Eschaton 03 Far Shore of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  FREDERIK POHL

  THE FAR SHORE OF TIME

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  For Betty Anne, as always

  PART ONE

  BEFORE

  CHAPTER ONE

  We were actually on our way home when it happened. We didn't have any doubt that that was where we were going, and we were, boy, ready. We had been months and months in the captivity of a weird alien creature from another world, the one we called Dopey. He was alien, all right. He looked sort of like a large chicken with a kitten's face and a peacock's tail, and he had kidnapped the lot of us-snatched us right out of the old Starlab astronomical satellite and thrown us into some kind of space-traveling machine that whisked us from hereto some unbelievably distant there in no time at all. And there was where Dopey kept us, in one damn miserably uncomfortable prison or another, on this unpleasant planet we had never heard of before.

  That was a truly nasty experience, but, the way it looked to us at the time, it was over! Against the odds, we had escaped! Our chance to get away came when some rival gang of nonhumans, these ones called the "Horch," invaded our prison planet. In the confusion we fought our way to the matter-transmitter thing, and jumped in, and were on our way home. I was the last to climb into the machine…

  And I saw the pale lavender flash that meant it was working…

  And I came out again…

  But I wasn't home at all. The place I was in didn't look at all like Starlab. A pair of those silvery-spidery Horch wheeled fighting machines that had been trying to kill us were standing there, not half a dozen meters away. This time they weren't shooting at me, though. If they had been, I couldn't have shot back, because something I couldn't see grabbed me from behind-no, enveloped me, in an all-points hug that didn't let me move a muscle-as I heard the machine's door open again.

  Dopey spilled out on top of me, plume all ruffled, little cat eyes glaring around in terror. He took one look at the machines and began to shake. Something hard and painful was pressing behind my right ear. I managed to yell a question at Dopey; and just before the lights went out he sobbed an answer: "Agent Dannerman, we are in the hands of the Horch."

  And that was the nastiest, the very nastiest, moment of all.

  PART TWO

  Interrogation

  CHAPTER TWO

  When I woke up I was lying on a hard, glassy floor. My head felt as though someone had taken a baseball bat to it.

  I kept my eyes prudently closed for a moment. I listened, trying to figure out where I was and what I was doing there. All I heard was an occasional skritchy-tinkly sound, like an incomplete set of cheap wind chimes, and now and then a faint whir that sounded a little like skate wheels on a hard floor.

  That told me nothing useful, so I took the plunge. I opened my eyes and scrambled to my feet. That made my headache worse, but was the least of my immediate worries. I was in serious trouble.

  The room I found myself in was smallish and square, with shiny walls that looked as though they were made of some sort of pale yellow porcelain. There was nothing on the walls-no windows, no decorations-only a couple of doors, both securely closed.

  I was not alone in the room.

  Two bizarre machines were hovering over a small chest, made out of the same primrose chinaware as the walls. They weren't the spidery Horch fighting machines I'd seen before. What they looked like, more than anything else, was a pair of squat, crystalline Christmas trees. They had spiky glass branches coming off a central trunk, and twigs off the branches, and needles off the twigs-yes, and littler needles coming off the needles, too. For all I knew there were still littler needles than those as well, but I didn't see them. Each of the machines was topped off by a sort of glassy globe, where the angel should have been on a proper Christmas tree, and these were faceted and glittery, like the rotating mirror spheres people rent to cast little spangles of light around a dance floor. One of the things was a pale green, the other a rosy pink. It seemed to me-that was hope speaking, not wisdom-that they looked pretty fragile. Whatever they were up to, I thought, I would have something to say about, because one swift kick would shatter a quorum of their glassy needles.

  I was quite wrong about that, of course.

  They evidently took notice of the fact that I was awake. The green one did something queer with some of its needles. Clusters of them rearranged themselves, fusing into colorless, faintly glowing lenses pointing in my direction, while the other extended a branch toward something I couldn't see inside the porcelain box.

  I must have made a sudden move, because there was a quick, new pang from my head. I reached up to touch the part that hurt and made an unpleasant discovery. Something that didn't belong there was just behind my ear. It was ribbed and hard-surfaced, and faintly warm to the touch, like my own flesh. It seemed to be embedded in my skin. It hadn't been there before, and I didn't like it.

  That was when the littler one-its needles were like slivers of shell-pink glass-rolled up close to my face, waving its nearest sprig of needles under my nose.

  Then it really surprised me. It spoke to me. It said, "You will be asked questions. Answer them quickly and accurately."

  That put a different face on things.

  I know it sounds peculiar, but when the machine said that to me it actually made me feel a bit better. Interrogation was something I understood, having done plenty of it myself. I spoke right up. I said, "My name is James Daniel Dannerman. I am a citizen of the United States of America and a senior agent of the American National Bureau of Investigation. I have been a captive of the Beloved Leaders, who are your enemies as well as my own-"

  The Christmas tree unhurriedly stuffed a fist of needles into my mouth to shut me up, and the needles weren't fragile at all. They were curiously warm. They didn't hurt, but it was like being gagged with a mouthful of steel wool. It said, "You have not been asked those questions. Answer only the questions you have been asked."

