My next memory was that of Kar-hinter shaking my shoulder, saying, "Eric, wake up. We are nearly there."
I shook myself, forced my eyes to open, and felt for an instant a great sense of impending doom that I was now sure was unjustified.
Can I say that things looked any different when I awoke? No. The skudder was exactly the same. My empty coffee cup still sat on the floor where I had put it. The magazine, its pages open, was exactly where I had laid it. Sally sat in the seat across from me, leaning against the wall, sleeping. Kar-hinter, the skudder pilot and Pall were as they had been, looked the same in every detail. Nothing had changed. Or had it? I felt that something had, but I could not say what and chalked it up to my imagination.
"I must have fallen asleep," I said, rubbing my face, feeling my hands on my cheeks, knowing that I was doing exactly what I was doing, but still somehow unsure of it.
Actually, even now, I'm not sure how much of this sensation of unreality I felt at the time and how much of it has entered my memories since the events -- which I have gone over in my mind so many times that I have probably lost the original memory under layers of, well, remembering the memories.
"Awaken Sally," Kar-hinter said. "We will be there in less than five minutes."
"Okay," I said, fully awake now.
I shook Sally's shoulder. Her eyes blinked open; she looked up at me, shook her head, yawned, and nearly smiled.
"We're almost there," I said.
"Oh, good," she said. "I was having the most pleasant dream."
"Momentarily you shall have a most pleasant reality," Kar-hinter said.
I became aware of the flickering of the skudder's probability field as it slowed and then stopped, and bright late-afternoon sunlight flooded the interior of the craft through the transparent dome.
"Everybody out," the skudder's pilot said, rising from his seat, then pushing a button that caused the craft's hatch to open.
"I hope that your sleep has been sufficient," Kar-hinter said as he rose. "We will be here several hours, and you will have little opportunity to rest before we leave."
"We're fine," I said.
"Good," Kar-hinter replied. "Come. We are expected."
The place where the skudder had come to rest was a shallow circular depression in a wide field composed of what I thought to be concrete, though the substance was blue-green in color and I discovered upon disembarking from the craft that it was soft under my feet. The field extended perhaps a hundred yards in all directions, pitted every few dozen feet with other depressions and in perhaps a third of them sat skudders like our own, though some were brightly decorated with designs that I didn't recognize.
On our left the field terminated in a broad green meadow which was apparently a landing field for another type of craft: fragile-looking teardrops of metal and glass that I tentatively identified as some type of antigrav aircraft. To our right the field gave way to a gray concrete slab upon which rested a slim golden tower that reached into the sky perhaps a hundred feet. On the top of the tower sat a transparent globe maybe ten feet in diameter or a little larger. I don't know what it was. Beyond the tower was another grassy field across which a number of people were strolling and playing a game that looked similar to the golf of Sally's Line. Beyond the field was the city.
It was a fairyland of towers and turrets and minarets and bright flags and streamers waving in the breeze, bridges and catwalks of spun glass connecting the towers, sparkling in the sunlight. Here and there in the air above them were the teardrop aircraft.
Two men and two women waited outside the craft, smiling, but not speaking until we had climbed down to the blue-green field and had taken in our surroundings. Then Kar-hinter said, "Eric Mathers, Sally von Heinen, please allow me to introduce our guides. Dylla, Jocasta, Dicton, and Hallacy."
The first two were women and the other two men, all with the rich earthy features of south Europe, the kind of Latin beauty you can find in some of the Roman statues that still exist in Sally's Line. There was a similarity about them, as if they were all of a single family, brothers and sisters, though I never really knew for sure. They all smiled in reply, offered their hands and welcomed us to Calethon I in flawless, idiomatic English of Sally's Line.
Just a few words about these people and their clothing. Like Sally and me, they were dressed in sleeveless shirts and knee-length pants made of an almost transparent material, transparent enough so that their excellent bodies were quite visible. And every square inch of their skin was artificially pigmented in bright, yet pleasant colors.
Dylla, the larger and more sensual of the girls, was sky-blue: her face, her arms, her legs, her torso, even her hair were blue, but of a darker shade, and her thin clothing was blue as well. She had an almost round, though not moonlike, face, with deep, dark eyes and full lips. Her breasts were large and it seemed as if they were about to tear through the thin fabric of her blouse. My eyes were drawn on down her slender waist to the triangle of dark-blue hair that grew between her thighs. I tore my eyes away to look at the others.
Jocasta and her clothing were a canary-yellow. She was a shorter girl than Dylla by several inches, and the proportions of her body were a little less impressive, though not bad at all. She made up for this lack -- if it can be said to be a lack -- with one of the prettiest faces I've ever seen and a smile that was simple, friendly, ingenuous. She was like somebody's kid sister who had suddenly become a woman, but still had the innocent openness of a child. I liked her instantly.
