The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  Finally, he opened his eyes.

  I’m Paul Heisenberg, he said, silently. He repeated it, in a more assertive manner, and then again, until he was sure that the thought and all that it implied held power within his mind.

  He was staring at a dusty ceiling, illuminated by fiery evening sunlight that streamed through a fully-glazed window. He turned his head from side to side, looking for the furniture that had been in the room before the dream began, but it was gone. The room was quite bare now, and the wooden floorboards were thick with grime.

  He got to his feet, and waited for a moment for the dizziness to recede, and for his heart to pump blood into his brain. Then he went to the door and turned the handle. The door did not yield, nor even rattle in its frame as he tried to jerk it back and forth. Then he went to the window.

  The concrete apron was cracked and weathered. Beyond, where there should have been a road, another building, a wall, and tall hawthorn hedges, grass and willow-herb, there was nothing but grayness—as if a thick film of oily dust had covered everything.

  The clouds in the sky were silvery grey, but the sky itself was blue and where the reddened sun was sitting on the western horizon the grey vapors that sought to blot it out were haloed with pink and yellow.

  There was no movement anywhere—everything was still and silent. He looked away to the south, where the lights of the city had been clearly visible the day the old earth died, but the city was gone. There was nothing but grey waste extending as far as the eye could see. In ancient times the Romans had defeated certain troublesome cities and had ploughed them under, so that no stone stood to make a foundation for rebuilding. It seemed that a whole world had been ploughed under here, the very greenness of life cancelled out and obliterated.

  Only the prison still stood, or, at least, the part of it that contained Paul Heisenberg.

  It occurred to him then to wonder what had happened to the others. He could not be sure that any of them had managed to launch themselves across time, but if they had, they had long since come to rest, and were gone...returned to the world of men, if there still was a world of men somewhere beyond the wasteland.

  The window had no catch, nor even a frame—the glass was set into the stone itself. It could not be opened. Paul wanted to breathe the air, to smell the grayness of the degenerate land, and he looked around for something which he could use to smash the glass. There was nothing. He tested it with his fingers, but the feel of it told him nothing.

  This is the world after the apocalypse, he thought. The harvest of souls has been gathered in. There is nothing left, save the messiah and the prison that exists to hold him. I am alone.

  Without emotion he turned back the clock of his memory, scanning the images that remained with him from the year 2119. It all had the quality of an anxious dream—he saw himself pursued and harried, assaulted by ideas, hurled through a few brief days of turmoil, understanding nothing, under pressure to produce miracles that were not in him to be produced. Then came the fire from above, the promise of oblivion, and the nightmare: hell itself, with its time-wind and its slithering and its all-consuming terror.

  And now, he thought, I am reincarnated into a new cycle, for surely this is limbo.

  Then a faint sound caught his attention, and he looked up again at the clouded sky to see a vehicle floating down from the sky, as light as a feather. At first, he took it for a helicopter but then he realized that it had no rotors but a system of fluttering, diaphanous wings. It was a great steel egg carried aloft by means that would have delighted a surrealist: the flight of an insect or a bird rather than the orderly, mechanical uplift of rigid aerofoils.

  The astonishing contraption settled on to the concrete apron without stirring so much as a flurry of the grey dust. The wings stopped beating, and Paul saw that there were six in all—great articulated structures, whose skeletal elements appeared to be made of metal alloy and whose main fabric was translucent, as if shaped from colored flexible glass.

  An oval aperture spread slowly across the surface of the egg, growing until it was large enough to permit the passage of a human body. Only one of the two bodies which actually emerged was human, however—a tall negro whose hair and beard were beginning to go grey. His companion was perhaps two meters tall, or a little more, and rapier thin by human standards. He was quite naked, save for sandals on his feet, and all of his skin was green, though the shade varied, being palest in the crotch and beneath his armpits. He had two legs and two arms, but folded over his back was a pair of angel’s wings, gorgeous in their feathered structure, but colored a uniform rich green. He was hairless, and his head seemed unnaturally bulbous—he had eyes that were very large and rounded, while his ears were practically non-existent and there was no jutting jaw-line. His mouth was small and rounded, as if adapted for sucking rather than biting.

  As the two came towards him Paul realized that the alien’s skin was not simply colored green, but had a curious quality, as if the epidermis were transparent and the green an algal forest floating beneath it in a fluid dermis. There was a strange semblance of change in the greenness as the creature walked. It was, in fact, a structure of strips and filaments. The overall effect was something like the pictures he had seen in medical textbooks, which showed what the human body might look like if the flesh were transparent and the muscles and blood-vessels stained to show up their structure and distribution.

  There were several small pits in the surface of the alien’s chest, lighter in color than the surrounding tissue, and there were other small surface features that were too small to attract attention until he was directly below the window. His arms were long, his fingers small and delicate, without fingernails.

