Collision with Chronos

by Barrington J. Bayley

  “We’ve captured the ruling clique, sir.”

  “All right, let me see them.”

  Brourne stared at the impassive, droopy-moustached, silky-bearded, satined and silked old men who came up on the screen. “How do you know this is the ruling clique?” he demanded.

  The youthful, enthusiastic Captain came back into view. “They admit it, sir. We’ve found a kind of computer that knows a few Earth phrases.”

  “Oh? How many?”

  “Not enough for a useful interrogation, I’m afraid.”

  “I see. Well, lock them up until later.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Captain snapped off a salute and went off the line.

  Brourne turned away, gingerly massaging his injured arm, which lay in a sling. What was the point of capturing anybody when he couldn’t talk to them? He cursed again for having let Hueh Su-Mueng get away. At the time he’d thought nothing of it, hadn’t even ordered any pursuit or search. Why bother? The Chink’s first move had doubtless been to divest himself of his uniform, whereupon he might as well have been invisible. It was practically impossible to tell these Chinks apart.

  There was another possibility, Brourne reminded himself. Leard Ascar was still in the city somewhere and sooner or later his men would find him. By all accounts Ascar was an intractable, unbalanced personality – in his preflight briefing Brourne had been advised that he was “unreliable” – but presumably he knew the language, as Heshke had. He would have to do.

  The vidcom burred again. Brourne returned to it.

  “HQ. Major Brourne.”

  A serious-faced tech officer gazed out at him. “The sortie to the lower retort has sent back a report, sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “They say it’s deserted. Crammed full of factories and workshops – but there’s not a single human being there.”

  “Deserted? You’re sure they’re not hiding out somewhere?”

  “That’s not how things look, and no one’s been found yet.”

  “So maybe that cur of a Chink was lying,” Brourne responded. “The whole place could be automated – no workers at all.”

  “Perhaps – but again, that’s not how it looks. Right now there’s not a wheel turning. And there are signs of decay, as though the whole complex had been abandoned about fifty years ago.”

  Brourne became thoughtful. “That doesn’t figure,” he rumbled. “It doesn’t figure at all. Wasn’t there supposed to be something about the two halves of the city not matching in time?”

  “Our men simply went through a tunnel about a third of a mile long,” the tech said. “But there are other ways in. There’s a marshalling yard where the produce of the factories comes through. I’ll investigate further.”

  “Do that. And keep me informed.”

  Right now, he thought, is where Leard Ascar would really come in handy.

  Ascar was trembling with excitement.

  During the past few weeks Shiu Kung-Chien had told him a great deal about the Oblique Entity that had once nearly annihilated Retort City – as much, indeed, as the elder scientist himself knew. Ascar had begged that he, too, be allowed to visit this strange intelligence via the all-sense sender, but Shiu had prevailed upon him to delay the experience. The all-sense transmissions, crude at the moment, needed refining.

  And so Ascar had worked patiently under the old man’s direction, studying and thinking deeply. The Oblique Entity, Shiu had intimated, had powers beyond the merely human. It wasn’t a biological intelligence; it wasn’t associated with any planet or celestial body; its nature, though it had a material structure, wasn’t readily intelligible to human beings.

  During the last phase of their work to improve the transceiver the Titans had arrived and invaded the ISS. Shiu, imperturbable as ever (Ascar was impressed by the way any event, no matter how grave, failed to shake the placidity of the people here; they were, Shiu had told him once, dilettantes at everything, even living), had left Ascar to carry on, which he did while the noises of destruction as the Titans pulled down sections of the city to facilitate their easy movement grew nearer and nearer.

  For the past half hour the sounds of conquest had died down. Presumably the Leisure Retort was now in the Titans’ grip, which meant that they’d soon be battering down his door. He was anxious to have made his trip before they did that, because they would very likely deprive him of any further opportunity and he was impelled by more than mere intellectual curiosity. Some time ago he’d asked Shiu Kung-Chien how the Oblique Entity’s own knowledge of the physical universe compared with their own.

