by Gerard Klein
Corson put his hands to his neck. The collar was there still, so light he often nearly forgot about it. Solid—cold—motionless, yet more dangerous than a cobra. But the snake slumbered. The idea of using the undead as recruits ought not to amount to an overt declaration of hostility.
Shaken by nausea, he bowed down to the sand, aware of Antonella watching him. The idea of making use of the undead appalled him. But it was much in the style of Those of Aergistal to make use of the leftovers, the war criminals or their victims, to avert a far worse calamity. They were casuists who adhered to the principle of the lesser evil—or rather they were total realists. Because those women were dead, dead for good and all. Empty wrappings! No longer capable of reason, or imagination, or even of suffering except on the most basic level. Perhaps they could still breed; that was a point he’d have to bear in mind. But to give them artificial personalities would be a crime far pettier than to annihilate a city full of intelligent beings by pressing a button. On reflection, it was no worse a transgression than an organ transplant, and surgeons on Earth had settled that problem long ago: the dead must serve the living.
He scraped sand over what he had vomited, swallowed painfully, wiped the corners of his mouth.
“I’m better now,” he told Antonella, who was still staring at him in dismay. “It’s nothing. A—a fit.”
She had offered no help, or even sympathy. She had not made a move.
Too young, maybe, he thought. Brought up in the silken safety of a world unaware of disease and pain. Hardly more than a pretty flower. Experience will change her. Then I shall be able to love her. By the gods, l'll take Aergistal to pieces stone by stone to find her again! They can’t keep her there. She has never soiled her hands with any crime.
And that justified Corson’s presence here. Antonella could not do what he had done, nor what remained for him to do. Neither Selma, nor Cid, nor anyone from their period could do it. They were not hardened as he was. They belonged to another world and fought on a different front. Unluckily for them, it was not free from danger. And it was the role of people like Corson to minimize their peril.
What we are, he said to himself, we’re the road sweepers of history, the sewermen. We paddle in shit so that the way will be clean for the feet of our descendants.
“Are you going for a swim?” the girl asked.
He nodded, not having recovered enough to speak. The sea would make him feel clean again. The entire ocean might not be too much.
CHAPTER 35
Cid was back when Corson came out of the water. He found an excuse to get rid of Antonella and described his plan. The general outline fitted together, but certain details remained unclear: the collar, for instance, which he still did not know how to take off. Maybe he would find out at Aergistal. or during a journey into the future. But for the moment it represented only a minor inconvenience.
Arranging the escape would be quite easy. Veran himself had given Corson a whole range of weapons after he had been fitted with the collar; assuming he had no more to fear from that quarter, he concluded that every available man was indispensable in time of war.
One of the weapons created the light-inhibiting field. By modifying it Corson thought he could increase its range at the cost of exhausting its power pack in a few minutes. Its corollary was an ultrasound projector which enabled you to find your way about in the dark; he also had one of those. The ration bag he would leave on the mausoleum planet formed part of the equipment of his pegasone. There remained the two suits he would give to Antonella and the other Corson, but he expected to pick those up without much difficulty during the confusion caused by his arrival.
Contrary to his expectations, Cid did not react when he came to the most delicate aspect of his plan: the reanimation of the undead girls. The man was either incapable of emotion or very strong-willed. Corson thought the former more likely.
“I have some knowledge of reanimation techniques and synthetic personality implantation,” Corson said. “It was being tested on casualties during the Earth-Uria war. But I’ll need equipment and perhaps technical assistance.”
“I suspect you will find all you need on the mausoleum world,” Cid answered. “These sadistic collectors of yours will certainly have prepared for all eventualities. And if you need advice, get in touch with Aergistal.”
“How? By shouting at the top of my voice? Do they always keep an eye on me?”
Cid smiled faintly. “Probably. But that’s not the way. Didn’t you know you can reach them through the pegasone? You’ve been to Aergistal. The route is indelibly imprinted on your nervous system. Besides, it’s not so much a route as a way of seeing things. Aergistal occupies the surface of the universe, which implies that it’s everywhere. The surface of a hypervolume is a volume with one dimension less. That’s not exact, because the number of dimensions in this universe is probably irrational and may even be transfinite, but for practical purposes it’s all you need to know.”
“But what do I have to do?” Corson asked in perplexity.
“I don’t know pegasones as well as you do, and I’ve never been to
Aergistal, but I assume it will suffice to establish your usual empathy relation with it and then call your journey back to mind. The pegasone will instinctively make any necessary corrections. Don’t forget it can reach quite deep into your subconscious.”
Cid stroked his chin. “You see,” he went on, “it all began with pegasones, on this planet at any rate. In the old days they were unknown on Uria. Into this probability line, or another adjacent”— with a sad smile—“you introduced the first pegasone. Urian scientists studied its offspring. They managed to work out how they jumped through time. Then they contrived to endow humans with the same talent, at first on a very small scale. I told you, it’s less a question of a talent than a way of looking at things. The human nervous system has no special powers, but it does have the ability to acquire them, which is perhaps even better. A few centuries ago, at the beginning of our period of responsibility, the humans on Uria were only capable of cogging a few seconds of their future. For some reason the Old Race, the avians, had even more trouble.”
