Not exactly, Harry answered. Even the best of them aren’t as good as this. In the Mobius Continuum, he explained, thoughts have matter, weight. That’s because they are in fact physical things in an immaterial place. Consider a tiny meteorite in space – which can punch a hole through the skin of a space-probe! There’s something of a similarity. Issue a thought here and it goes on forever, just as light and matter go on forever in our universe. A star is born, and we see it blink into life billions of years later, because that’s how long it took its light to reach us.
That’s what thought is like here: long after we’re gone, our thoughts will still exist here. But you’re right to a degree -about telepathy, I mean. Perhaps telepaths have a way of tapping in – a mental system which they themselves don’t understand – to the Mobius Continuum! And Harry chuckled. There’s ‘a thought’ for you! But if that’s the case, how about seers, eh? What about your prognosticators? Clarke didn’t immediately grasp his meaning. I’m sorry
Well, if the telepaths are using the Mobius Continuum, however unconsciously, what of the forecasters? Are they also ‘tapping in’, to scry into the future?
Clarke was apprehensive again. Of course, he said, I’d forgotten that. You can see into the future, can’t you?
Something of it, Harry answered. In fact I can go there! In my incorporeal days I could even manifest myself in past and future time, but now that I have a body again that’s beyond me – so far, anyway. But I can still follow past and future time-streams, so long as I stick to the Mobius Continuum. And I can see you’ve guessed it: yes, that’s what I want to show you – the future, and the past.
Harry, I don’t know if I’m ready for this. I –
We’re not actually going there, Harry calmed him. We’ll just take a peek, that’s all. And before Clarke could protest, he opened a door on future time.
Clarke stood with Harry on the threshold of the future-time door and his mind was almost paralysed by the wonder and awe of it. All was a chaos of millions – no, billions – of lines of pure blue light etched against an otherwise impenetrable background eternity of black velvet. It was like some incredible meteor shower, where all of the meteors raced away from him into unimaginable deeps of space, except their trails didn’t dim but remained brilliantly printed on the sky – printed, in fact, on time! And the most awesome thing was this: that one of these twining, twisting streamers of blue light issued outwards from himself, extending or extruding from him and plummeting away into the future. Beside Clarke, Harry produced another blue thread. It ribboned out of him and shot away on its own neon course into tomorrow.
What are they? Clarke’s question was a whisper in the metaphysical Mobius ether.
Harry was also moved by the sight. The life-threads of humanity, he answered. That’s all of Mankind – of which these two here, yours and mine, make up the smallest possible fraction. This one of mine used to be Alec Kyle’s, but at the end it had grown very dim, almost to the point of expiring. Right now, though –
It’s one of the brightest! And suddenly Clarke found himself completely unafraid. Even when Harry said:
Only pass through this door, and you’d follow your life-thread to its conclusion. I can do it and return – indeed I have done it – but not to the very end. That’s something I don’t want to know about. I’d like to think there isn’t an end, that Man goes on forever. He closed the door, opened another. And this time he didn’t have to say anything.
It was the door to the past, to the very beginning of human life on Earth. The myriad blue life-threads were there as before; but this time, instead of expanding into the distance, they contracted and narrowed down, targeting on a far-away dazzling blue origin.
Before Harry could close that door, too, Clarke let the scene sear itself into his memory. If from this time forward he got nothing else out of life, this adventure in the Mobius Continuum was something he wanted to remember to his dying day.