Eschaton 03 Far Shore of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  That was a drag. It did make playing Doctor under the boat deck half an hour later a little more exciting, but it never had the effect on us that Grandmother Dannerman intended. She didn't make us want to go to Heaven. She told us there was no sin there, and what was the fun of someplace where you weren't allowed to sin a little?

  That was then. This was now, and I thought I had finally found a good use for Grandmother Dannerman's sermons. I told them to the green-glass Christmas tree and, obedient to my training, I did my best to put a little spin on them. The angels in the old lady's Heaven: Were they sort of like the way the Horch would be at the Eschaton? Did the bright, angelic swords of fire correspond to the weapons of the Horch? When we all got there, would we spend our time singing and playing music and never, ever doing anything the Horch might consider a sin?

  That's what I tried.

  It didn't work very well. Green-glass didn't want questions from me. Green-glass wanted only facts. The first couple of times I tried throwing in a question it simply ignored what I asked. Then it instructed me to stop doing that. And then it got worse.

  See, I couldn't stop. I was convinced that I had no other way of gaining information, and I kept on doing it, and so the Christmas tree took its inevitable next step.

  That was the second time I got the helmet. It was just as agonizing as before; but it had a surprising result.

  I expect I screamed a lot. When Green-glass at last took the helmet off my head and I lay there, shaken and miserable, I saw that something had changed. One of the room's doors had opened. Something I had never seen before was looking in at us.

  It was a pretty hideous specimen.

  What it looked like, more than anything else, was a scaled-down model of one of the dinosaurs I'd seen in the museums when I was a kid-an apatosaurus, they called that kind-only this one was standing on its hind legs and wearing a kind of lavishly embroidered jogging suit. Its arms weren't like a dinosaur's, though. They were lightly furred and as sinuous as an elephant's trunk, and so was its long, long neck, with a little snaky head at the end of it that darted around inquisitively. It had a round little belly that was covered by a circular patch of embroidered gold-it almost looked like a particularly fancy maternity dress-and I recognized it at once from the pictures Dopey had shown us when we were his captives.

  It was the Enemy. I guess my screaming had attracted it, and so I was in the presence of a living, breathing Horch.

  When the Horch entered the room the Christmas trees stopped what they were doing, their twiglets turning deferentially toward it. It did not speak to them. It came toward me, arms and neck swaying, and it darted its little head at my face, sniffing and staring into my eyes. Then the long neck whipped the head away and the creature turned toward the door to the biological-needs room. The door opened at once and the Horch passed through, followed by the rosy-pink robot.

  What they were doing there, I could not see, though I could hear sounds from inside the room. The Horch and the Christmas tree were twittering to each other, though I couldn't make out the words. There was something else going on, too: squeaking, gasping noises I couldn't identify. Then the Horch came back into the interrogation room, didn't speak, simply left it again through one of the other doors, with that long neck curved back and the snaky little eyes peering at me.

  Rosy-pink buzzed back on its little roller-skate wheels to where I lay. It didn't comment on the visit from the living Horch. It didn't resume the questioning, either. "Attend now to your biological needs," it said, and that was the end of that session.

  The mystery sounds had come from Dopey. He wasn't alone, either. A bronze-colored Christmas tree was holding him down while a pale yellow one was doing some obviously painful things to him.

  It looked like a torture session to me, and that was both surprising and wrong. I mean sinfully wrong, a violation of order and propriety. Interrogations didn't take place in the biological-needs room! No prisoner likes to see changes in the rules, because changes are almost always bad, so I squawked a feeble sort of protest. It didn't go any further than that. The pale yellow one extended a clutch of branches menacingly in my direction, and I took the hint. I shut up. I couldn't help watching, though. Every time the machine touched Dopey he twitched and squeaked in pain, though they weren't asking him any questions. Then, abruptly, they released him and rolled out of the room.

  As soon as they were gone I knelt beside Dopey. He was breathing hoarsely, obviously hurting. "Are you all right?" I asked.

  He turned the kitten eyes on me. "No, Agent Dannerman, I am not all right," he gasped. "Leave me alone."

  I couldn't do that. "Did you see that thing? It was a living Horch, wasn't it?"

  Dopey gave me a look of disdain. "Of course," he said, pulling himself together. He stood up uncertainly, then limped toward the water jug.

  I followed. "You weren't surprised to see him?"

  He took his time about answering, drinking from his little cupped hands. It seemed to revive him. "The Horch rule here," he said, licking his lips. "What is surprising if one looks in on our interrogation? Did you expect it to be kinder than its machines?"

  As a matter of fact, I had, sort of. "He looked like he was inspecting the way we were treated," I said, unwilling to give up what little hope I could find. "I thought he might do something to help us, maybe."

  He gave me a look of contempt and said his favorite thing: "You are a fool, Agent Dannerman. Kindness from a Horch!"

  "Not kindness," I said stubbornly. "Common sense. If we get sick, we won't be any good to them."

  "In which case," he said, "they will simply scrap us and make new copies. Now I wish to sleep."