  The two looked up at Paul, meeting his eyes for a few brief seconds before they passed into the building and out of sight.

  Paul felt suddenly rather nauseous, and very tired. He remembered that he had not slept for a considerable time in the world he had left behind a few minutes before. He stood and swayed, feeling all the strength draining out of him, and he slumped back against the window, wondering whether he could even stay conscious until the human and the alien reached him. He put his fingers to his temples and tried to will himself back to alertness and control, but he was only half-successful.

  When they opened the door, he tried to walk across the room to meet them, but found that he could not take a step. They had to come to him, and then support him as they guided him to the door. He could only murmur his thanks. The hand of the alien, which gripped his left arm, felt no different from the hand of the human which gripped his right.

  They told him, as they walked him down the staircase, that everything would be all right, and that he could rest within the ornithopter while he received medical attention.

  He was still conscious when they climbed into the egg, and when they laid him down in a kind of pod whose plastic sides felt fleshy and warm, but he felt a slight pain as something wrapped itself around his wrists, and soon after that he drifted away into a very gentle sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Paul awoke with the sensation that he was floating, and a sense of well-being so complete that it took him by surprise. It was almost as if he were intoxicated—his head was not merely clear but hyper-clear, all his sense-impressions sharper. The sharpest of all, oddly enough, was his sense of smell, which conveyed to him a clean sweetness. His ears caught a steady susurrus—the faint pulsation of a quiet, efficient engine of some kind. It was his skin that gave him the sense of floating, for there was the sensation of gentle pressure across his back and his sides, as if he were half-enfolded by a fluid medium. There was no heaviness in his limbs.

  His eyes told him that he was in a small cubical room, its walls painted a pastel blue and inlaid with small designs sculpted in bas-relief. The corners of the room were rounded, and the angles softened by strange curlicues. The substance of the walls looked waxy. There was no door.

  He looked down at himself, and found that he
was, indeed, half-enfolded by what looked rather like an open mussel, a dark blue solid structure filled with a fleshy substance that was solid enough to support him beneath but which reached over his torso and abdomen with what looked like a loose-fitting cocoon of byssus-threads. He was struck, momentarily, by the absurd thought that he was about to be consumed by some dreadful alien predator, but he quickly abandoned the idea.

  He tried to sit up, and the threads of the cocoon broke easily. He stepped free of the “bed” on to the floor of the room, which felt warm. He was completely naked, and felt uncomfortable in consequence. There was nothing in the room save for the mussel, which now began to close. He watched the blue “shell”—its texture was not shell-like, but rather resembled the soft tegument of a giant insect—and saw it slowly retract even as it closed, gradually disappearing into the junction of wall and floor to leave him quite alone The notion of being in a room that was in some strange sense alive disturbed him, but he was easily able to dismiss the threat of fear.

  It came as no surprise when an aperture began to open in the wall, and grew slowly to become an elliptical portal. No one came in, so he stepped out, coming into a much larger room furnished with a long, curved desk, several armchairs and several filing cabinets. Most of it looked comfortingly inert, although the room itself had the same decorated walls and softened angles.

  Seated at the desk was an alien. Behind him there was an alcove in the wall to accommodate the furled wings. There was a curious keyboard panel in front of the alien, resembling a computer input terminal, and the short fingers were moving rapidly over the keys.

  “Forgive me for addressing you in this way,” said a vaguely metallic voice, emerging from a speaker set on the desk. “It is impossible for my own vocal equipment to produce the sounds that make up human languages.”

  The alien was looking at him with unusually large and rounded eyes that seemed the principal feature of his face, and Paul felt oddly as if he were under a microscope. He still did not feel afraid, and was surprised by his own calmness. He felt that he had been tranquillized.

  The lights set in the ceiling of the room seemed to Paul to be too bright, and he blinked several times. The alien waited for a few moments until the moment of adjustment had passed, and then gestured with his long arm, to indicate that Paul should sit in the armchair directly across the desk from his own position. Paul complied.

  “I fear that Gelert Hadan has other business to attend to,” said the alien, by way of his voice-producing equipment. “Normally, we would have had humans here to reduce the shock of your awakening into a much-changed world, but for the time being only Hadan knows that you have returned.”

  Paul said nothing, but was content to stare. The green component of the alien’s skin could now be seen quite clearly as a network of overlapping laminated filaments, with a complex supplementary network of vessels. There were other structures within the transparent matrix that were not green—networks limned in ghostly white. At certain points, Paul could see through the green to darker organs beneath, seemingly dark blue or dark brown.

  “Do you understand what I am saying?” asked the alien.

  “Yes,” said Paul.

  “I cannot tell you my name, because its syllables cannot be rendered into your speech, but I am commonly addressed by humans as Remila. Normally, of course, I do not need to communicate with humans in this way, for they understand the sounds I make, even though they cannot duplicate them, just as I understand human languages, although I cannot reproduce them. It is a means of intercourse that your people and mine now learn as children, although it is not easy.”

