THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY

by John Brunner

  He broke off. “Is Vyko all right?”

  “I think so. But you still haven’t really answered my question.”

  “What we think happens is that the forces inside a temporal surge cause an encapsulation of the space surrounding the transferred object. The distortion of space around the capsule has an effect like the surface tension of a liquid; we can detect its presence only by implication.”

  There was little they could do during the uncontrolled flight into the past. They monitored their instruments; at intervals they attended to Vyko, who seemed to have fallen into a deep coma—they could theorise about the cause of it, but his consciousness was completely inaccessible.

  They were, deep down below a protective illusion of normalcy, frightened beyond words.

  Nearly a day had been measured by the clocks on the walls when the first gap appeared in the greenness of the master time maps. Something crept into the air—a sense of destiny, a sense of survival.

  “At least,” Burma told them, studying the instrument readings, “we’re going to emerge into the real universe. After that—”

  “After that,” said a technician baldly, “the temporal energies will have overloaded our instruments until they are completely useless. What can we do about it?”

  The helplessness of their situation was only too clear. Burma shut the technician up with a scowl, and leaned excitedly forward. “We’re emerging,” he said tensely. “I want you to watch those dials right up until the moment they stop registering altogether.”

  The instruments were not the proper ones for studying a temporal surge, but they could be used—they were designed for investigating the fourth-dimensional extent of the Being. They revealed that they would be tossed up from the main peak, not a secondary one; the same could not be said of the rest of the team’s ships, which were scattering already.

  “And no time-travel equipment either,” Burma muttered. “At this stage of the universe’s evolution, probably no planets where we could land and construct such equipment—if our ships had been designed for landing on planets!”

  They broke free, and for better or worse their doom was sealed.

  Burma, tight-lipped, walked briskly from the room. In a few moments he called back to them over the communicator, which was still functioning for some reason.

  “Come out here,” he said shortly, and they obeyed without thinking. Red and Chantal were among the first to pass through the door into the only room in the ship from which there was a direct view into space.

  “This is a sight no human being has ever seen before,” said Burma into silence, and they stood transfixed.

  At first it was incredible; the eyes refused to take it in. Then logic supervened, and they began to be able to understand what they saw.

  Beyond the port the sky was on fire. It shone so white it appeared almost cold. Nowhere was there blackness—nowhere at all.

  “What we are looking at,” said Burma softly, “is the universe when young. Those are all the stars which we are used to seeing scattered across hundreds of parsecs. Here they are so close some of them are only light-hours apart. Probably the calamitous expansion which we know about has only just begun. ‘Only just,’ of course, in terms of the universe’s age.

  “We have come hundreds of millions of years.”

  “Why is there no black in the sky?” Chantal demanded, almost with a sob of terror.

  Red was so obsessed by a discovery and a memory that he almost failed to hear the answer. The discovery was that, once one’s eyes were accustomed to the sight, one could tell that every star in the heavens was a different colour. Most were white—diamond-white—with subtle gradations, but some were blue, some yellow, and some few shaded all the way to the deepest imaginable crimson.

  When he was a small boy, he had learned that jewels were dug from the ground, and he had pictured a jewel-mine, its walls sparkling, its floors sparkling, its roof sparkling—every inch in sight giving back multi-coloured fire.

  And here was the reality.

  “The universe,” said Burma, “is still so small that the light of the stars does not fade beyond visibility before it makes the complete circle. Beyond the near stars, out there, you can see the other side of the stars which are behind us as we stand now. This universe is like a gigantic hall of mirrors.”

  Something J.B.S. Haldane had said in one of his essays came back to Red. What was it? “I imagined myself in a—” What kind of space? Riemannian, that was it. “I was standing on a transparent plane. When I looked up, above me I could see the soles of my boots turned backwards…”

  He had once tried to express that in visual terms in one of his sculptures, and failed. And now here was the blind force of Nature interpreting it to him on a scale he had never dared to imagine.

  “Do—” He was surprised to find his throat so dry. “Do you think there might be life out there somewhere?”

  “I doubt it,” said Burma. “Almost certainly there are no planets. Those aren’t the stars we know, of course. Those are immense aggregations of dust and gas, barely beginning to radiate—in fact, most of their energy is probably still coming from straight gravitational contraction.”

  And this is the human race, he suddenly thought. The idea hit him in the pit of the stomach, leaving him limp with awe. Here am I, tossed into the very earliest days of the universe, and I can speak with certainty of things which no living creature has ever witnessed!

  “Perhaps, after all, time has neither meaning nor importance,” he reflected aloud. He looked about him, to find that he was alone with Red and Chantal; everyone else had returned below.

  “I don’t know if you can understand this,” he said after a pause. “But—well, think this over. Just a few centuries ago, maybe even less than that, time began. Everything began! You can’t say ‘before that,’ because there wasn’t a ‘before.’ There was nothing. Nothing at all!”

  Chantal shivered, and her face showed that she was trying to control it; Red put his arm round her and drew her close.

