Vestiges of Time (15 page)

brownish, alien Krith come around the back of the jeep in which he had arrived, his brown-marble eyes bright, his long tail swinging in the air like an interrogation point.

*“Eric, my friend,” the Krith said.

*“Mar-masco,” Mathers said in reply, bowing in Krithian fashion as the alien did the same. “Come in,” Mathers said, gesturing toward the doorway behind
him
.

*The Krith nodded and followed him.

*Mathers had seen the brown folder in his hand. The Krith had brought what Mathers was hoping he would bring.

Inside, Mar-masco sat down on one of the beds, Mathers on the other.

*“I have brought exactly what you wanted of me, Eric.”

^“Exactly?” Mathers asked.

^“Exactly,” the Krith repeated, opening the folder and then spreading sheets of paper out on the rough woolen blanket on the bed. “The new contract confirms your rank and pay scale and bonus, all in order. I have a check here too.”

*“Very good.”

*“You will be granted a month’s leave on one of the Rajaian Lines, as you requested, expenses paid— that part took some doing, I grant you, but we felt that your services to the Timeliners warranted it Your next assignment, when your leave is up, will be to . .

He withdrew, pulled back into the psionic darkness, reviewed things for a moment.

That was
me,
he thought, a version of Eric Mathers, a parallel Eric Mathers . .. still working for the Kriths as a Timeliner mercenary, as
I
once did, still loyal to them, still unquestioning of them, still waging their wars for them and helping them alter the histories of the parallel Earths so that they would fit into what

ever master plan it was tlie Kriths had for the universe.

There were other stars in the darkness; he sought out one of them, found . . .

*Pain and darkness, one eye seeing dimly the walls of the hospital room to which he was confined. Eric Mathers tried to stir on his bed, tried to- use the stump of an arm to relieve the pressure on the sores on his back, caused himself only more pain, fell back, groaned, tried to remember what it was like when he had been a whole man, when every moment was not one of agony, but found that he could not.

*With that same grotesque stump, he fumbled, pushed a button that rang a remote bell, sent current pulsing through a distant, incandescent bulb. A nurse would hear the bell, see the light, and eventually would come to see what he wanted. A bedpan? A bath? A drink of water? And then he would try to tell her, try to make her understand, for the nurse on duty now was one of the new ones and had not yet learned to decipher the gagged sounds that passed for speech, the noises that came from the twisted throat of Eric Mathers, ex-Timeliner, hopelessly injured beyond repair, another casualty of the endless wars across the Lines of Time. . . .*

Again he withdrew into the darkness of psionic space, shuddering within the resonance patterns of himself. The horror had been too great; he was not ready for
that
yet, for he knew exactly what
it
was . . . himself, a parallel version of Eric Mathers, so seriously injured in the explosion that had wrecked a place called Staunton on Line RTGB-307, where
he
had discovered the presence of a second alien race moving across the Timelines, altering worlds to suit
their
purposes, that he was now little more than a basket case, a painful distortion of a man confined to a hospital bed for the rest of his life. Mercifully, it would be a short one.

He rallied himself, collected the various components of himself, looked across the darkness once more at other points of psionic light, hesitant at first about approaching another, finally doing so, reaching out, probing, seeing. . . .

This was not quite as bad as the last one, though bad enough. . . .

*A tall blond man who appeared to be in his sixties, but who was actually less than forty years old, his face covered with a full beard, his emaciated frame covered with filthy prison garments, huddled in his gray stone cell, chewing a crust of bread, gazing up at the narrow window above his head, which was the cell’s only source of light. A bright beam of sunlight passed through the window, illuminating motes of dust in the air, splashing a narrow rectangle of light, bright and yellow, against the far wall, obscuring the wall’s many scribblings, executed over the years with bits of charred wood.

