at a moment which they judged suitable. Corson was no further forward.
He started to have doubts. Sometimes he wondered whether they were altogether sane, watching the way they behaved around him. Was their confidence in their powers a mere delusion? He had scarcely any evidence of their ability to time-jump except their absences. They could be deceiving him, consciously or unconsciously.
On the other hand they knew too much about him, his past, Aergistal . . . and they had shown that they were capable of intercepting a pegasone. Corson was sure they had forced it to lock on to this present. And at least as far as he could tell under normal circumstances they showed no hint of derangement. They acted like ordinary people, perhaps rather better adjusted than the average individual Corson had known before, in a time of war. That too was surprising. People belonging to a culture six thousand years older than his own ought to be different.
Then he remembered Touray, snatched from the mythical days of Old Earth, back when men had hardly ventured beyond the limits of their own world. He had detected no real difference in him, either. And Touray had adapted astonishingly well to life at Aergistal, which would not be created for a million years, or more likely for a billion.
He had reached about this stage in his musings when he found out that his companions were indeed different. They were united by a deep personal bond, whereas Corson’s society had recognized only the individual and the functional group. There was an especially strong attraction between Cid and Selma, but it did not exclude Ana—on the contrary. All three of them now and then mentioned larger groups.
They did their best not to shock Corson; while life on a beach might have its idyllic aspects, it did impose some limits on intimate relationships.
Oddly enough, Antonella seemed to remain apart, even more of an outsider than Corson. The three others did not shut her out of their group and even remained on superficially affectionate terms with her, but she was not attuned to them. She had neither Selma’s appealing spontaneity nor Ana’s rather casual sensuality. She was, or so it seemed, no more than a pretty young girl buzzing around Corson like a bee around a jam tart. She had a less forceful personality than the other two women but—Corson had at least to grant her this—she seemed in no way jealous of them. He ascribed the almost imperceptible, but nonetheless real, sense of distance between her and the others to her lesser experience of life, her more inhibited background, and the fact that she hailed from another time zone. He had never asked her which one. Without reference points any answer she gave would be meaningless. Each time he inquired about her previous life she replied only with commonplaces. She seemed to have no memories worth mentioning. He wondered for a moment why, in her future when she met him for the second time, she would say nothing—or from his standpoint had said nothing—about this restful period on the beach. It was hard to figure that out. Maybe she was afraid of a short circuit in time. Or, more simply, she might have no reason to speak of Cid, Selma, and Ana, who to her by then would be no more than meaningless names.
Whereas at present they were to him real friends. He could not remember having felt such affection for other people in the past He especially enjoyed the long evenings when they sat sipping wine and swapping ideas. Then it seemed to him as though all his problems had been solved long ago and troubled him no more than would old memories.
“You won’t forget to send that message, Selma?”
“It’s as though it has already been sent,” Selma would reply.
“And you’ll put my name to it, George Corson. That old fox Veran knew it even before I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance. And you’ll tell him that on Uria he can find weapons and pegasones, and even perhaps recruits.”
“Corson, seeing you so worried about this one might imagine it was a love letter!”
“Last time I saw him he was by the great ocean of Aergistal, where sea meets space. I hope that address will be adequate. Now I look back, I recall he seemed to be in difficulties. He must have been retreating.”
“We’ll send the message to Aergistal, marked 'to be called for.”' He had once explained to Selma the system of military postal zones which had been in use in his own time, and the poste restante mail ships which waited for their particular squadrons for a year, two, ten, sometimes through all eternity. Under robot control they made for a prearranged point and there remained as long as was necessary until their contents were collected. She had found the idea both absurd and comical. He had almost become angry. Then he had realized that to her the idea of waiting for news must be a totally foreign concept. Every day she received news from a time when she would be long dead.
Then he would turn to Cid.
“Are you sure that throwing Veran’s camp into confusion will be enough? Are you sure the citizens of Uria can cope with the soldiers and their pegasones?”
“Absolutely,” Cid would say. “Apart from Veran none of those soldiers has the makings of a leader. As soon as he is out of the way the rest will put up little resistance.”
“Collectively, perhaps not. Individually, I’m not so sure. They’re used to fighting under very bad conditions."
“They won’t be inclined to fight after what you’ll have dumped on them. And don’t underestimate the people of Uria. They may not be war veterans, but I’m not certain Veran would have gotten the better of them even without your plan. There would have been a fearful number of casualties, which is what we want to avoid, but in the end Veran would have been brought to his knees. In any case, though, that’s for us to worry about.”
The prospect of this confrontation filled Corson with anxiety. He knew that Veran’s men would be disoriented by the probable breakdown of the strict combat discipline they were used to. But they did possess formidable weapons, and knew how to use them.
“I’d very much like to be there,” Corson would wind up.
"No. You’ll have other tasks to attend to. You might be hurt or even killed. That would lead to a major timequake.”
Since the start Cid had insisted that Corson stay clear of the eventual battlefield. He had agreed without understanding why. He could not get to grips with the idea that this battle had already taken place and in one sense had already been won.
One evening Cid did not launch into his customary thesis. He simply said, “I hope you’ve finished your preparations, friend. Time is wasting. You must be on your way tomorrow.”
Corson gave a thoughtful nod.
That evening he took Antonella to a distant part of the beach. She turned out to be quite passive. He had retained a different memory of her. Now she was neither afraid nor eager, simply compliant, whereas on the same beach three hundred years earlier she had displayed great passion. He was sure of one thing: this was not her first time. But that was of no importance to him. What he did wonder was how many men she would meet before he found her again. Then he dozed off, cuddling her against him.
Next morning he harnessed the pegasone. He had found little time to attend to the beast, but it did not need much looking after. He had thought of trying to contact Aergistal, but he had not put the idea into effect. He preferred not to make inquiries of Those of Aergistal unless he was forced to. When he thought back to the crystal voice he had heard under that purple welkin he felt ill.
