Vestiges of Time (8 page)

earned it well during our romp on the great mattress, earned it every bit as well as the EstarSimirian prostitutes earned theirs in the pleasure-house in VarKhohs —but I had to talk with someone, and she was the most available. I rolled over, touched her cheek with my fingertips, and whispered into her ear, “EnDera, EnDera.”

“What is it?” she asked sleepily.

“Would you mind staying awake just a little while longer? I’d like to talk.”

A frown crossed her lovely face in the room’s dim light. “Is something bothering you?”

“This place, this Underground, I can’t figure it out.” “What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean I’m impressed and all. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Which wasn’t exactly the truth, but close enough to it. “It’s hard to imagine how something like this could have been built, and all this equipment and all these people brought in, without anyone knowing about it.”

“Oh, lots of people know about it.”

“That’s not what I mean. The government. How is it that they didn’t learn about it long ago?”

“Oh, I’m sure a number of people in the government have known about it. Never the top people, of course, but a lot of people lower down the line. It’s been seen to that they never pass their information on to the top.”

“What do you mean ‘seen to’?”

“Oh, a few bribes strategically placed, maybe a little extortion, maybe a little blackmail, maybe an ‘unfortunate accident’ here and there.”

“I see.” Maybe the BrathelLanza wasn’t just
playing
at revolution after all. Maybe they were deadly serious. Assassination. That’s deadly serious.

“I can’t say that we’re entirely safe here,” EnDera went on. “Sooner or later some overly zealous agent is going to put two and two together and come up with

the right answer and we won’t be able to stop him from alerting the ones on the top, but we hope that day can be put off long enough for us to finish our work here.” I nodded, understanding.

“Really, Harkos, we don’t have too many illusions down here. We know we’re under sentences of immediate execution on the spot, or prolonged torture in some of the lords’ dungeons, if we’re ever caught. We just hope we can put off being caught for a few more months.”

There was a coldness in her eyes and in her words that showed me a new side of EnDera and maybe a new side of this whole underground setup.

“That’s one of the reasons we were in such a rush to get your cooperation,” she went on, her fingers unconsciously touching the looped cross of life she wore. “Don’t flatter yourself by thinking you’re the only man in the world we could use. There are lots of others. We even have some people in our organization now who could serve in your place in a pinch. But you’re the most available of the best suited, if you follow me.” “And this business this morning when I asked you what they would do if I refused?”

“I know. I guess I was playing with you. But I didn’t want you to agree unless you wanted to cooperate. I didn’t want to scare you into it. But . . . but you’re right. If you hadn’t agreed this morning, you would probably be dead by now. I’m glad you agreed.”

“I am too.”

A long, quiet pause followed while I framed questions in my mind, working out a means of getting from her the kinds of answers I wanted.

“This place must have cost a fortune to build, several fortunes. Who’s paying for it?”

“A lot of people, an awful lot of people, Harkos. The lord DessaTyso and his family, for example. They’ve come close to destituting themselves to aid
us. He’s the most wealthy of us, of course, but a lot of

other people in the higher castes—people as fed up with things as we are—have helped us, have given us every bit of aid they could.

“And it’s not just rich people, either. Poor- and middle-caste people all over the nation have chipped in what they could to help us—and in a lot of cases, maybe in most of them, they didn’t even know what they were giving their money to, but they were told that they were working for the good of all the people. And that was the truth.”

She wasn’t as fanatic as AkweNema, maybe, but there was a dedication in her that burned like a bright fire.

“We have other friends too.”

My heart skipped a beat.
Other friends?

“People and organizations outside NakrehVatee,” she said, answering my unvoiced question. “Other governments. Private organizations. Wealthy individuals. A lot of people think the world would be better off if there were a different kind of government here in VarKhohs.

