Destiny Times Three

by Fritz Leiber

  A faint sound up the tunnel recalled his altered mind to his present predicament. It might have been a tiny scrape of claws on rock. It was not repeated. He gripped his knife. Perhaps one of the beasts was attempting a surprise attack. If only there were some light—

  A yellowish flame, the color of the woodfire he had been visualizing, flared up without warning a few feet ahead, casting shafts of ruddy glare and shadow along the irregular tunnel. It lit up the muzzles of a gaunt gray dog and a scarred black cat that had been creeping toward him, side by side. For an instant surprise froze them. Then the dog backed off frantically, with a yelp of panic. The cat snarled menacingly and stared wildly at the flame, as if desperately trying to figure out its modus operandi.

  But, with Thorn’s thought, the flame advanced and the cat gave ground before it. At first it only backed, continuing to snarl and stare. Then it turned tail, and answering in a great screech the questioning mews and growls that had been coming down the tunnel, fled as if from death.

  The flame continued to advance, changing color when Thorn thought of daylight. And as Thorn edged and squirmed along, it seemed to him that somehow his way was made easier.

  The tunnel heightened, widened. He emerged in the outer chamber in time to hear a receding rattle of gravel.

  The flame, white now, had come to rest in the middle of the rocky floor. Even as he stooped, it rose to meet him, winking out—and there rested lightly on his palm the gray sphere, cool and tin-smirched, that he had tossed away a few minutes before.

  But it was no longer a detached, external object. It was part of him, responsive to his every mood and thought, linked to his mind by tracts that were invisible but as real as the nerves connecting mind with muscle and sense organ. It was not a machine, telepathically controlled. It was a second body.

  Relief, stark wonder, and exulting awareness of power made him weak. For a moment everything swam and darkened, but only for a moment—he seemed to suck limitless vitality from the thing.

  He felt a surge of creativeness, so intense as to be painful, like a flame in the brain. He could do anything he wanted to, go anywhere he wanted to, make anything he wanted to, create life, change the world, destroy it if he so willed—

  And then—fear. Fear that, since the thing obeyed his thoughts, it would also obey his foolish, ignorant, or destructive ones, People can’t control their thoughts for very long. Even sane individuals often think of murder, of catastrophes, of suicide—

  Suddenly the sphere had become a gray globe of menace.

  And then—after all, he couldn’t do anything. Besides any other limitations the thing might have, it was certainly limited by his thoughts. It couldn’t do things he didn’t really understand—like building a subtronic engine—

  Or—

  For the first time since he had emerged from the tunnel, he tried to think collectedly, with more than the surface of his mind.

  He found that the depths of his mind were strangely altered. His subconscious was no longer an opaque and impenetrable screen. He could see through it, as through a shadowy corridor, sink into it, hear the thoughts on the other side, the thoughts of the other Thorns.

  One of them, he realized, was instructing him, laying a duty upon him.

  The message dealt with such matters as to make the imagination shiver. It seemed to engulf his personality, his consciousness.

  His last glimpse of World III was a gray one of dark, snow-streaked pines wavering in a rocky frame. Then that had clouded over, vanished, and he was in a limitless blackness where none of the senses worked and where only thought—itself become a sense—had power.

  It was an utterly alien darkness without real up or down, or this way or that, or any normal spatial properties. It seemed that every point was adjacent to every other point, and so infinity was everywhere, and all paths led everywhere, and only thought could impose order or differentiate. And the darkness was not that of lightlessness, but of thought itself—fluttering with ghostly visions, aflash with insight.

  And then, without surprise or any consciousness of alteration, he realized that he was no longer one Thorn, but three. A Thorn who had lived three lives—and whether memory pictured them as having been lived simultaneously or in sequence seemed to matter not at all. A Thorn who had learned patience and endurance and self-sufficiency from harsh World III, who had had ground into the bedrock of his mind the knowledge that man is an animal in competition with other animals, that all human aspirations are but small and vaunting and doomed things—but not necessarily worthless therefore—in a blind and unfeeling cosmos, and that even death and the extinguishing of all racial hopes are ills that can be smiled at while you struggle against them. A Thorn who had seen and experienced in World II the worst of man’s cruelty to man, who had gained a terrible familiarity. with human nature’s weaknesses, its cowardly submissiveness to social pressure, its capacity for self-delusion, its selfishness, its horrible adaptability, who had plumbed to their seething, poisoning depths the emotions of bate and resentment and envy and fear, but who in part had risen superior to all this and learned humility, and sympathy, and sacrifice, and devotion to a cause. A Thorn who, in too-easy World I, had learned how to use the dangerous gift of freedom, how to fight human nature’s tendency to go evil and foul itself when it is not being disciplined by hardship and adversity, how to endure happiness and success without souring, how to create goals and purposes in an environment that does not supply them ready-made.

