THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY

by John Brunner

  Of course, the exact diameter of the fleet, its numbers and composition had been worked out in view of the Enemy’s knowledge of the human ships’ performance, to make certain they could not be encircled before they reached the Solar System. But, thought Magwareet with a savage and primitive joy, they weren’t counting on this!

  He had his ships, and an extent of space to marshal them in. Summing up the situation as it developed, he made his plans—with alternatives—submitted them to Artesha as fast as he could talk, received her approval, and waited.

  The oncoming spearhead was within a quarter of a light-year when the original defending fleet struck home.

  They had re-formed as a cone, point exactly aligned with the heart of the jutting Enemy spearhead. Their degree of stagger was precisely judged so that the rear ships could distract the Enemy on the rim of the hemisphere while the main vanguard penetrated the middle.

  Only this time, unlike many previous times, the head of the cone held its course.

  It was like—like crushing together two candles against a red-hot stove. The tip of the cone melted away. So did that of the jutting spearhead. But as the cone grew shorter it grew wider, and soon the spearhead was dwindling the faster of the two.

  This was allowed for, of course. The ships at the rear of the hemispherical bowl were there for just that reason. The closer the defenders came, the more withering the fire they had to withstand.

  If we’d been on our own—! thought Magwareet sombrely. There could have been only one end to that struggle. But they were not on their own.

  The battle, as a unit, was now creeping towards the Solar System, from its original direction of Cetus, south of the ecliptic. Thus far, the original plan had been adhered to. The Enemy was making his inevitable progress. Now, soon, he would judge that enough of the defences had been drawn from their regular beats, and send half one of his wings of scouts to try and carry the fight into the System itself. They would probably, knowing men were oxygen breathers, drive for Earth direct, for in the past they had often enough launched over-driven missiles at it from far out in space. That was all right. It was only if they deduced—correctly—that Earth had been evacuated that they would turn their attention exclusively to Centre.

  Abruptly, Magwareet’s estimate proved right. The scouts went into maximum emergency drive and swung north towards the gap in the defences facing Ursa Major. And stopped as if they had hit a wall.

  For, awaiting them there, was a squadron of the newly arrived ships with drives cold, armaments switched off, and screens up in every conceivable electromagnetic and gravitic waveband. The scouts fought like hornets, but they were swamped.

  The Enemy reacted quickly. He realised he had walked into an ambush, but assumed that where so heavy a concentration of ships had been made, another place must have been left thin. A ring of ships disappeared from the bowl of the hemisphere, and struck at about the orbit of the asteroids from the direction of Argo. This time, he was temporarily right, and Magwareet’s heart sank, for this was the System’s most vulnerable area.

  The defending ships, lying in wait, took a few seconds to counter the blow. In that time, destruction had been sown broadcast, and Magwareet was horrified to see that one of the last Enemy to be destroyed had vaporised ten of the outlying components of Centre.

  Artesha!

  Then he blinked, for the wrecked ships were instantly back, where they had been before. “Where—where did they come from?” he gasped, before he realised it was aloud.

  “From the same place as the rest of the ships,” said Artesha, with a hint of a chuckle. “You can stop worrying, Magwareet. We’ve won. It’s only a matter of time.”

  Silently, beyond the limit of the Enemy’s detector range, the friendly strangers had crept around the Solar System. Now some of them—most of them—dropped the pretence and made themselves known. The fleet of the Enemy melted like ice in hot sunlight.

  Magwareet laughed aloud in sheer joy as he saw what was happening, and grew suddenly aware that someone had brought refreshments to him where he sat. Astonished, he noticed that the battle had been in progress nine hours.

  The person who had brought his refreshments was a boy, no more than ten years old—one of those who had a place, an essential though minor one, in Plan Red. Seeing Magwareet turn from his screen, he risked a question in high eager tones.

  “How’s it going, Co-ordinator?”

  “Well!” said Magwareet with a smile.

  The tattered remnants of the Enemy were scrambling out of range as fast as they could, back the way they had come. Magwareet gave them enough time to feel secure, and then, only then, revealed what he had quietly been attending to all this time.

  In those nine hours, sixty thousand ships had stolen with their screens up to the rear of the Enemy. When the remnants were already among them, they showed themselves. Outnumbering the Enemy as they now did, by three to one, they finished the job.

  Completely.

  Ten hours from the start of the battle, there was nothing left of the Enemy’s proud armada—except dust.

  XXI

  For the first long moment it seemed to Red as if he was looking down on the universe like a flat, broad road racing past beneath him. Then he remembered that this was not possible, and his mind rebelled. He found the presence of the Being in his head, supporting and strengthening him.

  There was something about the touch—touch? It was nearer to that than anything. He felt it in exactly the same way he appreciated the form of a sculpture before he began work on it. There was something feminine in it.

