It just didn't last long enough -- but then does it ever?
The universe shattered with our orgasms.
Then, after a while, we rose, dressed, and returned to find our companions near where we had last seen them.
Into the terminal head and then back out again -- into Manshein XIV, the university world, an earth given over to study, research, contemplation, to vast library computers that cataloged and reffned all the knowledge of the other Lines, where men sought the ultimate answers to the ultimate questions about the nature of time and space and man and Krith and the "what" and "why" of the universe -- but for some reason I didn't think that even here they had found the answers to those questions, not really.
Manshein XV -- again a Timeline where men sought ultimates, but here in dark robes and the quietness of cloisters, in meditation or the mind-expanding sensation of half a hundred kinds of drugs, a half million religious orders sought whatever it is that men call God in their own diverse ways -- and I wondered if any of them had made it.
"Time is running short," Kar-hinter said at last. "Take us back to Calethon I. We shall eat and see the sights of Bershaw before we must leave."
Following the undulations of Dylla's blue hips we walked back to the terminal head and flickered across the Lines back to Calethon I and the city of Bershaw.
Bershaw -- a city out of the Arabian Nights, though lacking the barbarism and cruelty of ancient Arabia. A pageant of light and color and sound, an orgy of food and wine and music under the stars and crystal towers, a symphony of beauty, a collection of all that is lovely from uncounted worlds.
Bershaw -- the gateway to the Cross-Line Civilization.
Six hours or a little more had gone by when Sally, Kar-hinter, Pall, and I returned to our waiting skudder, Sally and I at least still stunned by what we had seen and experienced. We said good-bye to beautiful blue Dylla, to yellow Jocasta, to red Dicton, to the Herculean-orange Hallacy, and began our trip back to -- well, back to an Eden Line that would seem more dull than it had before.
Flicker. And the Cross-Line worlds were behind us.
"Are you satisfied now?" Kar-hinter asked as we settled down for the trip back.
"They lied to me," Sally said, pain in her voice. "It was all a lie. They said that the Cross-Line Civilization did not exist. But it does."
"Yes, it does," Kar-hinter said seriously. "It is exactly as we have told it. Is that not so, Eric?" I nodded. "And the contratime communication is a fact as well, though I cannot prove it so easily."
"I don't think you need to, Kar-hinter," Sally said, apology in her voice. "We can accept that, too. Can't we, Eric?"
"Yes, of course," I said. "You've shown us more than enough, Kar-hinter. Please let me apologize for ever having doubted it."
"Don't concern yourself," the Krith said. "I am merely pleased that your questions have been resolved. Now we can go about our proper business of preparing for the future. Now, sit back, relax, for the trip ahead of us is long."
And I did, sitting back in the seat, letting drowsiness take me, feeling again that odd sense of unreality, that nothing was quite what it seemed to be, and somehow knowing that I was still lying to Kar-hinter, knowing that despite everything we had seen and experienced, I was still not really convinced.
Something was wrong, but damned if I knew what.
22
Dreams and Nondreains
Kar-hinter awoke us as the skudder came to rest in the Eden Line from which we had started.
"Give me your clothing," he said. "You still have over two weeks of your stay left. Enjoy It."
So we gave him our clothing, climbed out of the skudder, and, in the darkness watched it flicker out of existence. Then we went into the cabin.
During the days that followed Sally gradually began to adjust to the idea that her life had been compounded of lies and dreams, that what the Paratimers told her was false. One doesn't change a lifetime of belief overnight, but her strange, almost ambivalent feelings toward Mica slowly solidified into resentment, and he became the focal point of her growing anger; in absentia he bore the brunt of her disgust. And I, whom she had always wanted to like, became the pole to which she was attracted. She used me, I know, as a solace for her growing disillusionment with Mica and all that he represented, but I did not mind that use and still hoped that eventually her feelings for me would mature into something deeper. But even without this I had no cause for complaint.
On the night of our visit to the Cross-Line worlds we each slept alone. On the next night we went to our separate beds, though I had tried at least to persuade her to come to mine. She had resisted, though I thought I could feel that her resistance was weakening.
That second night I lay there in my bed, listening to the nightly rain as it began to fall, turning things over in my mind, things about Sally and Staunton and Kar-hinter and Calethon I and Dylla and other things that I couldn't quite put tags on -- though in time I would come to, I knew. After a while, a long while, listening to the rain and Sally's distant breathing, I fell into a shallow sleep and was perhaps on the verge of dreaming when I felt a soft warmness coming up against me, a hand placed on my naked chest, a mouth suddenly pressed against mine.
