“A modest disclaimer,” he said, as though acknowledging a routine we had to go through. “We feel that you handled the entire matter—a rather complex one—in exemplary fashion.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Up to this point,” he went on without bothering with my question, “we approve of your actions. However, to carry your mission farther would be to risk creation of an eighth-order probability vortex. You will understand the implications of this fact.”
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t,” I hedged. “Who are you? How did you get in here? This enclave is double sealed.”
“I think we should deal from the outset on a basis of complete candor,” the man in red said. “I know your identity, your mission. My presence here, now, should be ample evidence of that. Which in turn should make it plain that I represent a still later era than your own—and that our judgment must override your instructions.”
I grunted. “So the Seventh Era comes onstage, all set to Fix It Forever.”
“To point out that we have the advantage of you—not only technically but in our view of the continuum as well—is to belabor the obvious.”
“Uh-huh. But what makes you think another set of vigilantes won’t land on your tail, to fix your fixing?”
“There will be no later Timesweep,” the bald man said. “Ours is the Final Intervention. Through Seventh Era efforts the temporal structure will be restored not only to stability, but will be reinforced by the refusion of an entire spectrum of redundant entropic vectors.”
I nodded, rather tiredly. “I see: you’re improving on nature by grafting all the threads of unrealized history back into the Mainstem. Doesn’t it strike you that’s just the sort of well-intentioned tampering that the primitive Timesweepers set out to undo?”
“I live in an era that has already begun to reap the benefits of temporal reinforcement,” he said firmly. “We exist in a state of vitality that prior eras could only dimly sense in moments of exultation. We—”
“You’re kidding yourselves. Opening up a whole new order of meddling just opens up a whole new order of problems.”
“Our calculations indicate otherwise. Now—”
“Did you ever stop to think that there might be a natural evolutionary process at work here—and that you’re aborting it? That the mind of man might be developing toward a point where it will expand into new conceptual levels-and that when it does, it will need a matrix of outlying probability strata to support it? That you’re fattening yourself on the seed-grain of the far future?”
For the first time, he faltered, but only for an instant.
“Not valid,” he said. “The fact that no later era has stepped in to interfere is the best evidence that ours is the final Sweep.”
“Suppose a later era did step in: What form do you think their interference would take?”
He gave me a flat look. “It would certainly not take the form of a Sixth Era Agent, busily erasing data from Third and Fourth Era records.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”
“Then what—” he started in a reasonable tone and checked himself. An idea was beginning to get through, and he wasn’t liking it very well. “You,” he said. “You’re not…”
And before I could confirm or deny, he vanished.
40
The human mind is a pattern, nothing more. The first dim flicker of awareness in the evolving forebrain of Australopithecus carried that pattern in embryo; and down through all the ages, as the human neural engine increased in power and complexity, gained control of its environment in geometrically expanding increments, the pattern never varied.
Man clings to his self-orientation as the psychological center of the Universe. He can face any challenge within that framework, suffer any loss, endure any hardship—so long as the structure remains intact.
Without it he’s a mind adrift in a trackless infinity, lacking any scale against which to measure his aspirations, his losses, his victories.
Even when the light of his intellect shows him that the structure is itself a product of his brain; that infinity knows no scale, and eternity no duration—still he clings to his self-non-self concept, as a philosopher clings to a life he knows must end, to ideals he knows are ephemeral, to causes he knows will be forgotten.
The man in red was the product of a mighty culture, based over fifty thousand years in the future of Nexx Central, itself ten millennia advanced over the first time explorers of the Old Era. He knew, with all the awareness of a superbly trained intelligence, that the existence of a later-era operative invalidated forever his secure image of the continuum, and of his people’s role therein.
But like the ground ape scuttling to escape the leap of the great cat, his instant, instinctive response to the threat to his most cherished illusions was to go to earth.
Where he went I would have to follow.
41
Regretfully, I stripped away layer on layer of inhibitive conditioning, feeling the impact of ascending orders of awareness descending on me like tangible rockfalls. I saw the immaculate precision of the Nexx-built chamber disintegrate in my eyes into the shabby makeshift that it was, saw the glittering complexity of the instrumentation dwindle in my sight until it appeared as no more than the crude mud images of a river tribesman, or the shiny trash in a jackdaw’s nest. I felt the multiordinal universe unfold around me, sensed the layered planet underfoot, apprehended expanding space, dust-clotted, felt the sweep of suns in their orbits, knew once again the rhythm of Galactic creation and dissolution, grasped and held poised in my mind the interlocking conceptualizations of time-space, past-future, is-is-not.
I focused a tiny fraction of my awareness on the ripple in the glassy surface of first-order reality, probed at it, made contact…
I stood on a slope of windswept rock, amid twisted shrubs with exposed roots that clutched for support like desperate hands. The man in red stood thirty feet away. As my feet grated on the loose scatter of pebbles, he twisted toward me, wide-eyed.
“No!” he shouted into the wind and stooped, caught up the man-ape’s ancient weapon, threw it at me. The stone slowed, fell at my feet.
“Don’t make it any more difficult than it has to be,” I said. He cried out—an inarticulate shout of anguish springing from the preverbal portion of his brain—and disappeared. I followed, through a blink of light and darkness.
Great heat, dazzling sunlight that made me think of Dinosaur Beach, so far away, in a simpler world. There was loose, powdery dust underfoot. Far away, a line of black trees lined the horizon. Near me, the man in red, aiming a small, flat weapon. Behind him, two small, dark-bearded men in soiled djellabahs of coarse-woven black cloth stared, making mystic motions with labor-gnarled hands.
He fired. Through a sheet of pink and green fire that showered around me without touching me I saw the terror in his eyes. He vanished.
Deep night, the clods of a frozen field, a patch of yellow light gleaming from the parchment-covered window of a rude hut. He crouched against a low wall of broken stones, hiding himself in shadow like any frightened beast.
“This is useless,” I said. “You know it can have only one end.”
He screamed and vanished.
A sky like the throat of a thousand tornadoes; great vivid sheets of lightning that struck down through writhing rags of black cloud, struck upward from raw, rain-lashed peaks of steaming rock. A rumble under my feet like the subterranean breaking of a tidal wave of magma.
He hovered, half insubstantial, in the air before me, a ghost of the remote future existing here in the planet’s dawn, his pale face a flickering mask of agony.
“You’ll destroy yourself,” I called over the boom and shriek of the wind. “You’re far outside your operational range—”
He vanished. I followed. We stood on the high arch of a railless bridge spanning a man-made gorge ten thousand feet deep. I knew it as a city of the Fifth Era, circa A.D. 20,000.
“What do you want of me?” he howled through the bared teeth of the cornered carnivore.
“Go back,” I said. “Tell them … as much as they must know.”
“We were so close,” he said. “We thought we had won the great victory over Nothingness.”
“Not quite total Nothingness. You still have your lives to live—everything you had before—”
“Except a future. We’re a dead end, aren’t we? We’ve drained the energies of a thousand sterile entropic lines to give the flush of life to the corpse of our reality. But there’s nothing beyond for us, is there? Only the great emptiness.”
“You had a role to play. You’ve played it—will play it. Nothing must change that.”
“But you …” he stared across empty space at me. “Who are you? What are you?”
“You know what the answer to that must be,” I said.