THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY

by John Brunner

  Magwareet left the presence of Artesha and went down to

  Magwareet left Artesha’s presence and went down to see see the little biologist in his research hall. He found him Kepthin about the chance of a pact with the Enemy. However, excitedly analysing the psychological implications of the on his way, a general call from Artesha came to him over the Enemy signals which were now being intercepted. When communicators, and at her urgent command he returned the Magwareet broached his idea, however, Kepthin shook his way he had come as fast as he could.

  head.

  “No, the idea is impossible. What it amounts to is this: the Enemy discovered the existence and possibly also the nature of the Being before we did. (How far it extends, I won’t dare guess!) It was the first non-Enemy life form they had ever run across, and they’ve spread over several planetary systems—about twice as many as we have, I believe. Their background is one of extreme hostility between species, on their home world. They don’t keep pets, for instance. So when they discovered the Being localised in the area we inhabit, we automatically became a parallel object for attack. No, getting rid of the Being by joint effort is out of the question.”

  Magwareet, of course, was completely unaware of what had happened, and Artesha’s statement to him was a shock. “I’m where?” he said.

  “According to my instruments, you are at present in the Enemy research hall, talking with Kepthin. Listen!”

  Artesha opened a communicator, and Magwareet, wondering, heard his own voice mingling with the biologist’s in conversation.

  “Let’s see what happens to this going-double when I call them up,” said Artesha grimly. She threw in alarm circuits which shut off the research hall where Magwareet—Magwareet found it upsetting to think of himself in the third person—was, and alerted nearby personnel. Then she spoke.

  “Magwareet! Kepthin!”

  “Magwareet’s not here,” said Kepthin blankly. “Why, what is it?”

  “Not there?” Artesha consulted her instruments again.

  “What’s the alarm for?” Kepthin pursued. “You’re interrupting our work, I’m afraid.”

  Artesha couldn’t answer. She shut off the communicator and spoke blankly to Magwareet. “Didn’t you hear for yourself? Magwareet, how?”

  “Find out from Wymarin if there’s been any activity from the Being over the past few moments,” directed Magwareet. Things were falling into place in his mind. There was a beautiful simplicity about their arrangement which was almost aesthetically satisfying; it made him certain that he was on the track of a right answer at long last.

  “Yes,” was Wymarin’s report. “Very considerable activity! No temporal surges, but these associated side-effects which I told you were also found when a going-double appeared.”

  “What I hoped to hear!” said Magwareet jubilantly. “Artesha, listen to this. Let’s suppose that the Being does know we’re not actively hostile, and the Enemy are. Let’s furthermore postulate that it really exists in four dimensions, and is free to move through all of them as we are through three.

  “Now suppose that we artificially move in time. Our actions create alternative presents. There must be hundreds resulting from our recent interference with the time-stream. But the Being’s actions don’t have this result. It would be a contradiction in terms. The Being, we can say, regards our alternative presents as identical, despite their possible superficial differences.

  “It appears likely that the Being is responsible for the going-doubles, doesn’t it? I think that what it is actually doing is attempting to assist us in our struggle with the Enemy—witness, for example, the appearance of Wymarin’s going-double with what Burma thought, before he knew it was a going-double he was speaking to, was a workable plan for communicating with the Being. I don’t know in which alternative present that plan was hatched, but I suspect the Being approved of it.”

  “A hell of a lot of assistance it’s given us!” said Artesha bitterly. “It’s stripped our defences with its temporal surges and left us naked to the Enemy over billions of cubic miles of space. I hope you’re wrong, Magwareet, because if the Being is taking a hand in our affairs, and we remain without a means of talking to it, how will we ever know what’s going on?”

  “Only the Being can do that, in all probability,” Magwareet answered sombrely. “But if my theory is right, it does know, because in all those parallel presents it is precisely the same. Our interference with the time-stream doesn’t affect the Being in the slightest.”

  He broke off. “I wonder if the fact that my going-double appeared to Kepthin means that he doesn’t have a duplicate—exists only in this time.”

  “He must have a duplicate,” contradicted Artesha. “He said that you hadn’t been down there, didn’t he? The other Magwareet must have been talking to another Kepthin—”

  “And yet you noticed them!” exclaimed Magwareet. “They must have been together in this time—either that, or you are breaking through the fifth-dimensional barrier.”

  “Then it is the Being who has been interfering with my mind,” said Artesha stonily. “And the mess it has got us into—”

  At approximately that same instant every communicator in Centre awoke to life, as well as every one in the entire surviving defence fleet.

  “Plan Red,” said a crisp voice which didn’t quite conceal a hint of panic. “Repeat, Plan Red. Enemy fleet approaching Solar System from direction Cetus. About one thousand nine hundred major warships, about fourteen thousand medium-class warships, twenty-six thousand raiders and scouts upwards of a hundred thousand. Plan Red!”

  “Well?” said Artesha. “At least they aren’t coming towards the biggest gap in our defences, but they’ll find it soon enough. I think this is our last meeting, Magwareet, unless we eventually get a chance to pull off Plan Black. It’s been nice knowing you.”

