The appraisal in his eyes was franker now. “Mr. Grayne, do you ever read science-fiction?”
“I’m afraid not,” I told him. “At least, only very occasionally.”
He looked a little crestfallen. “Oh—well, do you know anything about the familiar science-fiction concept of traveling in time?”
“A little,” I finished my drink, wishing the waiter would bring us another bottle of wine. “It’s supposed to involve some quite staggering paradoxes, I believe. I’m thinking of the man who goes back in time and kills his own grandfather?”
He looked disgusted. “That’s at best a trite layman’s idea!”
“Well, I’m a layman,” I said genially. The arrogance of young people always strikes me as being pathetic rather than insulting. I did not think young Kennaird could have been more than nineteen. Twenty, perhaps. “Now then, young fellow, don’t tell me you’ve actually invented a time machine!”
“Good Lord, no!” The denial was so laughingly spontaneous that I had to laugh with him, “No, just an idea that interests me. I don’t really believe there’s much paradox involved in time-travel at all.”
He paused, his eyes still on my face. “See here, Mr. Grayne, I’d like to—well, do you mind listening to something rather fantastic? I’m not drunk, but I’ve got a good reason for wanting to confide in you. You see, I know a great deal about you, really.”
I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been prepared for just such a statement. I grinned a strained grin at the boy. “No, go ahead,” I told him. “I’m interested.” I leaned back in my chair, preparing to listen.
You see, I knew what he was going to say.
II
Ryn Kenner sat in his cell, his head buried in his hands.
“Oh, God—” he muttered to himself, over and over.
There were so many unpredictable risks involved. Even though he had spent three years coaching Cara, teaching her to guard against every possible contingency, he still might fail. If only he could have eliminated the psychic block. But that, of course, was the most necessary risk of all.
Sometimes, in spite of his humanitarian training, Ryn Kenner thought the old, primitive safeguards had been better. Executing murderers, locking maniacs up in cells was certainly better than exiling men in this horrible new way. Ryn Kenner knew that he would have preferred to die. Two or three times he had even thought of slashing his wrists with a razor before the Exile. Once he had actually set a razor against his right wrist, but his early training had been too strong for him. Even the word suicide could set off a mental complex of quivering nerve reactions impossible to control.
The tragedy, Kenner thought despondently, resided in the paradox that civilization had become too enlightened. There had been a time when men had thought that traveling backward in time would upset the framework of events and change the future. But it had been a manifestly mistaken
idea, for in this year, 2543 a.d., the whole past had already occurred, and the present moment contained within itself the entire past, including whatever rectifying attempts time-travelers had made in that past.
Kenner shivered as he realized that his own acts had all occurred in the past. He, Ryn Kenner, had already died— six centuries before.
Time-travel—the perfect, ‘the most humane way of banishing criminals! He had heard all the arguments which sophistry could muster. The strong individualists were clearly misfits in the enlightened twenty-sixth century. For their own good, they should be exiled to eras psychologically congenial to them. A good many of them had been sent to California in the year 1849. They thus took a one-way trip to an era where murder was not a crime, but a social necessity, the respectable business of a gentleman. Religious fanatics were exiled to the First Dark Ages, where they could not disturb the tranquil materialism of the present century; too aggressive atheists, to the twenty-third century.
Kenner rose and began to pace his cell, which was a prison in fact, if not in appearance. Outside the wide window spread a spacious view of Nyor Harbor, and the room was luxuriously furnished. He knew, however, that if he stepped a foot past the lines which had been drawn around the door, he would be instantly overpowered by a powerful sleeping gas. He had tried it once, with almost disastrous results.
This hour of high decision was his last in the twenty-sixth century. In fifty minutes, in his own personal, subjective time from now, he would be somewhere in the twentieth century, the era to which his rashness had condemned him when he had been apprehended by the psycho police while attempting to re-discover the fabulous atomic isotopes. And he wouldn’t remember enough to get back. He would be permitted to keep all his training—all his knowledge, and memory—but there would be a fatal reservation.