  All these experiences were now those of one mind. They did not contradict or clash with each other. Between them there was no friction or envy or guilt. Each contributed a fund of understanding, carrying equal weight in the making of future decisions. And yet there was no sense of three minds bargaining together or talking together or even thinking together. There was only one Thorn, who, except for that period of childhood before the split took place, had lived three lives.

  This composite Thorn, sustained by the talisman, poised in the dimensionless dark beyond space and time, felt that his personality had suddenly been immeasurably enriched and deepened, that heretofore he had been going around two-thirds blind and only now begun to appreciate the many-sidedness of life and the real significance of all that he had experienced.

  And without hesitation or inward argument, without any sense of responding to the urgings of Thorn II, since there was no longer a separate Thorn II, he remembered what the death-resisting Oktav had whispered to him in the Blue Lorraine, syllable by agonized syllable, and he recalled the duty laid upon him by the seer.

  He thought of the first step—the finding of the Probability Engine—and felt the answering surge of the talisman, and submitted to its guidance.

  There was a dizzying sense of almost instantaneous passage over an infinite distance—and also a sense that there had been no movement at all, but only a becoming aware of something right at hand. And then—

  The darkness pulsed and throbbed with power, a power that it seemed must rack to pieces many-branched time and shake down the worlds like rotten fruit. The thought-choked void quivered with a terrifying creativity, as if this were the growing-point of all reality.

  Thorn became aware of seven minds crowded around the source of the pulsations and throbbing and quivering. Homely human minds like his own, but lacking even his own mind’s tripled insight, narrower and more paternalistic than even the minds of World II’s Servants of the People. Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions of godhead. Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance—which their power protected.

  Then he became aware of vast pictures flaring up in the void in swift succession—visions shared-by the seven minds and absorbing them to such a degree that they were unconscious of his presence.

  Like river-borne wreckage after an eon-long jam has broken, the torrent of visions flowed past.

  World II loomed up. First the drab Servants Hall, where eleven old men nodded in dour satisfaction as they
assured themselves, by report and transtime televisor, that the invasion was proceeding on schedule. Then the picture broadened, to show great streams of subtronically mechanized soldiers and weapons moving in toward the transtime bridgehead of the Opal Cross. Individual faces flashed by—wry-lipped, uninterested, obedient, afraid.

  For a moment World I was glimpsed—the interior of the Opal Cross shown in section like an anthill, aswarm with black uniforms. Quickly, as if the seven masters hated to look at their pet world so misused, this gave way to a panoramic vision of World III, in which hundreds of miles were swept over without showing anything but fallen or fire-tortured skylons, seared and scrub-grown wasteland, and—cheek by jowl—glacier walls and smoke-belching volcanoes.

  But that was only the beginning. Fruits of earlier time-splits were shown. There was a world in which telepathic mutants fought with jealous nontelepaths, who had found a way of screening their thoughts. There was a world in which a scarlet-robed hierarchy administered a science-powered religion that held millions in Dawn Age servitude. A world in which a tiny clique of hypnotic telepaths broadcast thoughts which all men believed in and lived by, doubtfully, as if in a half-dream. A world where civilization, still atomic-powered, was split into tiny feudalistic domains, forever at war, and the memory of law and brotherhood and research kept alive only in a few poor and unarmored monasteries. A world similarly powered and even more divided, in which each family or friends-group was an economically self-sustaining microcosm, and civilization consisted only of the social intercourse and knowledge-exchange of these microcosms. A world where men lived in idle parasitism on the labor of submen they had artificially created—and another world in which the relationship was reversed and the submen lived on men.

  A world where two great nations, absorbing all the rest, carried on an endless bitter war, unable to defeat or be defeated, forever spurred to new efforts by the fear that past sacrifices might have been in vain. A world that was absorbed in the conquest of space, and where the discontented turned their eyes upward toward the new frontier. A world in which a great new religion gripped men’s thoughts, and strange ceremonies were performed on hilltops and in spacecraft and converts laughed at hate and misery and fear, and unbelievers wonderingly shook their heads. A world in which there were no cities and little obvious machinery, and simply clad men led unostentatious lives. A sparsely populated world of small cities, whose inhabitants had the grave smiling look of those who make a new start. A world that was only a second asteroid belt—a scattering of exploded rocky fragments ringing the sun.

  “We’ve seen enough!”

  Thorn sensed the trapped horror and the torturing sense of unadmitted guilt in Prim’s thought.

  The visions flickered out, giving way to the blackness of unactualized thought. On this blackness Prim’s next thought showed fiercely, grimly, monstrously. It was obvious that the interval had restored his power-bolstered egotism.

  “Our mistake is evident but capable of correction. Our thoughts—or the thoughts of some of us—did not make it sufficiently clear to the Probability Engine that absolute destruction rather than a mere veiling or blacking out, was intended, with regard to the botched worlds. There is no question as to our next step. Sekond?”

  “Destroy! All of them, except the main trunk,” instantly pulsed the answering thought.

  “Ters?”

  “Destroy!”

  “Kart?”

  “The invading world first. But all the others too. Swiftly!”

  “Kant?”

  “It might be well first to … No! Destroy!”