Cid was alone on the beach. He approached just as Corson was ready to mount.
“Good luck, friend,” he called.
Corson hesitated. He did not want to make a long speech at this parting, but on the other hand he did not want to leave without saying a word to anyone. When he had wakened Antonella had gone, perhaps to spare him a painful goodbye.
Simply to say thank you doesn’t feel like enough. He licked his dry lips. So many questions still to ask, so many things left unsaid . . .
“May you live here to the end of eternity,” he said at last. ‘To meditate your fill, as you said the evening of my arrival . . . Do you do it only so that you can administer these centuries?”
“No. That’s not even the most important aspect of it. We are preparing, as you know, to master time, and this”—Cid gestured to indicate the beach, the sea, the sky—“is our laboratory.”
“In order to travel into the future?”
“Not just that. Time travel is almost an incidental. We are trying to get used to the idea of living in a new way. We’ve coined the name ‘hyperlife’ for it. How shall I explain that? Perhaps I could say that what we want is to live in several possibilities at once, maybe in all possibilities. To coexist with ourselves on many probability lines. To be several people at once yet remain our unique selves. To be multidimensional. And think what it will mean when every being can introduce its own changes into history. The changes will combine with each other, they’ll set up interference patterns like ripples meeting on a pond, and some will be favorable and some will be harmful. No human mind could attain hyperlife and still be sane! Everyone is part of another’s possibility. You would have to know somebody incredibly well before risking a change in his destiny and your own. That’s what we are preparing ourselves for, Selma, Ana, and I. It’s a long road we’ve set out on—a long road.”
“You will become like Those of Aergistal,” Corson said.
Cid shook his head. “They’re different, genuinely transformed by evolution . . . No, that’s not the right term. No concept of ours even comes close. They will no longer be human, or avian, or saurian, or descendants of any species you can dream of. They will be all of them at once, or rather they will have been. Really we know nothing of Aergistal, Corson. All we know of it is what we see, not because it’s all we’re allowed to see but because it’s all we are capable of seeing. Almost nothing. We interpret it in the only way we can, and what we see there is ourselves. Those of Aergistal will conquer something which makes us afraid.”
“Death?” Corson said.
“No, death holds no terrors for those who have caught a glimpse of hyperlife. To die once is no great matter if an infinity of other parallel existences remain to you. But there is something we call hyperdeath. That consists in being relegated to mere potential, in being eliminated from all probability lines by a timequake. To be sure of escaping that, one must control every creode in the universe. One must make one’s own possibilities congruent with those of the continuum. Those of Aergistal have succeeded in doing so.”
Corson said slowly, “Is that why they are afraid of the Outside, and have girdled their domain with a moat of wars?”
“Perhaps,” answered Cid. “I’ve never been there. But you must not let what I say upset you. Come back here when you have done what you have to do.”
“I’ll come back,” Corson said. “I hope very much to see you again.” Cid gave an equivocal smile. “Don’t hope for too much, my friend. But return as quickly as you can. There is a seat waiting for you on the Council of Uria. Good luck again.”
“Goodbye!” Corson cried, and the pegasone took off.
He made a preliminary time jump to obtain two space suits. It would be best to organize the getaway in two stages. He decided to step in one minute before the moment of the actual escape. That would allow him to spy out the defenses and sow the confusion essential to the second phase. He had little trouble in slipping into one of the maintenance tents, but, as he had expected, night had brought no relaxation in the vigilance of Veran’s camp. He hardly had time to seize two suit packs and remount before the alleys were loud with alarms. The tent he had just raided was in a sector of the camp almost diametrically opposite where Corson and Antonella were imprisoned. The first movement of the guards would be to converge on the site of the robbery. They would have no time to rush back the other way.
He jumped a few days into the past, chose a lonely spot, and examined the suits. Satisfied, he decided to proceed to the second
phase. He locked in on the proper moment and parked his pegasone next to Veran’s. Among all the commotion no one noticed him. He was wearing a regulation outfit and might have been coming back from patrol. He at once switched on the light inhibitor and ran along the alleys of the camp as quickly as the blurred image of his surroundings afforded by the ultrasound projector would permit. He estimated it would take at least ten seconds for the most quick-witted of the guards to think of doing the same. Which would not get them much further forward, because they had no idea where the attack was coming from. The range of their projectors was reduced and their beams interfered with each other, fogging the images that they did pick up. The officers would probably waste a minute or so convincing their men that they must shut them off because they were useless. That would be plenty of time, provided that Antonella, warned by her precog talent, managed to persuade Corson to cooperate. And he knew she had succeeded.
Everything worked out as he had foreseen. He had blacked over his faceplate so that the other Corson would not recognize him, and communicated only by signs. It was not the moment to introduce another element of confusion into his earlier mind.
They took off into space, now, then leaped across time. Corson made a few swerves to shake off their pursuers, but the other pegasone followed like a guardian angel. Veran’s soldiers did not know their destination and might wander forever through the continuum without chancing on the mausoleum world. What was more, Veran would call off the chase as soon as a patrol informed him that Corson was about to come back.
The mausoleum world ... I wonder, Corson said to himself, when I first discovered it!
He had shown himself the way to it. It seemed he had managed to break the Law of Non-regressive Information; he had set up a closed loop. There must be a beginning to everything ... or maybe that was simply an illusion? Perhaps, much later, he would come across this planet for the first time and arrange for the information to be fed into the loop. Or did some mysterious bond of which he was at present unaware unite all the possible Corsons? For the moment he dismissed the enigma; he did not possess the data to reach a solution.
At the right spot above the planet he gave instructions to the other pegasone and abandoned it along with Antonella and his double. He himself jumped into the future. He could discern no trace of his earlier visit. That was a good sign. He had been half afraid of meeting himself face to face, or of stumbling on two bleached skeletons.