  I'm not sure what I tried to say in response. With that glassy bird's nest stuffed in my mouth it only came out as "wumf," but it made the thing remove the needles from my mouth and speak again.

  "You will now supply information," the machine said, "concerning the conspecific persons you identify as 'Scuzzhawks.' Did their poor personal hygiene and use of psychoactive materials adversely affect their mortality and reproduction rates?"

  CHAPTER THREE

  Of all the things I could have expected to be interrogated about by a Horch machine, that one was about at the bottom of the list.

  I did know all about the Scuzzhawks, of course. They were an ultralight plane gang that roamed the American Southwest, scandalizing law-abiding citizens. The Scuzz were more or less based in Orange County, California, but they rallied anywhere from Bakersfield to Tijuana. They didn't bathe much. They didn't wear much, either-there was a limit to how much load their frail little craft could lift, and they reserved most of their carrying capacity for beer and shotgun shells. They painted the wings of their ultralights with obscene slogans; they relieved themselves wherever they felt a need, which was frequently-even while they were airborne, and often enough over the clean, well-kept patios of respectable homeowners. The Scuzzhawks were not nice people. They earned their fuel and food and beer and dope by drug-dealing and petty crime, and sometimes crimes that were not so petty; and early in my career with the Bureau I had been assigned to infiltrate them. That mission hadn't been my choice. When it was over I felt lucky to get out of it alive and generally disease-free.

  Why this pink-glassy Christmas tree was asking about them, I could not guess, but the reason didn't matter. The impor
tant thing was that it did want to know about them.

  That gave me bargaining room. Information is a valuable commodity, worth trading for. I said, "Let's be reasonable here. I'll tell you all you want to know about the Scuzzhawks, but first I have a couple of questions of my own. What's this thing behind my ear?"

  The rose-pink one didn't answer that. It simply rolled away on its little wheels to the chinaware chest, where it extruded enough twiglets to open the chest and take something out, while Greenie rolled forward and grabbed me again.

  It was strong, too. It held me tightly, but not painfully. I would have guessed that some of those glassy needles would have punctured my skin where they touched. They didn't. Retracted, I supposed, like a playful kitten's claws.

  Then I saw what the pink one was carrying toward me, and I felt better right away.

  The thing it had taken out of the chest was a helmet of a kind I had seen before. Dopey had given us one when he was our jailer, and it was a truly wonderful little gadget. When I wore it I could tap into the mind of that other Dan Dannerman, the copy of me who had been sent back to Earth, in a marvelous kind of virtual reality. (I'm not talking about the Dan Dannerman who escaped with the others. This was a different one. I'm sorry about that. I know all these copies are confusing… especially to me.) With the helmet on I could see what that other Dan was seeing, feel what he was feeling, hear everything he heard. To all intents and purposes I was there-not counting that I couldn't do anything, just observe.

  It had not occurred to me that the same kind of helmet could be used to give me a sort of briefing lecture instead, but if that was what Pinkie had in mind, I was all for it. I said chattily, "That's better. There's no reason for us to argue, is there? We're both on the same side. You work for the Horch. I was taken prisoner by the Beloved Leaders. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?"

  Pinkie wasn't listening. It was fitting the helmet over my head, and I didn't resist. I waited complacently until it had flipped the earflaps into position, expecting some sort of lecture with diagrams, or-well, I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was pretty sure it was going to be helpful in some way.

  It wasn't.

  It not only wasn't helpful at all, it was bloody awful.

  As soon as everything was snapped down I found myself indeed in another place, but it was not any place I would have chosen. I was lying flat on my back, and I was looking up at a couple of the Christmas trees. And I was yelling. The one standing over me was an unfamiliar golden color, and it was methodically ripping my clothes off. I was struggling to stop it, but there wasn't any use to that. I was tightly fettered to a kind of operating table. I couldn't move a muscle.

  Not even when Gold-glass began to operate.

  It started by pulling out my toenails, one by one.

  Then, as my yells of protest turned to agonized screams of pain, it did even worse. With one set of its twiglets it grasped me by my private parts, and with others it began to hack away.

  See, the virtual reality those helmets provided didn't feel at all virtual. It felt bloody damn real. The pain was real. My screaming was real. I was fully aware that I was, for no reason I could understand, being slowly and painfully tortured to death, and I was bellowing with agony accordingly.

  Gold-glass didn't seem to care about my screaming one way or another. It went right on with what it was doing. And then, as it gouged a slit in the skin of my belly from breastbone to the beginnings of my pubic hair, and then began methodically flaying the skin off my body, the pain passed the point of being endurable.

  I endured it, though. I kept on enduring it, for much longer than I would have thought possible, until the machine's rummagings in my belly seemed to hit something crucial. Then, I think, I died.

  And then the other Christmas tree, the real, pink-colored one, lifted the helmet off my head, and I was once again cowering on that chinaware floor, still screaming, but intact.

