by Ian Watson
Kaminski and Bekker were also waiting for me, near the red “dike” ten centimetres high which surrounded the timegate.
“You’re almost late, Captain!” Kaminski jerked a finger at the triple chronometer mounted overhead.
“Nonsense. Hoffmann isn’t here yet.”
“He doesn’t need to go into Control.”
Skip was absent too. A pity. It may have amused him to see the ignorant natives gathered around their idol, praying that the timegate would grant us a change of tempo, such as it had always granted; but not knowing, not knowing for sure. Amused him; and demeaned us. This might have helped my mission by making us seem like a bunch of … articulate animals. We weren’t, at this moment, the technological masters of the stardrive. We were petitioners at an alien portal.
Beyond the red dike, duller with dust than yesterday, the oval hoop of the timegate cut a hole in the bulkhead enclosing a shimmer of air. Rainbow colours rippled faintly, as on a membrane of soapy water from which a child might blow a bubble. This membrane would let us step through it; unlike a bubble it wouldn’t burst. Beyond the membrane I could see all the screens and instruments of Control, only slightly distorted.
“Here’s Hoffmann now,” I said calmly.
What the witnesses saw when we stepped through the timegate, if they really concentrated, would be: a brief blur of activity within Control, the place full of flickering multiple images almost too swift to register. Then, ten seconds later, Kaminski and Bekker and I would re-emerge.
From our point of view the witnesses outside were frozen statues, snail-people.
We spent half an hour in Control. After a thorough analysis of the smeared images of suns in the starbow we trimmed course by a fraction of an arcsecond.
“They ought to install an oven in here,” I remarked. “Then we could feast like the kings and queens of infinite space that we are. Or ought to be.”
“You can’t have people flooding in and out of here whenever they’re feeling peckish,” said Bekker indignantly. “Think of the risk of collision! Slow-moving persons, fast-moving persons. It’s frisky enough us using this doorway once a day.”
“We fear it, don’t we? We treat it like an unexploded bomb. Or a glass mobile we’re balancing on a fingertip over an abyss. We never dance with time, nonchalantly.”
“Our work’s done,” said Kaminski. “We ought to rejoin the others.”
“What’s the hurry? They won’t miss us. Just imagine … if we stepped back through the gate, and this time it didn’t work.”
“Be quiet, Captain.”
“We would still be accelerated. They would stand there motionless. At first we would think it was a prank. ‘Hey you guys, don’t joke. This isn’t funny.’ Then we’d notice that they are moving, but very very slowly. ‘Okay, this is an order. Quit it.’ No response. We would have to write on the wall for them to read slowly. For the next seven years or so we three would have to live our lives at ship’s time.”
“Captain. Please.”
“Except, in just a few months we would use all the food and drink. That’s only a few hours from their point of view. They couldn’t stop us raiding the larder time and again, gobbling our fill every few minutes. We’d have no choice. We’d buzz about them like a swarm of locusts. And when the cupboard was bare … would we eat Chantal and Wenzel, Hoffmann and Takahashi too? Would we tear our alien friend apart and eat him? Yes! Unless the Tworf knew how to dance with time. Unless he speeded up to escape from our hungry jaws—and showed us the art of dancing!”
“For God’s sake,” Kaminski said.
For God’s sake. Not for the sake of the Perpetual State. Maybe this proved nothing. Scratch a policeman and you find a priest. Priests are the policemen of the soul. Police are the priests of politics. Often both wear similar black uniforms. Kaminski might still be the security officer.
We went back through the timegate. We were reunited together in slow time. All was well.
“I shall tell you a poem of the origin of the timegate, Cap.”
“You will? Tell me, Skip. Tell me.”
“I shall tell lies by means of beauty. As substitute for a wooing song.” All down its front the orange tendrils twitched.
“Those Who Run Faster once suffered from a strange malady: of hyperkinesis. Hence our name! We were overactive, accelerated. Something had gone sadly wrong with our biological clocks. The clocks in our bodies, you know?”