He climbed down from his pegasone and—not without apprehension-entered the vast and dismal hall. Nothing had changed. He set to work with deliberation. Time was no longer of much account to him.
Cid had been right. Equipment for reanimating the women and endowing them with synthetic personalities was located in an underground annex to the great hall. But the entry was so well hidden that he had to explore the foundations with the help of his pegasone. Operating it was simpler than he had feared it might be. Much of the job was taken care of automatically. Whoever the warlords were who had assembled this monstrous collection, they must like quick work. Very probably they knew even less than Corson about the principles underlying reanimation.
His hands trembled nonetheless when he set about his first test. He had designed a synthetic personality intended to last five seconds. The woman blinked, opened her eyes, uttered a sigh and slumped back into immobility.
The result of the first more serious trial was very unpleasant. A huge statuesque blonde, almost a head taller than himself, leaped up, gave a wordless cry, hurled herself upon him, and caught him in such a bear hug he almost suffocated. He had to knock her out. Shaken, he concluded he had overdone the folliculin.
To give himself a respite he decided to go back and deposit, at the right moment, the ration bag and the metal plate he had left before the mausoleum door. Now, the bit of metal seemed completely smooth. A few experiments convinced him that it must be sensitive to displacements in time. Its component crystals tended to regain their original relationship after a time jump. So the problem was to engrave the key section of the message deeply enough for it to survive several time trips. He did some figuring and set about inscribing the plate. He wondered what would happen if, say, he changed one of the words. Probably nothing; it would be below the timequake threshold. But he preferred not to alter the wording which was so deeply impressed on his memory. The stakes were too high.
There remained the problem of conditioning the pegasone which would take Antonella and his earlier self to Aergistal. He decided on a substitution. He undertook as complete an exchange of data as he could with the beast. He made certain that it would take its riders not merely to Aergistal but to the precise point where he himself recalled being set down. Beyond that he could control the pegasone no further. However, he assumed that under identical conditions the creature would react in an identical manner. The chance of a slip-up would be negligible. Besides, he could doubtless rely on Those of Aergistal to take care of details like that. He conditioned the pegasone to the mere name of Aergistal shouted in a loud voice.
In return he obtained a great deal of information concerning the habits, behavior, and motivations of pegasones. Although the beast’s racial memory had been weakened by captivity, enough came across for Corson to form an impression of its home world. To his great surprise he found that the Monster he had learned to beware of—at least in its wild state—was almost as timid as a rabbit. The image it retained of its original masters, who had long disappeared, was not very clear; plainly, though, it both adored and feared them.
The substitution proceeded without difficulty. Corson took the trouble to swap the harnesses. He did not want the other Corson’s attention alerted by some unnoticed mark on the straps. He laid the ration bag alongside the road and in clear view of the door.
Then he returned to the period at which he had undertaken to revive the warlords’ trophies. He did not know what would happen if he misjudged by a few hours and met himself unexpectedly, but the pegasone’s instincts saved him any worry on that score. The beast refused to take the precise path it had already followed across the continuum; it seemed that it could detect its own presence from a few seconds away, and shied off. In one sense it displayed blind obedience to the Law of Non-regressive Information. Corson preferred not to make it go against its nature.
He resumed the preparation of Veran’s "recruits.” Now he worked frenziedly, eager to complete the job. He was also worried about the chance of being surprised by the warlords and having to settle his account with them. But a few patrols into the future and the near past set his mind partly at rest
He designed three main types of synthetic personality. Too great a uniformity in the behavior of the women might expose the trick he was playing prematurely. For the same reason he took a random sample of them to avoid the chance of using too many similar physical types. After his first experiments he had intended to make the personalities sexually neutral; in the upshot, despite his reluctance, he did introduce a few feminine characteristics into his programs.
Another question he thought about long and hard was the durability of the personalities. Too short a life might endanger his plan. On the other hand the idea of giving these undead women an over-long existence . . . Even though he was treating them as mere machines, he was repelled by the thought of their lasting long enough to be exposed to the tender mercies of Veran’s men. He ended up by settling for personalities with a probable duration of forty-eight hours plus or minus ten percent. After that time Veran’s recruits would lose all semblance of life and without adequate supportive facilities would die beyond recall. If the situation worked out as he hoped, it would all be over in a few hours, if not in a matter of minutes. If it didn’t proceed that quickly, Veran would have time to regain control over his men even if it meant ruthlessly wiping out his “recruits,” and the plan would fail.
At this point Corson was wondering how many bodies to revive. Too limited a number might lead to arguments among the men, who would probably appeal to their leader for arbitration. Too large an invasion, apart from posing problems of transportation which Corson had not yet solved, might excite suspicion among Veran’s little army.
He estimated that it must comprise about six hundred men. Accordingly he decided to revive about two thousand women. But that was too many for him to tackle by himself in reasonable time. Unenthusiastically he endowed a score of bodies with personalities which would enable them to act as his assistants, turning them into docile, painstaking, tireless instruments. He had trouble stopping himself from bullying them, for their dumbness and their unchanging smiles got on his nerves.
What it came down to, he told himself, was that no industrialist had ever owned so many slaves, no conqueror had ever led such a horde of Amazons, no sultan had ever boasted such a harem, as he now had at his disposal.
But it was simply not his style.
When he was certain he could revive the whole two thousand in a few hours, he turned his attention to clothing them. Not a single garment was to be found in the mausoleum; as he thought bitterly, butterflies don’t wear clothes. He reconnoitered a nearby planetary system and, by shuttling back and forth in time, eventually located a military supply depot which he robbed without compunction. He hoped his depredations would not unleash a timequake in the planet’s history, but he thought it unlikely. From experience he knew that despite computerized records large stocks vanished from the stores of all armies now and then without entraining untoward aftereffects. Some clerk would spend a few sleepless nights inventing a more or less convincing explanation for the discrepancy in his stock of overalls. At worst he would be court-martialed. But that wasn’t the sort of person who made history.