Never, for the rest of his life, would Kenner be able to remember that he had come from the past. For the three weeks during which he had been confined to the cell the radiant suggestor had been steadily beaming at his brain. No defense his mind could devise had sufficed to stay its slow inroads into his thought.
Already his brain was beginning to grow fuzzy and he knew that the time was short. He drew a long breath, hearing steps in the corridor, and the whistle which meant the hypnotic gas was being momentarily turned off.
He stopped pacing.
Abruptly the door opened, and a psycho-supervisor entered the cell. Framed in the radiance behind him—
“Cara!” Kenner almost sobbed, and ran forward to catch his wife in his arms, and hold her with hungry violence. She cried softly against him. “Rhy, Ryn, it won’t be long—”
The supervisor’s face was compassionate. “Kenner,” he said, “you may have twenty minutes alone with your wife. You will be unsupervised.” The door closed softly behind him.
Kenner led Cara to a seat. She tried to hold back her tears, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Ryh, darling, I thought you might have—”
“Hush, Cara,” he whispered. “They may be listening. Just remember everything I’ve told you. You mustn’t risk being sent to a different year. You already know what to do.”
“I’ll—find you,” she promised.
“Let’s not talk about it,” Kenner urged gently. “We haven’t long. Grayne promised he’d look after you until—”
“I know. He’s been good to me while you were here.”
The twenty minutes didn’t seem long. The supervisor pretended not to notice while Cara clung to Kenner in a last agony of farewell. Ryn brushed the tears away from her eyes, softly.
“See you in nineteen forty-five, Cara,” he whispered, and let her go.
“It’s a date darling,” were her last words before she followed the supervisor out of the prison. Kenner, in the last few moments remaining to him, before he sank into sleep again, desperately tried to marshal what little knowledge he possessed about the twentieth century.
His brain felt dark now, and oppressed, as if someone had wrapped his mind in smothering folds of wool. Dimly he knew that when he woke, his prison would be yet unbuilt. And yet, all the rest of his life he would be in prison— the prison of a mind that would never let him speak the truth.
III
“—and of course, this hypothetical psychic block would also contain provision prohibiting marriage with anyone from the past,” Carey Kennaird finished. “It would naturally be inconvenient for children to be born of the time exiles. But if my hypothetical man from the future should actually find the wife he’d arranged to have exiled with him, there’d be no psychic block against marrying her.” He paused, staring at me steadily. “Now, what would happen to the kid?”
My own glass stood empty. I signalled to the waiter, but Kennaird shook his head. “Thanks, I’ve had enough.”
I paid for the wine. “Suppose we walk to the hotel together, Kennaird?” I said. “You’ve got a fascinating theory there, my boy. It would make a fine plot for a science-fiction novel. Are you a writer? Of course, what happened to the
boy—” we passed together into the blinding sun
light of the Chicago Loop, “—would be the climax of your story.”
“It would,” Kennaird agreed.
We crossed the street beneath the thundering El trains, and stood in front of Marshall Fields while Carey lit a cigarette.
“Smoke?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No thanks. You said you had a reason for confiding in me, young man. What is it?”
He looked at me curiously. “I think you know, Mr. Grayne. You weren’t born in the Twentieth Century. I was, of course. But you’re like Dad and Cara. You’re a time exile, too, aren’t you?
“I know you can’t say anything, because of the psychic block. But you don’t have to deny it. That’s how Dad told me. He made me read science-fiction. Then he made me ask him leading questions—and just answered yes or no.” Young Kennaird paused. “I don’t have the psychic block. Dad was trying to help me discover the time-travel device. He came up to Chicago, and disappeared. But I’m on the right track now. I’m sure of it. I think Dad got back somehow.”
Even though I’d known what he was going to say, I swallowed hard.
“Something very strange did happen when you were born,” I said. “You put a peculiar strain on the whole framework of time. It was something that never should have happened, because of—” my voice faltered, “the psychic block against marrying anyone from the past.”