Dicton was the largest of the four, a red man well over six feet tall and with the features and physique of an Adonis. He spoke rarely and then only in short sentences, and I didn't know whether that was because he wasn't too bright or because he was very bright and didn't want to waste time with useless conversation.
Hallacy was shorter, stockier, more bullishly masculine in all respects than Dicton -- an orange Hercules to his red Adonis -- and a loquacious fellow with a keen sense of humor once he got started. He was a likable person, but I suspected that he could be a hard man to deal with if you ever got his temper up.
These were our guides.
Calethon I, they explained, once the formalities of introduction were out of the way, was the most westward of all the Lines that made up the Cross-Line Civilization. To the East forty-nine more Lines extended, all interlinked and mutually interdependent, all differing phases, as it were, of the same "world." There were a dozen Calethon Lines, then five Matthen Lines, the sixteen Manshien Lines, and so on. Calethon I was, they told us, the Westward Terminal Line for the Cross-Line worlds, a transfer and processing world, in essence, though there was some light industry and a number of Transtemporal research centers and universities specializing in Timeline studies, history divergence and things of that sort.
"What will be first?" orange Hallacy asked. "A tour of Bershaw?"
"No, I think not," Kar-hinter said. "Let us save that until last. First I would like to prove to our friends that what we are saying is all true. Take us to the terminal head, please."
"Certainly," said Dylla, the girl of the big blue breasts. "We can take our aircar into Bershaw and leave it there." Turning to me and smiling a very warm -- and was it inviting? -- smile, she said, "That's the largest terminal head in this hemisphere, you know."
I certainly didn't know. I didn't even know what a terminal head was. But I smiled back, and then Sally and I followed the smiling foursome and Kar-hinter across the field to one of the teardrop aircraft. Pall, silent and enigmatic, brought up the rear, perhaps standing guard over us.
The crystal fairyland that I had noticed on arrival was the city of Bershaw, or as near to a city as these people of Calethon I had. It was a vast, intertwined complex of shops and open-air markets and government offices and amusement centers, though it was not a city in the sense of being a dwelling place for people. The natives of Calethon I lived in isolated houses scattered across the world, never in tight clusters like most of the Lines I knew. Someone,
probably Hallacy, told me that the permanent population of Calethon I was somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred million, and there was plenty of room for everyone to have privacy. There were certainly no population problems here.
Jocasta, the little canary girl who piloted the aircar, set us down in another green field in the very center of the city, directly in front of a long, colorful building of glass and metal and stone that must have covered an area equal to a dozen city blocks in Sally's world. The front of the building showed a long series of doors through which a constant stream of people moved, in and out, many of them in costumes differing wildly from those worn by ourselves and our guides or in no costumes at all. It reminded me a little of the mixture of cultures I had seen in Staunton and seemed to remind Sally of the same. At least her face clouded, though she did not speak.
From the rear of the building or perhaps from a landing deck on its top rose dozens of large aircars, or perhaps airlorries would be a better term since they appeared to be cargo-carrying vehicles. An equal number came dropping out of the sky to replace those that rose, all moving easily, silently, even gracefully.
We all climbed out of the aircar, crossed the grassy field, and stepped onto a moving sidewalk that carried us effortlessly toward the gaping doors of what our guides had called a terminal head.
"Just exactly what is this place?" I asked Hallacy, who was standing at my side.
Before the orange man could answer, Kar-hinter interrupted, saying, "Wait a moment, Eric, and we shall show you. That would be more effective than telling you. Would it not?" he asked of Hallacy.
The orange Hercules nodded, and I said, "Okay."
"Where shall we go?" the lovely blue Dylla asked.
"You make the choice," Kar-hinter answered. "Merely make it interesting for our guests."
"Very well."
With Dylla leading us with her swinging buttocks, we stepped off the moving sidewalk just outside the building, stepped onto another, and were carried into the terminal head.
The building was interesting in the way that many public buildings are interesting, decorated with vast, colorful murals and exotic statuary, but all in all it wasn't too unlike many other buildings that I had seen before. Except, that is, for the conveyors.
The far wall of the enormous room consisted of rows of booths that extended dozens of yards in both directions, small rooms that reminded me more of elevators than anything else, and my first impression was that that was exactly what they were. People in the line ahead of us stepped into the booths, punched a series of buttons, and the doors closed. Moments later the doors opened and the booths were empty.
I noticed that just the opposite seemed to be happening at the booths at the far end of the row. People got out, but no one got in.
"What is this?" Sally asked, perhaps with a touch of fear in her voice.
And then we were entering a booth ourselves; all eight of us, and the doors were closing behind us as Dylla punched on the button panel. I had an instant of fear myself, the thought that perhaps Kar-hinter had taken us all this way to . . . Don't be foolish, I said to myself. He's only doing what you requested.
"Calethon IV, I think, would be a good place," the blue girl was saying.
Then flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
Exactly like being in a skudder, I thought. Then, by God, that's what it is. A skudder!
