Vestiges of Time (24 page)

tack, swept it away, felt only minor pain. The nine of them still held, and prepared to lunge against him.

The Shadowy Man sought to strengthen his shields once more, found them weaker still and weakening more. His reserves were almost gone. Across the lightyears, across the centuries, he tried to drag replacement powers, reinforcement energies, but the gulf was too great, too great.

Again the Krithian females struck against him, battering his shields again and again, smashing through them, tearing them down one after the other, forcing piercing lances of psionic force through them and into him.

The Shadowy Man screamed, felt the last of his defenses fall, felt himself being rocked backward in space, in time.

No, damn you, no! he cried silently, but that was all he could do. They had defeated him again. Before they could strike against him once more, before they could drive more bolts of hellish fury into him and through him across time and space into the bodies that were his component parts, he disengaged, withdrew, fled, hung suspended Nowhere, Nowhen.

They had beaten him. And they had been right:
You cannot now defeat us, now or ever. . . .

He had lost again.

Perhaps for the last time.

The Sundering of Time

Still feeling the agony inflicted upon
him
by the blows of the proto-Tromas, still tasting in his mind the gall of defeat, the Shadowy Man slowly propelled the focus of his consciousness backward through time, across space and across paratime toward the physical bodies in the Underground of the BrathelLanza. Along with the pain there was confusion and a sense of hopelessness.

He had done what he had been able to do. There seemed no other avenues to pursue. Even in their infancy the Tromas were more than a match for him. And although he thought that he could have beaten them had he not been so thinly drawn, he knew that to be only academic. The facts being what they were, there was no way he could hope ever to meet the Tromas with an advantage over them. Perhaps there was, after all, a measure of predestination in the universe; perhaps it had been preordained that the Kriths would dominate all the Lines of Time, the bastard children of humankind, perhaps, but better suited for rule of the continuua of Earths.

So, despite his efforts, by and large the future would be as the Tromas had always seen it. When finally, centuries hence, the Timelines had multiplied so greatly that the universe would be forced to reorder itself to greater simplicity, the Kriths would most likely have had ample opportunity to assure their continued existence after that reordering. Then what? Once they had accomplished their racial goal, what would they do next?

The Kriths had no great love for their parent race, humankind, he knew, and would probably feel no significant obligation toward whatever portion of that race still existed after the reordering, whatever human Lines still remained, which should be a considerable number, considering the vast number of Lines spawned by mankind’s decisions when facing Either-Or. Would the Kriths finally take their vengeance on the race that had created them and then sent them off to the living hell of UR-427-51-IV? Or would they by then have gained sufficient insight to no longer hate humankind for being what it was? Would they allow the race of Eric Mathers and his kind to go on living, developing, perhaps to one day live up to the standards it sometimes tried to set for itself but seldom met? If the Kriths did let humankind go on, then in what status? As slaves of the Kriths? As inferior people to do their bidding, to further advance the Kriths and further assure
their
continued survival dining any future universal catastrophe? He did not know, could only speculate, but there was still enough of the human in him, enough of Eric Mathers, for him to feel a great concern, a fear for the future of man.

But what could he do?

He drifted back in space and time and paratime toward the Underground and the place of his physical existence as the senior of his resonating replicates. Now he could not even assure the survival of the physical body of Eric Mathers, though perhaps something could be done to help him. Perhaps.

As he came closer in space/time, as he moved through the nothingness that is everything, new perceptions came to him, sensations that impinged on his withdrawn consciousness. He looked out of himself, felt, probed, sensed.

Downtime, he thought, downtime there is
something.
What, he could not have said, could not have even guessed, but he was aware of something that had hap

pened/was happening/would happen, something that did have/was having/would have great consequences for all the Lines of Time.

With a growing sense of anxiety, forgetting momentarily the pain and humiliation, he thrust
hims
elf
through nothingness with greater force, swept downtime toward the space/time of Eric Mathers and the replicates, then past them and farther into the “past.”

Then he saw, felt knew. . . .

He had encountered it before, but then it had been farther downtime, more remote in the chronological past as Eric Mathers would have conceived it. And
it moved. . . .

A great wavefront was coming uptime, sweeping forward, fracturing and sundering as it came, spawning world after world after world, an ever-growing multiplicity of Timelines. The meddling of the Tromas, their flitting through and past themselves in retrograde time, their being/not being in duplication of themselves in the same relative space/time—all this, multiplied by the activities of the Shadowy Man in his own movements through time and his added manipulation of spatio-temporal events, had brought into being this!
something
that was the wavefront,
something
that was a swelling tide of rupturing paratime, duplicated, quadrupled world after world: worlds twinned, spawned, modified, and mutated, spreading the fabric of all the universes, all the continuua, thinner, thinner, ever thinner. . . .

And in the midst of this wavefront, spreading like a second cancer across the multiplicity of worlds, were the bluish-tinted creatures who were the true Paratimers, the beings truly behind Staunton and the raid on Fort Lothairin and who, perhaps, had been behind the destruction of the BrathelLanza, the nonhumans, non-Kriths who were the actual operating force behind so much that had been done in opposition to the Kriths—and in opposition to mankind as well.

Like the Kriths, the Paratimers sought to subvert a vast number of Earths, to bring them under their control, to alter the master plans of the Kriths and create futures more to their own liking.

But why? the Shadowy Man wondered. And what are they?