Carey Kennaird looked at me intently. “Hard to talk about the psychic block, isn’t it? Dad never could.”
I nodded without speaking. We climbed the hotel steps together. “Come up to my room,” I urged. “We’ll talk it over. You see, Carey—I’m going to call you that—Kenner used to be my friend.”
“I wonder,” Carey said, “If Dad got home to the twenty-sixth century.”
“He did.”
Carey stared. “Mr. Grayne! Is he all right?”
Regretfully, I shook my head. The elevator boy let us off on the fourth floor. I wondered if he, too, were an exile. I wondered how many people in Chicago were exiles, sullen behind the mask of a mental block which clamped a gag on their lips when they tried to speak the truth.
I wondered how many men, and how many women, were living such a lie, day in, and day out, lonely, miserable exiles from their own tomorrow, victims of a fate literally worse than death. Small wonder they would do anything to avoid such a fate.
My door closed behind us. While Carey stared, wide-eyed, at the device which loomed darkly in one corner of the room, I went to my desk, and removed the shining disk. I walked straight up to him. “This is from your father,” I told him. “Look at it carefully.”
He accepted it eagerly, his eyes blazing with excitement, sensing at once that it had come from the twenty-sixth century.
He died instantly.
Hating my work, hating time-travel, hating the whole chain of events, which had made me an instrument of justice, I stepped into the device that would return me to the twenty-sixth century.
Carey Kennaird had told the truth. A very strange thing had happened at his birth. Like an extra electron bombarding an unstable isotope, he had broken the link that held the framework of time together. His birth had started a chain reaction that had ended, for me, a week before in 2556, when Kenner and Cara had reappeared in the twenty-sixth century and been murdered in a panic by the psycho-supervisors. I, already condemned to time exile, had won a free pardon for my work, a commutation of my sentence to a light reprimand and the loss of my position. It was ugly work and I hated it, for Kenner and Cara had been my friends. But I had no freedom of choice. Anything was better than exile into time.
Anything, anything.
Besides, it had been necessary.
It isn’t lawful for children to be born before their parents.
The Colors of Space
Chapter One
The Lhari spaceport didn’t belong on Earth.
Bart Steele had thought that, a long time ago, when he first saw it. He had been just a kid then; twelve years old, and all excited about seeing Earth for the first time—Earth, the legendary home of mankind before the Age of Space, the planet of Bart’s far-back ancestors. And the first thing he’d seen on Earth, when he got off the starship, was the Lhari spaceport.
And he’d thought, right then, It doesn’t belong on Earth.
He’d said so to his father, and his father’s face had gone strange, bitter and remote.
"A lot of people would agree with you, Son," Captain Rupert Steele had said softly. "The trouble is, if the Lhari spaceport wasn’t on Earth, we wouldn’t be on Earth either. Remember that."
Bart remembered it, five years later, as he got off the strip of moving sidewalk. He turned to wait for Tommy Kendron, who was getting his baggage off the center strip of the moving roadway. Bart Steele and Tommy Kendron had graduated together, the day before, from the Space Academy of Earth. Now Tommy, who had been born on the ninth planet of the star Capella, was taking the Lhari starship to his faraway home, and Bart’s father was coming back to Earth, on the same starship, to meet his son.
Five years, Bart thought. That’s a long time. I wonder if Dad will know me?
"Let me give you a hand with that stuff, Tommy."
“I can manage,” Tommy chuckled, hefting the plastic cases. “They don’t allow you much baggage weight on the Lhari ships. Certainly not more than I can handle.”
The two lads stood in front of the spaceport gate for a minute. Over the gate, which was high and pointed and made of some clear colorless material like glass, was a jagged symbol resembling a flash of lightning; the sign, in Lhari language, for the home world of the Lhari.
They walked through the pointed glass gate, and stood for a moment, by mutual consent, looking down over the vast expanse of the Lhari spaceport.
