THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY Read online

  “There are still possibilities we haven’t studied,” he pointed out, trying to sound comforting. “Tesper, yours is very hopeful.”

  The ex-historian, who had been listening gravely to this exchange, leaned forward.

  “Yes, it’s this boy Vyko. You already know who he is, Artesha?”

  “Staff magician to this Croceraunian war party you had to mop up. Yes, go on.”

  “Well, he holds the key not only to the problem of what made that Empire so phenomenally successful, but also to communication with the Being, if that’s possible. Here we have someone who genuinely possesses a sort of four-dimensional consciousness. I haven’t been able to get details yet, because his language—though I speak it fluently—is very poorly suited to conveying the concepts. I’m having him given an intensive course of Speech at the moment.”

  “You’d better be careful none of the concepts he gets conflict with his ability,” said Artesha.

  “That’s been attended to. Anyway, if there’s a single person capable of identifying at all with the Being, he is the one.”

  “How does his extra-temporal perception work?”

  “It isn’t extrapolation. That we have found out. Any reasonably good computer can be adapted to prophecy if required—we do it all the time. No, his talent is under conscious control, although it extends more to emotions than actual events. He needs to know, or at any rate be associated with, the people he makes prophecies about, but details of their proposed course of action aren’t needed, and he can make forecasts completely without knowledge of the circumstances. He could, for example, forecast the probable fate of his war party when there had been no sign at all of an impending attack, though one was coming.”

  “How soon can we start making use of this talent?”

  “He’ll only have to get acquainted with Centre and the general situation, that’s all.”

  “I could figure out by pure deduction what it is necessary for him to know,” Artesha remarked pensively. “But I don’t see why I should waste the time when we have two people who’ve been through much the same sort of thing. Red, Chantal—I have a job for you. I want you to take Vyko around Centre—anywhere you like—and tell him the things which you wanted to know when you arrived here. Let him get the feel of things. You won’t have to give him complex scientific or mathematical knowledge—he’s educated according to his standards. Maybe a brief summary of astronomical facts will be required. Do you think you can handle that?”

  “No trouble,” said Red confidently. “Except that we’ll have difficulty finding our way around Centre.”

  “You won’t. Time is valuable, so we designed Centre in a way that lets anyone at all find their way about after about half a minute’s explanation. Magwareet will show you what I mean when we’re through here.”

  XV

  Take the Solar System, for example.

  There was (or was there?) a moon of Saturn. Pickering, its discoverer, was an experienced astronomer unlikely to be misled. He observed his find carefully enough to determine such things as its period of revolution. There was also the fact that it was many times brighter on one side than on the other—an easy aid to identification. Despite all this, people hunted for it afterwards in vain.

  There was also, possibly, an intra-Mercurial planet, which was given the appropriate name of Vulcan. Leverrier and other distinguished men believed in it, believed also that it had been unmistakably observed. Nonetheless, only a few decades after, it was established that it wasn’t there.

  No reasonable person considered adding the qualification “any longer…”

  Tesper spoke diffidently. “Artesha, there’s one very important point we haven’t seen to. Our ship brought back forty other Croceraunians besides Vyko, you know. I want to know what effect we’re having on history—and what ought we to do with them?”

  “We simply haven’t got enough information to say.” Artesha seemed weary. “As I see it, we’ll do least harm if we simply return them to the point at which the temporal surge first picked them up. But these surges have so complicated history we can’t be sure.”

  “Have they?” said Red pointedly. “Are you certain their effect isn’t already accounted for in the present?”

  “Of course it is!” snapped Artesha. “But which present?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We obviously can’t tell whether the temporal surges have changed anything or not—we live through their consequences. We can’t tell whether the present which would have come into existence if you had not gone back in time chasing the Enemy raider, for instance, might not have been favourable to us. In using and interfering with the results of these surges we may be sewing our own shrouds. Before your crew entered that long surge, was the actual present different from what we now remember—different from the present which your actions caused? Somewhere in a five-dimensional continuum there may be someone the equivalent of you, Red, doing something totally different at what appears to be the same moment of time! Think it over—I wish you better luck with it than I’ve had. Me, I get nightmares from it.”

  She broke off. “We must also investigate the possibility that the Enemy ship you chased into the twentieth century deliberately entered the surge in order to attack our past. Magwareet, I want you to see that attended to.”

  “Surely.” Magwareet looked unhappy.

  “All right. That’ll be all for the time being.”

  Tesper went out straight away, but Red and Chantal waited for Magwareet, who seemed to be making up his mind to something. At length he spoke.

  “Artesha, something has been bothering me. That Enemy raider which we followed into the surge… You warned us about it when we shifted twenty hours back in time. Why didn’t you warn us when we passed that point earlier? Did you not know about it? If not, why not?”

  “But I did,” said Artesha. “There would have been no point in warning you before you shifted—”

  “Listen! We were preparing to leave. Twenty hours before, this raider had entered the Solar System. Why was it not spotted and destroyed before it had a chance to enter the surge? Why didn’t we know about it before we went back?”