  “The human race has got itself out of some pretty tight corners before now,” Magwareet reminded her. “And, as you say, we may manage to pull off Plan Black. See you later!”

  On that note of false optimism, he hastened to take up the place prescribed for him in Plan Red.

  Plan Red had been Artesha’s greatest achievement. It was a means of mobilising the entire defensive potential of the human race. Every man and woman in the Solar System, and every child old enough to be of use, had a part in it. At the last announcement, they had left inessential tasks and gone to essential ones.

  Magwareet’s, like the other top co-ordinators’, was in the master operations room. It was anticipated that the influx of data would swamp even Artesha’s immense resources for computing. Therefore there were made available people who—like Magwareet—had the co-ordinator’s gift of snap decisions on the basis of inadequate information.

  He was barely settling into place before the banked communicators, time maps and viewscreens which would be his ears and eyes for as long as the battle lasted, when Artesha came through. “Magwareet, handle Plan Black, will you? As soon as you’ve attended to it, cut back into Plan Red.”

  “Right,” confirmed Magwareet, and studied the set-up.

  Plan Black was the last-ditch one. It was known that the Enemy’s first move on discovering man had been to englobe the systems the race inhabited; that was why no one knew where the Enemy actually came from. They had been uncertain for a long time which was humanity’s home world, but—inevitably—the slow withdrawals they had forced had led them to the correct conclusion. They had never before assembled so large a fleet to reduce a single system.

  It was suspected that from some of the outermost colonies small groups had broken away and penetrated the Enemy’s space in search of planets beyond their influence. But it was not certain. Perhaps they had found safety and would ensure the race’s survival; perhaps not. In any case, it was probable that the victorious Enemy would hunt them down and mop them up after Earth was defeated.

  Therefore—Plan Black.

  Centre was the nucleus of it. On the closing of one of many
thousand switches, at the very last moment possible, all the ships composing Centre—or rather, those which had survived—would immediately be thrown into faster-than-light drive. There was no way of reversing the process, short of mechanical failure or reduction of the available power below a certain minimum. Even at the emergency limit of the drive, it would be years before the crew of those ships saw starlight again.

  Thus, like the bursting of a spore pod, the human race would erupt outwards among the stars. Some of the ships would be hunted down; some would emerge from the star-drive impossibly far from a GO-type sun; some few would collide with the worldlines of stars or planets and explode into dust.

  But some fewer still might perhaps fall within reach of habitable planets thousands of light-years beyond the Enemy. It would be the greatest gamble in history—but it might spell survival.

  There was only one person whose chance of that was negligible to the vanishing point, and that was Artesha. Her very mind was spread over so many ships that it was virtually inconceivable that she should live through Plan Black.

  Like all other co-ordinators, Magwareet had calculated the chances of survival from that plan so often that he knew its details by heart. It took him minutes only to carry out all that was necessary to prepare for it—to activate the switches Artesha, or one of her deputies, could throw. Then he turned his attention to the developing battle.

  How is the Being going to like this? he wondered as he thought of the gigantic release of energies it would entail. What a handicap to fight under!

  Artesha was massing the available defence fleet along the Enemy’s line of attack; it was the only possible move. There was something enormously impressive about this sight of the concerted power of a whole race—

  Until one looked at what it was opposing, that was. Magwareet felt his heart sink as he considered how mankind was outnumbered.

  Seeing an opening to join battle, he awaited no orders from Artesha, but ordered up a squadron of heavies to take out the jutting wing of scouts closest to the ecliptic. It was over in moments, and scattered wreckage drifted in space.

  The first casualty report came in. “Forty-eight Enemy scouts destroyed,” said an unemotional voice. “Our losses—one cruiser disabled, five damaged.”

  Heartened, Magwareet’s companions bent to their controls. But before the next blow could be struck, a voice full of panic rang from the communicators.

  “Unidentified fleet approaching from direction Ursa! Repeat, unidentified! And there look like millions of ships!”

  Ursa! Straight for the gap in the defences!

  XX

  Time is a river?

  Time is an arrow? The movement of the hands on a watch? Something an atom vibrates in? There is an adequate answer to all these suggestions. Nuts!

  Time is an accidental by-product of the biological process.

  Take something—a star, say. It moves: now it is here, now there, but one cannot say if it is moving or the other stars are moving. At one moment it is in one place—but it is equally correct to say it is in one moment at one place. Move it in space, move it in time.

  Move it in time, to a moment when it already exists. It is the same star. Unless it is also moved in space, it is indistinguishable from its earlier self. But if it is in another place at the same moment—?

  If you can move it in time at all, you can move it so that it occupies not two places at once, but one moment in two places. It can, after all, occupy one place at two moments!

  The electrochemical process resulting in the localised reversal of entropy known as “life” might be insulated, so to speak—its reversal of entropy converted into an identification with the law of nature alluded to above.

  A star, moved back in time, is itself at the earlier moment. An organism, aware of the fact that it has been moved, is not. In obedience to the special laws of biology, it will proceed to move “forwards in time” again at its habitual rate. Let it become aware of the co-existence of itself in the moments it occupies, and it is no longer one, but two, selves.