"Sally," I murmured against her lips.
"Yes, Eric," she answered, moving her body closer still and then up over mine. She was nude, of course, and her soft breasts were crushing against me.
I pulled her mouth to mine again, and her answer was savage, demanding. I was almost gasping for breath when she pulled her lips away.
"Yes, Eric," she said again, still lying atop me.
"I want you, Sally," I said. "I've wanted you from the first time I saw you."
"I know," she whispered.
I did not speak again, but pulled her mouth back to mine and kissed her as savagely as she had kissed me. And as we kissed, her hips began writhing against mine, pushing herself down on me, demanding, almost begging.
Then suddenly she broke her lips away from mine and cried, "Now, Eric. I want it now."
Later our lovemaking settled into a comfortable pattern and we learned the intimacies of each other, the little ways of giving greater pleasure to each other, the sharing of our pleasure, and it was even better.
Eden was beginning to live up to its name.
But there were other things.
While the visit to the Cross-Line worlds appeared to have solved all the problems for Sally, it hadn't for me. The feeling of unreality had not left me but rather grew as the days went by. I could not have said why, but there was the feeling, the vague, deep idea, that what we had experienced had not been real.
Sally could accept it easily enough. She had not seen the work that the Kriths could do, how they could implant memories into the minds of men that were more real then the actual experiences; she did not know how the Kriths could alter men's personalities. I did. And I wasn't convinced.
Then there was the dream. I suppose that's what did it for me.
It was more than a week after our visit to the Cross-Line worlds. I had found it difficult to go to sleep that night. Sally had sensed something in me, had sensed that something still bothered me, though she had not asked me outright to tell her about it. She believed, I think, that I would tell her when I was ready.
So I lay there in bed beside her, waiting for sleep to come, and when it finally did come, it was a very disturbing sleep. The dream was like this:
We were in the skudder, Sally and Kar-hinter and the pilot and Pall and me. Sally and I were dressed in the costumes that we had worn in the Cross-Line worlds, and we had drunk our coffee and had fallen asleep.
Then the skudder stopped suddenly. My eyes half opened, then closed, and I could not force them open again, though I could hear the voices of Kar-hinter and the skudder pilot speaking in Shangalis.
"We're here," the pilot said.
"Good," Kar-hinter replied. Then I heard him move to a place beside me, felt him place his hand on my forehead, pull
back an eyelid and peer into my eye. I could see his nonhuman face, though it was blurred and I could not focus on it.
Moments later the skudder's hatch opened, and other voices spoke, voices that I thought were those of Kriths.
"You have them?" one of the voices asked.
"Yes," Kar-hinter replied. "They are quite unconscious.
"Very well," replied one of the unnamed Kriths. "We will help you carry them out."
Arms came under my shouders and knees. I was lifted, carried, handed down, carried again, then placed on some type of wheeled conveyance, and rolled for a long distance.
"The tapes are ready, I asssume?" Kar-hinter's voice asked.
"Yes."
"Both identical?" Kar-hinter asked.
"Yes," the other voice signed. "Except for viewpoint. They are self-programming, self-adjusting interacting."
"Very good."
The other Krith gave a very human snort. "It is quite complex, you know, the sort of interacting pseudo-memories you require for these two."
"I know," Kar-hinter's voice said. "But they must be convinced."
"They will be convinced. Of that I am absolutely sure. We worked all night on them. Six hours of tapes each, covering every human sense. There will be no reason for either of them to doubt their experiences."
"Are you sure?"
"Of course I am sure."
"Eric has a strong will. The Paratimers even tried telepathy on him, but it did not work."
"Yes, I know that, but when we are through, even he will be satisfied."
"I hope you are correct. You do not know this man as I do."
"I am correct."
There was a long silence, marked only by the faint squeak of the wheels of the thing on which I lay as it rolled along.
"Is this man really important?" the other voice asked.
"I believe he is," Kar-hinter said, "and the Tromas agree with me, though they seem to see even more in him than I do." He paused for a while before he went on. "He has been of great value to us in the past. I believe that he will be of even greater value to us in the future, once his loyalty is established beyond question."
"In six hours it will be."
Then I heard doors open, close behind me, and moments later the motion stopped.
"I will return in six hours," Kar-hinter said.
"They will be ready then."
My eyelids were peeled back, then held back by tape. Two small, cold glass objects were placed against my naked eyes. At the same time I was stripped of my clothing and felt cold metallic objects touching my skin in different places.
"Is the woman ready?" one of the Krithian voices asked after a while.
"Yes, sir," a human voice replied.