  “And here are we, a handful of human beings,” Burma finished. “Standing on the very threshold of eternity.”

  “Red,” said Chantal softly, “do you think this was worth it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It seems unlikely that we shall get away from here, doesn’t it?” the girl stated flatly. “Do you think it was worth it, for the sake of seeing this?”

  Red had not begun to think about it like that; it took him a moment to utter the answer, though he never had a doubt of what it would be. “Yes! Yes, I do!”

  “So do I,” said Chantal. “I never understood it before. But I suppose this is the feeling which was the reward for the first people to climb Everest, and Columbus, and whoever the first man was to fly to the Moon…”

  Burma looked across at them and knew a feeling of envy. For him, there was no one—Artesha was apart from him by uncounted millions of years.

  And the husband of Artesha could never be satisfied with anyone else.

  Through their stillness cut a cry with the suddenness of a lightning bolt. “What was that?” Red demanded, turning swiftly, but Chantal had already drawn the correct conclusion.

  “It sounded like Vyko,” she said, and hastened out.

  Other members of the ship’s crew had already responded to that heart-tearing scream; when Burma and Red followed Chantal, they found her bending over Vyko with a tense expression. The boy’s eyes were wide open, but they were unfocused, staring at nothing.

  “Vyko! What is it?” rapped Burma, and the boy moaned a little. Passing his tongue over his dry lips, he muttered a few words.

  “What did he say?” demanded Red, and Chantal stood up.

  “Something about everything coming to a stop,” she said uncomprehendingly, and then, as the possible significance of the remark hit her, she put her hand over her mouth. “Burma! Do you suppose—he can see backwards in time, as well as forward? Past the Beginning, I mean?”
r />   “Possibly,” Burma nodded. But this guess was immediately demolished by Vyko’s next words.

  “Nothing!” he moaned. “Nothing at all! Only stars and stars going on forever!”

  “What do you mean?” pressed Red, leaning towards him. “Can’t you tell us what isn’t there?”

  “Something! Something that’s always been there before, in my time and yours. Something huge and friendly and safe. And now I’m alone!”

  “The Being,” said Burma softly. “He can only mean the Being. But how did we escape from it, if the temporal surge threw us back here—?”

  “Inertia?” suggested Red. “The Being, you once told us, disliked the neighbourhood of suns and high-energy concentrations. The whole universe is a high-energy concentration this early. Suppose it doesn’t extend this far back? Then we might have been thrown past the end of the surge by the residual violence…” His voice trailed away.

  “We are alone,” said Chantal greyly. “Nobody in the universe but ourselves.”

  “Think how infinitely worse it is for this poor kid,” Burma reminded her. “He’s lost something that’s been a part of his very mind all his life. He’s aware in four dimensions, and in one direction there’s nothing to see, and in the other everything he knows is too far ahead.”

  “Look!” said Chantal abruptly, and they glanced back at Vyko. He had relaxed on his couch with a smile of delight on his face.

  “Ashtlik!” said Burma. “Has anything happened in the last few moments?” One of the technicians stepped back into the instrument room. “Is it back, Vyko? Is it back?”

  “Yes!” whispered the boy in sheer delight.

  “We just durated past the end of an important secondary peak!” Ashtlik called out. “Burma, you know this means we’ve been wrong about the Being from the start! If these surges can extend past its limits, it needn’t be a four-dimensional creature—”

  “Time enough to worry about that later,” said Burma. “Vyko, is everything all right now?”

  The boy, his eyes closed, looked faintly puzzled. “No, it’s too small. Somehow. But it is really there, I’m sure. I—I think it’s trying to talk to me.”

  “And we wasted all that effort on devising an instrument to communicate with the Being,” said Burma bitterly aware of the consequences of their last disastrous attempt. “We had our instrument in the palm of our hands! Vyko, can you make it understand?”

  “Yes, it understands. It’s trying to explain to me what it really is. I—I think—” He got up, rather unsteadily, from his couch, and walked towards the observation room, brushing aside the hands that sought to restrain him.

  The others followed in silence. Vyko paused before the massed glory of the suns, staring fixedly in one direction, for fully half a minute before he shook his head. “I see,” he said, “but I do not understand.”

  Burma pushed his way forward and followed the boy’s line of gaze. After a moment, he leaned forward as if that inch reduction in the distance would help to clarify what he saw. Straining their eyes, the others made out nothing but an oddly-shaped blot of darkness on the shining sky.

  “Some time ago,” said Burma after a while, and the remembrance that that “ago” was really millions on millions of years in the future again brought shivers to Red’s spine, “Artesha gave directions for certain of the ships in Centre containing her memory banks to be heavily insulated against high energy-levels. I remember watching the work being carried out. I never got around to asking her why only those few ships were so armoured, but I presumed they were repositories of vital information for use in case the Enemy ever did invade the Solar System.

  “But the work which was carried out on them left them a different shape from any other ship in the sky. They are quite unmistakable.”