  The discovery of time travel, in fact, is the first step only towards emancipation from the law of Time governing life-forms. But it is a step which brings them right up to the threshold of eternity.

  It was the only time Red and Chantal had ever seen, or were ever to see, Burma at a loss for words. He stumbletongued for fully a minute, before he made a completely incomprehensible remark to Vyko.

  “Of course! I see why not. But why here? Why now?”

  “Here is irrelevant. So is now. We are either at the very beginning of the universe, or the very end. That is to say, we are past a point at which the actions of any intelligent being—except myself—are of significance. But it was not until you had passed, as you count time, the point at which you entered this last temporal surge, that you could be of service in exactly the way necessary.”

  So that was why Burma’s use of “ago” in speaking of the far future was so oddly meaningful! Red felt astonished at his own intuition, but he had a complete vision of the universe as it must be in exactly the same way that he “felt” a sculpture before he commenced work on it—neither visualising it, nor imagining its tactile qualities, but a non-separable combination of the two. He could not have drawn a view of one of the works he intended, for the flat projection of it would not have been the same thing. Only under his hands and eyes together could he capture the essential quality he was looking for.

  But there was a question he had to ask. “You brought us here for a purpose,” he said bluntly. “If you can communicate with us now, you could have done so at any time. All times are alike to you in four dimensions. What is that purpose?”

  “It is exactly because all times are alike to me,” said Vyko’s voice, “that you, as you are, are here now. Burma, you are my interpreter. This boy Vyko is my mouth, because his is the only mind among you which is able to contain four-dimensional concepts naturally. For the others of you—all but two!—I have certain small individual tasks which anyone else might have carried out.”

  Which other two? They looked at one another questioningly. Vyko continued to utter the Being’s words.

  “My purpose, since you ask it, is simple. To defeat the race which you call the Enemy, since they are intent on destroying me.”

  “But could they?” said Chantal wonderingly.

  “Because I propose to destroy them, no!”

  And then, all of a sudden, a peculiar thing happened. Vyko’s face for a moment went slack and relaxed. At the same instant, Burma’s lit up with sudden delight, and he seemed to be listening to something. Then the same thing happened to one of the members of the crew, and another, and another, in rapid sequence. Chantal’s expression changed in the same way.

  These are the tasks he is choosing for us, thought Red. He wondered what his could be. It was quite natural for him to start thinking of the Being as masculine, since Vyko’s youthful but definitely male voice rang in his memory.

  Then there was something in his head that was like a memory speaking, but was not one. It said: You are one of the two needed for a special task. It said: You are a sculptor with a sculptor’s mind and a sculptor’s way of looking at space. It said: There could be nothing greater for you than to create with pure space and pure time as well. It said: You are to supply what is needful.

  It said: You are to help in moulding the universe itself.

  They had exactly enough time to become frightened after the panicky voice announced the oncoming, unidentified fleet. Magwareet flinched rather than deliberately moved his head to look across his detector screens, and saw that the wild estimate of the number of ships—millions of them—must be very nearly correct. At least there were hundreds of thousands of them.

  But it was another thing he noticed on the screens that really shook him. Forgetting that she would already know, he called to Artesha.

  “Artesha! You’ve got your memory back!”

  “Yes, I have,” said her calm, controlled
voice, and he heard a sureness in it that he had been hoping for for an age. “Listen to this, please.”

  From the communicators throughout Centre and throughout the ships of the defending fleet a voice, quiet and firm, spoke out. It was a voice he recognised.

  “I am placing my fleet of approximately one million vessels at the disposal of Centre for the duration of the present operation. Please begin to compute with them in your attack plan.”

  Burma’s voice!

  Perhaps the Being might know from what unimaginable resource of time or space he had dredged up a million fighting craft. Time enough to worry about that later. Right now, there was a war to be won.

  Another race allying with us? Where from?

  What about—afterwards? They outnumber us hopelessly!

  And then Artesha put sixty thousand ships at his orders, and he began to fight them.

  The formation of the Enemy was their standard one: a hemisphere, hollow face towards the Solar System, with a single line of heavy craft jutting from its centre and two flat wings of scouts in the plane of the System’s ecliptic. The nearest of the scouts had been half a light year away when Magwareet has sent in his first attack. That distance had already dropped by a quarter, and the minor gap in the formation which he had caused had been filled.

  The technique was simple and effective. The jutting spearhead was just out of range of the heaviest weapons carried by the ships at the rim of the semi-circle—but only just. It was their business to transfix the oncoming ships like a butterfly on a pin. Whichever way the defenders tried to take evasive action, they would find themselves coming within range of the ships in the hemisphere, who could fire on them without endangering their companions.

  By the time the engagement was properly joined, the hemisphere would have begun to contract into a sphere, enclosing their opponents and squeezing them like a ripe orange.

  If, by some miscalculation, the fleet proved to be outnumbered, out-gunned or out-fought, the spearhead could accelerate just a little and close the front of the hemisphere, which would thereupon become the rear, concentrating the heaviest armaments on the pursuers.