  Shiu Kung-Chien had hesitated. Compared with men, he’d said, the Oblique Entity had knowledge that was like that “of one of your ancient gods”.

  Ascar had some very definite questions to put to this entity.

  And so Ascar completed the countdown. Shiu had already completed a trial run with the new equipment; all Ascar had to do now was to make the final checks.

  The flickering ideograms froze at last; the apparatus was poised in readiness. He rubbed his eyes. Although he’d been trained in a matter of minutes to read the specialised calligraphy Shiu used, he still found the ideograms hard to focus on at speed.

  He glanced over the big, gleaming, block-like transformers of time energy that were dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the observatory, humming fuzzily. They had, he supposed, taken a couple of years to manufacture, yet they’d been delivered to Shiu within an hour of his submitting the designs. Such was the nature of the resources he could draw on: resources he used so carelessly, and in so cavalier a fashion, that Ascar was constantly amazed. He’d order new equipment with absolutely no thought for the labour time involved, drawing up version after version of some difficult design and demanding an operating model of each so as to try out his various (and sometimes offhand) ideas. His storeroom was jammed with machinery, much of it never used, and many items that arrived were sent back to be scrapped after a few desultory experiments.

  The Oblique Entity was already reciprocating on their contact stream, expressing its willingness for the exchange. The cybernetic servitor moved into position to operate the equipment. His heart thumping, Ascar stepped into the transparent sphere. The hatch closed behind him as he sat down in the central chair, and then he was in darkness.

  The transceiver seized his senses and snatched them out of intelligible time, hurling them in a direction no compass could ever find.

  At first there was only silence, and continued darkness. Then out of that darkness a voice said suddenly: “I am here. You have arrived. What do you want?”

  The voice, though loud, was smooth and confidential. It seemed to be spoken close to his ear – or rather, to both his ears. Behind the voice was a silence, but behind that silence Ascar fancied he could hear a whispering whistle, like the susurration that sometimes accompanied radio transmissions.

  “I want to see you,” Ascar said into the darkness.

  “How do you wish to see me?”

  Ascar didn’t understand the question for a moment; then he answered: “I want to see you as you are.”

  “Very well. Here is our physical reality.”

  The change was brutally abrupt. Ascar suddenly found himself amid an uproar in a long gallery. He was kneeling, for the height of the gallery was only about four feet and gave approximately the same room on either side, though it stretched away ahead of him seemingly into infinity. Furthermore it was only one of a multitude of such structures arranged around him, and which he glimpsed through the iron frameworks separating them. And those frameworks contained —

  He inspected the complex closely. As near as he could judge, the objects would best be described as machines. The galleries were, in fact, avenues for the siting of a continuous machine process which clattered, rotated and shuffled through indefinably intricate operations. Ascar was in the midst of a roaring, close-packed factory of vast extent, like some industrialised hell.

  “Did you construct this?” he asked into t
hin air.

  “No,” came the immediate answer, easily audible despite the deafening racket. “This is us – a small part of me. All this came into existence spontaneously, as a result of the process of time. I/We is not biological.”

  Ascar felt himself moving forward. The floor offered no perceptible resistance to his knees, but a hot wind played against his face. The endless galleries swept past blurrily as he gathered speed and went darting into a claustrophobic infinity.

  Then, without warning, he came to a stop. The machine complex was behind him in the form of a towering serried wall; its array, he recognised, was reminiscent of the array of atoms in a metal.

  He faced now a huge gulf from whose depths came tumultuous boiling, a giving forth of steam clouds and acid vapours which seared his skin. Its size was impossible to judge. Ascar moved along the edge of this infernal pit until he came to another of its boundaries: a second wall of solid-packed quasi-machinery. But this time there were no narrow galleries through the honeycomb; the whole mass was impenetrable, none of its interstices being large enough to admit his body.

