Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (17 page)

So I did succeed, Matheson thought. A strange surge of pride elated him. “Yes, but I can only go forwards,” he said. “If I go backwards I will return to the exact moment when I left. I don’t yet know why.”

“
And you never will,” the man said. The knowledge deflated him, despite his prophesized success.

Silence settled between them.

“
So what is your name?” he finally asked.

“
You may call me Racoczky Saint-Germain,” the man replied. “You are in my vessel.”

“
A spacecraft?”

“
No. It travels through space, but it is much more than that. I shall simply call it a vessel. We are in the spot the planet Earth occupied long ago, before its atmosphere perished and meteors tore its barren husk apart. Now there is only cosmic dust and fragments of the moon.”

Now Matheson knew what the feeling was that had gripped him the moment he had stepped off the pod. It was the feeling of being in an enormous tomb. He was in the graveyard of Earth. Although it shouldn’t have, the notion depressed him. All that effort, all that evolution gone to waste. All for nothing.

Racoczky stepped up to the sphere, feeling the texture of the craft with his elongated fingers. It looked nothing more than a large metal ball bearing. It bore no exterior controls whatsoever. Even the oculus was set to dilate upon his own biometric pattern.

“
I see your machine is actually quite simplistic,” Racoczky said with a faint trace of distain. “Obviously the rapid motion of the exterior of the craft generates the unified field necessary for sustaining the tachyon shield, thereby folding the space-time manifold and allowing for travel in the fourth dimension. Primitive, but ingenious.”

Matheson did not like the man’s patronizing tone. Did they have no manners in the distant future?

“
Are you alone here?” he thought to Racoczky. “Are there no others?”

“
There were others. They all perished. Died or killed themselves or translated themselves into pure electronic hums. Only I stayed as I am.”

“
How big is this vessel?” he asked. “Do you have museums? Artifacts of what went before? I’d be curious to see them.”

“
There is nothing,” Racoczky held up a long-fingered hand. “We have no interest in the past. It is gone.”

Matheson staggered a pace backwards, stunned. “Surely there must be something?” he said. “Books? Music? Shakespeare? Beethoven?”

“
Gone,” Racoczky answered. “We have no use for anything but technology.”

Matheson stammered. He’d had no idea of the effect this would have on him. Now it seemed that art, culture, everything he held dear, everything that made his life worth living, had gone, to be replaced by…what? Soulless machines? He began to eye Racoczky warily. Was the man himself some sort of mechanical construct?

Racoczky smiled grimly.

“
I am flesh and blood,” he said, reading Matheson’s thoughts. “But this is all that remains. These empty walls. My vessel is what we call a way station - an object removed from the temporal plane of existence. Here, we exist beyond space-time, no longer subject to the vagaries of physical laws, or the passage of time. In that respect, this craft is a little like myself.”

His eyes widened, “You mean—”

“
I am immortal,” Racoczky said. “I neither age nor die. None of us have, since the first treatment.”

“
Treatment?” Matheson repeated. “Then this is a medical procedure? An advancement of science that I might take back with me?” he thought. “Please,” he pleaded, sensing the other’s hesitancy. “You must let me know. Men have sought a cure for ageing since time began.”

Racoczky’s thoughts were suddenly shrouded from Matheson - a trick he supposed one learned through countless years of practice. He thought he saw a look of pity in the other man’s dark, piercing eyes.

“
The treatment, yes. A vaccine against ageing,” Racoczky said. “We discovered it by accident. Reactivated dormant stem cells by the use of a retrovirus. It was offered to all countries in the Western world.”

Again, Racoczky tuned his back on Matheson to observe the final agonized throws of a dying solar flare from a nearby sun.

“
Forgive me if I do not give you my full attention,” he said. “But it’s not every day one sees the final moments of an entire universe.”

“
What?” Matheson gaped.

He had not noticed before, but across the vast gulf of space, stars were winking out. One by one, they disappeared in faint explosion.

“
This is the moment you have waited for,” Racoczsky told him. “The end of the universe is here.”

Matheson stepped right up to the screen. As he watched, two of the spiral arms of a galaxy collided with each other. The whirlpool-like structure broke apart. In the process, an impossible number of worlds were wiped out.

“
Look at that,” Racoczky smiled at the screen. “The last of the universe. Dying. Two hundred million years ago, the milky way merged with the Andromeda galaxy. Throughout the universe, galaxies had died, creating supermassive black holes that pulled the debris and space dust across the cosmos into this – one last, final black hole. Now it is dragging the last remaining star systems toward each other. In a few hours, they will reach critical mass and explode, just like all the others have done. I have been watching this for thousands of your millennia. I have seen countless burgeoning civilizations destroyed. Innumerable stars perish. We call it
Charybdis
.”

“
But what about the immortalization treatment?” Matheson pressed.

“
Oh, it worked,” Racoczky turned back to him with a somber face. “Our stem cells constantly replenish themselves, forever turned on. The body does not die, does not age. But let me ask you this: once every cell in your body is replaced, are you really the same person, or are you something different altogether?”

Matheson listened as Racoczky went on. He had heard his argument before, and had never been able to answer it.

“
Do you stop being yourself? And if you are not yourself, has the old “you” ceased to exist? Each day, your body sheds thousands of skin cells to make way for new ones. Do you not then continually die each day? Can you say with certainty that you are that same Arthur Matheson who stepped out of that ship several minutes ago?”

“
I
—I don’t know,” he replied truthfully.

“
I have had time to ponder these questions.” Racoczky said with an enigmatic frown.

“
Where are the others of your race?” Matheson asked.

“
As I said, I am the last,” Racoczky answered. “Those that went to the stars did not return. I think they have merged with the universe, which has become their final resting place. Perhaps they are at peace. Who knows? They may still exist in one form or another.”