“And maybe some of them aren’t so friendly. Maybe they’d like nothing better than to see internal turmoil paralyze NakrehVatee so they could go about their business without the interference of our government. Okay, we’ll take their money and their aid. But we’re not committing ourselves to anything or anyone outside the BrathelLanza.” Where had I heard similar sentiments expressed before? “We’re not going to stage our revolution so that some other nation can jump into an international power vacuum and start dominating the small nations in our sphere of influence. That’s one thing we’re not going to do. We’ll keep up our nation’s strength against foreign powers.”

I wasn’t certain that I followed her line of reasoning, but that’s not what was coming to concern me right at that moment. “Other friends,” she had said, and those two words led me to think about the world

in which I had found myself, how I had come there, why I had come there; to think of the Kriths and the Tromas who directed them and what they had said that had led me to the world of the BrathelLanza and NakrehVatee. “Other friends” seemed to abound.

Aud I was remembering some words spoken to me some months before by a gross and alien female Krith. The words came clearly into my mind as if I were listening to a recording of that conversation:

“There is another falsehood,” the speaker for the Tromas had said to me, “that you and countless others have come to accept, a falsehood which has been ‘proved’ mathematically to a vast number of scientists.” “And what’s that?” I’d asked.

“That travel through time is impossible, travel from one point in time to an earlier point in time.”

I had just looked at the female Krith.

“Time travel
is
possible, Eric, travel from one location in
linear
time to another location, future and/or past. It is something we do not wish to become common knowledge. It is a secret
we
must keep, at the peril of our racial lives.”

And later on in that same, long conversation:

“How it was we discovered the one Timeline that had achieved true time travel,” she had said, “I will not go into, nor how it was that we, our entire race, migrated back in time hundreds of years in order to begin our ‘remodeling’ as early as possible. You must merely accept these things as so, as you have seen for yourself.”

All this was clear in my mind, and the realization that the operative sentence was:
It is a secret
we
must keep, at the peril of our racial lives.

This was that world, the one with true time travel, I was almost certain, and if that were so, then there could be no chance of the Kriths having allowed Paratimers
or anyone else
to have infiltrated this world, to

have financed and assisted with the planning of a revolution that would probably drastically alter the government of this Earth’s most powerful nation. Nor would the Kriths or the Timeliners meddle with this world, but merely stand outside it and make certain no one else did.

(How, then, did you get into this world so easily? a portion of my mind asked. They should have been watching for exactly the thing you did—a stranger coming skudding in to make use of this Line’s “time machines.” They should have caught yon. If this
is
the right world . . .)

And again: If this is the right world, if I haven’t made a terrible blunder, then would the Kriths allow even the natives of this world, the BrathelLanza and people like them, to make drastic alterations in its historical processes?

(And another part of my mind: But the Shadowy Man wouldn’t have advised you to cooperate with the BrathelLanza, to allow them to clone your cells and to have you lead an army of replicates so that when the revolution is all over you can get your hands on a chronal-displacement device, if this is the wrong world. The Shadowy Man is on your side. Isn’t he?)

And again: But if the revolution is staged and executed solely by natives without any Outtime activities involved at all, would not that revolution be a part of that world’s natural historical process, something that must have happened here if the future is to turn out as the Kriths see it?

(But there is an Outtime influence! You!)

But the Kriths don’t know it, do they?

(They should.

(If you’re on the right world.

(If you haven’t made the worst blunder of your life.

(If the Shadowy Man isn’t playing you for a fool.

(If
. . .
)

EnDera was looking at me strangely but didn’t speak. She had had her say.

So I just kissed her, and she returned the kiss, and I pulled her naked body closer to mine and kissed her again and for a while I forgot about all those things running through my head. For a while . . .

A Conversation with KaphNo

Although AkweNema, KaphNo, ThefeRa, and a score of others had insisted that the taking of the tissue sample from my body would be absolutely painless, I discovered that they had stretched the point just a bit. Oh, the taking of the sample itself was painless enough, I admit. I was given a local anesthetic in my left hip, placed on something that looked like a hybrid of a conventional operating table and a dentist’s chair, had a strap placed across my chest, and ThefeRa himself—I should consider this an honor, I was told— placed a device against the outside of my left thigh, which sent a small, circular blade about an inch into my flesh, taking out a core a few millimeters in diameter of skin and flesh and muscle tissue. During the taking of the biopsy, KaphNo, who stood at my left hand, told me the approximate number of cells that would be removed, but I’ve forgotten how many he said. Sufficiently large for their purposes, with a good loss factor figured in.