  He glanced overhead, attracted by a regular, gigantic noise. Slanting obliquely over the space above him was something like a moving belt, or a high-speed printing press. It roared on its way at a colossal speed, for all that it must have been a hundred miles long.

  “Perhaps you would prefer to meet me in different surroundings,” the Oblique Entity said. Everything vanished, and was replaced.

  Ascar was sitting in a moderately sized room. The walls were of pale blue decorated with a white cornice. The light, coming from an unseen source, was very radiant, reminding him of sunlight. Before Ascar stood a table of polished walnut.

  A door opened. In walked a young woman who sat down opposite him. Her skin was silver-blue. A slight smile was on her lips. Her eyes were bright blue, also, but they looked beyond, Ascar, as if they weren’t functional.

  “Good day,” she said in a pleasant, full voice. “Is this more agreeable?”

  Ascar took a moment to recover himself. “But this isn’t you as you really are, is it?” he said then.

  “No, that is true.”

  Ascar was vaguely disappointed. “Then it’s just an illusion you’re putting through the all-sense receiver. I didn’t come all this way looking for illusions.”

  “Incorrect: it is no illusion. I have constructed the environment as a physical reality, into which I then projected your senses. Even the woman is a real living woman.”

  Now Ascar was startled. “You can do that – in a moment?”

  A pause. “Not in a moment, exactly. To produce the woman took a hundred years. Duration is of no consequence when time can be turned in a circle.”

  So that was it, Ascar thought. It was the Production Retort all over again, but on an even larger scale. Here, the beginning and the end of a lengthy process could be bent around to occupy successive moments. He mulled over another point.

  “Sometimes you call yourself I, and sometimes we,” he observed. “What are you, a single intelligence or a community?”

  “I am neither individual nor plural,” the Oblique Entity replied. “Neither I nor we is adequate to describe my nature.”

  “Then just what are you?”

  The girl inclined her head, her eyes seeking a point beyond the wall, and a slight, quizzical frown crossed her features.

  “Perhaps these surroundings, even, are disconcerting?” she suggested. “Let us try again.”

  She rose, and pointed to a second door that opened itself behind Ascar. “Please continue on down the corridor,” she invited. “Another room has been prepared.”

  After a last doubtful glance at the girl Ascar obeyed. At first the corridor was featureless, grey and doorless, stretching away to a bend, or dead-end, about two hundred yards ahead. But as he proceeded a peculiar illusion began to occur. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed arcaded openings beyond which fish-like shapes flitted among green stalks and through wavering groves. Yet when he turned his head to look directly at this phenomenon his eye met only a blank wall.

  He began to get the odd feeling that the elusive fish-shapes flitted, not externally, but through the recesses of his own mind. After a few tens of yards, however, the illusion ceased. But at the same time the character of the corridor began to change subtly, to become less featureless and more familiar. Suddenly Ascar stopped. He had come to a door: a door with the number 22 stencilled on it.

  He looked around him. Just ahead was a T-junction, where arrowed notices pointed out departments in either direction. He looked again at the door with the number 22, recognising scratch marks and pimples in the paint.

  This place was a corridor in the Sarn Establishment! Or a perfect replica thereof.

  With thumping heart he opened the door. Within was a cosy, cabin-like room with a bunk, chairs, and a table strewn with abstracts and reports together with a large scratch-pad. The wall to his left was a bookcase holding a small library of specialised volumes.

  It was his own room and refuge that he’d inhabited for five years.

  Slowly he closed the door and sat down in his favourite chair, realising as he did so that the Oblique Entity must have extracted all these details from his own memory.

  Above the door was a small speaker that had been used in the Sarn Establishment for paging. The Oblique Entity spoke now through this grill.

  “To answer your question,” it said in its former male voice, “the type of consciousness I possess is neither an individual consciousness, nor is it a group consciousness or a community of individuals. In your language I could come closer to the facts simply by referring to ourselves as here, rather than to I or we. Henceforth, then I will give ourselves the personal pronoun here.”