“
But you didn’t go?”

“
I like my body. I enjoy the immediacy of physical experience. Every thousand years or so I download my memories into this ship - so that I do not forget anything when my brain reaches its maximum biological capacity. Would you like to see?”

He waved his hand over one of the glowing lights inside the walls. An instant later, a three-dimensional image flashed before Matheson’s mind’s eye. Another thought transmission.

Suddenly he thought he saw vast cityscapes - the like of which no mortal man had ever seen - huge boiling oceans of metal churning across distant planets. And men and women, reduced to a pre-Eden-like state, scampering through unruly jungles populated by gigantic fruits and vines.

It resembled Paradise.

It made him sad. Sad in a way he could not describe. He missed all the people he had known who had now died. All the girlfriends who had perished, all the relatives now turned to dust. It made him think of the cruelty of Time. He resolved that when he returned, he would give away his invention for free, to everyone who needed it. They would seed the stars of the future and the past.

One last question bothered him.

“
How do you know that galaxy is the last, Racoczky? The universe is infinite. There could be more star systems, more planets out there.”

“
My ship detects no more,” Racoczky laughed. “Our instruments are limitless in scope. Our wormholes can take us anywhere. Distance is no object. Yet now all my devices tell me there simply is nowhere else. The universe may be infinite—but its infinity is simply the absence of matter. Matter itself can have an end. And in seven hundred billion years, you’d be surprised how many planets you can explore.”

Seven hundred billion. So that was how far he’d come—to the end of it all.

It seemed so final, that he could put a figure on the end of time.

“
Excuse me,” said Racoczky, “I must feed.”

He waved his hand over the console. The wall warped open to reveal a thin, transparent tumbler. Dark red liquid splashed into it from a faucet hidden in the ship’s mechanism.

“
An unfortunate side-effect of the treatment is that I can no longer imbibe drink or food. I must have the raw nutrients direct from source.”

Racoczky took a sip.

Matheson felt his stomach drop. “That’s blood,” he said.

“
A synthetic compound, yes. Cloned from my existing supply based on the DNA pattern of a human being.”

Realization rocked Matheson. He took a startled step away from his host.

“
My god, you’re a vampire.”

Racoczky smiled, surprised. “In your terminology.”

Appalled, Matheson backed up toward the pod. But he knew it was futile; Saint-Germain could cross the distance between them in an instant. He knew it from the man’s mind. Unpleasant thoughts were creeping to its surface. The inheritors of man’s empire were its destroyers—these evil things had become the rulers of the universe!

“
Be not afraid. I am no creature of superstition,” Racoczky laughed. “I cast a shadow, just like you. Once I was even human. True, in the first few centuries we did feed on your kind. We preyed on them wherever we could. But we were many and you were few. Out of necessity, we learned to manufacture what we required. Soon afterwards, all those who refused the Treatment gladly accepted it. That was how humanity perished.”

Matheson’s mind reeled. All the horrors he had witnessed, all the endlessly futile wars, all had been for nothing. Humanity had perished. It had not died out. It had simply been transformed—into what? Into monsters?

“
You are undoubtedly in shock,” Racoczky said. “But in time you will accept the destiny of humankind is to shed what is human. Stay with me awhile. You have travelled so far. Now let us watch the end of the universe. We are a speck in God’s eye, about to witness the destruction of his creation. And I for one am happy to see it end. I have found there are no more mysteries to explore. I long for change. Now, this is that change. Watch!”

Matheson stared into the view screen.

Two massive black holes, simply fuzzy vortices of light within the blackness of collapsed stars, began to churn more fiercely. As he watched, the lightless chasms converged into one yawning vortex of darkness. Several small constellations of stars erupted at the rim of the scything hole. Fear seized his stomach. This was it - the final supermassive vortex into which all other galaxies had been sucked.

“
Behold!” Saint-Germain announced. “
Charybdis!
”

The rim of the black hole - if it could be called such - suddenly blazed with light. Thousands of star systems imploded under its tremendous gravity. The resulting cosmic windstorm disappeared like celestial confetti into the gaping maw. Matheson watched with awe as the colossal black mass consumed the entire, swirling nebulae. Then even the dust was gone. The black hole swept the last dying sun into itself with a faint glimmer of a nuclear explosion, viewed from hundreds of light years away. All light vanished.

Only a void remained.

The way station lights flickered, reduced to ambient red, presumably in accordance with Racoczky’s telepathic wishes.

“
In a few moments, the black hole will collapse upon itself. Then perhaps a new universe will be born like a phoenix from the ashes of the old one,” Racoczky mumbled, dreamlike. “Of course, the explosion might disintegrate us, protected as we are. This new universe will contain a new sort of matter—one totally unprecedented. In any case it will be billions of years before the first life forms evolve, if indeed this universe is capable of supporting any life at all. I have theorized that perhaps there have been many universes with no life of any kind. Those universes simply were—then over countless eons they also vanished without a trace.”

“
I can’t believe this is all there is,” Matheson said.

“
What more can there be?” Racoczky asked. “My world ended thousands of years after I should have died. Everything became so different. It was no longer the place I had known. And I too am different. I feel things and have thoughts I never would have as a mortal man. Whether I still exist as Racoczky Saint-Germain or as some cursed immortal being, I shall never know. And now, watching it all disappear, and knowing it may never repeat itself, I only feel isolated from every other living thing in the universe.”

He turned back to Matheson, “Except you.”

His hand crept onto Matheson’s shoulder. It was cold and hard. He realized how close he had been standing next to Racoczky in his desire to see more of the end of the universe. Had his immortal thirst truly abated? Was he satisfied with synthetic liquid?