Debt of Ages

by Steve White

  And then, came a thought like a blighting chill, there were the Korvaasha—the living confirmation of Goethe (she had learned of him during the last fifteen years) for they showed that sentience can enable its possessor to become beastlier than any beast.

  The thought led her consciousness back to Bob, where she had resolved not to let it wander. The details hadn’t made their way across the Pan-Human League yet— messages were limited to the speed at which the combination of displacement points and continuous-displacement drive would allow a ship to carry them; humanity left instantaneous communications behind when it emerged onto the interstellar stage. But it was clear enough that the mysterious menace that had emerged from the unexplored spaces beyond Loriima was yet another surviving fragment of the old Korvaash Unity. (How many more? some inner self that had never left girlhood behind asked God.) And Bob was now on the far side of the League organizing humankind’s resistance…

  She shook her head, for she knew the futility of wishing to be with him at this moment. They had learned to live with the long separations their careers mandated, and the realities of space travel had made humanity relearn the patience of the Age of Sail. And it wouldn’t really matter if it weren’t for the sense of something unresolved, of feelings he has that are always hidden from me, a part of him in which I can’t share. If it weren’t for that I could face the possibility of never seeing him again without this gnawing feeling of incompletion. Her thoughts remained far away as she entered her small suite of rooms and dropped her satchel on the bed.

  “Hello, Tiraena.”

  She whirled around at the impossible voice, her sense of reality reeling. “Bob?!” She knew it came out as a ridiculous squeak, but she could no more worry about that than she could doubt that it was really him—she had known him too long for the idea of an imposter to even enter her consciousness. Then she was in his arms and for an instant no mysteries or impossibilities existed… or, at least, mattered. But only for an instant. She disengaged and held him at arm’s length so she could look at him. It was only then that she noticed the other man, also in Fleet uniform.

  “Ah, Tiraena, this is my operations officer, Captain Geoffrey Draco.”

  “Charmed,” she said mechanically. “Bob, what are you doing here? How did you get here?” The figures for the voyage from Loriima ran through her head, and she didn’t even have to activate her implanted calculator to see that he couldn’t be here.

  “Tiraena,” he said with apparent evasiveness, “you don’t know Captain Draco, do you?”

  She looked at the ops officer closely for the first time. “No..Should I?”

  “We’ve only met once, Ms. DiFalco-Sarnac. And I wasn’t at my best at the time—in fact, I was only semiconscious. You see, I was dying. Prior to that you may have gotten a bad impression of me, since you knew my wife, from whom I was estranged.” •

  “Well, there’re always two sides to these things,” Tiraena said with ritual politeness. “And I’m glad you got to the regen tank in time.” She turned back to Sarnac. “Bob, you didn’t answer me. What’s this all about? How could you have gotten here from Loriima? And why didn’t anyone tell me you were here? And how did you even get into this suite… ?”

  “Tiraena,” Sarnac stemmed the flood of questions, “you remember the recurring dreams I’ve had—the ones that didn’t really seem like dreams at all, but rather like incomplete memories?”

  She blinked twice. “Of course. In fact, I was only just thinking of it. I know they’ve been getting worse.”

  “Well, they were fragments of memory, Tiraena. Memories that were taken from me. Memories of incredible experiences we went through fifteen years ago. You see, the memories were taken from both of us by someone you don’t remember named Tylar.” A crooked smile. “It’s just that in your case he did it right. So there’s been more to our lives together than we knew—more than you still know. But I’ve had the memories restored, so I know that part of our lives together has been missing, without us even knowing it was missing. Only, I think we did know it was missing, on some level beyond even Tylar’s understanding. That’s why there’s always been—let’s be honest—a kind of incompleteness about our life together, something we both knew was absent.”

  Tiraena started to speak, but then her mind flew back over the last fifteen years—the heady days after their arrival at Sol, the end of the war, the children, everything—and her mouth closed again and she nodded slowly.

  “Now,” Sarnac continued, “you can also regain those memories. It won’t be easy, I can tell you. But its very important to me that you do it. I don’t want it to come between us again, this… this lack that we can’t even put a name to. Especially since I’ve got to do something for Tylar now, and I need very badly for you to be a part of it. For that, you’re going to need your memories back.”

  For a time they looked levelly into each others eyes— they were almost exactly the same height. When Tiraena finally spoke, her words awoke in Sarnac the joyful realization that he did know her after all, for they held neither fear nor confusion nor doubt.

  “Who’s this ‘Tylar’?” was all she said.

  “Let’s go meet him,” Sarnac replied with a smile.

  She smiled back. “Well, as long as we don’t have to go too far—I have a ton of work waiting for me, you know. I can’t exactly go to Loriima with you!”

  “Oh, no, we’re not going to Loriima. Just to Sol.”

  Her smile vanished, for he had spoken deadpan. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Bob, didn’t you hear me? I’ve got work to do here…”

  “And I’ve got a war to fight,” he cut in. ‘Tiraena, you’re just going to have to take my word that this isn’t going to interfere with our duties. Don’t ask me to explain—you’ll understand when you have your memories again.”