  “But—” Artesha hesitated. Then she spoke slowly, giving the words an air of puzzlement. “I—I remember the episode twice, Magwareet! Part of it is recorded in each of two memory banks. One time, I knew about it—that must have been the moment when we were passing that instant normally. I could do nothing about it—”

  “Then there’s your answer to the problem of the alteration of history. We do alter it. You couldn’t have it destroyed immediately because, in the far past, it had already been destroyed, three thousand years ago.”

  “Analyse that, and you’ll have the whole solution,” Magwareet stated shortly. “You’re the only person who can do it, Artesha. We’ve interfered with history to such an extent I’m seriously worried. Did you actually order it to be left alone?”

  “I—I don’t know! Magwareet, this is terrible! The human race is relying on my judgment, and I’m forgetting things—”

  “There is no way in which you can forget things, Artesha. Except through mechanisms in your own brain, and you have the tools to deal with those.”

  He stood for a moment, gazing at the featureless panels concealing Artesha, and then turned and went out.

  Pausing beyond the door, Red and Chantal saw that their companion’s face was ashen with strain. He gave them a wan smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to warn Artesha about that—she’s the only person capable of psycho-analysing herself, and although the majority of her mind is now composed of artificial units which can’t go wrong, her actual brain-patterns—the human ones—are still fallible. Oh, but this tampering with time is risky!”

  He broke off, and showed them the way to get about Centre’s gigantic complex of individual ships. As Artesha had promised, it worked to such simple rules that only one brief summary was necessary. Then Magwareet took his leave.

 
; As they headed towards the department where Vyko was being taught Speech, Red muttered, “What a fantastic person Artesha must have been to go through an experience like the one she had and remain sane!”

  “I suspect Burma had a lot to do with it,” Chantal answered. “Imagine being her husband…”

  “Something’s changed since we’ve been away,” Red exclaimed after a pause. “Do you—smell—tensions in the air?”

  Chantal nodded. “People are showing more signs of stress. It must be this news from Tau Ceti. Is that very close?”

  “I suppose so—I don’t know exactly. Here—excuse me a moment, Chantal.” Red turned aside into a washroom, and she waited in the corridor outside for a few moments.

  Just as Red returned, a movement at the end of the passage caught her eye, and she gave a terrified gasp. “Look!” she said faintly.

  Red followed her pointing. At the far end of the corridor he managed to catch a glimpse of a man turning and going away. The only striking thing that he noticed was the other’s hair; it was as red as his own.

  “I don’t see what you mean,” he began, but Chantal cut him short. She put out a hand and touched his shoulder, as if expecting to find him insubstantial.

  “Red—didn’t you see? Didn’t you see the likeness?”

  “I couldn’t see his face, but I admit his hair was like mine. Well, what about it? Is red hair so very unusual?”

  “Red, you don’t understand,” said Chantal desperately. “That other man was limping, exactly the way you do from sheer force of habit. He wasn’t just like you, Red—he was you!”

  Chantal seemed completely unnerved by the shock, and Red put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen!” he said urgently. “There are people from dozens of planets here at Centre—I expect lots of them have red hair. And what’s so astonishing about a limp? Maybe the guy had a sprained ankle!”

  “But with the medical equipment people have now, sprained ankles just don’t last.”

  “Well, this is the medical section we’re heading for, isn’t it? Maybe he just sprained it a few minutes ago and is going to have it fixed. Come on, that sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?”

  Chantal sniffed. “I—I guess so,” she agreed reluctantly.

  “All right, then. We may very well find him in the room ahead of us—let’s go straight down and look.”

  Walking a trifle unsteadily, Chantal followed him the few remaining steps to their goal; he pushed open the panel and stepped inside, finding a small bare cubicle.

  After a moment a plump woman in green came out to them from the room beyond. “Yes?” she said shortly.

  Red explained their mission, and the woman nodded. “All right. I’m expecting to bring Vyko out of his coma in a few minutes now—if you’d just hang on, I’ll call you in when I’m ready to waken him.”

  “Red,” Chantal put in. “Red, ask Artesha if anyone like you is going around Centre.”

  He turned to her in astonishment. “Chantal, for goodness sake! We can’t bother her with a figment of your imagination!”

  “All right,” said Chantal composedly, “I’ll tell her. Just a moment!” she called after the plump woman. “Is there any way I can get in touch with Artesha from here?”

  The woman stopped dead in the doorway and stared at her. “Er—er, yes, there is. One moment, please.” She stepped very briefly out of sight.

  When she re-appeared, there was a man with her who towered over her, fully six foot six tall; his face was set in a menacing expression, and—most alarming of all—there was something in the woman’s hand that they didn’t recognise, but which looked purposeful and which she kept very steadily aligned on them.

  “Get behind them, Duarak,” she said softly. The man moved with the speed of a pouncing lion, and Red and Chantal found him with his ham-like hands poised above their shoulders. “All right, you two. Explain yourselves. I should tell you this gun I’m holding will kill you before you can make a move, and it won’t hurt Duarak either!”

  “Are you crazy?” said Red in utter disbelief.