Transportation was another matter. He almost appealed to Aergistal. But he put off that ultimate solution. The idea of asking advice from the gods was unbearable. He retained too clear a recollection of the scorn in that great voice. He was willing enough to be a pawn, but by the seven circles of hell he would not let himself become a robot! Perhaps that was a childish attitude, but it was his own.
At last he hit on a solution which though inelegant was nonetheless practicable. With the help of his assistants he dismantled several of the internal fitments of the mausoleum and obtained enough metal plates to build a reasonably airtight container. After all, he himself had traveled from Aergistal to Uria in a sort of coffin. A pegasone could carry a good deal of material across space-time provided the journey was not too long. That was how Veran transported his equipment. He had had to come to Uria from the far end of the universe, and twenty-five men plus their gear was as much as his pegasones could manage. Corson established with a few trials that between here and Uria he might shift two hundred women at one go.
When he gave the signal for departure, he had spent a little more than two weeks on the mausoleum world. He had long ago used up the rations he had brought with him, but he had obtained plenty of extra provisions from the warehouses on the neighboring planet. For lack of anything better he had kept his helpers going on serum and glucose drawn from the life-support system.
He was almost at the end of his resources. He would dearly have liked to rest awhile, but he preferred to spend no longer than he had to on this dismal planet.
With close attention he supervised the revival of the first batch and the implantation of their artificial personalities. A tired smile crossed his face when he saw the two hundred women leave their couches, parting the sterile mist which had served them for shrouds, assemble in the central aisle, and line up as though on parade. Then nausea turned him inside out like a glove.
One of his helpers took a step toward him. He waved her—it?— aside.
“It’s okay,” he said. As he would have done to a human being.
But he could read nothing in the splendid violet eyes trained on him, neither comprehension nor pity; they were like soft stones. Reflex, not surprise, had provoked the motion. These creatures could hear, they obeyed his voice, they even possessed a limited vocabulary which he had carefully worked out and included in their programing, but they had no understanding. They did not exist as people. Each time he was tempted to forget their nature, those eyes would remind him, and the overprecise movements they made among the shadows. They were no more than crude projections of his own mind. Behind their eyes there was no one else for him to meet.
The door control at the exit was not deceived. It would not open for the procession of the undead. He had to stand on the threshold while they filed past him, picked up the overalls he had dumped in piles on the grass, and put them on. Then, on his word of command, they drew hoods over their heads and entered the rough metal box he had fashioned where, at another order, they sank into a hypnotic trance. He fastened its door and attached the pegasone’s traces and climbed into his saddle and plunged into time with his cargo of ghosts.
He set down on Uria, near Veran’s camp, in a secluded spot and at a time not long after he had set out on his embassy to the future. He would not be away from here again more than a few seconds, although the return, the revival of another contingent and the second trip would take him several hours. He made ten trips, which took up whole days of his subjective time. The third day he broke down in tears and fell asleep. The fifth day the pegasone showed signs of exhaustion and he had to wait until it recovered, his mind empty and dry. At the moment when he left the mausoleum world for the last time he called his helpers together and pronounced a single word. They collapsed, still smiling.
He aroused the recruits and marched them in a long column toward the encampment. A good distance from the perimeter defenses he halted them in plain sight and hailed one of the sentries. A moment later Veran showed himself.
“You look tired, Corson,” he said. “What have you brought us?”
“Recruits,” Corson said.
Veran made a sign. Gunners trained their weapons on the veiled forms standing in a curve around the camp. Others activated scanners.
“No trickery, I hope, Corson! Otherwise your collar—”
“None of us is armed,” Corson interrupted. “Except myself.”
“No weapons,” a technician confirmed.
“Good,” Veran said. “So you found out how to convince them, up there in the future. I approve of efficiency, Corson. Perhaps even they felt themselves touched by ambition. Advance the first rank. And tell them to take their hoods off so I can get a sight of them.”
Everyone in the camp had gathered behind him, except the pickets on guard duty. Corson noted with satisfaction that the men seemed less alert, less rigidly organized than when he saw them for the first time. Weeks of inactivity on Uria had taken their toll. It was not so much that discipline had slipped as that the atmosphere had changed. Corson’s practiced eye picked out the almost imperceptible evidence: one soldier who had hooked his thumbs in his pockets, another placidly sucking a little metal tube.
He strained to identify by their security collars the members of Veran’s personal bodyguard. He counted just under a dozen of them.
He uttered a single meaningless command. The front rank advanced. Veran made a sign. The defensive wire ceased to glow. Two soldiers rolled a section of it aside. Veran seemed to have lost all suspicion. But Corson knew how crafty the warlord’s mind was. He would not let anyone enter the camp without checking for himself.
After a pause, the second rank followed the first, and the third, and the fourth, their clothing making a rustling sound. Corson shouted another order. He was sure no one in the camp had guessed the true nature of these recruits. They were all tall, and their loose-cut military overalls hid the shape of their bodies. At his voice, in a unison movement, the first rank threw back their heads and let their hoods slip down.
Now there was no sound, not even footfalls or the brushing of cloth on cloth, except for the distant whistling and grunting of a pegasone having a dream.
In the camp someone stifled a sneeze, or a laugh. Then someone else began to shout.
“Women! They’re only women!”
“There are two thousand of them,” Corson said with deliberation. “They are strong and obedient.”
Veran did not react. His head did not turn by the least fraction of a degree. Only his eyes moved. He studied the faces of the women. Then he bent his gaze on Corson.
“Strong and obedient,” he echoed.
Yonder in the camp the men had started to fidget, leaning forward, craning their necks, their eyes popping from their sockets.
“Well,” Veran said without raising his voice, “you can just take them back where they came from.”