  Ascar pondered that, nodding. The Entity’s ploy, he decided, was working. He did feel more relaxed to be sitting here in his own room. It would have been easy to forget altogether that this was not, in fact, the Sarn Establishment.

  “Since you can evidently read my mind, you already know what I mean to ask you,” he said. “Tell me, how much do you know of Earth?”

  “Here know all about Earth,” the Oblique Entity replied.

  “You mean you’ve read all about it in my mind?”

  “No. Here knew about Earth already. By direct observation.”

  “Then you know what’s about to happen there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then,” said Ascar, giving his words emphasis and deliberation, “is there any way – any way at all – that the stream of time can be turned aside or stopped? Any way that collision can be avoided?”

  The Oblique Entity didn’t answer immediately. Instead, a rich humming note issued from the speaker. All at once everything exploded around Ascar. He was floating in an inchoate void. Around him swam coloured shapes of every description, drifting in and out of his vision like sparks.

  His body seemed to become elongated, like a streamer of smoke in a breeze; he was being stretched out to infinity. This process seemed to go on for a long, long time; and then, just as suddenly, he was back in his favourite chair in his comfortable room.

  “There is nothing you can do,” the Oblique Entity said.

  When Brourne’s troops finally broke into the space-time observatory they found Leard Ascar still sitting in the transparent sphere of the all-sense transceiver.

  After a matter of minutes they contrived to open the hatch. Ascar appeared not to see them. He sat muttering unintelligibly to himself, offering no resistance when they grabbed him by the arms and hauled him out.

  “This must be Ascar,” the sergeant said. “If you ask me these Chink gadgets have driven him out of his mind!”

  “Maybe he’s fallen foul of a Chink puzzle,” a trooper offered helpfully.

  “Eh? What?” Ascar began to come round, peering at the trooper with narrowed eyes.

  “Let’s get him away from here,” the sergeant ordered. “Major Brourne wants to see him right away.�
�

  They steered Ascar out of the observatory. And then an unexpected sound caused them all at once to come to a stop and gaze at one another wonderingly. For some hours the city had been quiet, but now, from the distance, came, the sudden, continuous eruption of heavy gunfire.

  Heshke accepted a tobacco roll, inhaling the fragrant smoke with a sense of special pleasure.

  It was, in the fullest sense, a farewell party. They all knew that the Titans would come rolling into the reservation tomorrow, or at the latest the day after. Herrick had called together a few of his friends, as he put it, to “celebrate the end of the species”.

  The atmosphere was relaxed and convivial. Heshke couldn’t help but admire the calm way the Amhraks were accepting the inevitable. Perhaps, he thought, it was the inevitability that lent such dignity. If there had been any hope at all, that might have led to panic.

  Much of the conversation was in Amhrak, at which Heshke was not as yet very skilled. However, out of politeness, enough Verolian – the main language of white men that was used all over the Earth now – was spoken so that he felt by no means left out.

  A lanky Amhrak girl chatted to him, sipping a glass of wine synthesised by a newly perfected process. “You must find our village rather dull after Pradna,” she said, smiling.

  “I wasn’t actually in Pradna,” he told her. “I spent most of my time in the field, working on alien ruins. Pradna is a pretty ghastly place anyway, to tell you the truth. I like it much better here … in spite of what’s happening.”

  As he spoke the last words he had the sinking feeling of having committed a faux pas. These people could have a taboo about speaking of … that, he thought timidly. But the girl merely laughed, quite without strain.

  “It must be really awful in Pradna,” she joked, “to prefer that.”

  Herrick had opened the double doors of his workshop and was fiddling with his transmitterless television receiver. To hide his embarrassment Heshke joined him, and for some minutes Herrick phased through the magnetowaves, seeking coherent visuals and gaining more than the usual number.