  “Not at all,” the woman told him grimly. “The communicator system here is perfectly ordinary—standard pattern. Artesha is always available from anywhere in Centre. I want to know why you asked that question!”

  Red felt Chantal relax with a shuddering sigh. He himself couldn’t help smiling. “We don’t know our way around Centre yet,” he explained. “The same thing happened to us as happened to this man Vyko you have here. We’re both from the twentieth century.”

  “Have you heard anything about this, Duarak?”

  “Not a thing,” the brawny man replied.

  “All right. We’ll have to check, then. Contact Artesha, will you?”

  Without taking his eyes off them, Duarak reached for the wall behind and felt for a pattern on the studs below a communicator panel which they had not noticed.

  “I apologise in advance if I’ve misjudged you,” the woman in green said unsmilingly. “But since we discovered that the Enemy are oxygen-breathers, we daren’t take a chance.”

  “What is it?” Artesha’s familiar voice filled the air.

  The woman summed up the situation, and Red and Chantal both felt glad when Artesha made a short and irritated answer. The woman lowered the gun.

  “Sorry,” she said without expression.

  “Artesha!” called Chantal suddenly, as if on making up her mind. “Chantal here. I want to tell you something.”

  “Chantal!” said Red in annoyance.

  “Let her go ahead,” Artesha rebuked him. “Yes?”

  “While Red and I were coming towards the section where we are now, I’m absolutely certain I saw someone at the end of the passage who looked exactly like him. Exactly—even down to his limp!”

  There was a brief pause. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me—there are several million people in Centre. But what you say about the limp is interesting. All right, I’ll work through my memory banks and check up for you. That all?”

  “Yes,” Chantal confirmed, and when the communicator went dead, looked triumphantly at Red.

  “You see? She didn’t think it was ridiculous, did she?”

  Red muttered something inaudible. “We have a job to do,” he said pointedly to the woman in green, and she nodded.

  “All right, come along.”

  Such complete economy had been observed in the use of the space available within the ships of Centre that even the theatre where they now found themselves was barely big enough for all four of them to stand around the couch on which Vyko lay. The tattoo marks on his arms and chest stood out vividly under daylight lamps.

  The woman in green went to a cabinet whose shelves were full of shiny sterile equipment; selecting a percutaneous syringe, she administered a quick shot of some straw-yellow fluid. Waiting for it to take effect, Red noticed the hypnotic equipment which had been used to teach Vyko Speech folded tidily away from the end of his couch.

  The magician yawned and rubbed his eyes, exactly as if emerging from an ordinary night’s sleep. After a moment, he looked up at them, blinking.

  “I—I feel different,” he said, puzzled.

  “Are you all right?” Red inquired, and the boy nodded.

  “Yes, I feel very well. And I—I seem to understand things better.” Vyko frowned. “I know where I am, and I know that you’ve taught me your language by magic. Are you—?” He checked himself, raised his body into a sitting position, and made a quick pass with both hands.

  “Excuse us,” put in the woman in green. “Can you handle everything from here on? Duarak and I are wanted elsewhere.”

  “Yes, surely,” agreed Red absently. “Vyko, I’m afraid we aren’t magicians as you mean it. What you call magic, we call science, and it’s rather different.”

  “I have been taught that word, and what it means.” Vyko swung his feet to the floor. “And I can’t tell you how wonderful it is. I expect you know all about me, don’t you?”

  “Well,
not very much,” Red told him.

  “I was what we call a magician, you know, and I was taught all that the priests thought about the world, but I sometimes used to wonder if in the Old Days people had known better. Now I have the chance I’ve always wanted.”

  “What exactly did a magician do, among your people?” Red wanted to know.

  “Oh, he studied the old books, and serviced small arms, and made the supplies of the Breath of Terror—I can do all those things,” he added with pride. “But the most important thing about a magician was that he could look into the future. Priests could do everything else but that.”

  “And how does this talent work?”

  “It’s just something you know how to do. You can’t explain it—many times my people tried to teach more people to do it, and failed. It’s something you’re born with, I imagine.”

  Comparing Vyko’s enthusiastic acceptance of what had happened to him with his own overt hostility, Red felt a pang of shame. This was the right spirit—one of adventurousness.

  “Well, we’re going to show you all round Centre—that’s this place where you are now,” Red stated. “The same thing happened to us as happened to you—we’re from a time in what to you were the Old Days, before the atomic war which destroyed our countries. But the people of this time know far, far more than we ever did.”

  “How much actually have you been told about where you are, and what everyone is doing?” Chantal inquired.

  Vyko seemed to pay attention to her for the first time. He ran his eyes curiously up and down her, noting her obviously feminine body under her coverall. “Are you not a woman?” he said after some moments’ hesitation.

  Chantal smiled broadly. “Of course,” she answered.

  “And you also know about—science?”

  “A little.”

  Vyko stood up, shaking his head in a puzzled gesture. “This is indeed a strange world I have come to. You see, among my people women can be neither priests nor magicians—they are never able to see into the future. Women’s duties are—domestic, like tanning hides and preparing food and liquor, and bearing children. Is that not so now?”