As he moved backward in chronological time, the Shadowy Man paused only briefly, snatching an image here, another image there, putting together in his composite mind a backward-running motion picture film that led him to the devastated Albigensian Lines of the far Temporal-West, to the dead, blasted worlds Eric Mathers and Sally had found when they had fled from Kar-hinter and sought Mica’s world. Still farther back in chronotime: balls of thermonuclear flame and towering mushrooms of dark smoke; missiles climbing on tails of fire from hidden silos, from submerged submarines, falling from orbiting stations: a war that spanned a dozen parallel Earths and more, a war fought by the Kriths and their human servants who weren’t yet Timeliners against the Paratimers.

Kriths! the Shadowy Man wondered. On worlds this far to the T-West? But the Kriths had never come this far to the T-West, had they? But perhaps they had. Perhaps they had—originally.

Still farther back in time: the Kriths consolidating their hold on a world, a single world; Kriths without their Great Lies and their Timeliner mercenaries and their vast propaganda machines to convince humans of their beneficence; Kriths who had established a tyrannical rule over the race who had created them and sent them to a hell among the stars; a beleaguered humanity fighting a losing war against its creation, then turning to fight with fire, unleashing against the Kriths a second subspecies created in the laboratories of genetic engineers, a second subspecies as different from the Kriths as the Kriths were different from their ancestral humans, a second subspecies that turned against

its embattled creators and destroyed them before taking up the war against the Kriths and their human servants.

Insanity! the Shadowy Man cried within himself. And wondered if any of what he was witnessing had any reality at all or was just some vague, fanciful twist of probability/improbability as the universe of universes grew near sundering, as the maddened wavefront swept uptime, spawning a phantasmagoria of worlds and drawing thinner yet the fabric of totality.

He looked again at the wavefront that moved forward in chronological time and thought: in such a condition the universe cannot long endure. If the wave- front were to spread much farther uptime, increasing the number of existing Lines by exponential powers, the universe would have to crumble to its very foundations, or reorder itself.

The concept of godhead, of deity, had little place in his mind, in his thoughts, as he considered the restructuring of the universe to greater simplicity. Yet there was about it, almost, the feeling of a directing intelligence, a guiding force that would see to it that the universe remained intact, did not crumble into an infinite number of bright but meaningless fragments. Something, mind or force or basic structure, would not let this happen, would step in and see to it that the now almost incoherent multiplicity was reordered into sanity and greater simplicity. What it was even the Shadowy Man did not know. He did not call it God, though perhaps that name could have been applied. Whatever the name, he knew
it
was there and
it
would act. Soon. Very soon.

The Tromas had been right in their judgment of the coming necessity of universal reorganization. But their time scale had been off, very far off. Not hundreds or thousands of years from the moment Eric Mathers stood in the palace of the Tromas and learned of it from them, but only months ahead in time.

But then they couldn’t have known all that the

Shadowy Man now knew, couldn’t have foreseen it, could they?

There was a great deal more he knew now, and he realized that the Tromas had not even begun to fully understand the nature of time, nor had he. Perhaps it was incomprehensible. Perhaps it did take a universal godhead to fully comprehend what time was/is/will be, how it is an aspect of the same thing of which paratime is an aspect, of which all energy and matter too are aspects.

As wrong as was the viewpoint of time being a linearly progressing thing, so was it equally wrong to consider time an all-existing thing, the future, the present, and the past already in final shape and unchangeable. Time was not such a simple tiling. It was far more complex than that—or perhaps far less so: or both at once. And it existed not by the rules laid doWn by men or Kriths or any other finite intelligences. It, and all the universe, existed by its own rules, regardless of whether anyone knew those rules.

What the Tromas had told Eric Mathers about the nature of time had not been
wrong,
no more than Newtonian physics were
wrong.
Just incomplete. If he carried the analogy forward: his present knowledge of time was Einsteinian to their Newtonian, and just as Einstein had superseded Newton, had explained more of the workings of the universe, so too had his viewpoint been incomplete and would one day be replaced by another viewpoint that more nearly comprehended it all.

How ignorant we will always be! he said to himself. And “looked” at the wavefront that swept glittering and screaming uptime, the wavefront that he had abetted. Unwittingly, unknowingly, by means he had not intentionally devised, but because of what he had done, the sundering of the universe would come long before the Kriths were ready for it, long before they had become so entrenched in the Timelines that nothing

could dislodge them. They had greatly increased their probability, of course. But not enough. Though they commanded hundreds of Timelines, there were millions more they had not touched, and for each they had touched, for each Line they had manipulated and altered, there stood beside it its parallel, which they had not touched, perhaps could not touch, for by their very touching of a Line they engendered its alternative, a Line they had not influenced. Had they realized this? That their very manipulation, too, had twinned each Line they had reached, bad created its duplicate—one world manipulated, one not—so that no matter how many worlds they entered, altered, they could never hope to encompass even a small fraction of all the Lines of Time, Lines they themselves helped to multiply at an ever-increasing rate. Would they ever have been able to keep up with it?

Did it matter now? he asked himself, pausing in space/time, observing the wavefront that “moved forward” at a rate of its own, creating a subtime within the totality of time.

When the universal catastrophe came, when the majority of Timelines with lower orders of probability winked out of existence,
would never have been,
so too would the Kriths cease to exist, so too would they never have been. Neither they nor the Paratimers, whatever they were, nor all the works they had set out to do would ever have existed.

He watched the wavefront, calculated, saw the coming of the limits, the final sundering when catastrophe would occur.

He fixed
a
date in his mind. The year
A.D.
1973
as
the calendar was reckoned on the world of Sally’s birth. Early in the year. What day? The sixty-third day of that year. The month of March. The fourth day of that month, on Sally’s calendar.

Then it would be over. All of it. No more Kriths. No more Timeliners. No more Paratimers.