  She visibly kept a thousand questions penned within her, only releasing one. “Well, how are we going to get there? You never did explain how you got here, you know!”

  “There’s a ship waiting for us, outside this base.” Sarnac gestured to the mysterious Captain Draco, who placed a device unfamiliar to Tiraena on the floor. What followed didn’t register at first, for the luminously bordered hole in the universe was too far beyond what was right and ordinary and proper. But then Sarnac had stepped through it, then turned and beckoned. Without stopping to consult reason, she followed. There was a slight resistance as she entered what lay beyond—it was the inside of an artificial construct, but there was nothing to identify it to her mind as a spacecraft. Equally unfamiliar was the late-middle-aged man who stepped forward to greet her. “Tiraena, my name is Tylar…”

  Sarnac was the first through the door and at her bedside when she had awakened and was able to receive visitors.

  “Tiraena, darling, it’s me. Are you all right?” He desperately wished for something besides banality. But, contrary to the opinion of innumerable generations of playwrights, intense and genuine emotion poses for most people an impassable barrier to style.

  Her eyelids fluttered open and she gave a drowsy smile. “Yes, I’m fine,” she assured him. ‘The disorientation was bad at first, but I’ve had time to integrate it all. And you were right—there has been something missing all these years, and I could never even identify a gap, much less know what belonged there. And,” she continued, reaching out a hand and grasping his with all the strength she could manage, “you’re the only thing these new-old memories have in common with the ones I’ve had all along. That’s why I know they’re genuine.”

  Sarnac felt himself nodding as he returned the pressure of her hand. “Yes. Naturally it occurred to me to wonder if the memories were fake—but I never seriously considered it for a minute. You see, I already knew exactly what it felt like to fall in love with you—I’d done it in the life I already remembered. And now I know I’ve done it twice, never knowing the second time that it was the second time. And you know what? It felt exactly the same both times. Not even Tylar could fake that.”


  As though illustrating the old adage about speaking of the Devil, Tylar’s voice came from near the door. “Yes, I’m sure she’ll recover faster than you did. In her case the process was not complicated by residual scraps of memory to which extraneous recollection had accreted from the dreams in which they had been incorporated for years. So you see, my dear, it was simplicity itself by comparison.”

  Tiraena looked up at him. “Hello, Tylar. Yes, you and your people obviously did a superlative job. And,” she continued, still smiling sweetly, “the first time you tell us you haven’t been entirely candid with us, I’m going to personally wring your scrawny neck, you lying old grolofv!

  “Yup,” Sarnac drawled, with a wicked grin at the time traveler. “No question about it She remembers everything!”

  “I can already see one problem.”

  The four men at the table turned toward Tiraena, their heads moving against the backdrop of star-blazing blackness. Three walls of the meeting room in Tylars villa had vanished to show the view outside the ship that was bearing them toward Sol at a speed that gave the closer stars a visible relative motion.

  Tylar had explained that the ship generated around itself a bubble of accelerated time, within which a modest velocity became incredible multiples of c relative to the outside universe. Sarnac could believe it, having once utilized the effect on an individual scale, and his intellect was able to assure the rest of him that God hadn’t really rescinded general relativity and the Doppler phenomena.

  Still, his skin prickled as he watched what looked to be a type A giant give new meaning to the term “shooting star,” hurtling impossibly past and dwindling astern.

  “What problem is that, my dear?” Tylar asked.

  “Well,” Tiraena said, “as I understand it, you intend to go back to the late fifth century A.D. of the alternate timeline and change things so that its future will turn out differently. I can provisionally accept the possibility of doing that.

  But if we succeed, then what happens to Andreas?” She gave the young transtemporal voyager a smile that Sarnac sternly reminded himself was maternal. “I mean, if we wipe out his history…”

  “I assure you that the philosophical problems have been taken into consideration. In particular, the fact that Andreas himself will be one of the people doing it makes the situation reminiscent of the ‘grandfather paradox’ that time-travel theorists were raising centuries before your time. Nevertheless, it is our considered opinion that his existence will be placed in no danger.”

  “But Tylar,” Sarnac protested, “didn’t you tell me that you and I and Tiraena ceased to exist in the alternate history the instant it branched off, because its future couldn’t have produced us?”

  “The present situation is entirely different. We’re not going to be creating yet a third timeline, which would hardly fulfill our ethical obligation to Andreas’ people and which, as I’ve pointed out, is almost never possible. Instead, we’re going to be changing the future course of an existing one, which we believe is possible at certain times in history. And we believe that the ‘grandfather paradox’ is chimerical, that one who travels back along his own timestream as Andreas will be doing possesses a personal existence rooted in a reality which cannot be affected by any history-altering actions he takes. The future in which Andreas was born came ‘before’—in some absolute sense—the ‘new’ future in which he will never be born.”

  Through his developing headache, Sarnac heard Tiraena speak challengingly. “But you can’t really be sure, can you? Andreas, has he made all this clear to you?”