*The man in the cell was named
Thimb
ron Parnassos; that was the only name he had ever known in his life. He had never been approached by the Timeliners, had never joined them, had never moved across the Lines of Time, waging the wars of the Kriths to change tomorrow, had never been given the name Eric Mathers during an assignment in an English-speaking country on a Line labeled by the Kriths RTGB-307.

♦Parnassos continued to stare at the beam of sunlight, wondering what the world was like outside the prison now, for it had been more years than he could remember sipce he had seen anything outside the four gray walls that enclosed him. He did not think of it now, but the memory was always there, just below the surface, the memory of the last time he had seen the outside world: it had been a gallows yard, where he and a dozen other students waited for their turns to come, their turns to mount the steps and place their

heads within the sweat-stained nooses, for the traps to be opened under them and for their bodies to fall, for their necks to be snapped as the ropes burned into their flesh. They had been convicted of sedition and treason against the government of North Ionia, and they were to die. But they did not die. A cruel quirk of fate. In celebration of a major victory over the rebellious forces, the governor of North Ionia had commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, solitary confinement, no chance of parole. Death would have been preferable. The boys were taken back into the gray prison, never to see the outside world again.

*Pamassos rocked on his knees on the floor of the cell, his crust of bread eaten, his stomach still empty. He rocked on his knees and hummed to himself an old, old song his father had taught him as a child. His father had been very lucky. He had been hanged. But he didn’t think of that very often either. He didn’t think of very much at all. . . .*

He withdrew in pain and confusion. He found it hard to believe that the huddled figure was himself, was Eric Mathers, another parallel of the man he had been. But it was. It was.

Across the darkness again, seeking still another pinpoint of luminance, another fragment of consciousness in the emptiness.

Touching. Contacting . . .

*The big blond man was dressed conservatively, his clothing unsuited for his frame, the cravat around his neck loosened. Under his coat and his shirt, his shoulders slumped and his back bent; it was as if he were trying to diminish his size, to appear smaller than he actually was, as if he did not wish to bring attention to himself, which was true.

*He stood behind a lectern, this man named Thimbron Parnassos, and behind him was a large map of North Ionia, labeled in Greek characters. Before
him

was a room filled with students, and he was lecturing to them in a variant of the Greek language about the period of troubles in North Ionia, the time, nearly two decades before, when a handful of anarchists and misguided students had risen in revolt against the lawfully established government, and how the government had ruthlessly but righteously put down the revolt, how all sedition in North Ionia had been done away with, and how the governor, in his wisdom, had established what Professor Parnassos could not call a “police state” but which was exactly that.

*Thimbron Parnassos, professor of post-Hellenic history, did not mention the fact that his own father had been among those rebels. Of course, all that was in the files of the Astefee—the secret police—and had caused him many an uneasy moment. But, of course, the police knew that he, Professor Parnassos, was a loyal subject of the state, had rejected his father, had denied any allegiance to the older man’s involvement in rebellion, and even had been instrumental in helping to arrest the group of which his father had been a mem- _ ber. Over the years since adolescence he had proved himself loyal, dependable, and trustworthy, never one to say a word out of line.

*But still he had nightmares sometimes, and there was a portion of himself he could not trust. One day, he knew, that mad side of himself would break free, would reveal itself, and then the Astefee would come for him. . . .*

Repelled, he withdrew, pulled back into darkness.

Were they all Uke this? All the versions of Eric Mathers/Thimbron Parnassos? Were all the rest of
him
traitors?

Farther and farther back he pulled, across the darkness, across the Timelines, back toward the Earth of the BrathelLanza and the Underground and the laboratories that held the forms of Eric Mathers and his

336 replicates that were the source of the response patterns that were himself.

And as he came back and drifted into' the corporeal bodies, he thought he was beginning to understand exactly what the Shadowy Man really was. Who he was. And what he had to do.