“Yes, yes. Mitochondria, the little powerhouses of the cells. Circadian rhythms. The pineal eye.”
“Each successive generation of Those Who Run Faster was living at a quicker rate than the previous generation. We were maturing faster, moving faster, talking faster, discarding ourselves faster.”
“Discarding? Do you mean ‘dying’? Don’t creatures who divide by fission live forever like amoebas?”
“We are more complicated than amoebas. Shall I digress?”
“Not yet. Go on, Skip. The Tworfs were speeding up.”
“We were burning ourselves out. The end of our race was predicted. In our case it was a race, and no mistake! But then our scientists pinned down the source of the trouble. A black hole of swelling mass was digesting our sun from within. This eating of our star caused a local anomaly in time.”
“This isn’t a poem,” I cried with mounting excitement. “It’s a scientific explanation.”
“It is a song. Our hyperkinesis was an evolutionary adaptation to the fact that we must complete our history much earlier than Nature had expected. So we discovered how to retard ourselves, by use of timegates. The first timegates were spun out of our inmost being, our accelerated selves. As an earthly spider spins silk; as an earthly snail secretes a shell. The silk, the shell, was time itself. We ingeniously transferred time’s extra momentum to the gates. Later, we automated the procedure. Our history continues.”
“But how did you accomplish this marvel?”
Hitherto Skip had been waggling his vestigial hands as he wove his narrative. Now he knit those suckers together across his bristling chest as much as to say, “That’s all. Story over.”
“But your sun must still be doomed!”
“Our whole species danced with time. We arrested the black hole. We cured our star.”
“Hang on a moment. If all of you were living faster, adapting at the same rate, what difference would the time anomaly have made to you?”
“A great difference. We Tworfs were adapting, because we were the most sensitive and highly evolved species. Our loving animals did not live any faster than before. Mounting them became frustrating and exhausting. Our wooing songs squeaked far too rapidly in their silky ears. Love took far too long.”
For the first time in our acquaintance Skip stretched out one of its long arms to touch me; to touch my virtually indestructible garment. Tentatively.
The next day Skip told me an entirely different story; though I suppose it complemented the first explanation.
“Yes, we are immortal,” it explained, “unless killed by accident. Every time we mount a loving animal, and mate it and divide ourselves, we gain a new lease of life. However, as an earthly snake sloughs its skin, likewise we must lose something. What we have to discard is memories. We must cull our memories, or else our minds would overload with the enormity of the past. We couldn’t function successfully in the present.”
“Ah, I see. You shed half of your memories into your offspring, into your double. That’s what makes the pair of you different persons.”
“Yes and no. If we imprinted too much memory on our double it wouldn’t have initiative and curiosity. Therefore, dancing, we secrete a jewel which contains that extra part of the past which we wish to discard. We excrete this, as an earthly bird excretes an egg. This jewel is memory. And memory is time. These jewels are essential to the functioning of the timegate.”
“You create a jewel each time you mate a loving animal?”
“We used to give the jewels to the animals afterwards. They
wore the jewels as necklaces, of honour and worship. But they didn’t understand the jewels properly. Now we use them scientifically.”
I barely curbed my excitement. “You must be a very different person after mating, Skip. You must forget a lot that happened earlier on.”
“Do not your earthly poets refer to human orgasm as ‘the little death’? In a timeless moment, you forget yourself.”
I was spooning up some cold slop with my plastic utensil. Jocelyn Chantal positioned herself nearby.
“How are you feeling, Captain?”
“Okay.”
“How is our alien guest enjoying its voyage?”
“Is a voyage to be enjoyed—or endured? Perhaps neither! What does it really matter whereabouts we are in space and time, or what the quality of our circumstances is, so long as we survive without too much discomfort? And so long as we serve the Perpetual State? Thus we ensure the survival of humanity. Thus we guarantee its spread throughout the stars, that are so very far apart. Any means of enduring such a voyage is healthy. Impeccable.”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s why we endure the timegate every day.”