  It was a moment before anyone got the significance of that present tense. Red was the first to try and utter his conclusion.

  “You mean—those—?”

  “Yes.” It was Vyko, unexpectedly, who answered, in a clear and confident voice. “Those ships over there are part of Artesha’s memory. They are the only part of her which can stand the concentrated stress of space and time at this early stage of the universe’s existence.”

  Dryly, the body and voice of Vyko added, “In case you have not yet realised, you are talking to the Being.”

  XIX

  Kepthin to Artesha: Herewith fullest possible vocabulary of the Enemy language, together with details of their communication bands.

  Artesha to all units, triple red: Enemy mass attack being mounted from direction of Tau Ceti.

  Wymarin to Artesha: Space-time distortions detected in association with materialisation and dematerialisation of going-doubles bear strongest resemblance to manifestations already known to be connected with activity of Being. Details separately.

  Artesha to all units, triple red: Investigate possibility that Being is non-hostile or actually friendly. Analysis of all its activities urgently reviewable in this light.

  Artesha to Magwareet, unofficial: Magwareet, for pity’s sake help me!

  The desperate urgency of the plea brought Magwareet in panic and haste. But he concealed his emotions as far as he could from Artesha’s view, although he was no longer certain if such dissembling was effective with the immense volume of knowledge she had at her command. He had to come into her presence, for it would not be wise to let the conversation he expected get to the ears of everyone.

  “What is it?” he asked, as calmly as he could.

  “Magwareet, you remember asking me why I didn’t warn you of the Enemy raider which flew into the temporal surge you were using to go in search of Wymarin?”

  “I do.”

  “I had the answer. I received a solution signal from the banks I had put to work on it just before Burma initiated his disastrous experiment. I’m certain of that, because the notification is recorded in one of the memory banks I still have.

  “But the solution itself, and all the relevant data, were in the banks which have gone into the past.”

  Magwareet started to say something, but Artesha interrupted. “Let me finish! Do you recall that some while ago I had a group of my memory banks specially insulated?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is those banks that have gone! Only those! But they also contained the reason why I had them insulated. I can do no more than guess at the reason why I did it—and all my guesses lead to one conclusion.”

  “Which is?” Magwareet waited attentively, feeling on the brink of a great revelation.

  “That I have had knowledge of the future available to me—somehow—and I haven’t made use of it. Magwareet, what can have happened to me?”

  Magwareet knew that Artesha must have drawn the same—the only possible—conclusion. He steadied himself and voiced it with dispassionate lack of emphasis.

  “Someone, or something, must have been tampering with your memory, your whole mind.”

  “And there is only one possibility, who it could be. The Enemy!”

  Magwareet waited a little while longer, and then, realising Artesha could not supply the missing statement herself, finished for her. “I’m sorry, Artesha. You’re wrong. There is a second possibility—and a much more likely one. The only person in the universe who could have tampered with your mind is yourself.”

  If Artesha had had human lungs any more, she would have drawn a long, shuddering sigh. “Yes, Magwareet. Do you suppose that I, like so many other people, have a going-double who is not quite the same as myself?”

  The idea staggered Magwareet for a moment. He had a momentary impression that he had seen a vision of some all-embracing truth, but it was gone, leaving him fumbling for the tail-ends of thought which had in that instant knit together in his mind.

  Artesha went on, “But what is the reason for all this? Have the missing parts of my memory passed through that fifth-dimensional gap Wymarin suggested—to be going-doubles of another Artesha somewhere else, and unify the continuum? Wh
y have none come to me? Is the unification of the continuum more important than the survival of the human race, and in whose opinion?”

  “You’re better qualified to answer questions like those than anyone else in history,” said Magwareet soberly. “Why ask me?”

  “How can I trust myself any longer?” said Artesha, and Magwareet, in a horrifying access of vivid imagination, pictured the breakdown of the entire structure of human effort, through the failure of the support it all relied on. He had to do something swiftly. What was still human of Artesha required comfort, friendship and reassurance like anyone else; Burma had long been accustomed to provide it, Magwareet knew, but Burma was somewhen at the back of Time.

  “There’s one thing you can be certain of,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “That is that all these putative Arteshas, like yourself, are working towards the survival of the human race. You can’t do anything else, can you?”

  “No,” Artesha agreed.

  “Have you, since discovering that the Enemy are more interested in destroying the Being than ourselves, studied the possibility of combining with them to do that? After all, we’d be as glad as anyone to get the Being off our necks!”

  “We can’t do that,” said Artesha firmly.

  “Why?”

  “Because—” Artesha’s first word was assured, but it stopped as if cut off with a switch. “Why, I know—I know there is a reason, but that must be in the missing banks, too!”

  “Where did you get your information from? Kepthin?” Artesha confirmed that fact. “All right, I’m going down to see him. That, at least, we can settle definitely.” He started towards the door.

  “Magwareet!” Artesha called after him. “Do you think I should go on trying?”

  “Yes!” said Magwareet forcefully, and went out.