“A good thing too,” Corson grunted, remembering Ngal R’nda. “But the people I met on my arrival had the power, and the study of pegasones must have happened later.”
Cid smiled again, this time with genuine amusement. “How many people did you actually meet?”
Corson searched his memory. “Only two—Floria Van Nelle, and Antonella.”
“They came from your future,” explained Cid. “Later on the most advanced or the most gifted entered communion with Aergistal. Everything has become much easier. At least, in a manner of speaking.”
He straightened and filled his lungs.
“Now we have begun to move through time without pegasones or machines. We do still need a little device, a memory-jogger, as it were. But soon we’ll be able to do without that, too.”
“Soon?”
“Tomorrow, or in a hundred years. It makes no difference. Time counts little for those who have mastered it.”
“Many will die between now and then.”
“You’ve already died once, haven’t you, Corson? And that isn’t preventing you from carrying out your mission.”
Corson remained silent awhile, concentrating on his plan. What Cid had told him disposed of two problems: how to get the pegasone to take Antonella and the other Corson to Aergistal, and how to locate the mausoleum world. Because he had been there once, he would know how to get back. Obviously it was impossible for a man to keep track of the billions and billions of celestial bodies in this corner of the universe, let alone follow their relative motions over long periods of time. But he could always retrace a route he had taken once, just as it is not necessary to have read every book in order to know how to read a few.
“We could have given you a certain amount of training,” Cid remarked, burrowing in the sand. “But it would have taken a very long time. And t
his probability line is rather fragile. It’s better for you to use the pegasone. As for us, we are forcing ourselves to give them up.”
He unearthed an engraved silver-gilt container.
“You must be hungry,” he said.
Corson spent three ten-days on the beach. It was a sort of furlough. But he devoted most of the time to perfecting his plans. From memory he drew on the sand a detailed map of Veran’s encampment. He would have little time to lead the fugitives to the pegasone park and there must be no question of tripping on a tent peg or losing his way in the maze of alleys. He also worked out the principal attributes of the artificial personalities he wanted to give to the reanimated girls. He still did not know how to get them from the mausoleum world to Uria, but there would be time to figure that out when he had dealt with the earlier stages of the scheme.
The rest of the time he spent swimming, chatting, or playing with Antonella, or taking part in the activities of the Council. At first sight they did not appear to be very demanding, but little by little he realized the extent of the responsibilities weighing on Cid, Selma, and the other woman, whose name he now knew to be Ana.
Now and then, for periods of hours or days, they disappeared. Several times Corson saw them come back worn out, incapable of uttering a word. Strangers sometimes sprang from nowhere, demanding advice or bringing information. For long hours, almost every day, one at least of the councillors was in communion with Aergistal. Most often it was one of the women. Were they perhaps more advanced than Cid along the road to mastery of time? Or was it simply that Those of Aergistal preferred them as intermediaries?
Some of the communions seemed to be especially trying. Once he was awakened by screams. Ana was twisting and rolling on the sand as though in an epileptic fit. Before Corson had time to intervene, Cid and Selma had lain down beside her and gone into communion themselves, and in a few minutes Ana’s cries and writhing ceased. The next day Corson did not dare ask what had happened.
Something he did inquire about, on the other hand, was the six-thousand-year history of Uria which he had overleaped. The answers he received, though, were unsatisfying. Six thousand years was an almost unimaginable span of time. Not so long had elapsed between the first space flight from Earth and Corson’s birth. Science must have made incredible progress. A whole gazetteer of new worlds must have swollen the empire of mankind. And had not explorers made contact with the very ancient races legend spoke of, those millions of times more advanced than men? The answer to this last question appeared to be negative, and anyway Corson doubted whether humanity would have withstood the shock. Such races must have attained the Aergistal level, where—as the god had said—“there is no more difference.” If they intervened in human evolution it would not be under the crude guise of aggression or peaceful trade. It would be across time.
What surprised Corson most was the nature of the answers the councillors gave him; one could almost describe them as parochial. They knew a little of the history of Uria and of a few score neighboring star systems, but nothing coherent on the galactic level. Even the concept of galactic history seemed foreign to them.
Corson thought at first that must be because it was too vast for any human mind to grasp. Then he realized their very notion of history differed from his. They viewed it as an assemblage of situations and crises of which none was irreversible and all were obedient to complex laws. They were no more interested in a catalog of all possible crises than an engineer in Corson’s day would have been in an exhaustive tabulation of solutions to technical problems, or a doctor in a list of every cellular change caused by viruses. Principles were known to exist which accounted for the vast majority of actual situations. The rare occurrence of an event which could not be thus explained led, sooner or later, to the formulation of a new principle, or even a whole new system of principles. The only History which they could conceive of, as Corson found out, was the History of the successive sciences of history. None of them was a specialist in that field.