An unarmed soldier, who must have been off duty, jumped the fence at a point where it had not been rolled aside, and headed toward the women at a run. One of Veran’s personal guards took aim at him, but Veran struck the gun aside. Corson understood and admired his quick thinking. He was afraid, but he wasn’t showing it. He hoped this was a trap, that the soldier would fall into it and his fate would serve as a lesson to the others.
But this was no trap, or at least not of the kind he was hoping for. When the soldier was halfway to the women, Corson uttered a key word, clearly but quietly. He did not want the men in the camp to mistake what he said for an order to attack.
The front rank undid their overalls and took a half pace forward. The garments slid to the ground. They wore nothing else. They stood among the tall dense grass, haloed by the sunlight. Their hair fell around their shoulders and over their breasts. They scarcely moved but for their slow deep breathing, and kept their empty hands open, palms to the front.
There was a sort of roar from the camp, not a cry or a call, but a dull groan like a monstrous bellows, a unison gasp from hundreds of lungs.
A score of soldiers rushed forward. Others dropped their guns and gave chase, uncertain whether they were running after the others to bring them back or because they were afraid of getting there last. One of Veran’s guards made to open fire, but his neighbor pushed him off balance. Some of the soldiers took the precaution of breaking the power packs on their weapons before likewise making for the women.
Corson had thought of saying something, addressing the soldiers over Veran’s head despite the risks. But it was no longer necessary. The camp was emptying. Veran was fighting his own men. Bodies fell. Someone was trying to reactivate the perimeter fence, not without trouble, for it was blinking on and off. Clearly Veran was still trying to avoid more than minimal bloodshed. But he had no one around him now except his personal guards. A few other men, demoralized, were fighting with little enthusiasm.
It looked as though Veran was going to give in; Corson saw him raise his hand. The shots grew fewer. Then night came down. It swallowed up women, camp, soldiers, and all.
Irresolutely Corson took a few steps backward. Then he dropped to the ground. Veran had played his master card, the light-inhibitor. Now perhaps he would turn his guns loose at random on the neighborhood of the camp. Corson tried simultaneously to burrow into the earth and to crawl away. Over the muffled uproar that filled the darkness he heard the sound of a footfall. He rolled over, folded into a ball, straightened like a spring, jumped up, almost lost his balance, struggled to retain it while flailing the air with his hands.
A grip on his arm spun him around. An arm tilted back his chin and crushed his throat. He heard Veran pant in his ear.
“You fooled me, Corson. You were tougher than I thought. I could kill you for getting me in a mess like this! But I’m leaving you the key—the key to your collar. Think of the others.”
Something fell between Corson’s feet. The grip relaxed. His skull seemed to swell up as though it would burst. He dropped on all fours, gasping for breath. Somewhere in the darkness behind him Veran was running into the forest, in search of the pegasone Corson had not taken the trouble to hide. Corson heard him shout in a mocking voice half muffled by the inhibition field, “I’ll get back on my feet, Corson! You’ll see!”
There came the fierce howl of a heat beam, shrunk by the field to a wasp-like buzz. Corson ducked. Eyes closed, he waited. Smells rose to his nostrils: smoke, burning wood, scorching meat. Beyond his lids the universe glowed.
He opened his eyes. Day had returned. Still in a crouch, he looked around. More than a hundred of the women had been killed, and a score of soldiers. A dozen more would never be good for anything again. Part of the camp was in flames.
Rising, he turned in the direction of the forest and saw what remained of Veran. The pegasone had vanished.
Veran had played his last card, and lost. He had managed to get himself killed in two ways at once. The heat beam—possibly aimed at him—had touched him just as he was mounting the pegasone. A fraction of a second earlier the beast, alert to the danger, had shied through time without caring what was nearby. It had taken half of Veran with it, and his light-inhibitor.
Somewhere in the universe, Corson thought, there must be a pegasone drowning in night and silence, struggling in unfathomable darkness at the bottom of a well which no energy could reach until the inhibitor’s power pack ran out or until it managed to shake off the device during one of its frantic time leaps. But why should Veran have taken his pegasone, when his camp was full of the beasts? Then Corson realized. He must have wanted access to the memory of that particular pegasone, to find out how and by whom he had been outwitted.
He trod on something. Bending down, he retrieved a little flat blade of blackened metal with a square notch at one end. He raised it to his neck and engaged the collar in the notch. No result. He began to turn the collar slowly. His hands shook and he almost had to stop. A block of ice exploded in his guts. Sweat poured into his eyes. The capillaries in his suit, overloaded, ceased to keep his back and armpits dry. He was suddenly very thirsty.
When he had turned the collar completely around, it fell apart in two sections. He caught them, looked them over for a moment—seeing that their edges were smooth, as though they had been no more than pressed together—and, in a futile gesture, hurled them far away.
He could see no sense in what Veran had done. Had he hoped to get clear so completely that Corson would never again be a threat to him? Had he detected a certain fellow feeling on Corson’s part?
An idea came to his mind. Maybe Veran had tried to take the pegasone in the hope of returning to Aergistal. That was the right place for him. And if indeed Aergistal was hell, he had no doubt succeeded.
Corson headed into the camp, hoping to find another pegasone there. The fighting had died down. In a few hours at most the Urians would have the situation in hand. They would meet hardly any resistance. The dying had been finished off. A few lightly injured men were trying to dress their wounds. Guns lay around here and there. But what Corson had been most afraid of was not happening. The soldiers were not maltreating the women. Some were walking about, rather shyly, in the company of three or four beauties, while others, sitting on the grass, were trying to strike up a conversation. They seemed surprised, almost frightened, at the willingness of the girls to cooperate. Maybe they were disappointed.
They would be even more so, Corson thought, forty-eight hours from now . . .
He spotted a soldier wearing a security collar, who sat grief-stricken on a gun carriage with his head in his hands. He touched the man’s shoulder.
