She found herself desperately wishing she had a mirror.
"They must have done something. While I was asleep." She lightly touched her temples, the skin around her eyes. "I’m not wearing any glasses! I can see perfectly!" She looked around her. The room she was in was even more Spartan than the jail cell had been. There were two metal benches facing each other, and on them sat as motley a collection of men and women as she had ever seen.
There was a woman who must have weighed three hundred pounds–and every ounce of it muscle. Beside her sat an albino lad so slight and elfin he hardly seemed there at all. Until, that is, one looked at his clever face and burning eyes. Then one knew him to be easily the most dangerous person in the room. As for the others, well, none of them had horns or tails, but that was about it.
The elf leaned forward. "Dawn Era, aren’t you?" he said. "If you survive this, you’ll have to tell me how you got here."
"I–"
"They want you to think you’re as good as dead already. Don’t believe them! I wouldn’t have signed up in the first place, if I hadn’t come back afterward and told myself I’d come through it all intact." He winked and settled back. "The situation is hopeless, of course. But I wouldn’t take it seriously."
Ellie blinked. Was everybody mad here?
In that same instant, a visi-plate very much like the one in the police car lowered from the ceiling, and a woman appeared on it. "Hero mercenaries," she said, "I salute you! As you already know, we are at the very front lines of the War. The Aftermen Empire has been slowly, inexorably moving backward into their past, our present, a year at time. So far, the Optimized Rationality of True Men has lost five thousand three hundred and fourteen years to their onslaught." Her eyes blazed. "That advance ends here! That advance ends now! We have lost so far because, living downtime from the Aftermen, we cannot obtain a technological superiority to them. Every weapon we invent passes effortlessly into their hands.
"So we are going to fight and defeat them, not with technology but with the one quality that, not being human, they lack–human character! Our researches into the far past have shown that superior technology can be defeated by raw courage and sheer numbers. One man with a sunstroker can be overwhelmed by savages equipped with nothing more than neutron bombs–if there are enough of them, and they don’t mind dying! An army with energy guns can be destroyed by rocks and sticks and determination.
"In a minute, your transporter and a million more like it will arrive at staging areas afloat in null-time. You will don respirators and disembark. There you will find the time-torpedoes. Each one requires two operators–a pilot and a button-pusher. The pilot will bring you in as close as possible to the Aftermen time-dreadnoughts. The button-pusher will then set off the chronomordant explosives."
This is madness, Ellie thought. I’ll do no such thing. Simultaneous with the thought came the realization that she had the complex skills needed to serve as either pilot or button-pusher. They must have been given to her at the same time she had been made young again and her eyesight improved.
"Not one in a thousand of you will live to make it anywhere near the time-dreadnoughts. But those few who do will justify the sacrifices of the rest. For with your deaths, you will be preserving humanity from enslavement and destruction! Martyrs, I salute you." She clenched her fist. "We are nothing! The Rationality is all!"
Then everyone was on his or her feet, all facing the visi-screen, all raising clenched fists in response to the salute, and all chanting as one, "We are nothing! The Rationality is all!"
To her horror and disbelief, Ellie discovered herself chanting the oath of self-abnegation in unison with the others, and, worse, meaning every word of it.
The woman who had taken the key away from her had said something about "loyalty imprinting." Now Ellie understood what that term entailed.
In the gray not-space of null-time, Ellie kicked her way into the time-torpedo. It was, to her newly sophisticated eyes, rather a primitive thing: Fifteen grams of nano-mechanism welded to a collapsteel hull equipped with a noninertial propulsion unit and packed with five tons of something her mental translator rendered as "annihilatium." This last, she knew to the core of her being, was ferociously destructive stuff.
Nadine wriggled in after her. "Let me pilot," she said. "I’ve been playing video games since Mario was the villain in Donkey Kong."
"Nadine, dear, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you." Ellie settled into the buttonpusher slot. There were twenty-three steps to setting off the annihilatium, each one finicky, and if even one step were taken out of order, nothing would happen. She had absolutely no doubt she could do it correctly, swiftly, efficiently.
"Yes?"
"Does all that futuristic jargon of yours actually mean anything?"
Nadine’s laughter was cut off by a squawk from the visi-plate. The woman who had lectured them earlier appeared, looking stern. "Launch in twenty-three seconds," she said. "For the Rationality!"
"For the Rationality!" Ellie responded fervently and in unison with Nadine. Inside, however, she was thinking, How did I get into this? and then, ruefully, Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.
"Eleven seconds ... seven seconds ... three seconds ... one second."
Nadine launched.
Without time and space, there can be neither sequence nor pattern. The battle between the Aftermen dreadnoughts and the time-torpedoes of the Rationality, for all its shifts and feints and evasions, could be reduced to a single blip of instantaneous action and then rendered into a single binary datum: win/lose.