  “I see,” said Paul. “There are still people in the world, then—apart from jumpers?”

  “Yes. Many people in your own country were destroyed during the battle that was fought at the time of our arrival—largely because the installation coordinating the mechanical defense system seemed to be located near the city where most of the population of the region was concentrated—but the rest of the Earth suffered relatively little damage.”

  “Where am I now?” asked Paul.

  “South America. Most of the humans who survived the immediate effects of the battle by time-slipping have been evacuated here as we have been able to rescue them. Many do not survive, but we have medicosymbiotic facilities adequate to the recovery of at least fifty per cent of them. You are in unusually good health, no doubt because you have been active for only a few days since the period before the wars.”

  “What happened to the others—the people who were with me in the same room?”

  “Ricardo Marcangelo is dead. He returned to normal time some three hundred years ago, and made a considerable contribution to the establishment of understanding between our races. He lived out his life in the ordinary way, and died just before the close of the twenty-second century, according to your old calendar.”

  “It’s now the twenty-fifth century, then—on our old calendar?”

  “The year is 2472, in the ancient way of reckoning.”

  “There were others with me apart from Marcangelo: a girl named Rebecca, and a man named Scapelhorn.”

  “The girl is alive, but presently timelocked. We have no record of Scapelhorn at all.”

  “What about Adam Wishart?”

  “Dead. He did not survive the shock of his second jump.”

  “And the machine? The one that fought you for possession of the Earth?”

  “Apparently destroyed. All orbital systems were wiped out, as was the surface installation in the northern hemisphere. If there were other installations we did not find them.”

  “So you won.”

  “We did not want to fight. We had no aggressive intentions, but we had to respond when we were attacked. It is important that you realize that. Because of the machine, many of your people became convinced that we were your enemies. That was not so. Today, no one believes it any more—it is all too obvious that the interests of your people and mine coincide—but still there is something that keeps your people and mine apart. It is vital that you, of all people, should be made to see the truth and to understand it.”

  “Why me?” asked Paul, already knowing the answer.

  “Your name still thrives as the emblem of many beliefs, not only among humans, but among my kind as well. It is possible that you will find the world of 2472 more like the world of 2119 than you could have anticipated.”

  “That’s what I was told in 2119, too,” said Paul. “But what I’ve seen so far tells me that this world has changed rather more than I could have imagined. That room I’ve just come from...your egg with insect-wings...and you.”

  “Our technology imitates nature a little more than yours,” said the alien. “We are accomplished biological engineers. We build organic machines, and organic houses—they are not alive, you understand, in any true sense, but they duplicate many of the faculties and some of the methods of living tissues. The ornithopter is simply a machine that makes use of the principles of bird and insect flight. The medicosymbiotic system which restored you to health is, admittedly, much more of an artificial organism, but it remains simply an instrument. It is the same with myself and my kind. We look strange, but in our minds we are not so very different. We have photosynthetic symbionts within our body walls, and vestigial flightless wings that provide extra photosynthetic surfaces, but our eyes are sensitive to approximately the same range of wavelengths of light as yours, and our ears to a similar range of sounds. Your kind and mine live in very much the same perceived universe. What we know of it is basically similar. We have found no insuperable problems in communication; we have similar concept-systems, despite the fact that my kind whistle while yours grunt. We believe that a genuine symbiosis is possible between your race and mine. It is possible, that is, if it is wished for and worked for.”

  “I begin to see the similarity you mentioned,” said Paul. “Your message begins to sound like a parody of Marcangelo.”

  “It is no parody,” rep
lied the metallic artificial voice. “It is in many ways precisely parallel to it.”

  “Is that why your people came here? To seek a productive symbiosis?”

  “Why else would we travel for a hundred years across the void? There is nothing beyond the void that surrounds any world but the possibility of other life, and the only possible reason for meeting other life is the hope of symbiosis.”

  “And yet your spacefleet seemed to be heavily armed—just in case, I suppose.”

  “You have not travelled between the stars. You do not know what threats there are to life and harmony. You do not know how few are the worlds where second-phase life exists. Even the radio signals that drew us to your world could not be taken as an infallible indicator of the presence of second-phase life.”

  “Do I take it that there are other kinds of life?”

  “We classify life-systems according to a tripartite system. First-phase life is not inimical, but third-phase life is deadly. The evolution of third-phase life means that a planet is forever uninhabitable for our kind of life, and our kind of life cannot survive even the least contact with it.”

  There was something in the dead, matter-of-fact tone in which the statement was made that Paul found slightly horrifying. He realized that he was out of his imaginative depth. Clearly, what the alien was saying meant far more than he could see from a standpoint within his own narrow perspectives.

  “What is this third-phase life?” he asked, quietly.

  “I will tell you about third-phase life on another occasion. There are issues more central to our immediate concerns that must be discussed.”