In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  —he stood in a hot wind under a desert sun. The speed at which life passes slowed, and he was speaking to his warriors in the dusty square of the village. “… we must hew our days,” he was saying, “as if from stone. We are better for this than those who have changed their bodies and spirits, who leave the Earth for an outer darkness, which is also within them …”—

  —what a savage I was in those endless days of my first century, living among the unchanged. I was one of them—Herdal, who lived long enough to fall in love with an outsider—

  —“I’ve been awake all the nights of this year,” Rydpat said to the cocked ear of his diary, “hoping for peace, for some kind of contentment, no matter how small, before dawn comes. Day is turmoil, unfocused, uncontemplative, a scattered light. Night is space to think in …” He stopped and listened as his mind-linked harpsichord dusted the space of his house with tinkling notes. Each series was the direct analogue of preceding thoughts, which had to be clearly stated and elegant. “Only my most painful memories create the best sounds …”—

  —To what purpose are these selves retrieved? Who is forcing me to see them again? The unchanged Herdal, Rydpat the composer, and others had long ago passed from his self during renewals. It was not part of sequences to look back so overtly.

  —Who are you? he thought, wondering why the illuminati were failing to protect him. Was the intruder more powerful?

  There were no answers to his questions. Alone he was powerless to bear himself out of the transfixed state. Plucked one by one, he knew, from the stores of the illuminati, memories began to exist once more, living things, invasions sharper than any spear point, fears of origin, kindly murdered long ago … crying to be restated, examined, redeemed, understood, accepted. …

  2-1 / The Unchanged

  “… any sweeping change in man is likely to become worldwide; there will be no reservoir of unchanged men to follow alternate possibilities, unless we consciously choose to maintain such a reservoir.”

  —GERALD FEINBERG, The Prometheus Project: Mankind’s Search for Long-Range Goals

  Herbal lay under the desert stars, shivering in his blanket. A fire would only reveal him to whoever had been tracking him for the last two days.

  At his right towered The Eye’s Bright Treasure, snowy peaks with rock like blue metal, lower reaches draped in shadows. In those shadows lay the cave of those who had gone before, all now lost forever. To reach the cave was a difficult journey across swamp, desert, stone-sharp foothills, glacier—a test of his right to lead. One day in years ahead he would fail to come back, and the one who came after him would arrange the bones on his first visit, mingling them with all the others in the great pit at the back of the cave deep within the mountain.

  Did they think him so weak that they would send the next one so soon? He had led his people for only six years. It had to be a stranger, maybe from outside, from the dreamlife that had taken his mother long ago. …

  Herdal turned away from the mountains, pressed his cheek to the cooling sand flat, and watched the dark line of horizon. The sky was deep blue in the bright starlight; it would be easy to see the silhouette of anything moving toward him.

  A bump appeared at the edge of the world, the black center of an unseen spider, growing larger as it crept toward him; it stopped.

  He watched for a long time, as he had for the last two nights; the pursuer was motionless, asleep. Slowly Herdal closed his eyes and rolled on his back—

  Eyes followed him as he left the village. Toothless women sat in front of their adobe houses. Children stopped to watch him as he walked through their playing. The men were in the swamp forest, hunting small game, snakes and fishes. The younger women were planting grain in the field. The oldest men were asleep.

  He saw his father’s eyes inside himself. All his life Rastaban had gone to the invisible wall, to gather the food which appeared daily. Those who followed the way of honor hated him and those like him. Herdal hated him also, but gave his protection. The old man ate the leavings of the powerful ones who had taken his wife; he had traded his young son’s mother for a lifetime of eating without effort. Herdal walked the way of honor for himself and for his father; and the village knew that for this reason Herdal would always come back from the cave, even when he became old. For his father’s faults Herdal would not die in the cave; his bones would belong to the desert. There would be no one to take them to the cave, even if they were found.

  —bright lights blinded him, brighter than the sun, yet it was too early for sunrise. He threw off his blanket, jumped up and shouted at his pursuer, “Come and face me, coward! What trick is this!”

  Something fell over him and he began to claw his way through it, straining to break the strands. He struggled, but the net was pulled tighter and he fell. The lights went off and he lay still in the dawnlight.

  A figure came and knelt down over him, touching his thighs, tearing open a few of the leather stitches that held the pieces of his pants together. Hands reached in to check his genitals, then pulled at the hair on his chest. He heard a laugh, like a boy’s giggle.

  A sliver of sun pushed up over the horizon, spilling light across the barren flat. Herdal looked up and saw a tall woman standing over him, her face pale under a dark, wide-rimmed hat. The rest of her was covered in unbroken silver. She was thin and bony, her hips protruding grotesquely. An outsider for sure, he thought. Behind her stood a three-wheeled vehicle, its twin lamps still bright in the daylight.

  “You smell horribly,” she said in his own words, “but we’ll clean you up and you’ll do fine.” She knelt down to him again. “Were you going to that awful cave with all the bones?”

  He nodded, and poked his right hand through the net to grab her face. She fell back on her heels and kicked him. “You’ll like it better after some changes.” Her nostrils flared and he wondered if she really had two hearts and had lived more than one lifetime.