The Rationality lost.
The time-dreadnoughts of the Aftermen crept another year into the past.
But somewhere in the very heart of that not-terribly-important battle, two torpedoes, one of which was piloted by Nadine, converged upon the hot-spot of guiding consciousness that empowered and drove the flagship of the Aftermen time-armada. Two button-pushers set off their explosives. Two shock-waves bowed outward, met, meshed, and merged with the expanding shock-wave of the countermeasure launched by the dreadnought’s tutelary awareness.
Something terribly complicated happened.
Ellie found herself sitting at a table in the bar of the Algonquin Hotel, back in New York City.
Nadine was sitting opposite her. To either side of them were the clever albino and the man with the tattooed face and the filed teeth.
The albino smiled widely. "Ah, the primitives! Of all who could have survived–myself excepted, of course–you are the most welcome."
His tattooed companion frowned. "Please show some more tact, Sev. However they may appear to us, these folk are not primitives to themselves."
"You are right as always, Dun Jal. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Seventh-Clone of House Orpen, Lord Extratemporal of the Centuries 3197 through 3992 Inclusive, Backup Heir Potential to the Indeterminate Throne. Sev, for short."
"Dun Jal. Mercenary. From the early days of the Rationality. Before it grew decadent."
"Eleanor Voigt, Nadine Shepard. I’m from 1936, and she’s from 2004. Where–if that’s the right word–are we?"
"Neither where nor when, delightful aboriginal. We have obviously been thrown into hypertime, that no-longer-theoretical state informing and supporting the more mundane seven dimensions of time with which you are doubtless familiar. Had we minds capable of perceiving it directly without going mad, who knows what we should see? As it is," he waved a hand, "all this is to me as my One- Father’s clonatorium, in which so many of I spent our minority."
"I see a workshop," Dun Jal said.
"I see–" Nadine began.
Dun Jal turned pale. "A Tarbleck-null!" He bolted to his feet, hand instinctively going for a sidearm which, in their current state, did not exist.
"Mr. Tarblecko!" Ellie gasped. It was the first time she had thought of him since her imprinted technical training in the time-fortress of the Rationality, and speaking his name brought up floods of related information: That
there were seven classes of Aftermen, or Tarblecks as they called themselves. That the least of them, the Tarbleck-sixes, were brutal and domineering overlords. That the greatest of them, the Tarbleck-nulls, commanded the obedience of millions.
That the maximum power a Tarbleck-null could call upon at an instant’s notice was four quads per second per second. That the physical expression of that power was so great that, had she known, Ellie would never have gone through that closet door in the first place.
Sev gestured toward an empty chair. "Yes, I thought it was about time for you to show up."
The sinister grey Afterman drew up the chair and sat down to their table. "The small one knows why I am here," he said. "The others do not. It is degrading to explain myself to such as you, so he shall have to."
"I am so privileged as to have studied the more obscure workings of time, yes." The little man put his fingertips together and smiled a fey, foxy smile over their tips. "So I know that physical force is useless here. Only argument can prevail. Thus ... trial by persuasion it is. I shall go first."
He stood up. "My argument is simple: As I told our dear, savage friends here earlier, an heirpotential to the Indeterminate Throne is too valuable to risk on uncertain adventures. Before I was allowed to enlist as a mercenary, my elder self had to return from the experience to testify I would survive it unscathed. I did. Therefore, I will."
He sat.
There was a moment’s silence. "That’s all you have to say?" Dun Jal asked.
"It is enough."
"Well." Dun Jal cleared his throat and stood. "Then it is my turn. The Empire of the Aftermen is inherently unstable at all points. Perhaps it was a natural phenomenon–once. Perhaps the Aftermen arose from the workings of ordinary evolutionary processes, and could at one time claim that therefore they had a natural place in this continuum. That changed when they began to expand their Empire into their own past. In order to enable their back-conquests, they had to send agents to all prior periods in time to influence and corrupt, to change the flow of history into something terrible and terrifying, from which they might arise. And so they did.
"Massacres, death-camps, genocide, World Wars ..." (There were other terms that did not translate, concepts more horrible than Ellie had words for.) "You don’t really think those were the work of human beings, do you? We’re much too sensible a race for that sort of thing–when we’re left to our own devices. No, all the worst of our miseries are instigated by the Aftermen. We are far from perfect, and the best example of this is the cruel handling of the War in the final years of the Optimized Rationality of True Men, where our leaders have become almost as terrible as the Aftermen themselves–because it is from their very ranks that the Aftermen shall arise. But what might we have been?
"Without the interference of the Aftermen might we not have become something truly admirable?