“You endure it, Captain.” Chantal hesitated before adding, “In company with Helen and Mark.”
“Everyone endures it, Chantal. Everyone.”
“Yes. We all do.”
“I think I’m starting to regard the timegate not with queasy dread, but in happy anticipation—as something vitalizing and inspiring. Each time I use it I die and am reborn. Almost as another person in another time. If we use the timegate often enough it may make us immortal. We shall journey thousands of light years all the way around the galaxy, instead of a measly ten or twenty light years from Earth. We ought to improve the cuisine, though. Does an immortal get bored with eating an infinity of meals? Mid Velvet Fastskip hasn’t complained about the menu.”
“Is our alien guest immortal? How strange that an immortal race should bother to invent timegates.”
“Maybe they’re immortal because they use timegates. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Plus, their method of reproduction.” I oughtn’t to be so frank with Chantal. My masters on Earth had sworn me to secrecy. Here was I on the verge of betraying my mission. I went on in lighter vein, “What if they aren’t immortal? Thanks to timegates they can dance their way right to the end of the universe within a single lifetime.”
Suppose you stepped through one timegate, to slow your life processes. Suppose you immediately stepped in the same direction through a second gate. Then a third! Decelerating and decelerating. The sun would zip through the sky. Day and night would strobe. The galaxy would revolve like a spinning top. The whole cosmos would expand to its utmost, pause, and collapse again. While you stood still.
“Certain time-dancers on our world are attempting this,” admitted Skip.
“You’re a time-dancer too.”
“Those are slow dancers. I skip fast. None of those slow dancers have reached their fourth gate yet. They move so slowly, you see.”
“Oh.”
I had never visited Tworfworld. I was always on the same run from Earth to Twinstar Two. I tried to imagine Skip’s planet.
The yellow prairies where herds of silky animals grazed and frolicked and chanted simple songs, and experienced fleeting ecstasies of high mentality and metamemory when ridden in love by Tworfs. The fanatical slow-dance Tworfs poised motionless between one gate and another. The single ocean on whose shores no turtles nested, above whose waves no gulls screamed hungrily. Lying sparkling on a silver beach, where Tworfs had ridden their mounts, mated, danced, and split, would be the jewels of time.
I visualized the Tworf cities of domes and minarets; the guarded embassies of the exotic races which could hibernate for years on end, at will; the spaceport from which Tworf vessels rose powered by human stardrives.
It was time for love; high time.
“Look at me, Skip. Behold me.”
I parted my indestructible garment down the frontal seam. I shucked it off like a snakeskin, newly moulted. I stroked my blond, near-white beard. I turned my back on Mid Velvet Fastskip.
“Touch me.”
Swiftly the alien mounted me. The long arms jointed themselves around my chest, locking together. The little arms burrowed under my armpits, suckering tight. Erect tendrils gently pierced my shoulders, spine, buttocks, nerves. Skip was nearly weightless; the least of burdens. My alien rider increased my strength, the bounce of my steps and the vigour of my body, my potency and sexuality. I had been impotent for years; not now. On the contrary!
It was as I foresaw. I was possessed by a daemon, by a living god. I rushed through my privacy-sheet into the corridor. There, I pawed the deck and champed like a thoroughbred stallion. I snorted. I whinnied wordlessly.
Just then Helen Kaminski appeared from around the far bend. She stared in amazement at her potent, eager Captain with the alien rider on his back, porcelain head peeping over human head. She broke into a run—not away from us but in the direction of her own doorless cabin, cloaked in its white privacy.
We raced to meet her. We ran faster. But she had less distance to cover. She vanished through the masked doorway. Forbidden!
Skip urged me through the privacy-sheet—through into the KAMINSKI cabin from which no sight nor sound could escape.
During consummation, as I flowed into my noisy mate, Skip flowed through myself into Helen Kaminski and back into my body through her raking fingernails.
I was filled with alien understandings and timely enlightenments such as I can no longer express.
