Vestiges of Time

by Richard C. Meredith

  The Shadowy Man, stunned by the sudden reversal, retreated. The nucleus of his energy floated, drifted, moved relative to spatial frameworks.

  Into the Hying room of the suite came the form of the Shadowy Man, his smoky, ghostly form now clothed in flickering lightning and halos of incandescence; sheets of auroral flame surrounded him, flickering in neon colors across the spectrum from the edges of infrared to the margins of ultraviolet. The air around him was becoming ionized; carpeting and woodwork smoldered as he brushed across them, moving ever more slowly and ponderously, struggling to halt his retreat, to turn back toward his enemies, to again try to find weapons to use against them.

  Other weapons he did find, and hurled the strength of them outward, but with ease the Tromas seemed to catch them and throw them back against his shields.

  They were powerful, unimaginably powerful, these females of the Krithian race. How had he ever thought he could equal them in combat?

  But he could not yield, not yet. For a while he must hold. He must give Mathers and Sally time to escape, for if they did not escape, there would never be a Shadowy Man. The universe looped and looped within itself. What was it Mathers had once said? “The universe is a can of worms, and each worm is bending back upon itself to eat its own tail. . . .”

  For a moment there was respite again. For an instant the Tromas did not hurl wave after wave of psionic energy against him. He gasped within himself, drew himself together, welded back together the shattered margins of his consciousness, tried to find additional means of strengthening his shields, for now he knew that all he could hope to do was hold, for just a bit longer, hold and give Mathers and Sally time. He could not defeat the Tromas. He could barely even strike back at them.

  And then there it was, sweeping across space and time again, a tsunami of psionic force, greater than all the others before, a cresting wave of hatred, anger, and destruction; burning, shattering mental forces rushing toward him. The Tromas had gathered all their power in one great field and threw it with all their strength at the conflux of forces that was the Shadowy Man.

  He braced himself for the swelling tide of flame.

  It came, splashed against his shields, tore against them and then through them, one after the other, ripping them away and plunging deeper and ever deeper, toward the remote core of his consciousness.

  How do I relate it? How do I tell what it was like to be . . . smashed and battered by psionic blows of tremendous, godlike, unimaginable power, to be struck and struck again and to be almost overwhelmed by the waves of hate and anger from the female Kriths, to

  feel your composite mind tom to shreds by psionic forces infinitely greater than your own, ancient and more wise in their use of power, to be beaten to your figurative knees and then, screaming in psionic pain, withdraw, fall upward through time, inward across the Lines, back into the subterranean laboratories where your own physical body and those of your replicates are contorted with pain.

  How do I tell it? I don’t know.

  But with that last assault the Shadowy Man could endure no more; he knew that his consciousness was being destroyed and in instants more he would no longer exist and his physical bodies would be nothing more than vegetables with bumed-out brains.

  With an effort that took more strength than he knew he had, the Shadowy Man disengaged himself, not knowing at the time how he was able to accomplish even that. Mortally wounded, he felt himself, dying, himself and the physical bodies upon whose brains he was built. He fell upward, inward, screaming in the pain he could no longer tolerate, seeking the safety of the underground shelter so that he might die in some semblance of peace.

  Downtime Again

  But he did not die.

  The wounds were not mortal. Painful and soul-shattering, yes, but not mortal. The blasts had hurt him, the Shadowy Man, but they had not moved far enough across time and space and paratime to touch the brains of which he was the composite mind.

  He fell back to those cerebral cortexes, resonated among them, rested, wept, shuddered in remembered pain, and then, at last, for the first time in his existence, he slept.

  When the consciousness of the Shadowy Man again had self-awareness, he knew that he would recover from the ordeal through which he had gone. He would recover and he would do more than that. There was a great deal that he could learn from the experience, a great deal that he could put into practice the next time he encountered the Tromas, for he was certain that he would again encounter them in combat, though exactly where, exactly when, he was yet to know.

  He rested, studied, analyzed, gained knowledge and regained strength, and then, for a brief moment, cut himself away from the bodies of the replicates, now relaxing with the passing of the pain they too had felt, and entered complete third-level resonance with the superior of the replicates, the physical Eric Mathers of Here and Now.

  The body was still drugged, was still without the ability to move itself, other than to rotate its eyes within their sockets and raise and lower its eyelids.

  166

  The Shadowy Man had anticipated this, and was not disturbed.

  Through those eyes he again looked out into the recording room within the Underground of the BrathelLanza, saw once more the bloodstained body of the dead technician on the floor near the chair, and Mathers’ immobile figure, what he could see of it. With the eyes of that body he swept leftward and found once more the chronometer. The digits read 12:42:01. Just over thirty minutes of chronological time had elapsed since he had last looked at the chronometer, before he had begun his series of flights across space and time.

  There was, he realized, a definite correlation between time as he experienced it and time as the still body of Eric Mathers experienced it, a correlation, but one of extremely high ratio. There was a linearity to time, he was certain, although time was not linear in the sense that he had once believed it to be. Nor, he suspected, would it be possible for him, the Shadowy Man, to occupy a point in space/time already occupied by himself. Why, he was uncertain, but he believed it to be so. He would have to hold these things in mind and work them into the concepts of the nature of time as he was gradually developing them.