“The key,” he said. “The key to your collar.”
The man looked up. Corson read in his eyes stupefaction and alarm. He repeated, “The key of your collar!”
He bent down and opened it, and handed the two pieces to the soldier, who gave a weary smile.
“Take the key,” Corson said. “Other men have collars on. See to them.”
The soldier nodded, but his expression remained absent. The collar might have left his neck, but no key could release him from the memory of Veran, from the ghost of his dead leader.
Corson picked out a pegasone without meeting any opposition. He strapped himself on with extreme care. He had done what he had to do and closed the loop in time. There remained one more jump for him to make, to the beach where—perhaps—Antonella was awaiting him.
And the Council of Uria, Selma, Cid, and Ana ... his friends.
On the beach a woman alone: blond, naked, lying face downward. She was either asleep or in communion. There were no footsteps on the sand except hers. Corson sat down nearby and waited for her to awaken. He had plenty of time. Ahead of him stretched a fragment of the eternity on which was founded Aergistal.
He relaxed. He had reached the end of his road. He could afford to stare at the sea and run sand between his fingers. Later, he too would learn to master time. He had already had a certain amount of practical experience.
The woman roused. She stretched, rolled over, rubbed her eyes. Corson recognized her.
“Floria Van Nelle,” he said.
She nodded and smiled, faintly and almost sadly.
“Where are they?” he demanded, and when she appeared not to understand, went on: “Cid, Selma, and Ana! I must make my report to the Council of Uria.”
“There has been a time slip,” Floria said softly. “Thanks to you, not a very grave one. But in this line of probability they do not exist.” “They’re dead?”
“They have never existed.”
“I’ve lost my way,” Corson said. “I’m in the wrong place—the wrong time—maybe the wrong universe!”
“You have erased them. They inhabited a parenthesis of history. Your intervention has abolished them.”
Corson felt himself turn pale. He clenched his fists. "They were my friends, and I’ve killed them!”
Floria shook her head. “No. They belonged to another possibility and you have brought about this better one. They knew what would become of them if you succeeded, and they hoped you would succeed.” Corson sighed. He had had friends and they had vanished, shadows now even fainter than those claimed by death. They had left nothing behind, not a footprint, not a scratch on a stone, not even a name in this universe which to them was forever closed. They had not been born. They were no more than a memory in Corson’s mind and abstract entries in the ghostly records of Aergistal.
What I touch I wipe away. I am the eraser of the gods.
He recalled Touray, a good comrade, doubtless tossed back into the crazy chaos of unending battle. He thought of Ngal R’nda, last Prince of Uria, torn to bits by his own devoted followers, and Veran, the cunning mercenary, struck down by his own companions. He thought, with terror, of Antonella. He wanted to ask a question, but words would not come.
“On the other creode I did not exist,” Floria said. “And I was assigned to welcome you when you arrived on Uria. Did you think I turned up by chance? Here I exist, thanks to you. Don’t say you’re sorry.”
Bitterly Corson said, “So we are ripples on the surface of reality, to be reshaped or dispersed by a puff of wind according to the whim of the gods. I’ve been a toy for Those of Aergistal, the puppeteers who are making over history.”
‘They are not gods, even if they are somewhat more than we are. They do not act merely from caprice.”
“I know,” Corson rasped. “They work for the best. They are eliminating war. They’re rearranging history so that it will climax with them. I heard all that at Aergistal. To eliminate war, comprehend war, preserve war . . . There they cower like rats at the end of time, scared of the Outside.”
“That’s only half the story,” Floria said patiently. “They are ourselves.”
“They’re our descendants. They mock us from their billion-year vantage point.”
“They are ourselves, Corson,” Floria repeated. “We are Those of Aergistal. But we don’t know that we are. We have to discover and grasp that truth. They are the sum of everything that’s possible, for their kind, for ours, for all others, even for species you cannot dream of and that could not dream of you. They are all the fragments of the universe and all the perceptions of the universe. We are not the ancestors of the gods, nor are they our descendants, but we are one part of them, cut off from our origins or rather from our completion. Each of us is one of their possibilities, a detail, a creode, aspiring in our muddled way to achieve union with them, yet struggling blindly in the dark to assert our separate existence. Something has happened somewhere in space and time which I myself don’t understand, though I know it was neither at the beginning nor the end of time. There is no ‘before’ or ‘after.’ To them, and already to a tiny extent to us, time is a dimension along which events coexist like objects laid side by side. We are one moment of the long path that leads to Aergistal, toward the union of all possible consciousness, and Those of Aergistal are each and every one of the beings who have ever taken and will ever take that path.”
“Gods with schizophrenia,” Corson grunted.
“Yes, if that helps you to understand them. Sometimes I tell myself that they must have set out to explore the full range of what is possible, and got lost on the way and became us, and that’s the reason for war, this splitting and cracking and crumpling of history which they are so carefully smoothing out. The fact that it has been broken prevents them, despite their great power, from instantly and completely setting the universe to rights. For what they are, we are also. War is part of them. And we must grope about to rediscover the long, the very long road that leads to them, that’s to say to ourselves. They were bom of war, Corson, from this dreadful tumult that shakes our lives, and they will only exist if they abolish it. Here and there they repair a fault, reknot the mesh. We do it, sometimes with their help. You have done it. Do you regret that?”
“No,” Corson said.
“To eliminate war,” Floria went on, “Those of Aergistal make use of people who have waged it. They know what it’s like. Sometimes they come to hate it enough to want to abolish it—really to want that, no matter what the cost. Those who do not immediately arrive at this conclusion spend a certain while at Aergistal. Eventually they understand. In the long run they all understand.”
“Even someone like Veran?” Corson said sceptically.
“Even someone like Veran. Right now he’s canceling a flare-up in the Lyra region.”
“But he’s dead,” Corson said.