16

A Shadow Visits

Through 674 now-opened eyes he saw 337 different scenes. One of them was a mnemonic-recording chamber, brightly lighted, in which lay the body of a dead technician named MaLarba and the living form of Eric Mathers, still strapped into a reclining chair, the body still incapacitated by drugs. The other 336 views were essentially the same: looking out through murky fluids that were in constant motion before the eyes, looking out of the transparent encanter cylinders, across a spaceman aisle, to another cylinder in which floated the naked form of a young boy, perhaps fourteen years of age, whose eyes were now open, who looked out of his own cylinder into his own eyes, and in the eyes that looked and in the eyes that looked back was a strange, uncertain, excited, and very curious consciousness.

Carefully now he forced 672 eyelids to close, shutting off the nearly identical scenes they saw. Finally he saw only one scene. That of the recording room. He commanded the single pair of eyes through which he looked to move. Reluctantly they did.

Nothing appeared to have changed in the room. It was exactly as he remembered it. There was no indication that the drug had worn off the body that called itself Eric Mathers. Nor was there indication that corruption had begun to dissolve the body that had been MaLarba. Yet it seemed that days, even weeks, had gone by. There should have been signs of
something.
Time could not have stopped. Could it?

Leftward the eyes moved, seeking the chronometer and the digits in its face that displayed the passage of

132

time. The eyes stopped, and the composite mind of the senior and his replicates considered the data.

The chronometer read 12:09.31.

Five minutes. Less than five minutes. How was it possible?

Or had a full twenty-four or a full forty-eight hours passed?

No, that was not possible.

Although it seemed that he had been roving through paratime for days, for weeks, and before that more days or weeks integrating himself, it had been less than five minutes since he had come in contact with the first of the replicates and begun his expansion, his creation.

Only minutes . . .

Or was it that his composite mind now had command of chronological time as well as parallel time, of vertical time as well as horizontal time? Had he actually spent days—or years—in his own creation and in his quest, and then returned from out of time to place his consciousness in this particular present, less than five minutes after his beginning? Or did he perhaps exist in a unique sort of chronological time, a subtime, so to speak, which progressed toward the future in a linear fashion, but at a different rate?

Could these things be so? And if so . . .

The Shadowy Man could command time. The Tromas had said so.

And I . . .

For a while he rested, in real time, feeling the breathing of the body of Eric Mathers, hearing the
swish- swish-swish
of air circulating through the room, the hiss of tape across recording heads above and behind him, seeing the digits that represented seconds clicking one after another across the chronometer’s face.

When the chronometer read 12:11:17 he began to withdraw from the body, to fully reintegrate himself, to divorce himself from all the corporeal bodies. He was going to try an experiment.

There were now within his mind vague bits and pieces of data, odd and long-forgotten remembrances, sensations he had collected during the time of his own existence as the composite mind. He thought he knew what to do, how to do it, but he was yet uncertain— and there is no way I can put into words these feelings and hunches he felt then. Again: there are no words in any language; it is an experience beyond the finite concepts of finite beings. But he did it.

Into the psionic darkness again, searching, seeking, finding . . .

A bright point of awareness, of consciousness, similar to the others he had encountered, yet also different, far more familiar than they had been, a stronger sense of kinship. Here was another Eric Mathers, another Eric Mathers there in the Underground, a conscious, living, breathing Eric Mathers who was terribly similar to the Eric Mathers who was now a part of the composite resonance pattern.

He did not actually
touch
that mind. That was not his plan, to enter into a second- or third-level resonance. He was going to try to do something else, something wild, fantastic—impossible, perhaps; yet, if
he could
do it. . .

Focusing all his attention on that spot of light that was the consciousness of
an
Eric Mathers, he began to formulate within himself the position of that spot of light in time and in space, at least four frameworks of reference, at least four sets of coordinates: and he saw that it was a roving, wandering, three-dimensional tube of light passing through space/time from a direction that could be labeled past toward a direction that could be labeled future. He narrowed his references. Selected a space/time. Again he focused his attention, isolated one particular fragment of space/time, and propelled himself toward it.

Frozen time. Frozen space. A universe stopped dead in its tracks. Almost. Now he could do it.