  He looked as though he needed it. "All right," I said reluctantly. "I forgot they'd been torturing you."

  He gazed at me with an expression of blended contempt and woe. "Torturing me? No, Agent Dannerman, they were not torturing me. They were doing worse. They were giving me medical treatment to keep me alive. Now let me sleep!"

  CHAPTER NINE

  Day followed day, and the pointless, endless questioning went on, on the robots' capricious choice of subjects. Childhood games: How many players were necessary for hide-and-seek? Were Little League baseball players paid like their adult colleagues? Theater: What had Christopher Marlowe written besides Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta? What was the function of the chorus in Greek drama?

  Those questions puzzled me at first. I certainly knew a lot about theater, because that's what I had majored in in college, but why did they ask me about the parts I didn't know instead of the early-twentieth-century playwrights I had studied?

  It took me several days to figure it out, and when I did the answer gave me no pleasure. The robots had asked all the obvious questions already, but they had asked them of some other Dan Dannerman. As Dopey had said, now they were simply filling in the gaps that remained.

  Along about then that living Horch dropped in again on my interrogation. This time he didn't come alone.

  The Horch who came with him was female. There was no doubt about that. The evidence was clear, because she was suckling an infant Horch with one pendulous breast, though otherwise the two adults were hard to tell apart. They both wore the colorful jerkins, with soft, flexible half-sleeves over their snaky arms. The only difference in their costumes was that her belly was covered not by embroidered fabric but by a shiny metal dome, almost like a medieval knight's helmet if it hadn't been on (he wrong part of her anatomy. When the infant released her breast it dangled over the metal dome until she tucked the breast away and slung the infant under one ropy arm, the baby's little neck swinging foolishly around.

  The interrogation had stopped, the robots standing silent and immobile. The two adult Horch paid them no attention. They conferred for a moment, snaky necks almost intertwined and the little rattlesnake heads so close together that I couldn't hear anything. Then the female darted her head in my face. "The least grandson of the Two Eights, Djabeertapritch," she said-I
thought that was the name she used, as close as I could make it out-"is of the opinion that your physical state is deteriorating. Is that the case?"

  I goggled at her. The last thing I had expected was that a Horch would concern itself with my physical state. While I was puzzling over that, the other Horch took a hand. "It is to your advantage to answer her, Bureau Agent James Daniel Danner-man," he said. "Please respond."

  The most startling part of that was the "please," but the other thing that struck me was that, although there was no doubt they were speaking the same language, the male's accent was markedly different. The female's was identical with that of the robots. His was throatier and more drawn out.

  I managed to answer. "Yes. They're really giving me a hard time."

  "Djabeertapritch is also of the opinion that if you were allowed to rest, however, you might survive indefinitely," the female stated.

  I didn't much care for the way that was put, but I managed to answer. "I hope so," I said cautiously, and that was the end of the interview. The two of them marched out without another word, the baby flailing about under its mother's arm, and at once my interrogators returned to life.

  "Tell us," Green-glass said, as though there had been no interruption, "why you consider craps a game of skill while roulette is merely chance." And we went right on with the interrogation.

  I decided that what the female Horch had said was a good thing, however unattractively it had been put. I almost believed that the Horch were beginning to take an interest in my future. That was encouraging; it suggested that I might actually have one.

  But when I saw Dopey again he cackled humorlessly at me. "Do not attribute kindness to the Horch, Agent Dannerman," he advised. "Their motives are their own."

  I could see that he hadn't been receiving much kindness from them. His breathing was fast and shallow, and he was clearly in pain. I don't think of myself as a person without compassion. Treacherous little freak that he was, Dopey was still the closest thing I had to a friend anywhere within some distance measured in light-years, and I didn't really want to cause him more suffering.

  On the other hand, the thought that I might somehow survive all this had revived my desire to learn whatever might be advantageous to the human race. I said, doing my best to sound sympathetic, "I guess they're forcing you to tell them all kinds of things, Dopey."

  "That is a correct assumption, Agent Dannerman."

  "Including the things that you wouldn't tell us when we were your prisoners?"

  "Including everything. Why do you ask?"

  "Because," I said, "if you've been spilling your guts to the Horch robots already, what's the point in keeping secrets from me anymore?"

  He considered that grayly for a moment, then gave his wriggly sort of shrug. "Very well, Agent Dannerman. What is it you wish to know?"

  I said, "Everything."

  "Everything" turned out to include more information than I could grasp in a single session. Since those sessions occurred only at the convenience of the robots, they didn't come very often, either, and they didn't last long when they did. Worse than that, a lot of what Dopey admitted to having told the Christmas trees did nothing for me. I had no particular interest in the dietary needs of the other species who worked for the Beloved Leaders-Docs, fighters, half a dozen other serving races-and when I asked him what part those other weirdos played in the grand Beloved Leaders scheme, his answers made little sense to me.

  But the Christmas trees had also asked him in detail about the way he had come to Earth, and that might be worth knowing. It was radio that had done us in. One of the random scouting ships of the Beloved Leaders had detected some early terrestrial broadcasts, and that was the signal they had been looking for. At once the ship changed course, homing in on the radio signals, and we had become targets.