“No one dies,” Floria countered. “A life is like a page in a book. There’s another next to it. Not after it—next to it.”
Corson rose and took a few steps toward the sea. He halted at the edge of the surf.
“It’s a great story. Who’s to tell me if it’s true?”
“Nobody. You’ll find that out by snatches. Maybe what you’ll find out will be a little different. No one has the monopoly of truth.” Without turning, Corson said—forcefully, almost violently—“I came back to learn the mastery of time, and how to commune with Those of Aergistal. And—”
“You’ll learn. Everything you’re capable of learning. We need people like you. There are so many outbreaks of war to be put out, like so many fires.”
“But I hoped to find peace,” Corson said. “And—and I came back for Antonella.”
Floria drew close and set her hands on his shoulders. “I beg you—” she began. He cut her short.
“I love her! Or ... or I used to love her. She has vanished too, hasn’t she?”
“She never existed. She had been dead for a long time. We took her from the mausoleum world, from that warlord’s collection, and equipped her with an artificial personality, just as you did with Veran’s recruits. It was essential, Corson. Without her you would not have acted as you did. But a real human being could not have entered Aergistal.”
“Without being a war criminal,” Corson said.
“She was no more than a machine.”
“You mean she was bait.”
“I’m desperately sorry. I will do whatever you wish. I will love you, George Corson, if that is what you want.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” he muttered, recalling what Cid had told him: he must not hold against them what they had been forced to do. Cid had been expunged. He had known what was in store for him, yet he had pitied Corson . . .
“No one dies,” Corson said. “Perhaps I’ll find her again in another existence.”
“Perhaps,” Floria sighed.
Corson took a step into the sea. “So nothing is left to me—neither friendship nor love. My universe disappeared six thousand years ago. I’ve been cheated.”
"You are still free to choose. You can wipe it all away, return to square one. But remember! Aboard the Archimedes you were about to die.”
“Free to choose?” Corson echoed disbelievingly.
He heard her move away; when he turned he saw she was delving in the sand at the spot where it still bore the imprint of her body. When she came back she held an opalescent phial the size of a pigeon’s egg.
‘There is one more thing you must do in order to become completely one of us. Wild pegasones are no more capable of time travel than a caveman of advanced mathematics. At best they can move a few seconds back or forth. This phial contains an accelerator which multiplies their embryonic power billions of times over. You must administer it yourself at the proper moment. The dose has been carefully calculated. Its introduction into the past will cause no appreciable timequakes from your point of view. So far as your date of emergence is concerned, the margin for error is narrow, but we have taken that into account. A pegasone carries a certain volume of space along when it jumps through time. Now you know all that’s necessary. The decision is up to you, George Corson.”
He heard and understood. One last thing to be done. The keystone to be set on the arch. His own hand to be outstretched to himself across a gulf of six thousand years.
“Thank you,” he said. “But I don’t yet know what I’ll do.”
He took the phial and headed for his pegasone.
Corson jumped more than six thousand years into the past, groped around to get his bearings, made a spatial correction . . . and the pegasone locked into the present. The planet spun around him for a moment until he managed to stabilize himself. He was in a very elongated orbit, the sort which a warship would adopt if it wanted to brush past the planet, spending minimal time close to its surface but needing to discharge something under the best possible conditions and out of the eye of the sun.
He waited, musing. The universe was spread out before him, yet he saw practically nothing of it. It was like a well, infinitely deep and infinitely wide, whereas all that any human—or alien—eye could perceive was the narrow borehole of its own awareness. Tangled together, but never uniting, all those pipelike strands led to the skin of the universe, toward its ultimate surface, where they all at last united at Aergistal. Each point in the universe, so Cid had claimed, possessed its own ecological universe. So must any given observer, any given maker of decisions.
Everyone tries to read his own destiny on the walls of the well. Everyone, if he can, seeks to alter the design of his life. Unaware, we burrow away and distort the shafts our neighbors are sinking . . .
But not at Aergistal. Not on the surface of the cosmos. For Those of Aergistal there was no distinction between the ecological universe and the plenum. They could not neglect anything. They could not be unaware of anybody.
Below Corson, Urian scanners were searching the sky. They voiced the fears of another segment of this complicated history. But at this distance the combined masses of pegasone and rider were too small to unleash a reaction from the gun batteries.
Corson hesitated. He could make off, in which case he would most likely be killed in the explosion of the ship. He might perhaps reach the ground in company with the Monster; then, sooner or later, he would fall into the clutches of the Urians. Few prisoners had returned from Uria and none in good shape. He could let Lieutenant George Corson, part-time soldier, specialist in Monsters and ignorant of almost everything about them, continue to the term of his natural destiny. Then he, the other Corson, the time traveler, would be obliterated. Was it worth dooming the other Corson to all those trials which would culminate in the frustration of continuous check and the gall of loneliness? He wondered what the other Corson would decide at the conclusion of his journeyings. Then he recalled that he was that Corson.
Well—was it worth it?
That night of terror in the forest beside the wailing Monster. Floria Van Nelle. She must have known he was going to attack her. Or could she really sense nothing beyond that fringe of a few seconds where the future loomed into certainty? Dyoto, the city he knew to be doomed, and his comical wanderings among its vertical streets. Antonella, who seemed to have sprung from nowhere and in fact had done so. Veran. His captivity. The house of the dead at the end of the blue road. Aergistal, that caldron of war where death itself was no more than a respite. And this web of intrigue, this mad to-and-froing of fanatics and warmakers in which time tore itself apart.
If he did nothing, if he went away . . . The Monster would reach its destination. It had proved how tough it was. It would bear its offspring. In due time Earth would win the war. She would dress her wounds. She would control, by cunning or by force of arms, the nascent Confederation. There would be rebellions, and further wars.