  And then he understood.

  “Artesha!”

  “Yes, Red. I am the Being. That is knowledge I have had to conceal even from myself before I discovered what I was.”

  “How—?”

  “By insulating certain memory banks, and filching them away when there was danger of my guessing correctly before I actually did guess correctly.”

  “But—”

  “I am no longer in time, Red! There’s no paradox, for by becoming as I am I grew into four dimensions. After—when there was never to be any more ‘after’ for me—why should I not control my earlier self? After all, I had already done so, so far as my earlier self was concerned.”

  “But then—” Red’s mind leapt ahead with the swiftness of intuition, “—then you have no more purpose in existing! You have nothing but the present!”

  “Exactly. But there is nothing after it, because there is no more ‘after.’ Look, since you are puzzled, and I will show you.” She did so, without words, and when it was over Red felt a little faint, but he understood.

  “A present in which one is directing the universe is no small one,” Artesha commented dryly. “Now, Red, this is what you have to do. You have a certain way of appreciating form, and space, and of effecting meaningful changes in it. I need that. Because I am completed, and cannot change again, I must borrow it from you.”

  A small area of the road which was the universe stilled within Red’s comprehension, and he studied it. Somehow, it was blurred. He recalled Vyko’s description of trying to look into the future of someone with a going-double.

  Artesha—focused—it for him, and he realised it was the span of human history. “Why is it blurred?” he asked.

  “Because of time travel, and temporal surges,” Artesha told him. “There are several presents at this point of the universe—do you see? What we must do is to choose certain ones which are best for our purpose, mould them so that they are ideal. Then, at a certain point, we must bring them together, fold the present into one present, and—”

  “And?”

  “And that is all.”

  He studied the various parallel presents for a while, getting to know the subtleties which distinguished them. He could not quite work out how they were separated, because each and every one of them was the present. Something occurred to him, and he asked, “Why are there no presents in which the human race loses its war to t
he Enemy?”

  “Because the human race wins its war,” was the answer, and it seemed sufficient.

  “These,” he said after another short while, as he might have selected a particular stone or clay mixture for a sculpture.

  “They are yours, to do with as you like.”

  Then began for Red the sheerest ecstasy he could ever have imagined. The timestreams were like clay under his hand, and yet the appreciation of them was not confined to his touch and sight. It was like creating an objective sculpture in his mind alone.

  At first he was hesitant, but then he became absorbed in the joy of pure creation, and gave himself up to it.

  It was necessary that certain actions occur at certain points. It was very necessary that a sculptor called Red Hawkins should be available at one point; that a Croceraunian war party should do certain things in a time not its own, and that a staff magician called Vyko should not die. These things gave basic form and balance to the creation, like the wire framework for a clay model.

  But that was only the beginning. There were details, each tiny, each tending towards the perfection of the completed work. It was also necessary that certain people with an influence on scientific thought should be puzzled by the behaviour of sub-atomic particles; that they should scratch their heads over the impossible appearance of a prehistoric monster in the twentieth century. A prophet had to have a vision of angels, and certain aircraft had to be lost to cause it.

  It was necessary that a certain warship should sail with her superstructure burning across a boiling sea in the dim dawn of time, and that the crew of another vessel should build themselves shanties of cycad wood on the shores of a carboniferous swamp. Time and natural processes erased the name they had carved to give them an anchor to reality on one of the shanties: Marie Celeste.

  It was necessary that an army commanded by a king called Cambyses who had dreams of empire should be defeated by the savagery of a snowstorm deep in the Antarctic. A man called Bierce and another called Bathurst and thousands upon thousands of them had to do something at particular times. For the luckier ones, it was an inexplicable mystery; for the less fortunate, it was hell, or insanity.

  And on, and on, and on…

  Until at last, there were five presents, and each of them was designed to fit into the others like dovetails.

  Red tried to look ahead into the moment when his work would take its definitive form. He failed, because the effort of distinguishing between the five timestreams now was too great.

  “What have we done?” he said, conscious only of an all-embracing weariness which was the end product of having achieved something more than his greatest ambitions.

  “You have given the human race a fleet to win its war with,” said Artesha. “Watch.”

  Red did not understand how it was done, but the separate presents—folded—together and became one, and the objects which were important were in their proper place.

  “So it was I who forced those temporal surges,” he said. “And it was I who created the going-doubles.” He remembered but the memory was a poor shadow compared with the omnipotence he had briefly known.

  Briefly? In a single now, like the now Artesha in her guise of the Being experienced. But she did not have to return from it to the tyranny of slow-seeping time. She had crossed the threshold of eternity. Almost, he found it in his heart to envy her.

  “Listen!” said Artesha, and he heard Burma’s voice.

