If men could only help the universe. If he could get back—
He said, “Teach me to fly in—in time.”
The girl’s voice said, “He means ____ ______ ____ ______.”
The boy interrupted. “I know what he means, but how can I show him?”
“Show me,” insisted Ban, desperately. “Show me.”
“I am showing you. I’m up’n’downing you.” (And behind the words, Ban could now hear a dim and simultaneous “past’n’futuring you.”)
The girl said suddenly, “Lift him all the way up—Let’s see what happens.”
“No,” screamed Ban.
He felt the lifting as though something, not air, not matter, but something, pressed against him with the speed of his passage. His cheeks were downy with unreaped fuzz and his legs were spindly. The pants came down over his shoes and then he seemed to shrink together.
He remembered his wings. He reached for the flight stud but it was gone and the wings themselves had fallen off his back a dull lump of reddish rock.
“No,” he screamed in treble, and started to run across a fog-shrouded beach on short legs that entangled themselves in strands of raw wool that was turning to fleece. He fell and kicked chubbily, drooling and conscious of nothing more than a vague hunger. His lips moved in response, sucking—
Then his legs stretched out, and he rose tottering, unsteadily, to his feet. He was thin, about a foot less in height than he dimly realized he ought to be.
A voice said, and he recognized it all over again, as a girl’s. “He changed. Did you see that? He changed.”
“Of course.” It was a boy’s voice. “He’s one of the Change People. What do you expect?—He isn’t as timevy as he was.”
Timevy, thought Ban’s boy-mind. Time-heavy.
He remembered. And he didn’t remember, too. He remembered the past and his own future when he would grow up; no, when he had grown up. It was madly confusing. He was twelve years old. Just a moment ago, he had been on Mwyrland and Ilbur the Robot had told him stories out of his long, long memory of a time when men crowded the earth and built cities on power unthinkable—dim myths and legends coming out of the crowded mechanical consciousness of a deathless robot—
And then he had been twenty-two and then ninety-three and then fifty-one and then twenty-nine and then a half and then twelve again, in inextricable confusion.
Yet how could he understand it better now? It made more sense.
Even the fog—The fog!
It was still there, but thinner. He could make out a glimpse of flatness, of gleaming smooth evenness and of infinite gap and sparkle and, in the distance, moving patches of shininess. The Cloud People?
He turned to bend his glance at the two who were with him. They were shrouds still, but sparkling shrouds now.
The boy said, “He’s ______ now. When we lifted him up high, he got ______.”
Ban almost caught that. The young were intimate with time. Time stands still for them and flows oddly, commingled and intermingled. It is only in maturity that the convention clamps down.
He had felt the movement through time just there at the end. He had felt something rushing past them.
“Teach me,” he said, “teach me now how to move through time.”
“Put out ________ ______ ____ ________,” said the boy’s chiming voice.
Ban tried. He tried. He tried to let his mind intuit if it could not understand. Almost he thought he had it. He put out something—something—
“No,” said the boy. “Like this.”
Ban felt something wrenching at him and something of him had moved. Nothing anywhere on his body. Something deep in his mind. It had moved and even fluttered.
“Now,” said the boy. “I’ll let you dow-ture-n easy.”
Ban felt himself swelling and filling out, lift up and grow broad across his shoulder. The uniform was on him, fitting snugly, and the comfortable weight of furled wings was on his back.
The boy said, “No. You don’t get the right ______. It’s out, but you don’t use it.”
And a new voice interrupted. A deeper voice of chords that were incredibly beautiful. A mature voice, a subtle one.
“Younglings. It is long past time you were home. And you have been asked not to stray so near the fog banks.”
The boy’s chimes, thin and subdued, said, “Yes, Knower.”
But the girl said, “We have one of the Change People.”
“I know that, youngling. And you have been amusing yourself with him, which is not kind. And I see you have been trying to teach him to ______ also.”
“It was wrong,” said the boy, humble.
“Have you decided it was wrong?” said the Knower, without anger or reproof, merely questioning.
Ban cried, “Knower. Wait.” But when he cried “Knower” he felt the thought shoot across the gap between himself and the Cloud People in a different form.
“You wish something?” There was a third shroud next to the two he had seen earlier, and it did not glitter. Even in the thinned fog, it did not glitter.
Ban had to bring his new knowledge to the City. He said, “Send me back, Knower. Let me return.”
“Ought I?” The Knower said nothing more than that to him. The next words were addressed to the boy. “You are holding him.”
“He’s not very timevy,” said the boy.
“I understand that. Let him go.”
“But I’ll fall,” cried out Ban. “I’ll die. Don’t let go.”
The third shroud clarified itself. A face, something very like a blank, formless face, came mistily into view. Something like blind, luminous ellipses formed themselves to gaze with infinite compassion down upon him.
“Let him go,” said the Knower, and Ban knew that the boy must.
And he also knew the thought into which his word “Knower” had transmuted itself. He cried out, stranglingly, “Prophetess—Prophetess—Are you one of them?” And the boy let go and, in his despair, Ban let himself fall, uncaring. The beach was under him, steady, motionless, but he fell and his aching muscles slackened.