Moreover at any given moment—inasmuch as that phrase meant anything—there could be found on the various human and alien worlds almost the entire imaginable range of situations. Galactic civilization was one of islands. Each island had its own history and customs, and interference between them was relatively rare. Corson came to understand that war had been the principal bond between the worlds which had been baptized the Solar Powers, just as it had been between those of the Empire of Uria and all subsequent empires.
The question remained, how to find out whether Uria was indeed a key world because it had happened to attract the attention of Those of Aergistal. To Cid the question was meaningless. In Ana’s view the Urians were called on to play a special part in the universe because they had been the ones to find a way of conquering time. For Selma, all worlds were equally important and the mastery of time would have been revealed to those species which were sufficiently advanced by Those of Aergistal through means and at a moment which they judged suitable. Corson was no further forward.
He started to have doubts. Sometimes he wondered whether they were altogether sane, watching the way they behaved around him. Was their confidence in their powers a mere delusion? He had scarcely any evidence of their ability to time-jump except their absences. They could be deceiving him, consciously or unconsciously.
On the other hand they knew too much about him, his past, Aergistal . . . and they had shown that they were capable of intercepting a pegasone. Corson was sure they had forced it to lock on to this present. And at least as far as he could tell under normal circumstances they showed no hint of derangement. They acted like ordinary people, perhaps rather better adjusted than the average individual Corson had known before, in a time of war. That too was surprising. People belonging to a culture six thousand years older than his own ought to be different.
Then he remembered Touray, snatched from the mythical days of Old Earth, back when men had hardly ventured beyond the limits of their own world. He had detected no real difference in him, either. And Touray had adapted astonishingly well to life at Aergistal, which would not be created for a million years, or more likely for a billion.
He had reached about this stage in his musings when he found out that his companions were indeed different. They were united by a deep personal bond, whereas Corson’s society had recognized only the individual and the functional group. There was an especially strong attraction between Cid and Selma, but it did not exclude Ana—on the contrary. All three of them now and then mentioned larger groups.
They did their best not to shock Corson; while life on a beach might have its idyllic aspects, it did impose some limits on intimate relationships.
Oddly enough, Antonella seemed to remain apart, even more of an outsider than Corson. The three others did not shut her out of their group and even remained on superficially affectionate terms with her, but she was not attuned to them. She had neither Selma’s appealing spontaneity nor Ana’s rather casual sensuality. She was, or so it seemed, no more than a pretty young girl buzzing around Corson like a bee around a jam tart. She had a less forceful personality than the other two women but—Corson had at least to grant her this—she seemed in no way jealous of them. He ascribed the almost imperceptible, but nonetheless real, sense of distance between her and the others to her lesser experience of life, her more inhibited background, and the fact that she hailed from another time zone. He had never asked her which one. Without reference points any answer she gave would be meaningless. Each time he inquired about her previous life she replied only with commonplaces. She seemed to have no memories worth mentioning. He wondered for a moment why, in her future when she met him for the second time, she would say nothing—or from his standpoint had said nothing—about this restful period on the beach. It was hard to figure that out. Maybe she was afraid of a short circuit in time. Or, more simply, she might have no reason to speak of Cid, Selma, and Ana, who to her by then would be no more than meaningless names.
Whereas at pres
ent they were to him real friends. He could not remember having felt such affection for other people in the past He especially enjoyed the long evenings when they sat sipping wine and swapping ideas. Then it seemed to him as though all his problems had been solved long ago and troubled him no more than would old memories.
“You won’t forget to send that message, Selma?”
“It’s as though it has already been sent,” Selma would reply.
“And you’ll put my name to it, George Corson. That old fox Veran knew it even before I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance. And you’ll tell him that on Uria he can find weapons and pegasones, and even perhaps recruits.”
“Corson, seeing you so worried about this one might imagine it was a love letter!”
“Last time I saw him he was by the great ocean of Aergistal, where sea meets space. I hope that address will be adequate. Now I look back, I recall he seemed to be in difficulties. He must have been retreating.”
“We’ll send the message to Aergistal, marked 'to be called for.”' He had once explained to Selma the system of military postal zones which had been in use in his own time, and the poste restante mail ships which waited for their particular squadrons for a year, two, ten, sometimes through all eternity. Under robot control they made for a prearranged point and there remained as long as was necessary until their contents were collected. She had found the idea both absurd and comical. He had almost become angry. Then he had realized that to her the idea of waiting for news must be a totally foreign concept. Every day she received news from a time when she would be long dead.
Then he would turn to Cid.
“Are you sure that throwing Veran’s camp into confusion will be enough? Are you sure the citizens of Uria can cope with the soldiers and their pegasones?”
“Absolutely,” Cid would say. “Apart from Veran none of those soldiers has the makings of a leader. As soon as he is out of the way the rest will put up little resistance.”