The doors opened and we were back in the terminal head. Or, rather, a terminal head. One very similar to the one we had just left, but differing in some respects, minor things that were hard to pin down. Except for the people. Most of them were lighter-skinned than those we had encountered before, and their clothing was of a different cut, more elaborate and decorative, though there was a liberal sprinkling of other costumes, not a few clothed as we were and with brightly pigmented skin like that of our guides. I still had not seen a single Krith besides Kar-hinter in the Cross-Line worlds.
"This is Calethon IV," Dylla said, "one of our heavy industry Lines. Let's go outside for a moment; then we'll go on to Matthen II."
Following the blue girl's swaying butt and then stepping onto a sliding sidewalk, we moved out of the terminal head and out into a city that looked more like what I thought a city should look like: regular streets, buildings of steel and stone and glass, moving vehicles that stayed on or near the surface. Beyond the city, from an observation deck located on top of the terminal head, we saw the dark structures of factories stretching toward the horizon, belching thin, filtered smoke into a sky that was still very blue. Somehow the factories had an esthetic charm of their own, but I would find it hard to describe. It wasn't at all unpleasant.
"There are more skudders produced here in a day than on all the other Lines combined," red Dicton said proudly.
Then, a little while later, after stopping for drinks in a luxurious lounge in the terminal head building, we reentered one of the conveyor booths and flickered again.
Matthen II was the spaceport Line of the Cross-Line worlds, where huge, silvery, needle-thin spaceships rose silently into the sky, bound for the Moon and Mars and Venus and the asteroids, there to discharge passengers and cargo and reload with raw materials and a few finished products from the extraterrestrial colonies and return them to Earth. Space travel was comparatively rare across the Timelines; it was generally far more expensive than skudding, but even here in the Cross-Lines there were a few products that were cheaper to get from the Solar planets than to try to collect across the Lines.
Hallacy told me that a fantastically huge spaceship with a faster-than-light drive was being built in orbit, around Earth. Soon it would carry a load of colonists across the light-years to a very Earth-like world that scouts had recently discovered some three hundred lightyears away. And he said that he was sorry that we could not wait around an hour or so until it got dark and then have a chance to see the ship. Even though it orbited rather far out, it was large enough to be easily seen from Earth after dark.
I was impressed.
After that, just before we returned to the terminal head, Dylla whispered something to me about Manshein IX which I didn't fully understand, but left me with a pleasant, excited feeling of anticipation.
Our next stop was Matthen V, the "Sea World," they called it, where most of mankind had moved into the oceans, leaving the land little more than a carefully landscaped playground, a world where men talked with dolphins, had learned to live in their aquatic environment, breathing through surgically implanted gills. Together, men and dolphins, they were building a culture unlike any on any other Timeline known to the Kriths.
Manshein III was a Timeline devoted entirely to the arts. Here there were settlements of writers where the greatest literature of all the Lines was slowly coming into being, we were told: artists' colonies where painting and sculpture were reaching unparalleled heights; groups of musicians who were evolving new and exciting forms of musical expression; photographers and holographers, engravers and printers and lithographers and dancers. You name it. We had no more than a few minutes to glimpse something of each, though even then our senses were overwhelmed with the sound and color and beauty of it all.
I hated to leave there, and that may sound odd coming from a professional killer like me, but it was true.
Manshein IX -- the one blue Dylla had hinted about -- was a Line devoted to nothing less than pure sexual hedonism, a world of constant Saturnalia, a place to which people came from the other Lines to spend a few days -- or perhaps years -- in erotic escape.
It was here, in the city that occupied Bershaw's place on this world, as darkness was beginning to fall, that our party became divided. And I was sure that it was by intent, though who engineered it I didn't know, nor did I really care.
Dylla and I found ourselves alone, wandering down a wide avenue filled with people and one or two Kriths. The humans wore the most exotic and erotic dress I have ever seen, and the evening air was filled with pleasant, sensual odors and sounds and sights.
"We have a few moments together," Dylla said, looking at me with an inviting smile in her eyes. "Shall we spend them in pleasure?"
I looked back at her, my eyes following the full length of her blue-dyed body, nodded, felt a familiar urge rising in me.
"Come then," she said, leading me across the wide street and. down a narrower one into a great green park that consisted of labyrinthine hedges and soft, yielding grass and the odor of flowering plants. Around us were the soft, rustling sounds of body against body and subdued cries and moans of pleasure and excitement, though the producers of those sounds were hidden from us by the growth of hedges and flowers.
"Here," Dylla said after a while, leading me into a hedge-surrounded recess as large as a medium-size bedroom and covered by soft grass.
"Now, dear Eric, do you want me?"
I didn't speak, and there was no need to. Dylla quickly undressed us both and then lay back on the grass and opened herself to me. I moved above her and entered her easily, finding her warm and moist and passionately ready for me.
At the Narrow Passage Page 22