  She looked at him intently, then reached forward and seized his left wrist with a grasp of iron. “I’ll let you out if you behave.”

  He nodded again. She took out a pair of metal jaws and began cutting the net. “You’re really magnificent, you know.”

  When he was free and standing, he saw that she was a head taller than he, and larger in chest and shoulders despite her bony frame. He watched her as she went back to her three-wheeler. She turned off the lights, took out a small package from behind the seat, came back, and dropped it at his feet. “Take off those rotting things and put these on.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “My parents and friends made what I have to last a long time—”

  “That won’t be long from the way it looks.”

  “—and it would show I have little respect for the labor of my people.”

  “I can’t wait that long,” she shouted. “Put these on!” She came up close, grabbed his shirt, and ripped it off with one motion, burning him with the leather; then she grasped the waist of his pants and pulled, tearing the seam as he was thrown to the ground.

  He lay on his back, humiliated. She was strong, and unafraid to use her strength. It would be best to do as she wanted, until a better moment; he would use her garments until he could repair his own. He sat up, pulled the bundle to himself, and began unfolding it. Standing up, he looked away from her as he put on the thin one-piece garb; he knew that she was watching him, enjoying his shame. The white suit felt comfortable.

  Forcing himself to turn around and look at her, he asked, “Why do you follow me?”

  She looked out from under the rim of the hat, tilted her head back, and he noticed that the hat hid all her hair, if she had any; her eyes were very large. “From time to time,” she said, “we’re interested in seeing what you unchanged beasts have come to. Some others will look you over, then you’ll stay with me.” She smiled. “You can change too, if you want;
of course you don’t know what that means now, but you won’t want to come back after you’ve seen the outside.”

  “What do you mean?” He was beginning to feel a vague fear.

  She came up to him and closed the lock seam on the open chest of his new clothes. “You’ll be like us,” she said. He looked down at the smoothness of the fabric and wondered about the lack of buttons.

  “Why should I want to be like an outsider?” he asked, looking up at her.

  “Don’t look so frightened—we were all here once, a long time ago. The whole world lived as you do, died as you do—”

  “Outsiders took my mother.”

  “She’s alive, somewhere. You won’t have to die,” she added.

  He had heard that they would open his head, spill his blood, take away his pride, giving him pain and forgetfulness in return. He struggled with his fear, as it stole into his arms and legs, urging them to move: hit her in the face and run.

  “If you run, I can catch you easily with my wheels. Old-fashioned, but fast.”

  He looked at his feet, and the fear he had never known made him tremble inside. “Please let me go on to the cave,” he said without looking up. “If I am to die, let me die there, so that the one who comes after me may lead without fear. …”

  She touched his arm. He looked up and saw the hairless skull of death smiling at him. She had taken off her hat, revealing her emaciation.

  He tried to jump back, but she reached out and held him in place. He made a fist with his free right hand and swung at her face, but she pushed him away and he hit the sandy flat with his back. She fell on him before he could get up, spread-eagling him on the ground. Her eyes were soft and brown, examining him intently as she pressed herself down to hold him still. She blinked and smiled, eyes without eyebrows, skull bones set in pale flesh.

  He shouted and tried to push up, but she hit him in the chest. Stunned, he lay still as she touched him through the seam of the suit. “Quiet now,” she said, stroking him, “quiet.” After a few moments she again closed the seam. “You’re a wonderful beast. I’ll want you for a long time.”

  He was gasping for air when she stood up and went back to her vehicle. She came back with a device of some kind strapped to her waist. She held another exactly like it in her right hand. Kneeling down, she lifted him into a sitting position and attached the small metal box to his waist, pulling at the device once to make certain it was joined to the suit. “We’re going to fly,” she said. She touched both boxes once and took his right hand in her left. Herdal felt himself lifted into the sky and hurled toward the high mountains. She turned her head to smile at him, and let go his hand. He cried out but did not fall. She drifted close to him and said, “You’ll feel no cold or wind—we can go as high as we want.”

  The peaks were below them. His fear was gone as he stared down at the impossible ridges of rock and snow and valleys like plowed furrows. He tried to glimpse the trail that led to the cave of his ancestors, but it was too small and probably behind them.

  There would be no bones for the one who came after him to arrange.

  Sleep was a ship drifting on waves of darkness. Orbion could not open his eyes. A giant blue sun blazed in his dream-space, illuminating his insides with a cold, electric glare. The star burned upward into his brain, showing him the moisture-filled universe inside his body. The star pulsed with his heartbeat. Its life was his life. Slowly the personal sun brightened, turning yellower, whiter and hotter, permeating his body. The light coursed through his circulatory system, correcting time’s deposit of random incoherence in cell structures. I want to die, but only for a short while. Light flowed through his nervous system, cleansing his brain—

  He saw gangs of unchanged men breaking into the sleep centers to destroy the flasks. He saw himself waking at the end of time, crawling out of a damaged flask to silence and a blood red sun, knowing that they had forgotten to reanimate him. All of life was past now; he had missed it. A day in the springtime of creation was now worth more than a million years in a dying universe—

  —and the sun was bloating into a giant red blot upon the sky; slowly the redness evaporated as seconds turned into ages, leaving only a small bright star which sent a chill through the cooling liquids of his body. Soon the star would give in to the closing hand of gravity, collapsing into a black cyst in space, locking up in a fist the energy it had once so freely given, until the moment when all space-time became one point readying to reveal a new unwinding of possibilities.…

  “Do you wish to remember all your previous lives?” a voice asked.

