“No,” Ra said, holding up a hand. “It doesn’t matter. That isn’t the issue. I’m here. The Gorths are dead and the Master driven off for the moment. That’s all the time I need to take the key pieces of the temporal shifter. I cannot believe I’m here in the ancient past. This is a marvel. Now, it’s simply a matter of returning to our time with the priceless relic.”
I stared at him, trying to think of a way to upset Lord Ra’s plans.
“Perhaps it’s best if I put you under brain freeze,” he said. “You’re obviously scheming, and I have need of what’s in that brain of yours—later. I can’t afford you getting killed just yet.”
Ra motioned to a neutraloid, one taking out a small black disc. The mentalist held my arms behind my back as the neutraloid lowered the disc toward my forehead. I had the feeling he would attach the disc to my head, and that would give me brain freeze as Ra had said.
As hard as I could, I kicked the neutraloid between the legs, but he blocked with a hand before I could connect properly. They were so damned fast that I found them frustrating.
The neutraloid grinned in a predatory fashion, likely understanding my chagrin.
I squinted suddenly as a bright light once again shined in my eyes. The neutraloid’s muscled shoulders hunched, and he twisted his neck so he could look back over his shoulder.
Other neutraloids aimed and fired their blasters at the ceiling, presumably at the reappeared Master.
Ra hissed between his teeth, releasing my wrists. No doubt, he was going for his pink-ray weapon.
I dove to the side, crawling across the deck over dead and oily bleeding Gorth carcasses. One of them moaned, sitting up. I crawled faster, freaked out by the dead rising, before realizing that the Gorth was trying to stanch the pumping black blood pouring from him.
The brightness intensified, and heat washed across the back of my neck. It hurt, and my garments began smoldering. The brightness became even hotter.
Neutraloids howled, holding forearms before their eyes as they fired blindly at the heat-radiating Master.
Ra fiddled with the lantern device, intense concentration screwed across his face.
I heard a voice, then. It wasn’t the Master’s or Ra’s voice telling me something. It was an inner voice. “Jason, Jason Bain,” it said.
I must have been hallucinating.
“Do you want to save your planet?” the voice asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then you must heed my instructions.”
I realized it must have been an Avanti recording in my brain. I didn’t believe the Avanti in the Solar System could be communicating with me over this great distance. Likely, though, she could have set it up in my mind, that if I ever reached the temporal shifter, the recording would play as inner speech.
“I can show you how to deplode the shifter.”
“Is that anything like implode?” I asked.
The heat pulses were getting worse. My garments were smoking, and the agony in my neck felt like being branded. I had no idea how I could listen to voices and respond to them just now. Maybe that was another process of the Avanti.
In any case, there was no answer to my implode question.
I scrambled on all fours across the deck for the control panel. I quite likely recognized it because of Avanti pre-knowledge she’d placed in my mind. In those fleeting seconds, I wondered what would happen to me if I deploded the temporal shifter. It seemed likely I would die in this time past, as Calidore had called it. But would it help save Terra if I did this?
“Yes,” the voice assured me.
I was sure the recording was lying, but on the off chance that it wasn’t—I rose to my feet, sliding to the controls and manipulating them as fast as my fingers could punch buttons and twist dials.
The eerie otherworldly singing struck. I shuddered in fear as goosebumps rose all over my body.
“Stop what you are doing,” the singing angel voice said. I understood the Master now. “I will give you vast rewards, worm. But first you must stop.”
I did not stop. My fingers moved of their own accord. I had no conscious idea of what I was doing. How could I? But I understood that I was setting up the conditions for a temporal deplosion.
The brightness shined so I could no longer see. I think my clothes burst into flames. I howled, but my fingers continued to press buttons and twist controls. Then the mother of all flashes occurred, blasting me into a swirling kaleidoscope of sights and sounds. I felt as if I was tumbling through time end over end. The assault upon my senses was too much, overloading everything—and I blanked out, wondering if I would ever know if I had won or lost.
-47-
I groaned. I hurt all over. The sun burned upon my tortured flesh, and my tongue was swollen due to the lack of water.
With infinite slowness, I opened my eyes and took stock of my surroundings. I lay on hot sand with nothing else around me. My eyesight was blurry and my back and the backsides of my legs hurt liked a son of a gun. By slow degrees, I worked up to my feet, where I stood swaying.
What had happened to me? Where was the Gorth spaceship? Where were Lord Ra and his neutraloids? What had happened to Calidore and Schaine?
My mind hurt, but not as much as my burned-raw back. The sunshine was literal torture. It occurred to me that except for my socks and boots, I was naked. What had happened to my clothes?
The last thing I remembered was being in the grip of a foreign intelligence. I’d manipulated the temporal shifter—there had been a blast—
I frowned. Had the temporal blast thrown me clear of the spaceship? If that was true—I made a slow rotation, but there was nothing else in the desert with me. There was no box city, no fern forest, although I spied the Kurgech Mountains in the distance.