"Very well, begin the tapes."
Suddenly I could see again, into the skudder, and a voice was saying into my ear, "Eric, wake up. We are nearly there." It was Kar-hinter's voice.
And then I relived the whole visit to the Cross-Line worlds!
The dream was just a dream, wasn't it? Or was it a real memory that had been suppressed by drugs?
But was that possible? I had been told that the Kriths were not able to tamper with a mind that had been conditioned as mine had. But, then, had they actually tampered with my mind? No, in the dream they had merely drugged me, and then, while I was drugged, they had fed me false sensory data. They had not tried directly to manipulate my mind or to alter anything that was already in it. Yes, I supposed that it was possible.
Okay, I thought, suddenly convinced, this whole damned thing was faked. As I sat up on the side of the bed, my thoughts went on: I was never in the Cross-Line worlds. Kar-hinter took us a few Lines away, drugged us, and then planted the false memories. Why?
Well, that was pretty simple. There was no Cross-Line Civilization after all. Mica had been telling the truth about it. It was all an enormous plot.
I lit a ciagrette, looked down at Sally, who still slept soundly.
What the hell was I going to do about it?
"Sally," I said shaking her shoulder. "Wake up."
Her eyes opened. She looked up at me with a startled expression on her face, recognizing the urgency in my voice.
"What is it?"
"I've got to talk to you."
"Okay," she said, sitting up and accepting the cigarette I offered her.
I dialed for coffee on the autokitchen extension, lit myself another cigarette.
"What's bothering you, Eric?" she asked as the coffee arrived.
"Listen to me carefully, Sally," I said.
"I will. Tell me."
"It's all a lie just like Mica said it was. There is no Cross-Line Civilization."
"But, Eric, we were there. We saw it."
"We only thought we did. It was all faked. False memories.
"How do you know?" Sally asked, something on her face saying that she almost doubted my sanity.
I told her about my dream, about how I thought I remembered all the preparations for implanting the false memories.
"But maybe it was just a dream," she said.
"No."
"How do you know? How can you be sure?"
"I don't know, but I'm sure. You don't know the Kriths the way I do, Sally. They can do things like this. I've seen it done before."
"But would they do it to you, Eric, knowing that you know they can do it?"
"They did it," I said. "They must have a lot of faith in it."
"But it's fantastic."
"Hell, it's all fantastic. That's as easy to believe as any of the rest of it."
"I don't know, Eric. I mean . . . I don't know what to believe now."
"There's truth somewhere," I said. "And we've got to find it. And I know that we won't find it with Kar-hinter's help."
"Then how will we find it?" she asked.
"We'll go find Mica and ask him."
Sally looked at me, and by this time she was firmly convinced that I was insane. Maybe she had a right to be.
23
The Western Timelines
By the time the skudder came to take us back to Sally's world I had her sufficiently convinced of the truth of my beliefs so that she at least agreed to go along with me.
When the Krithian skudder materialized in the garden before the cabin, Sally was half way ready to accept once more the belief that Mica and his kind were the saviors of mankind. I wasn't, not quite, but least I was willing to accept them over the Kriths, whom I now knew to be liars on a scale I had never before imagined possible.
Well, as I said, the skudder materialized in the garden. The pilot stepped out, waved to us with a big grin.
"You people ready to go back?" he called as we walked down the path toward him.
"Try to smile," I whispered to Sally. Then louder, "No, not really, but I guess we have to. Everything in the cabin's on standby. I guess we can leave now."
"Good," the pilot said. "Kar-hinter said to get you back to him as quickly as possible. He has some news for you."
"What kind of news?" I asked, now within handshaking distance of the pilot.
"Didn't say. He just said that it was something that both of you would find very interesting."
"I guess we'll find out soon," I replied.
The pilot now opened the hatch, gestured for Sally to climb in, offered her his hand. "I've got clothes in here for you."
"Good," I said, keeping a false smile on my face.
"Must be nice here," he said as Sally placed one foot on the lip of the hatch, hoisted herself in with both hands.
For a moment the pilot's eyes strayed from Sally's bare buttocks to the cabin and the blissful, idyllic panorama that surrounded it. And that was exactly what I wanted.
I could see Sally in the hatchway out of the corner of my eye as she pulled herself erect, then slowly, carefully turned so that she was facing outward, then lashed out with her foot to the back of the unconcerned pilot's head.
I switched into combat augmentation and was satisfi
ed that everything worked perfectly. The world slowed to my senses; sounds grew deeper and shifted toward the bass; light shifted toward the red.
At the Narrow Passage Page 23