  “I am placing my fleet of approximately one million vessels at the disposal of Centre…”

  The going-doubles had effected the final, incredibly delicate adjustments of the parallel presents. Now, it was complete.

  “Now I have something else to do,” said Artesha. “I have to alter—very slightly—the whole pattern of the universe, because it is now running, as one might say, at a small angle to the path it can most easily follow.”

  There was a brief pause. “After I have done so,” Artesha went on, her tone seeming to change subtly, “I shall have achieved my purpose, and you will no longer know me. There is a little time—for you—in which you can ask questions if you wish.”

  Red cudgelled his tired brain. After omnipotence, omniscience…

  “What is the eventual fate of the human race?” he said slowly, and knew as he asked what the answer must be.

  “The same as that of the universe. To—keep going—and stop.”

  No, that direction was no good. There were too many questions to ask. He changed his mind. “Who was the other person with a special task?” he said. “What was it?”

  “Chantal was the other person,” said Artesha. “And her task— You know, I think.”

  “Burma,” said Red with complete certainty.

  “Of course. That is the one personal desire I have allowed myself in all this work. That is why I have something still to put right. Out of all the re-shaping of history we have undertaken, I have left over one special person, who because of what was done was exactly the right person.”

  Some deep-sunk part of Red’s mind flashed—like sunlight caught on a turning mirror—with a hint of jealousy. But his entire being was too suffused with the weariness of utter satisfaction for it to rise to the surface.

  “It was too much, and had been for too long, to ask Burma to love a person trapped in metal,” said Artesha, with her last hint of melancholy and pity.

  Red knew that his tiredness would overtake him and drown him in only a moment. Forcing himself to form the words, he asked, “And what is your purpose—the one you will now achieve?”

  “I shall have created myself as I am,” said Artesha, and took two planetary bodies away from the Solar System at precisely selected instants of time. The work was no longer perfect, for there was nothing imperfect to compare it to.

  It was all there was.

  Magwareet stretched himself and rose to his feet. The defence of the Solar System was over. The power of the Enemy was broken, and in due course the still mighty fleet of Earth (it was good to be able to think that again! How wonderful to walk under blue sky, breathe air without remembering that it was accounted for litre by litre!) would search man’s opponents out and finish the job.

  Burma, still a little awed at the magnitude of the disaster which had overwhelmed the Enemy, completed the task of assessing his casualties—which were light—and filed the report with Centre. Turning away, he found himself looking at a girl with brown hair and a tip-tilted nose, and for the first time since Artesha’s accident found himself admiring another woman without guilt.

  Wymarin stared at his instruments, hoping to find a hint of how a fleet whose members almost precisely duplicated the ships already in space in the Solar System had penetrated what he still thought of as the fifth dimension.

  Kepthin heard the news of the Enemy’s defeat, took a shot of issue alcohol, and went to the research hall where the captured specimen waited dumbly in the confinement they had imposed on him at the beginning of Plan Red. “You poor bastard,” the biologist said softly, and wondered in the same instant whether pity was not wasted on the creature. But there was no further need of this specimen now, and on a sudden impulse he brought a gun from a nearby arms rack and ended the Enemy’s life.

  Vyko awoke from some sort of a deep trance, wondering how it could be that the going-doubles of the people about him no longer affected his visions of the future, discovered that half a day had elapsed, and went to ask someone what had happened. He found time to ask himself how Chasnik, his former captain, would have reacted to the news that his staff magician would wind up planning the actions of a fleet of spacecraft mopping up among the Enemy.

  Artesha took in the battle casualty reports with part of her mind; with the rest, she was engaged in analysing the fantastic facts stored in the data banks of the section of her memory which had been restored to her at the outset of the battle. It would be a long job, but there was a promise of something at the end of it…

  Artesha began to discover what she ha
d hidden from herself about herself. In so doing, she began to create herself.

  Except that she already was, and had been since the beginning and would be until almost the end of Time. Even the Being, she knew, required the universe in which to be.

  This was neither the beginning, nor the end, for there is, was and will be, nothing but everything, which is the universe.

  EPILOGUE

  Los Angeles Herald, 16th March, 1957: SCULPTOR DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT. Lightning claims well-known victim. Three Waters, 15th March. Victim of a freak lightning strike was sculptor Lawrence Hawkins at his home near here last night. A bolt struck the artificial leg he wore as the result of a childhood highway smash in which his parents were killed. Dr. Meade J. Calloway, who carried out an examination of his body, said death was instantaneous.

  The Weather Bureau reported no thunderstorms in the area on the night in question. Chief Meteorologist Jack Ellis commented, “It may have been due to static electricity building up in a pocket of dry air. Weather does funny things sometimes.”

  Hawkins’s death will be regretted in Californian art-loving circles. Still in his thirties, he was held to have great promise. He was unmarried.