“Jason,” Calidore shouted. “I’m over here.”
I mumbled something past my swollen tongue and cracked lips that I took to be, “Calidore?”
“Jason, can you hear me?”
I stumbled across the sand for fifteen feet and found the computer slate, trying to pick him up. I snatched my hands away. The computer was hot.
“You look awful,” Calidore said. “Where are your clothes?”
I mumbled more words.
“What was that?” he asked. “I can’t understand you when you mumble like that.”
I would have dropped to my knees, but the sand was too hot for that. I had to get out of the sunshine. It was burning my already toasted back.
“We have to get back to the sky-raft,” Calidore said. “There’s water and spare clothes for you on it.”
I couldn’t spit on my hands, because I didn’t know if I possessed any in my mouth. Somehow, though, I managed to pick up the computer slate and start the awful journey to the sky-raft.
I won’t belabor the point. I must have had heat stroke or the next thing to it, plus some degree of burns. A lifetime as a Wolf Clan warrior in Nevada Territory helped me to endure the stifling heat and the agony. Without boots on, though, I’m not sure I would have made it.
Calidore might have been talking to me during the trek, but I remember nothing about his words. The trek was torturous, and it was long, but eventually I staggered to the sky-raft.
I sipped water aboard it, waited in glorious shade, and sipped more. I did this for a time, I don’t know how long. I found ointment in a compartment and smeared it all over, everywhere I could reach. Then, I took my last gulps of water and fell into a deep slumber.
I woke several times, drank, and conked out again almost immediately.
The next mid-morning, I awoke with a raging thirst. I drank and drank, and I managed to chew some food I found in a locker.
My tongue was no longer so swollen, but my stomach felt as if it clawed up against my spine.
“You should be dead,” Calidore said.
I found more food, wolfing it down, gulping the rest of the water and eating again.
“That’s disgusting,” Calidore said. “I’m ama
zed a body can hold that much food in its belly.”
I almost told him about my superior healing, but it didn’t seem wise to tell him everything about me. That healing factor must have given me the strength to make the trek, and it was already repairing the worst damage from my burns. The Master had seared me good on the Gorth spaceship when he’d burned off my clothes and blasted the others.
I perked up and turned to the computer slate as my mind began functioning semi-normally again. “Where’s Schaine?”
“Not here,” Calidore said.
I cursed myself for forgetting about her. I started up the sky-raft and floated to where I had woken up. For an hour, I flew it back and forth, searching for her body.
“I do not detect it,” Calidore said. “I did not think I would, as I didn’t detect her earlier.”
“What happened to her? And what happened to the Gorth spaceship?”
“Isn’t that obvious?” Calidore asked.
“Not to me,” I said.
“We’re back in our own time.”
“Okay…”
“You destroyed the temporal shifter, doing so in the distant past.”
“You know that for sure?”
“The time distortion we used to reach the past was gone when we returned to the sky-raft. Before the distortion vanished, it must have saved the raft from the reordering of reality.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I’ve been considering the implications of your actions, the vanished time distortion and the Avanti’s fears for quite some time. I’m finally ready to give you my findings.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“Are you interested or not?”
“Will it help me find Schaine?”
“Possibly,” Calidore said. “But you might not like what I have to say.”
“I already don’t like it,” I muttered.
“You changed Aiello’s past and you did so in a big way,” Calidore said. “Thus, you obviously changed the future, our present. What you knew before entering the time distortion is not the same reality or situation because history changed, and possibly drastically so. Because of you, there never was a temporal shifter placed deep underground on Aiello, a place that eventually flooded. That was why we saw all those halftracks coming down the ramp. They were bringing digging equipment to the surface and would have built a deep driller, placing the spaceship and temporal shifter down there.”
“Why did the Master want a spaceship down there in the first place?”
“I have an idea of why he wanted a temporal shifter down there,” Calidore said, “or why the Avanti feared the shifter, in any case. I doubt we’ll ever know the Master’s reasoning for certain, though. We stopped the event from happening. Thus, there never were strange readings on Aiello. Maybe that prevented the so-called pulsating stones from forming in the Kurgech Mountains. That changed the history of the Wind Runners and Hunge. I have a feeling there never were any starmenters landing here, or if they did land, they did so for different reasons than the first time. I’m sure the mentalist brothers Ammon and Ra never showed up here. It’s quite possible they’re still alive somewhere else in the Orion Arm. That means there never was a people called the Fighting Hunge, and thus Red Schaine grew up in a completely different environment, and thus became a different person from the one you knew. Likely, I never went to the plateau and changed her even more.”
I rubbed my forehead. Thinking about all this hurt, but I forced myself to consider the implications.
“Why are we here, then?” I asked. “If the Master never put a temporal shifter down deep, wouldn’t that mean the Avanti never needed to send us here to stop the mentalists from grabbing it?”
“We were the causal agents that made the time change, thus our history didn’t change. Something had to remain constant.”