And when the desire for life overwhelmed him, as it must to the end and he struck at his flight-stud to unfurl wings and race old age to the City, the rusted remnant came off in his trembling fingers and his cheeks fell in over disappearing teeth.
He struggled with fading fierceness against the end. “Prophetess—” he wailed.
Part Three
By Robert Sheckley
Desperately he fought time. Wisps of fog curled around him like pale headless snakes, and the sand far beneath his feet shifted and crept like an army of malignant ants. Ban winged through the fog bank, eternally falling, and saw his rifle barrel corrode and crumble to fine dust before his eyes. He flew, and a part of him watched with fascinated horror as ropelike blue veins corrugated his emaciated arms, and his head, unsupported by the wasted muscles of his neck, drooped on his chest.
“No man wins a race against time.”
Who had spoken? Was it the Knower? Or had the prophetess shrieked into his ear. Whoever spoke the words, Ban knew they were true. Even before reaching the far edge of the fog bank, Ban knew himself as old, too old. He could feel the sluggish blood pounding in his brittle veins, could sense the threadlike beat of his heart threatening momentarily to stop.
He knew then that he would never live to reach his city. Even now he was dying, dying . . .
Uselessly.
With an old man’s petulant anger he turned back. What had the Cloud People taught him? Could he remember it now, when memory had grown dim? Could he check his fall through the unplumbed depths of time?
Ban fought his way upward, swimming like a tired fish against the rushing river of time. He remembered concepts without words, he sensed his heaviness in time. A new direction seemed to open for him. He struggled toward it singlemindedly, and someone was singing a song without words. He fought for knowledge. Truly were his people called the Change People! For now Ban
discarded everything he had learned, believed or felt before entering the fog banks that marked the furthest ramparts of time.
He attempted to lift himself in time.
In part, he succeeded.
He could feel the bone-wrenching jar as his body struck the sand. The blow would have shattered an old man’s frame; but Ban was old no more.
Neither was he young.
He lay helpless on the sand, and realized that his stupendous effort had been based upon an incomplete knowledge of time’s processes. He had held back death; but his present state was perhaps worse.
Stretched out on the sand was the heroic trunk and head of a middle-aged, yellow-bearded man. Beside him was his gun, the barrel deeply pitted, the wooden stock turned green and beginning to sprout. The hand that held the gun was a talon with brown-spotted parchment skin stretched tightly over frail bones. The other hand belonged by rights to a chubby boy of perhaps twelve. His legs could be judged at about four years old; but there from those small, fat legs hung a man’s colossal feet.
Ban had learned the use of time—partially.
“Listen to me, Ban. Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you,” Ban said, and realized that the Knower had spoken to him.
“You must become again what you were, Ban. You must fight again with time. You must ______ yourself.”
“Impossible!”
“You must do it,” Knower said. “For your own sake, and for the sake of all others. Because now we are all in deadly peril.”
“I do not understand,” Ban said.
“You still comprehend yourself only spatially. You must think temporally, as well. You must realize that you have stretched yourself to an immeasurable distance across time. How can I explain to you? Ban, your temporal elongation has created a flaw, a fault, a discontinuity in time. Now you are a ______.”
“I still do not understand.”
“Do you know what a fuse is?” Knower asked.
“Yes.”
“You are a fuse. You are a connection. You are a conductor. A sea-wall holds back the ocean; you are a hole in the wall. A single tree on a barren plain attracts the lightning; you are a tree. Two elements may be stable until a link has been made between them; you are a link. Now do you understand why you must become as you were?”
“For whose good?” Ban asked.
“For the good of your people and mine,” Knower said. “Ban, our people are not truly at war. Instead, we are both warred against. We push you because we ourselves are pushed, by the chaos that seeks to engulf the ordered universe. We must quarrel no longer. We must cooperate, your people and mine.”
“How can I believe you?” Ban asked. And after a moment, he heard a cool, lucid voice behind him.
“What he tells you is true,” the voice said, and Ban recognized it as that of the prophetess. “I myself tell you, Ban, you must become as you were. That is the first step.”
Ban listened in an agony of indecision. Here in the thin mists, a man could be led to believe anything! Was this the prophetess speaking to him, or had the Knower adopted new form? What was happening, what was time going to do?
He decided. He fought to become as he had been. The heroic middle-aged trunk and head grew years younger; the parchment right hand started to fade, to take on size and strength. He fought to retain it, and suddenly his boy’s legs grew three years younger. Desperately he aged his legs, and felt his arms grow thin and old. He made them young again, and felt his feet shrink hideously in his boots.
“It’s impossible!” Ban screamed. “I can’t do it all at the same time!”
“You must!” the prophetess told him.
“I need help!”
“No one can help you. Only you can do it. And Ban—there is very little duration left to do it in!”
Now Ban could hear a vast roaring in his ears. The sand beneath him seemed to mutter and shrink. He heard the Time children wail suddenly.
“Quick, Ban, quick!”