  I had my clothes on again. I was alive again, and-not counting the headache that still persisted-as far as I could tell, in as good shape as I had ever been, toenails, balls, bowels and all.

  That is, physically I was all right, though the memory of the pain was nearly as bad as the pain itself. And Pinkie said, "Now you will answer our questions about those conspecific persons called 'Scuzzhawks.' "

  CHAPTER FOUR

  From then on I answered all its questions, all right. I had learned that that was a good idea. When I hesitated, all it had to do was gesture toward the box with the helmet. Then I stopped hesitating right away.

  See, no matter what you've heard, nobody ever holds out against serious, protracted physical torture. The body doesn't allow it. When real agony starts, the body cuts the volitional part of the brain right out of the circuit. It doesn't matter what your intentions are. First you suffer, then you scream, then you do whatever the person inflicting the pain wants you to do, including giving away every secret you ever knew.

  Bureau doctrine told us there were things we could sometimes do about it, provided you had a chance to do them-including, as a last resort, biting down on a capsule of one of the Bureau drugs that turn off all physical sensations, so the guy who's interrogating you can do any horrible thing he likes and you just don't feel a thing. Provided, that is, that you've had a chance to get the capsule into your mouth ahead of time. Even that doesn't really solve the problem. You know exactly what is happening when the guy starts inflicting major and irreversible damage on the only body you own. Then you almost certainly talk anyway.

  I didn't have to go the way of irreparable body damage. The pain was enough. I talked, and kept on talking, for a very long while.

  I don't know how long, exactly. The only way I had of measuring time was by the internal clocks of my belly, bladder and bowels. By their count, that first round of questioning went on forever. I told the glass machines everything there was to tell about the Scuzzhawks, Green-glass taking it all down with his microphones and lenses. That wasn't the end of it. Then Pinkie switched without a pause to questions about the precise nature of their smuggling operation, and what "smuggling" meant in the context of Earth's more or less independent political entities called "nations," each with its own laws about what was forbidden or taxed. And then it wanted a detailed catalogue of all the sorts of things that were smuggled-dope, money for laundering, weapons-and then what the weapons were used for. Which led to many more questions on some large subjects. Crime. Terrorism. Why such aberrations were permitted to continue when they obviously interfered with the orderly workings of government and commerce.

  Then, without warning, the lights went out in the camera lenses. The green-glass machine that had been operating them turned to the wall and a door opened. And the pink one said, "Go through there and attend to your biological needs. We will resume when you have finished."

  I hesitated. Perhaps I hesitated a moment too long, because my headache was still slowing my reflexes, but the machine wasn't patient. It reached out toward me in a way I didn't like. I turned and hurried to the doorway.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The biological-needs room was a twin of the one I'd just left: bare walls of the same yellow chinaware, no windows, no pictures. The big difference was that there were three doors instead of two-all securely locked against my immediate attempts to open them-and in addition to the chinaware chest against the wall (also unopenable by me), there was a pile of food on a low chinaware table.

  The food at least was familiar. I had seen it all before. In fact, I had seen a lot of it. We had been living on identically that same grub for months, me and Pat, in all her copies, and Rosaleen Artzybachova and Jimmy Lin and Martin Delasquez. Apart from a few unfamiliar and unappetizing ropy twists of something smelly and purplish, it was the food Dopey had copied for us when we were his prisoners, duplicated from the stores on the Starlab orbiter we had been snatched from. Apples. Corn chips. Heaps of dried or irradiated meals in cans and jars and cartons, every one of which I was totall
y sick of. When I first saw that pile of rations it made me suddenly aware that I was, as a matter of fact, pretty hungry. When I realized it was the same boring stuff I'd eaten much too much of already, a lot less so.

  There were a couple of jugs of water beside the stack of rations. I took a swig out of one of them-it tasted flat, as though it had been distilled-but while that relieved one biological need, it just made another one worse.

  I had to pee.

  I looked doubtfully at the floor. When we were captives of Dopey and his Beloved Leaders, our cell had this trick floor that doubled as a sewage-removal system. Any waste that hit the floor was absorbed and carried away without leaving even a stain. Even human waste.

  This canary-yellow porcelain stuff was something else again. It didn't look promising. However, nature was not to be denied. I selected a corner of the room and let fly; and when I was through I watched, without much optimism, to see if the urine would seep away.

  It didn't.

  I said, "Shit." All right, that's a trivial thing. But it was one more damn blow, on top of a lot of others. You have to remember that, just hours before, my future had seemed really bright: home, safe, with the dear Pat Adcock I had just discovered I loved.

  But I wasn't home. I wasn't safe. Pat was God knew where, and I was worse off than ever. Literally, now I didn't even have a pot to piss in.

  So I did the only thing I could do. I fell back on my Bureau training.

  I took a deep breath. I crammed some corn chips into my mouth, popped open a random jar (chicken a la king, it was, and really unpleasant in its cold and slimy state). I looked around the room to see if any curious eyes were observing me-didn't matter if they were, of course-and I began to tap systematically at the walls and chest and doors.