“Is this fact or Calidore time-traveling theory?”
“Theory for the moment,” he said. “I admit my theory sounds fishy. Time travel is an odd topic with imprecise ramifications. Surely, there are many variables I don’t understand or haven’t taken into account. Think for a moment. We came here, yet there was no reason to come if the temporal shifter wasn’t down there. Thus—”
“Okay, okay,” I said, interrupting. “I get it. We changed time and that changed other stuff. I don’t need to hear the explanations. Although I would like to know why we didn’t stay in the distant past. I mean, I destroyed the temporal shifter. So what returned us to the present?”
“I have a theory, but it isn’t conclusive. I wonder if anyone really knows.”
“What do you mean?”
“As far as I can see, we could have as easily been stranded in the distant past, and already be dead.”
“Dead now in our distant future?”
“Correct,” Calidore said. “There are theories, and there is the present reality. You and I are here where we started. Perhaps the temporal shifter kept us back there the way a man can hold a balloon down in the water. Once he removes his hand, the balloon shoots back up to the surface. Perhaps with the temporal shifter and time distortion gone, we shot back to our time where our bodies belonged.”
“Weird,” I said.
“Very,” Calidore agreed. “Time and time travel is…is a difficult topic to understand fully. I would go so far as to suggest that the Avanti did not know if we would survive or not.”
I glanced at him sharply.
“She must have provided you with knowledge to manipulate the time machine the way you did,” Calidore said.
I shrugged.
“That is as good as saying yes,” Calidore said. “Whatever the case, we survived the Avanti, even though I don’t think she cared about us once we completed her project. I suspect her primary reason for sending us here was to destroy the temporal shifter. Likely, the device represented a horrible danger to her.”
“What kind of danger? You said you had a theory regarding what the Avanti feared.”
“That’s right,” Calidore said. “I wonder if the Masters hid a temporal shifter on a nondescript planet as an emergency measure. Maybe the Masters knew they were going to lose, or thought there was a possibility. Maybe they reasoned that a temporal shifter could send them to a different era. Maybe the Avanti feared that someone could use the time machine and bring Masters up to our time. That would reignite the ancient war, with the Avantis at a serious disadvantage, especially if our Avanti was the last one left.”
“That’s a lot of theorizing,” I said.
“What else do you think an immobile computer does?”
I stared at the computer slate, finally nodding.
“I still want my robot body like you promised,” Calidore said.
I thought about that. “Yeah. I did promise. And I’m going to keep my word. So how do we go about doing that for you?”
“We have a sky-raft,” Calidore said. “After we find you some clothes, I suggest we explore our options and see if there’s a way off Aiello.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s get started.”
-48-
Three days later, I wore nondescript gray garments and boots and had a conventional Aiello five-shooter on my hip. It had big bullets in a cylindrical chamber. I’d bought it secondhand from the dealer who had purchased the sky-raft.
The dealer had been a darker-skinned individual than I was used to seeing during my short time on the planet. My experience had all been before the time shift, of course. The dark-skinned, hawk-nosed trader was from Rhone, a planet in the Oladahn Confederacy known for their sharp trading practices and well-constructed goods. The trader had declared the sky-raft of inferior construction and had driven a hard bargain.
With the monies, I’d bought a fake ID, proclaiming I was a native of the planet Saravan, which was outside the Oladahn Confederacy and noted for pale-skinned people like me. The forger had not come cheap, but he’d said the ID would pass gate inspection and allow me to buy a ticket on a regular spaceliner.
I’d made a few inquiries in the spaceport bars. No one had heard of Terra or Earth, although one individual had heard rumors of mentalists and something of the notorious starmenter named Esteban Dan.
“He is a Hunge,” the bartender said. “He came from Jemez, a province in the foothills of the South Kurgech Mountains.”
I had a good idea what the starmenter looked like, and I hoped I never ran into him. Would Esteban Dan have a—I don’t know—a precognition that we’d met in a different time, and that I’d killed him?
Esteban Dan’s existence proved that much had changed.
“Is he’s the same individual you fought or just someone with the same name?” Calidore said.
I didn’t know and I wasn’t going to argue with the computer about it. In many ways, it was as if we’d never gone through all those horrible events. Yet, they had happened. I remembered them just fine. We had slain mentalists, destroyed the temporal shifter and done what the Avanti had demanded of us.
The big question was: what now?
We had changed local Aiello history, but I wouldn’t think we’d done anything anywhere else, including my homeworld. The Avanti’s Arch Ship must still orbit the crystalline-shrouded Terra, keeping everyone in stasis. Mentalists might still come poking around the Solar System someday if they ever learned about the Avanti vessel and technology.
“Hey,” I said. “One thing’s sure. The mentalists don’t know about us or about Terra.”
“I’m not sure that’s precisely true.”
“It has to be true. Ammon and Ra never came here and thus never talked to you and me.”
“Of course they did,” Calidore said. “They came the first time.”
The Imprisoned Earth Page 21