  The emissary of a desperate reality looked at her gravely. “He has explained it, Tiraena. I don’t pretend to understand the theory, but the possible consequences are clear enough. I’m willing to take the risk.” He gave one of his infrequent smiles. “It’s no more of a risk than I took when I ventured into your reality!”

  “But,” Tiraena persisted, “even if Tylar’s right about your personal existence, we’ll be wiping out your world. It has to be your decision.”

  Andreas seemed to gather himself. “As I’ve told Robert, I have few close ties with my world. It’s one of the reasons I volunteered for the mission. And… my world isn’t worth having close ties with.” He kept pushing the words out, despite what each of them obviously cost him. “We’ve lived our lives knowing what’s been happening on Earth for almost three centuries—the last furtive broadcasts after the Korvaasha landed made it clear enough—and knowing that sooner or later it will happen to us or our descendants. Do you have any idea what that does to a society? You hardly ever hear even children laugh on Chiron—it affects them early. Not that there are as many children as there used to be! There is a growing movement among us, men who emulate certain ancient orders of fanatical monks and—” he looked at Tiraena and blushed “—render themselves incapable of siring children. They claim it is a sin to bring new lives into a universe where Satan obviously reigns triumphant. Its hard to argue with them. We constantly wonder what the human race has become on Earth, if they’re still human at all in any but the biological sense. But we also have to wonder how much worse they can be than ourselves.”

  For a moment he could not continue, and no one else broke the silence. Sarnac stole a glance at Tiraena, whose Raehaniv ancestors had endured a mere few years of Korvaash rule, and saw her jaw muscles clench.

  Finally, Andreas recovered his usual self-possession and spoke in an unwavering voice. “My world is a world without hope, without joy, and without a future for humanity save as a species of livestock that won’t even be allowed the mercy of extinction. There are only a few people in it who I care about, but I know they would all join with me in saying to you: ‘Erase it, if there’s any chance at all of replacing it with something better!’ “

  There was another silence as the simulated stars streamed by. Then Sarnac drawled, “Well, what about it, Tylar? How exactly do we go about the erasing? Since you’re not worried about preserving history, and in fact setting out to change it, I suppose we can just go in and use all the high-tech goodies we want.”

  “By no means! Any blatant display of magical-seeming technology would blight and distort the alternate Earth’s subsequent development, giving rise to unforeseeable social pathologies. An open announcement of our presence, implying the existence of alternate realities and time travel, would be even worse. No, we must be at least as subtle and inconspicuous as we were before.”

  “Uh-huh!” Sarnac nodded fatalistically. “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with those little ‘difficulties’ you mentioned to me before, Tylar?”

  “Ah, well, I’m afraid I haven’t…” Tylar saw Tiraenas expression and caught himself just in time. “As you pointed out, my dear fellow, twenty-two years of the alternate timeline will have passed by the time change becomes feasible. History will have diverged too much for us to have any hope of forcing it onto the exact road ours traveled. Instead, we must set in motion events that result, not in Western history as it transpired in our timeline, but in a similar state of political pluralism that is equally conducive to uncontrolled technological innovation. The ultimate aim, of course, is an advanced civilization capable of standing alone against the Korvaasha in a universe without the Raehaniv. Hopefully, Terran humanity will have built an interstellar empire of its own which will crush the Realm of Tarzhgul long before the latter reaches Earth in the twenty-sixth century.” He smiled, and a K type orange dwarf star that must have been very close to their course to be visible at all whizzed mischievously past his head. “I daresay the alternate world’s future historians will devise theories of ‘historical inevitability’ to account for what we will have done! If they do, then we will have succeeded, for the course their history has taken will seem entirely natural— the ‘only possible’ one.”

  “Okay, so how do we accomplish this subtle nudging? How can you be clear on the details of Andreas’ history, about which he doesn’t claim to be an expert?”

&n
bsp; “He’s not—but we were able to access his memories, including all the history he was ever taught, whether or not he consciously retained it. Most of it was valueless, as is generally true of the history that filters down to educational bureaucrats for dissemination in required courses. But one fact stood out: when the Restorer died in 491, his adopted successor was assassinated. I’ll let Artorius trace the steps our research has taken from there.”

  “You’ll be pleased to know, Robert,” Artorius smiled, “that our inquiries led us to the alternate version of an old acquaintance of yours: Sidonius Apollinaris.”

  “Oh, yeah, Sidonius! He seemed much too nice a guy for the lousy fate Tylar told me was in store for him.”

  “Well, his fate was a happier one in the alternate reality— up to a point. In 483 he was elected Pope.”

  “Pope! Uh, did that mean as much then as… ?”

  “Perhaps not officially; the Bishop of Rome was elected locally like any other bishop of the period. Until the early fourth century, he was known as just that: Bishop of Rome. But then, in the bishopric of Silvester, the pontifical title was added as a recognition of the primacy he had always been accorded as successor of Saint Peter. So the election was a matter of wide importance, and Artorius…” Artorius trailed to a rueful halt. “Let’s call him ‘the Restorer’ to avoid confusion. The Restorer took steps to assure the election of his loyal supporter, Bishop Sidonius of Clermont. Then, in 491—”