  Thirty minutes. Then MaLarba had been dead nearly seventy-two minutes. An hour and twelve minutes had passed since the raid on the Underground had taken place. That still gave him, ample time before the drugs began to wear off the body of Eric Mathers.

  The drugs had begun to become a matter of concern to him. He was certain that, at least in part, his creation was based on the condition of this physical body, which had been his starting point. The drugs had altered the mind of Eric Mathers, had made that mind more capable of digging into itself, of bringing forth unconscious memories, had made it more sensitive and more receptive to union with the replicates. And the mnemonic recorder, he felt, was also a factor: the

  electrodes were still attached to Eric Mathers, his so- called brain waves were still being detected by them, passed on to the amplifiers of the recorder, and in the fact of their amplification lay something of the secret of the creation of the Shadowy Man. Many factors had gone into his genesis.

  Now he was uncertain of how the wearing off of the mnemonic drugs might affect the resonance patterns between the senior and the replicates. There would be some effect, of that he was certain. But how great? Was it possible that with the passing of the drugs, it would be impossible to maintain the total resonance between the 33-7 bodies? Might it be that he would disintegrate into merely a senior and a cluster of replicates, a single conscious mind, that of Eric Mathers, and the nearly unconscious minds of the replicates? Would, he was asking, the Shadowy Man cease to exist once the drugs no longer held their sway?

  He was not certain. Despite the data that had swelled up out of the unconsciousness of Eric Mathers, there still was not enough information to answer that question. Perhaps there was not enough data anywhere. Who had ever researched this sort of thing? Such a condition had never before existed in all the universes,
he believed, outside of the existence of the Tromas themselves, and he was uncertain how close an analogy he could draw between them and himself. Again, too little data.

  But that time was centuries away as time was experienced by the Shadowy Man, and there was a universe of things he could do before that much time had gone by.

  He set out to do them.

  Once again he divorced himself from the physical bodies upon which he was built, existed as a resonance pattern between the senior and the replicates, and once more moved into a psionic void where none of the conventional human senses had any validity, although

  he had awareness, more awareness than any mere human being could ever have had.

  Again he moved outside the framework of ordinary dimensions, outside length, breadth, height, outside chronological time, outside parallel time. Now these terms were all but meaningless, save that he could move about and select whatever dimensional coordinates he might wish, pick out a 'spot in the continuua, touch it, freeze it, place himself there.

  But he did not yet choose to do that. For a while, which could not be measured in terms of the passage of time, he remained without motion, without time, and once more assessed what knowledge he had gained since he had come into existence.

  Most of what went through his composite mind could not be expressed in words, perhaps could not be expressed by the symbols of any human mathematics, but one line of thought, the conclusion of his mentation, might have been something like this, had he been using words:

  It is obvious that I cannot defeat the Tromas on their own ground, on their own terms. Another encounter such as the last, even with what I have learned, could destroy me. So, I must find a way to meet them on more nearly equal terms. I must find conditions more favorable to me, find the Tromas less ready to fight back against me, find them ignorant of the threat

  am to them and ignorant of the powers I possess, perhaps ignorant even of the powers they themselves possess. But where? When?

  There were other hazards, he knew. The farther he moved from his time/place of origin, the more tenuous would become the link between himself and his corporeal bodies and weaker would become the powers he could summon. He could not move too far away, but . . .

  The Shadowy Man moved outward in space, across paratime, backward in chronological time, downtime

  to . . . KHL-000 in the chronological past . . . pausing along the way to freeze a fragment of the continuua, to reach into four-dimensional space/time and touch the electronic workings of a vast library computer on a world dominated by the Kriths and their Timeliners. It took him moments or aeons to learn the computer’s language, and more moments or aeons to seek out the data he wanted, to separate the truth from the hes. Then, satisfied that he knew what he wished to know—for the moment, at least—the Shadowy Man once more moved downtime. . . .

  Years downtime now, centuries into the past as Eric Mathers would have understood the structure of time, back to the year a.d. 1610.

  Eric Mathers had visited KHL-000 and had spoken with the ruling females of the Krithian race in the month of February, a.d. 1972, as the calendar was kept on some worlds.

  Yet, in some spacio-temporal frameworks, from certain viewpoints, the Kriths themselves did not come into being until the year a.d. 2214, the product of genetic engineering on a Timeline the coordinates of which the Shadowy Man had not yet discovered. The Kriths had been “grown” from human genetic material, engineered to survive on a world very different from any of the Earths across the Lines, a planet of another star, light-years remote in space.

  And it had been nearly two centuries later, a.d. 2404, before the descendants of the colonists of UR-427-51- IV fully assessed the power that resided within themselves, commandeered a spaceship and returned to Earth, then self-skudded across the Lines until they found a world to their liking, an Earth they could take over as their own, which they called KHL-000, their first headquarters in paratime.