The biopsy was over in a matter of minutes and the small wound in my thigh was closed and sealed with something I would have called “plastiskin.” They wouldn’t let me try to walk until the anesthetic had wom off, but when it had I didn’t much want to walk anyway. That’s what they hadn’t told me about: once the anesthetic wore off, it did hurt terribly for a while. You know how puncture wounds are. But I didn’t complain to anyone. Generals don’t cry, do they?

I spent the rest of that day, my second full day in the Underground of the BrathelLanza, resting in the

“study” of my suite, using the equipment that EnDera had finally shown me how to work, sipping cold beer —they brewed some fine beer Here and Now—smoking cigarettes, which I’d finally been able to obtain— the use of tobacco being almost unknown in NakrehVatee—and skimming through the spools of an encyclopedia, familiarizing myself with the more salient facts about the city of VarKhohs, the nation of NakrehVatee, and the world of which they were a part.

This world, I determined, was one of a series of related Timelines that the Kriths collectively called Neo-Carthaginian. Carthage. In the Phoenician,
Kart Hadasht.
In the Greek of my ancestors,
Karchedon.
The Jewel of North Africa. The Mother of Kings—in this world at least.

In the history of these so-called Neo-Carthaginian worlds, the tactics of the great general Hannibal had been more successful than on many another Line. Iberia had remained in the hands of Carthage during the Second Punic War. Hannibal crossed the Alps and fell on Rome with all his fury. And it had been the Romans, in the year
B.C.
200, who had gone down in flames, not the descendants of the Phoenicians.

Rome was leveled and her colonies taken over by the Carthaginians. Though later rebuilt as a satellite of Carthage and renamed, the city of Rome never gained great importance outside the Italian peninsula. The centers of power remained in the Near East and the Far East, moving to Europe only centuries later when it too was colonized and dominated by Asiatic and African peoples who had risen to power following the fall of the Cartho-Byzantine Empire.

All this, in much more detail, I learned as I read books and scanned tapes that day, relaxing and attempting to enjoy myself.

Late that evening, after sharing a large meal with EnDera, which she’d prepared with aid from the auto

kitchen, I was paid a visit by Professor KaphNo, who now seemed to be a rather happy, animated old man.

“Well, Master Harkos, we have begun,” he said, sitting on a cushion across from me, gazing into the foam in his mug of beer, which EnDera had also provided. “The replication?” I asked.

“Not the replication exactly, but the first stages of cloning that will lead to replication. Your cells have been placed in the growth media and are already beginning to respond. We should have an ample quantity of cells to begin the actual replication processes by the end of the week, I would say.”

“And' then?”

The bright eyes in the deep sockets sparkled. “Then . . . well, in about ten months, General, you should have your army.”

“The replicates will be mature then?”

He nodded. “There are some other things you should keep in mind, however.”

“Okay.”

“When the replicates reach a maturation level equivalent to eighteen years of age—ML-18Y, that’s the way we say it in the labs—they will be ready to be decanted. However, you cannot expect them to be able to immediately function as would a normal human being. Their muscles will have a lot of developing yet to do. Although they will have been fed certain data during the last weeks of their development—data concerning the use of their muscles—much of this data cannot be fully integrated by them until after decanting. What I am saying, Harkos, is that it will take the replicates several weeks to
learn to use
their bodies, to be anything more than helpless babies.”

I nodded over the top of my own beer mug.

“Also, during the last few weeks of their development prior to decanting, they will have been carefully fed certain portions of your cerebral recordings. That is, with your assistance, during the recording, the edit