This had once been a great desert. Now it was all floored in with some strange substance that was neither glass, metal nor concrete; it looked like gleaming crystal—though it felt soft underfoot—and in the glare of the noonday sun, it gave back the glare in a million rainbow flashes. Tommy put his hands up to his eyes to shield them. “The Lhari must have funny eyes, if they can stand all this glare!”
Inside the glass gate, a man in a guard’s uniform gave them each a pair of dark glasses. “Put them on now, boys. And don’t look directly at the ship when it lands.”
Tommy hooked the earpieces of the dark glasses over his ears, and sighed with relief. Bart frowned, but finally put them on. Bart’s mother had been a Mentorian—from the planet Mentor, of the star Deneb, a hundred times brighter than the sun. Bart had her eyes. But Mentorians weren’t popular on Earth, and Bart had learned to be quiet about his mother.
Through the dark lenses, the glare was only a pale gleam. Far out in the very center of the spaceport, a high, clear-glass skyscraper rose, catching the sunlight in a million colors. Around the building, small copters and robotcabs veered, discharging passengers; and the moving sidewalks were crowded with people coming and going. Here and there in the crowd, standing out because of their height and the silvery metallic cloaks they wore, were the strange tall figures of the Lhari.
“Well, how about going down?” Tommy glanced impatiently at his timepiece. “Less than half an hour before the starship touches down.”
“All right. We can get a sidewalk over here.” Reluctantly, Bart tore his eyes from the fascinating spectacle, and followed Tommy, stepping onto one of the sidewalks. It bore them down a long, sloping ramp toward the floor of the spaceport, then sped toward the glass skyscraper; came to rest at the wide pointed doors, depositing them in the midst of the crowd. The jagged lightning flash was there over the doors of the building, and the words:
here, by grace of the Lhari, is the doorway to all the stars.
Bart remembered, as if it were yesterday, how he and his father had first passed through this doorway. And his father, looking up, had said under his breath “Not for always, Son. Someday men will have a doorway to the stars, and the Lhari won’t be standing in the door.”
Inside the building, it was searingly bright. The high open rotunda was filled with immense mirrors, and glass ramps running up and down, moving staircases, confusing signs and flashing lights on tall oddly shaped pillars. The place was crowded with men from all over the planet, but the dark glasses they all wore gave them a strange sort of family resemblance.
Tommy said, “I’d better check my reservations.”
Bart nodded. “Meet you on the upper level later,” he said, and got on a moving staircase that soared slowly upward, past level after level, toward the information desk located on the topmost mezzanine.
The staircase moved slowly, and Bart had plenty of time to see everything. On the step immediately in front of him, two Lhari were standing; with their backs turned, they might almost have been men. Unusually tall, unusually thin, but men. Then Bart amended that mentally. The Lhari had two arms, two legs and a head apiece—they were that much like men. Their faces had two eyes, two ears, and a nose and mouth, all in the right places. But the similarity ended there.
They had skin of a curious pale silvery gray, and pale, pure-white hair rising in what looked like a feathery crest. The eyes were long and slanting, the forehead high and narrow, the nose delicately thin and chiseled with long vertically slit nostrils, the ears long, pointed and lobeless. The mouth looked almost human, though the chin was abnormally pointed. The hands would almost have passed inspection as human hands—except for the long, triangular nails curved over the fingertips like the claws of a cat. They wore skin-tight clothes of some metallic silky stuff, and long flowing gleaming silvery capes. They looked unearthly, elfin and strange, and in their own way they were beautiful.
The two Lhari in front of Bart had been talking softly, in their fast twittering speech; but as the hum of the crowds on the upper levels grew louder, they raised their voices, and Bart could hear what they were saying. He was a little surprised to find that he could still understand the Lhari language. He hadn’t heard a word of it in years—not since his Mentorian mother died. The Lhari would never guess that he could understand their speech. Not one human in a million could speak or understand a dozen words of Lhari, except the Mentorians.
Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack Page 40