  “They hurt,” he said.

  “They can all be retrieved.”

  “It’s enough that they are safely stored.”

  He trembled at the edge of an abyss, then fell and could not close his eyes.

  Herdal became Rydpat, and lived three centuries. Rydpat became Kolem, who edited all his memories, forgetting Herdal. Kolem became Solion, who lived a thousand years without changing—his pride stopped him from admitting that he was bored with himself. Tooz, Esteb, and Versh lived a thousand years of borrowed lifetimes, inventing nothing, finally disappearing into the first Thrushcross. Anfisa, who had brought Herdal out of the wilderness, returned to the second Thrushcross as Evelyn, revealing that she was his mother from the time of Herdal, greeting him now through twenty lifetimes. Thrushcross revised himself for the third time after Evelyn told him that as Anfisa she had brought out his father, Rastaban.…

  Stop, Thrushcross thought. The past runs away like water. A cool stream of water washed through his brain cells, removing small grains of unimportant memory, bits that would in time fill him to capacity with useless information. “I don’t want these memories,” he said to the intruder. Life without end made one a sieve through which eternity flowed, each deposit of personal identity to be washed away by the next. The unchanged solved the problem through birth and death, through the peace of dissolution which followed too soon the pain of beginning. The unchanged accepted death as he welcomed passage in the sleep ship; the unchanged dead would never return again, but he craved the life to come, the returns to come.

  He saw his body wrapped in yellow incandescence, the fine tracery of brain and nervous system visible as a whiter design. As the intensity of light increased, he felt himself dissolving into consciousness. His eyes ached to open. His ears strained to hear. His skin tingled warmly. Desire focused itself in his groin. His arms and legs sought to stretch. …

  “Not yet, not yet,” the intruder whispered in a hiss. “Your life is not your own. The imagination of others, long gone, preys upon your life. You exploit urgently, ruthlessly, and are yourself exploited within a web of needs and contrasts spun from the irrational past still present in the lower structures of your brain—a brain still awash in an ocean of blood.” Thrushcross saw a massive artery snaking down from a red sky into his chest. The voice was encamped in his center, as close as the protective illuminati. “I will not be dislodged easily. That you will have to do for yourself, because I have bypassed your protectors.”

  Silence. A memory quivered …

  … and the third Thrushcross became Tross…

  2-2 / Eyes of Satin, Rimmed with Gold

  “… this very abdication of human control over the direction of events might be regarded as a positive step by some, especially those who feel that the proper concern of mankind is the complex psychic world within each person. The desire to be master of one’s fate is not universal … even in the West, where a few centuries ago this would have been regarded as dangerous heresy.”

  —GERALD FEINBERG, The Prometheus Project

  All over the green countryside the stables were quiet, waiting for the dawn that would release their charges. Tross stood on the hillside watching the houses where the masters slept behind stone walls. He trembled slightly, startled by his own existence, his presence in the world at this v
ery moment out of all possible moments, as if there had never been other moments, other places, other awarenesses turning inward in recognition; everything had just been created, including himself; the sense of the arbitrary, of the newness of things named only as he looked at them, was compelling. He was alive in a puzzle, trapped in a tide of things readying to follow this moment; he would act, and he felt the pleasure of anticipation, but he did not know what he was going to do next. The grass glowed in the morning night, drops of moisture still trembling with the light of steel-cold stars.

  He lay down among the dew-laden blades and took a deep breath. Creepers groped toward his body, slowly attaching themselves to the fleshy valves on his arms and chest, filling his bloodstream with the liquid that held all knowledge of rooted, growing things. He felt his senses sharpen; he breathed in the fragrant festival of warming air wafting in ahead of the sun.

  The grassy vines covered his body now, and he felt the movement of living things in the soil around him.

  The sun pushed up slowly over the edge of the world, throwing a carpet of orange across the green land. The grassy vines withdrew as Tross breathed in the air of morning day. The dew dried from his body, leaving him washed and satisfied.

  He stood up and went down to the villa below, through the open gate, across the court now flooding with light like a pool, through the open double doors into a room, surprising the waking lady as she lay naked in her bed. The master would by now be at the stable, preparing to release the beasts for the morning hunt of the unchanged, those who still lived in a chaotic freedom, resisting direction.

  He fell on her just as she opened her three eyes, pushing up into her natural place. Her four arms beat on his back as he moved. She tried to squeeze his waist with her legs, stopping when she saw that it caused him no pain.

  She was limp, resisting him with her contempt, glaring at him, trying to turn him to stone with her disdain.