Staring wildly, Ban saw a strange entity before him, a creature of blind, luminous ellipses, beautiful, unhuman hands, a sparkling shroud. It was Knower. It was the prophetess. For a moment, Ban thought that they were standing side by side. Then he realized that he was staring at a single hermaphroditic entity, neither male nor female nor neuter, combining essences of all. Surely not human, yet perhaps benevolent. And Ban could not fathom the purpose of this Janus-natured creature, though he knew that purpose had to be there.
“Ban! For your own sake and for the sake of your people! Become what you were!”
Ban stared at the entity. Barren knowledge flooded his mind. Suddenly he understood the important yet ambiguous nature of the Time children, and what they would do to him, and he to them. Almost, he could understand the nature of the Knower-Prophetess.
“Ban!”
He blocked all thought from his mind. He made a massive effort, pitting all his strength and concentration against the baffling task before him. His hands became a man’s, and his feet grew large again, his legs stretched. He ground his teeth together, concentrated . . .
Space and time recognize no differences, no difficulties, no separations. Near and far, past and present, are terms for men to use; but the forces of space and time are not contained in terms.
So, in another part of the galaxy, at another time and place, an event was taking place whose meaning was crucial to Ban and also to his people.
On a planet named by its inhabitants Hiallo, a small red crustacean dropped to the sandy ocean floor. Far from his burrow, he moodily contemplated the mysterious ways of love. He considered the reasons for his rejection by the brood-queen. He thought of his position in life, the honors he had attained, the chances he had missed. He wondered about the ocean of air far above him, distant, hidden.
He finished thinking. With one powerful claw he pinched off his head, thus committing the eight thousandth suicide for that year upon Hiallo.
His act was in no way remarkable. Rejection by the brood-queen was normally followed by suicide upon Hiallo. And yet, this one particular act was crucial to Ban and his people.
In another part of the galaxy, at another time and place, an event was taking place whose meaning was crucial to Ban and his people.
A biped named Marcellus, of a planet called Terra, sat beneath a huge oak tree. The sun was hidden, and the gloomy forest somewhere in Germania was chilly, so Marcellus pulled his woolen cloak tightly around him. He looked around and tried to figure out where he was. Everything looked the same in these damned woods; one tree looked like another tree, and all the avenues of the forest led in different and unknown directions.
Marcellus and ten others, under the command of a centurion, had marched out from the forward command post at Legae to check on the movements of the barbarians. They had penetrated half a day’s march into the forest, had been about to turn back when the tall, pale-skinned men had fallen upon them. It had been a slaughter. At the end, Marcellus had fled; and now he was lost.
He was an unimportant man; and yet, it was very important that he get back. For he, a common foot soldier, had glimpsed a sight in the forest that might change the destiny of Rome itself.
Marcellus got to his feet, stifling a curse when he put weight on his slashed leg. He looked around at the identical corridors of the forest. From what direction had he come? He didn’t know; but it was unlike a Roman to stay indecisive for long. Marcellus chose a direction and struck out, limping.
After half an hour’s march, he stopped. There were faint sounds on either side of him, sounds that no bird or beast would make. Marcellus peered around him into the gloomy woods. It was almost night. He was very hungry, thirsty, and weaponless.
The whispering sounds came closer. Marcellus listened for a moment, then broke off a branch of a tree. Quickly he stripped it of twigs. A Roman soldier would die fighting, no matter what he had to fight against.
His only regret, as the whispering drew nearer, was that he would probably not live
to tell the others of the strange and marvellous thing he had glimpsed in the woods of deep Germania.
Death in battle was a common fate for soldiers of the Roman Empire, and Marcellus himself was in no way a remarkable man. And yet, what he had seen in the dark German forest was crucial to Ban and his people.
In another part of the galaxy, at another time and place, an event was taking place whose meaning was crucial to Ban and his people.
On a planet whose discoverers called it 3Bcc, two explorers were having an argument. They were at present four-legged and two-handed. For the purposes of the argument, each had extruded a triple tongue. Enormously simplified, their argument went like this:
“It was your fault!”
“Yours!”
“You took the gravity readings wrong. You left out an entire decimal point. You gave me this misinformation, and in that way our ship was wrecked.”
“I will admit that the dials did not read correctly. But you were landing the ship. You should have felt the gravity fault and corrected for it in spite of the readings.”
“You shouldn’t have trusted the dial. You should have become a dial.”
“I was sleepy. Besides, if I had become a dial, who would have been on standby?”
The two explorers stared at each other. At last, good humor reasserted itself. They flowed into friendlier shapes and contemplated the planet upon which they had crashed.
“It is a good land.”
“A very good land.”
“We will stay here, we will propagate, we will increase.”
“And lose capability for our journey?”
“It is intended for journeys to have an end. And when the end is reached, the capabilities for journeying are no longer needed.”
“That is true. This is a good land, and you have made a good answer. We will not be as we are . . . Still . . . Tell me, which of us will bear the children?”
“You will. After all, I piloted the ship.”
“No, you will. For through me we came to this place, and the next task is yours.”
Various Fiction Page 199