Might we not have become not the Last Men, but the First truly worthy of the name?" He sat down.
Lightly, sardonically, Sev applauded. "Next?"
The Tarbleck-null placed both hands heavily on the table, and, leaning forward, pushed himself up.
"Does the tiger explain himself to the sheep?" he asked. "Does he need to explain? The sheep understand well enough that Death has come to walk among them, to eat those it will and spare the rest only because he is not yet hungry. So too do men understand that they have met their master.
I do not enslave men because it is right or proper, but because I can. The proof of which is that I have!
"Strength needs no justification. It exists or it does not. I exist. Who here can say that I am not your superior? Who here can deny that Death has come to walk among you? Natural selection chose the fittest among men to become a new race. Evolution has set my foot upon your necks, and I will not take it off."
To universal silence, he sat down. The very slightest of glances he threw Ellie’s way, as if to challenge her to refute him. Nor could she! Her thoughts were all confusion, her tongue all in a knot. She knew he was wrong–she was sure of it!–and yet she could not put her arguments together.
She simply couldn’t think clearly and quickly enough.
Nadine laughed lightly.
"Poor superman!" she said. "Evolution isn’t linear, like that chart that has a fish crawling out of the water at one end and a man in a business suit at the other. All species are constantly trying to evolve in all directions at once–a little taller, a little shorter, a little faster, a little slower. When that distinction proves advantageous, it tends to be passed along. The Aftermen aren’t any smarter than Men are–less so, in some ways. Less flexible, less innovative . .
. look what a stagnant world they’ve created! What they are is more forceful."
"Forceful?" Ellie said, startled. "Is that all?"
"That’s enough. Think of all the trouble caused by men like Hitler, Mussolini, Caligula, Pol Pot, Archers-Wang 43... . All they had was the force of their personality, the ability to get others to do what they wanted. Well, the Aftermen are the descendants of exactly such people, only with the force of will squared and cubed. That afternoon when the Tarbleck-null ordered you to sit in the window? It was the easiest thing in the world to one of them. As easy as breathing.
"That’s why the Rationality can’t win. Oh, they could win, if they were willing to root out that streak of persuasive coercion within themselves. But they’re fighting a war, and in times of war one uses whatever weapons one has. The ability to tell millions of soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the common good is simply too useful to be thrown away. But all the time they’re fighting the external enemy, the Aftermen are evolving within their own numbers."
"You admit it," the Tarbleck said.
"Oh, be still! You’re a foolish little creature, and you have no idea what you’re up against. Have you ever asked the Aftermen from the leading edge of your Empire why you’re expanding backward into the past rather than forward into the future? Obviously because there are bigger and more dangerous things up ahead of you than you dare face. You’re afraid to go there–afraid that you might find me!" Nadine took something out of her pocket. "Now go away, all of you."
Flash.
Nothing changed. Everything changed.
Ellie was still sitting in the Algonquin with Nadine. But Sev, Dun Jal, and the Tarbleck-null were all gone. More significantly, the bar felt real in a way it hadn’t an instant before. She was back home, in her own now and her own when.
Ellie dug into her purse and came up with a crumpled pack of Lucky Strike Greens, teased one out, and lit it. She took a deep drag on the cigarette and then exhaled. "All right," she said, "who are you?"
The girl’s eyes sparkled with amusement. "Why, Ellie, dear, don’t you know? I’m you!"
So it was that Eleanor Voigt was recruited into the most exclusive organization in all Time–an organization that was comprised in hundreds of thousands of instances entirely and solely of herself. Over the course of millions of years, she grew and evolved, of course, so that her ultimate terrifying and glorious self was not even remotely human. But everything starts somewhere, and Ellie of necessity had to start small.
The Aftermen were one of the simpler enemies of the humane future she felt that Humanity deserved.
Nevertheless they had to be–gently and nonviolently, which made the task more difficult–opposed.
After fourteen months of training and the restoration of all her shed age, Ellie was returned to New York City on the morning she had first answered the odd help wanted ad in the Times. Her original self had been detoured away from the situation, to be recruited if necessary at a later time.
"Unusual in what way?" she asked. "I don’t understand. What am I looking for?"
"You’ll know it when you see it," the Tarbleck-null said.
He handed her the key.
She accepted it. There were tools hidden within her body whose powers dwarfed those of this primitive chrono-transfer device. But the encoded information the key co
ntained would lay open the workings of the Aftermen Empire to her. Working right under their noses, she would be able to undo their schemes, diminish their power, and, ultimately, prevent them from ever coming into existence in the first place.
Ellie had only the vaguest idea how she was supposed to accomplish all this. But she was confident that she could figure it out, given time. And she had the time.
All the time in the world.
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Legions In Time Page 3