Afterwards, Skip descended from me and danced for us. It whirled like a dervish till my eyes were dazed. It seemed to grow shorter, and spread out. As the wild dance slowed I could distinguish two short Tworfs whirling round together, disentangling from one another.
At last they separated and halted. Helen fled naked from her cabin. One Tworf bowed and presented me with a blue jewel that pulsed with inner radiance. The jewel was about the size of the iris of a human eye. This done, the Tworfs ran away like a couple of mischievous children or elves. I was left alone. My understanding dimmed, to that of an ordinary human being. My god had gone.
But I knew what I needed to do. Clutching my treasure, I set out for the timegate and Control.
I had lost my high, vital strength. Mark Bekker held me by one arm, actually touching me. Robert Hoffmann held my other arm. We were stalled in the vestibule. So near, yet so far.
I protested. “I’ve learned the secret of the timegate.”
“There’s no alien on board, Captain,” said Jocelyn Chantal. She too had intercepted me. She looked a lot older than previously.
“Quite right. There are two.”
“Two?”
“Mid Velvet Fastskip divided. They’re probably hiding somewhere. The environment may seem unfamiliar.”
“There was never any alien on board. How could there be? We know of no aliens.”
“Those Who Run Faster gave us the timegate, Chantal.”
She sighed. “There’s no timegate, either. If only there was.”
“But look! There it is!” I attempted to point. Since my arms were pinioned I had to content myself with jerking my head in the direction of the red dike, and the shimmering oval gap beyond.
“I only see the entrance to Control,” Chantal said. “Look at the calendar-clock above.”
I glanced up at the chronometer. Its digits were flowing too fast to read clearly.
“This is the fourteenth year of our actual voyage, Captain.”
“Free my hand, Bekker. Let me show you something.”
Bekker did so guardedly.
I opened my fist to display the time-jewel.
“Possibly there wasn’t any alien,” I allowed. “Yet now we have a timegate for sure! This has been created. This power-crystal.”
“It’s one of those twelve-sided gaming dice that Helen uses, isn’t it?” asked Bekker.
“Oh well, it might have be
en. Now it’s altered. It was changed in the crucible of heightened consciousness! See how it glows. We need only link it in circuit with the stardrive. We’ll fly through hyperspace, through hypertime. We’ll arrive within days, not decades. I know this.”
Bekker asked incredulously, “Are you seriously proposing that we open the drive unit up and insert this … object … into the matrix?”
“We could certainly give it a try,” said Hoffmann. “Are you quite positive that you achieved insight, Captain? A genuine altered state of consciousness?”
“Yes. Yes.”
Hoffmann released his hold. He stepped away from me. And I realized that he was the political officer of Pegasus. Pudgy, bald-headed Hoffmann. Bland Hoffmann. Hoffmann was the secret supervisor of this journey of ours, which wasn’t just a journey across light years of void but also a trip into powerful, parahuman dimensions of the mind.
“Are you as mad as he is?” Bekker asked softly. “Jocelyn, don’t you have any tranquillizers left?”
“After fourteen years?”
“Please give me that bauble,” begged Bekker. “We’ve played along with this farce for too long. I absolutely refuse to countenance—”
Hoffmann hit Bekker on the jaw, decking him. Hoffmann’s fist heaved some weight.
Unfortunately the time-jewel did not produce quite the desired effect. In fact the stardrive quit.
If only I could find where Those Who Run Faster are hiding, I could ask them why. I’ve glimpsed them a couple of times but they run faster than me.
We still travel onwards, nudging the speed of light as before. Unless we achieve another breakthrough such as mine I wonder how we will ever trim our course or slow down in time for our destination.
In the bad old days prior to the advent of the timegate it’s well known that not all starships arrived safely at journeys’ end. Some vanished entirely and were never heard from.
No matter! Extraordinarily, Helen Kaminski is pregnant. Despite her age! Despite my mandatory vasectomy of fourteen years vintage! In such singular circumstances surely she will give birth to an unusual baby. A paranormal child, whom we will lovingly foster, who will show us the true way. Her baby will be semi-alien.