  With a fresh surge of horror and revulsion, Thorn realized that these minds were absolutely incapable of the slightest approach to unbiased reasoning. They were so fanatically convinced of the correctness of all their past decisions as to the undesirability of the alternate worlds, that they were even completely blind to the apparent success of some of those worlds—or to the fact that the destruction of a lifeless asteroid belt was a meaningless gesture. They could only see the other worlds as horrible deviations from the cherished main trunk. Their reactions were as Unweighed and hysterical as those of a murderer, who taking a last look around after an hour spent in obliterating possible clues, sees his victim feebly stir.

  Thorn gathered his will power for what he knew he must do. “Sikst?”

  “Yes, destroy!”

  “Septem?”

  “Destroy!”

  “Okt—”

  But even as Prime remembered that there no longer was an Oktav and joined with the others in thinking destruction, even as the darkness began to rack and heave with a new violence, Thorn sent out the call.

  “Whoever you may be, wherever you may be, Oh you who created it, here is the Divider of Time, here is the Probability Engine!”

  His thought deafened him, like a great shout. He had not realized the degree to which the others had been thinking in the equivalent of muted whispers.

  Instantly Prim and the rest were around him, choking his thoughts, strangling his mind, thinking his destruction along with that of the worlds.

  The throbbing of the darkness became that of a great storm, in which even the Probability Engine seemed on the verge of breaking from its moorings. Like a many-branched lightning-flash, came a vision of time-streams lashed and shaken—Worlds I and II torn apart—the invasion bridge snapped—

  But through it Thorn kept sending the call. And he seemed to feel the eight talismans and the central engine take it up and echo it.

  His mind began to suffocate. His consciousness to darken.

  All reality seemed to tremble on the edge between being and not-being.

  Then without warning, the storm was over and there was only a great quiet and a great silence present, that might have come from the end of eternity and might have been here always.

  Awe froze their thoughts. They were like boys scuffling in a cathedral who look up and see the priest.

  What they faced gave no sign of its identity. But they knew.

  Then it began to think. Great broad thoughts of which they could only comprehend an edge or corner. But what they did comprehend was simple and clear.

  XIV.

  And many a Knot unraveled by the

  Road

  But not the Master-knot of

  Human Fate.

  The Rubaiyat

  Our quest for our Probability Engine and its talismans has occupied many major units even of our own time. We have prosecuted it with diligence, because we were aware of the dangers that might arise if the engine were misused. We built several similar engines to aid us in the search, but it turned out that the catastrophe in our cosmos which swept away the engine and cast one of the talismans up on your time-stream and planet, was of an unknown sort, making the route of the talisman an un~ traceably random one. We would have attempted a canvass of reality, except that a canvass of an infinitude of infinitudes is impossible. Now our quest is at an end.

  I will not attempt to picture ourselves to you, except to state that we are one of the dominant mentalities in a civilized cosmos of a different curvature and energy-content than your own.

  Regarding the Probability Engine—it was never intended to be used in the way in which you have used it. It is in essence a calculating machine, designed to forecast the results of any given act, weighing all factors. It is set outside space-time, in order that it may consider all the factors in space-time without itself becoming one of them. When we are faced with a multiple-choice problem, we feed each choice into the engine successively, note the results, and act accordingly. We use it to save mental labor on simple decisionmaking routines, and also for the most profound purposes, such as the determination of possible ultimate fates of our cosmos.

  All this, understand, only involves forecasting—never the actualization of those forecasts.

  But no machine is foolproof. Just because the Probability Engine was not made to create, does not mean that it cannot create, given sufficient mental ti
nkering. How shall I make it clear to you? I see from your minds that most of you are familiar with a type of wheeled vehicle, propelled by the internal combustion of gases, similar to vehicles used by some of the lower orders in our own cosmos. You would see in it only a means of transportation. But suppose one of your savages—someone possessing less knowledge than even yourselves—should come upon it. He might see it as a weapon—a ram, a source of lethal fumes, or an explosive mine. No safety devices you might install could ever absolutely prevent it from being used in that fashion.

  You, discovering the Probability Engine, were in the same position as that hypothetic savage. Unfortunately, the engine was swept away from our cosmos with all its controls open—ready for tinkering. You poked and pried, used it, as I can see, in many ways, some close to the true one, some outlandishly improbable. Finally you worked off the guards that inhibit the engine’s inherent creativity. You began to actualize alternate worlds.

  In doing this, you completely reversed the function of the Probability Engine. We built it in order to avoid making unfavorable decisions. You used it to insure that unfavorable decisions would be made. You actualized worlds which for the most part would never have had a remote chance of existing, if you had left the decision up to the people inhabiting your world. Normally, even individuals of your caliber will show considerable shrewdness in weighing the consequences of their actions and in avoiding any choice that seems apt to result in unpleasant consequences. You, however, forced the unwise choices to be made as well as the wise ones—and you continued to do this after your own race had acquired more real wisdom than you yourselves possessed.