  Close to a century had gone by before the Kriths had decided to go downtime. After finding KHL-000, the few thousand members of the race had lived there

  for nearly a century before they became aware of the enormity of what would happen when the parachronal potential of the universe would be forced to reorder itself toward simplicity, or cease to exist. Around a.d. 2500 the Kriths somehow brought a chronal-displace- ment device to KHL-000. And from the KHL-000 of circa a.d. 2500, the entire Krithian race had migrated downtime to circa a.d. 1600, still on KHL-000. And from this vantage point in the “past” they had begun gradually increasing their strength, recruiting humans and then forming the Timeliners to do their work for them. Three and a half centuries later, a vast number of worlds lay under their sway, and more were poised to fall into their orbit.

  The Shadowy Man knew his destination: in paratime, KHL-000, once more, in chronotime about the year a.d. 1610. The Kriths would be there, nearly every member of their race, just now beginning to move across the Lines of Time. This would be the place/time to strike, before they had begun their remodeling of tomorrow, perhaps before the Tromas had matured sufficiently to be fully cognizant of their powers.

  As he moved through the darkness that he no longer considered black, as he swept across the multidimensional fabric of the universes and neared a destination that could only have been expressed in five or more separate sets of coordinates, certain things for which he was not looking impinged on the Shadowy Man’s awareness, things he sought now to ignore—for he did not wish to be distracted from his goal—but which he found he could not totally disregard:

  There was a distortion of the universal matrix through which he passed, a confusion, a series of anomalies; in terms of human senses, if such analogies are justifiable: shrieking sounds came out of the stillness, rising along an alien musical scale to vanish and then reappear; splashes of light and color coming and then

  going, yellows and oranges, explosions of bloody crimson; a flow here of space/time that seemed to turn about upon itself, moaning as it did so, leaking yellows and greens into the blackness, a loop in the stuff of the universe, or perhaps becoming a spiral, a purple, sighing whirlpool. And there was another, spinning off from the first, flashing silver and gold, touched with red, screaming and moaning, creating new and different, unknown and unexpected currents through the nonmatter/nonenergy of the continuua. And farther on downtime, still another: vortexes of color and light, of infrared and ultraviolet, of sound and motion, vortexes of confusion wherein time and space and paratime followed not the multibranched, quasilinear progression, but doubled back, meeting themselves again, producing still more eddies in space/time. Then there was a wavefront sweeping forward in time, black and silvery, roaring as does an avalanche, spreading out from a single point in the five-dimensional context, producing still more confusion.

  For a few moments, caught up in the bending, looping, swirling stuff upon which the universes are built, he lost his bearings, was unable to pinpoint himself within the five-sided references, felt a weakening not so much of himself as of the medium through which he swam, found it difficult to propel himself through the miasma, as if here, in this Nonplace, Nowhen, there was something that might be described as a tear, a flaw in the matrix.

  A kind of fear swept through him. For a moment he was near panic. Was it possible that he might get caught in one of these eddies and be unable to escape, captured forever in a loop in time that had no beginning and no end, that forever doubled back on itself meaninglessly?

  Then he regained control of himself, steadied, studied as well as he could the forces at work, and the lack of working forces in other places. For an infinite moment

  he paused, then charted himself a path. Drifted for a moment. Then propelled himself again across the Nothingness, the Everything.

  He was free, and again paused, wondered, speculated. What had happened, what could possibly have taken place here to so disturb the basis of all time and space and paratime? And did he have time to try to determine the answers?
r />   Although “time” was very largely a meaningless term in this context, there was a subjective passage of time to the Shadowy Man, an urgency within him. There were things he had to do, and the sooner he got them done, the better. He realized that despite the powers he had gained in evolving from Eric Mathers into the Shadowy Man, he was still very much a human being in his psychology, still very much hampered by a psychological point of view that saw time as a steady progression from past to present to future, and his consciousness still continued to function as if that progression were true. Perhaps that was the only way a human or human-evolved mind could function. But then, perhaps, once his quest was completed, once his mind was at ease, he could more fully explore this, could come to feel as well as know that such terms as “past,” “present,” and “future” really have very little meaning at all.

  Later, he told himself, later—and realized that it would be a difficult thing indeed, even for him, to ever fully comprehend a nonlinear view of time.

  Again he oriented himself, established once more his five-dimensional position, moved toward his goal, KHL-000, a.d. 1610.

  Through the Nowhere, Nowhen, he moved, again, passing out of the worst of the confusion and entering into relative blackness, relative silence, across time, space, and paratime, and arriving. ...

  Now, with a mental sigh of relief, the Shadowy Man once more was able to freeze a point in space/time, to

  focus himself on a single place/event, to involve himself with three-dimensional space, the passage of chronological time.

  The spatial viewpoint that the Shadowy Man initially established for himself was akin to that of alow-orbiting satellite above Earth as it existed on Line KHL-000. Below him, the planet turned slowly, a cloud-whitened world, a world of oceans and land, rivers and mountains, forests and deserts.

  For a long while he drank in. with pleasure the sight of this Earth below him, reveling in the beauty of it. From this height it appeared to be a virgin world, an untouched, unspoiled near-paradise. He was still very much a human being, he thought, as he considered his love for this planet.