  All that took time. How much time, Dopey couldn't tell me with any precision, but from the nature of those first broadcasts-sports events, political speeches, random news programs, and all in AM sound radio only-I figured out that the scout ship had had to be more than a hundred light-years away at the time of:i detection. Which meant something over a hundred years of travel time for the ship. And sometime along the way, as the ship sniffed its way down the electronic scent trail of humanity, Dopey was dispatched to the ship to begin the task of deciphering what those broadcasts were all about.

  "Not just one of me," Dopey clarified. "It is what I am f trained for, but the volume of data was too great for a single person to handle. Many broadcasts, from many parts of your planet, and ultimately with vision as well as sound. We eavesdropped on every scrap of voice and picture. Altogether there were seven copies of me, to share the work of deciphering your preposterous number of languages. I do not know what happened to the other six. But I was the one who was tasked to remain on your Starlab orbiter, until you and your party came to investigate."

  That was as far as we got in that session, and I was burning with impatience to learn more. When the next chance came, Dopey was looking frailer and closer to his Eschaton than ever. He didn't really want to go on talking to me, but I wasn't willing to let him stop. He told me how the scouting ship had dropped off the pod that attached itself to Starlab, and how they had filled the old satellite with recording and transmission devices. He described the scout ship itself to me-a vessel much larger than Starlab, with a crew of dozens of beings of several different races. And then he became obstinate. "This is all foolishness, Agent Dannerman," he complained. "What is the use of telling you all this, when there is no chance that you can pass it on to your conspecifics?"

  I said staunchly, "I'm still alive, Dopey. So there is always a chance."

  "But," he said reasonably, "you do not know if your planet still exists. We have no way of knowing how long it has been before these copies of us were made."

  I had an answer for that. "It can't be very long," I told him. If it was all over on Earth, they wouldn't still be asking me all those questions."

  He looked at me in surprise. "That is not so. You are forgetting, Agent Dannerman, that the Horch and the Beloved leaders wish to know everything possible about all intelligent species. Even the extinct ones. It will make them easier to rule at the Eschaton."

  CHAPTER TEN

  I wasn't willing to believe that. I couldn't afford to. But it stayed in my mind.

  I stripped down and used my wretched underwear for a washcloth, while Dopey watched me with lackluster curiosity. While I was wringing out my shorts and draping them on the edge of the table to dry, I said, "If I only had some clean clothes, I'd almost feel human."

  That wasn't entirely true, but I was trying to cheer Dopey up. It didn't work very well. He didn't respond. He just sat there, perched on the far edge of the table, with his eyes half closed and his great peacock fan the color of mud. He had been taking punishment, all right. There were rips in the periphery of his fan that hadn't been there before, and new stains on the jumper he wore. I tried again, encouragingly. "We don't have to give up, you know. There's always a chance to escape."

  He didn't answer that, either, just sat there, breathing raggedly. He wasn't asleep. His eyes were more or less open, and he hadn't pulled his fan over his head to shut me out, but he wasn't listening.

  I gave up. I spooned some water out of the drinking jug into one of the cups of dehydrated stew, and ate one of the apples while the stew was soaking. I tugged at the lid to the litter box, thinking it might be some kind of weapon if I could get it off. I couldn't.

  Then I saw that Dopey had begun to move. He levered himself painfully off the table and waddled slowly over to the water jugs. He drank some, then splashed some over himself.

  I took him by his frail little arm and said clearly, "I intend to escape. I need you to help me make a plan."

  He grunted without actually answering. I squeezed harder on the arm. "Talk to me!" I demanded.

  He wrenched himself free. "If you make a plan," he said, "you are telling the Horch what to expect. Are
you an even greater fool than I thought?"

  "But-but that was why I asked in English!"

  He sighed. "They listen in, no matter what language we speak. Whether we see them or not, they are observing us at all times."

  I said, "Hell." Of course it was only an illusion, but I had believed we had at least that much privacy. I shouldn't have. That was a Bureau trick, too. I'd done it myself: after you've interrogated a couple of suspects for a while, you put them together and listen to what they say to each other.

  He was talking again. "In any case," he said gloomily, "there is no hope of escape. We will die here, Agent Dannerman, and the next time I see you we will be at the Eschaton."

  His certainty was bringing out all the stubbornness in me. "If there's really going to be an Eschaton," I said.

  "But of course there will!"

  I shook my head at him. "Pat didn't think so, and she's an expert in that subject-"

  "An Earth-human expert!" he sneered.

  "All the same. Pat said it had been conclusively shown that there wasn't enough mass in the universe to make it contract again. It will go on expanding forever and never shrink down again to the Big Crunch. So no Eschaton. She said there was no doubt about that at all."

  Dopey made the gagging rattle in his throat that was his version of a contemptuous laugh. "Your primitive beliefs! Both the Beloved Leaders and the Horch are far, far wiser than Dr. Pat Adcock. There is no question."