But this, he realized, was ancient history. A warmed-over tale from six thousand years ago. In the future where he had lived, the war between the Solar Powers and the Princes of Uria had been filed and forgotten. Nobody had won, and in the final analysis both sides had lost. Whatever he did, that would be the outcome. It was no longer important to him, anyhow. He had ceased to be Lieutenant Corson of the Archimedes, worried about the course of the war and the safety of his own hide. He had turned into another person altogether.
Process ... He looked at the stars spangling the sides of the universal well, more numerous here than in the sky of Earth. In six thousand years they would still shine in virtually the same places. Each held a mystery, and a promise, and a fragment of History. To Corson the lieutenant they had been only abstract lights, the glints on the teeth of terror. To the new Corson it was more as though each lighted a rung of a scaling ladder by which he could climb over the ramparts of time.
He could leave the lieutenant to eke out the short span of life remaining to him, wipe away all bitterness, accomplish the most perfect suicide of all eternity. But that other Corson in the black hull of the Archimedes had had no desire to die.
Can I divide myself from him? Corson wondered. And it came to his mind that Floria had spoken only half the truth. Yes, perhaps warfare was the result of shattering that union of all possibilities experienced by Those of Aergistal. But why Those, in the plural? Was there not some point at which Those of Aergistal would be revealed as all possible variants of a One? And might not that One have grown bored, and chosen to scatter Himself knowingly into oblivion, becoming each man and all men, each being and all beings? Rock and worm, star and wave, space and time . . .
Am I dreaming? Corson wondered. Or am I remembering?
He would never know if the other Corson were to die. Along with his life, he would lose the memory of having lived.
Beyond life, there was hyperlife. Like the pages of a book, in Floria’s image. A hypercube, a tesseract, contains an infinite number of cubes yet its volume is finite in four dimensions. “Our lives are not infinite, but they are boundless,” so the being at Aergistal had said. “You will learn to control time. You will become like us.”
So there were at least three levels of existence: the level of potential, that of Cid and Selma and Ana, where one was no more than an entry in the phantom records at Aergistal; the level of linear life, like that of the other Corson, where one was held prisoner by time from birth to death; and finally the level of hyperlife, which might symbolically be mapped along a dimension perpendicular to the time axis, where one was liberated from time.
What he was reminded of was the notion of excitation states of elementary particles, as defined in primitive physics. Maybe the pioneering scientists of early human history had sensed a great truth. A particle—atom, nucleon, meson, quark—once excited, rose to a higher energy level. It would become something else without ceasing to be itself. It could spontaneously revert to its initial state by giving off in its turn particles of a lesser order, such as a photon, an electron, a neutrino, a muon, or the like.
Now Corson was standing on the threshold of hyperlife. He could fall back to the level of linear existence by emitting the counterpart of a neutrino, his existence of the past several weeks, which would become potential and cease to have significant consequences. It would not vanish completely, but it would have negligible reality, massless and chargeless like a neutrino. Someone in a laboratory at Aergistal would observe the equivalent of a shower of sparks. A spectral cloud chamber would record the discontinuance of a hyperlife.
Not every page of the book could be so drowned in bitterness . . .
Corson reached his decision.
The blackened hull of the Archimedes was occulting a cluster of stars above him. He desynched the pegasone, approached, penetrated the screens and armor of the ship. Unafraid of being noticed, he made for the magazine; temporal dephasing would make him effectively imperceptible to any observer on board.
He felt his pegasone hesitate, reluctant to come close to its wild cousin. Calming it, he slipped the phial into the grip of one of its tendrils. He saw himself from behind, his outline distorted by the temporal dephasing and the pegasone’s peculiar senses. The tendril coiled around the phial probed through the force screen enclosing the Monster. When the phial was above the creature’s maw, he locked his pegasone into the present for a billionth of a second. A flash, a sharp crack. The force screen had chopped off the tendril and the injured beast had shied through time and space.
A leap of a few kilometers, a few seconds.
Away in space Corson waited, staring at the tiny, almost invisible hull of the ship. A very old memory came back to him. Just before the catastrophe he had seen a flash, unbearably brilliant but so brief he had doubted its reality. He had had no time to puzzle about it then.
A new flash was superimposed on that infinitesimal trace. The Archimedes had blown up. And the gun batteries on Uria had remained silent. The orbit her captain had selected had fulfilled its purpose; her approach had gone unnoticed.
A generator breakdown, he said to himself.
More likely, though, was that he himself had unleashed the catastrophe. The accelerator had vastly multiplied the powers of the Monster. It had not made use of them at once to flee through time. It had turned against its cage, and the generators could not stand the load.
Shattered, the hull of the Archimedes plunged toward the jungles of Uria. It seemed to Corson that something separated from it. An illusion. He did not yet have the power to see across time. But that would come.
He thought of his old comrades, dead now. There was nothing he could do for them. The die was cast once for all.
A long while later the hull reached the atmosphere and burst into flame. The ground batteries finally opened up. Space became full of spy missiles. Corson forced himself to believe that the ship would have been destroyed in any case. Another illusion.
The ship burned out under the heedless stars.
Somewhere on Uria, six thousand years away, another Corson was struggling to stay alive. He did not yet know he would be called on to cancel out a war under the chill gaze of the eons, that at Aergistal he would hear the voice of the true gods, and that he would perhaps enter into hyperlife.
“Why me?” Corson asked himself as once again he took the path toward the future.
Me—me—me . . . said echo-Corsons spread out along his lifeline, and all around on the lifelines of alternative Corsons. He felt his mind fill with a murmuring sound such as might give birth to words, the undercurrent of their common consciousness. It seemed he was on the brink of communion with them, these countless Corsons of the ramifying future. He could believe that he was going to know what they lived through, see with their eyes, think their thoughts. But he remained as yet on the threshold of that perfect union, for time had not finished its work, nor had experience, and those Corsons were only just beginning to have the shadow of a chance of existence.