Vestiges of Time (10 page)

that her parentage and her Oriental ancestry would give her the mastery of brush and pen for which “China” had long been famous in this world, she found that this did not satisfy her, and ultimately, after some initial successes, she largely gave up her painting and began to devote herself to revolutionary activities— for which she was eventually jailed and given psychiatric treatment. The treatment failed to change her views, although she simulated recantation sufficiently to be released. Upon her release she immediately sought out the strongest revolutionary movement of them all, the almost legendary BrathelLanza. In the Brotherhood she found the acceptance that had so long been denied her. Now she lived full time in the Underground, going to the surface only on occasion, working again as an artist and designer—not such a strange occupation for a revolutionary, if you think about it. Part of her artistic efforts were devoted to the design and execution of posters thought up by the BrathelLanza’s propaganda department—the leaders of the Brotherhood knew the necessity of getting their message across to the masses. The rest of her efforts were spent on more innocuous types of art, these to be sold through the art galleries of VarKhohs and the profits channeled into the treasury of the BrathelLanza. The mysterious artist who signed her delicate, almost esoteric works merely “ED” had become something, of a rage among certain castes of the city who took seriously the collecting of art. EnDera also worked in other capacities for the Brotherhood, one of which was as companion and mistress to a newly appointed general, a barbarian with the outlandish name of HarkosNor.

“And you’re happy living like this?” I asked her once as she sat before her easel, a watercolor landscape ablaze with bright flowers evolving under the deft strokes of her brush.

“Happy?” she said, pausing to dip her brush in clear water. “I don’t usually t
hink
of myself in those terms,

but—well, I suppose I am, as happy as I can be in the world the way it is. Someday, perhaps . .

“Someday?” I repeated, making the word a question.

“Someday the world will be different and I will be free and happy in it. When that day comes, everyone in NakrehVatee will be happy.” Her brush moved toward the ceramic palette and a pool of brilliant yellow color.

“Everyone but the ones we”—I now used the first- person plural when speaking of the BrathelLanza— “throw out of their positions of wealth and power, is that right?”

“Well, of course
they
won’t be happy. But they’ve had their day. Like the dinosaurs. And they’ll be extinct too.”

A yellow flower blossomed on the rough texture of the watercolor paper.

“But everyone else will be happy?” I asked.

“I certainly hope so.”

“And what about you?”

“Isn’t that what I said?” She rinsed the brush in clean water. “I’ll be happy then. I’ll have done my job.” There was an angry, disturbed look in her eyes as she dipped the brush into a green pool and then began to paint a stem and leaves for the still-wet yellow flower.

I said no more. Maybe I’d already said too much.

But I wondered.

What does a born revolutionary do when all the revolutions are over?

Well, there’s always another government to overthrow somewhere else, I suppose.

As for old KaphNo, except for bits and pieces I’d gathered here and there, mostly when he was rather deep in his cups, his life was a closed book. What had changed him from a satisfied member of one of the higher and more affluent castes to an almost fanatical

revolutionary bent on destroying the society in which he’d lived the first fifty or so years of his life, I never learned, though I did learn that he was just as I have described him: whereas AkweNema and the lord DessaTyso and the bulk of the members of the BrathelLanza desired only to simplify and reorder the caste system of NakrehVatee, to introduce into it more elements of justice and mobility between the castes, KaphNo would have been truly satisfied with nothing less than the total abolition of the caste system itself. That was his desire. But he was an intelligent and realistic enough man to know that that was something he’d never see in his lifetime. He would have to settle for half of that loaf: the accomplishment of the stated goals of the BrathelLanza. But it galled him.

And, as a rule, he was a shy, reserved man, little given to talking in the presence of strangers, or even in the presence of close acquaintances unless it was concerning one of the many subjects of which he had mastery.

A high-level technologist by birth and training, KaphNo had never stopped his education, and could, at the drop of a suitable hat, argue medicine with AkweNema and ThefeRa, microbiology with SkorTho, psychology with GrelLo, or aesthetics with EnDera. And as often as not he would win those arguments.

Why he seemed to like me so well I had no idea— it was certainly not because I was his intellectual peer! —but I found myself flattered that he did. In turn, when I learned to take his frequently taciturn behavior with a grain of salt, I got to like him as well. Of all those in the Underground, he was the only man I really did like without reservation.

And I wasn’t certain whether I really liked EnDera all that well. I felt a strong physical attraction for her, of course, and there were many things I did like about her personality, her mind, and I could understand her problems and even sympathize with them, but I’m not

certain that I sympathized with her revolutionary ardor, though I’m sure her hatred of the system against which she fought was very similar to the hatred of the Kriths and all they stood for that had grown in me.

Yet—and this is the strange part—neither did I sympathize with KaphNo’s even greater revolutionary ardor, and I called him friend.

“All the world’s a bit queer, but for thee and me,” said the old Pennsylvania Dutchman, “and sometimes I wonder about thee.”

You know, there are times when I wonder a little even about myself. . . .

Of a Dream, and of Identities

When I had been in the Underground only a little over a month, my replicates had reached ML-2Y and looked very much as I must have looked as a two-year- old. Their lives differed in that they were never really conscious, and were taken from their encanters every other day for brief periods during which their muscles were exercised—cerebral programming had given them only the vaguest hint of what walking was all about. Then the replicates looked like 342 identical little brothers, normal and happy, if always “asleep.”

In many ways it seemed much longer than a month to me, though I was certain that by now it must be about the first of October, as time was measured by the calendars of a world a long way from this Here and Now.

Two weeks later AkweNema’s “daughter” was decanted for the last time and gradually awakened to the world outside the glass cylinders in which she’d grown from the cells taken from a dying girl's body. Education, in addition to the cerebral data fed to her before decanting, was begun, and every effort was made by the psychology team to re-create in the replicate a personality as similar as possible to that of the real daughter. AkweNema’s reaction to the seeming resurrection was hard to gauge, but I got the impression that it alternated between delight and horror, and filled him with an almost morbid fascination he could not effectively fight. And there were times when KaphNo seemed to regret the growing of the replicate; things might have

been easier for AkweNema had his daughter died once and for all.

At the same time as the replicate girl’s decanting, my own replicates had reached the stage of three-year-olds and looked like a band of miniature HarkosNors—or Eric Matherses, the name to which I was more accustomed—or even Thimbron Pamassoses, as I had been called when I was their age, or rather at their “maturation level.”

Like AkweNema, I didn’t know whether I was fascinated and awed by the replication process or disgusted and frightened by it. Maybe it was a mixture of both, with a touch of narcissism thrown in for flavoring.

And as the time passed in the Underground, the dream I’d had a year before kept coming back to me:

A city of towering buildings and streets and parks illuminated in the night by floating globes of light, a city that I could see in my dreams but dimly and with double vision, poorly and out of focus and half hidden by rain and mist, but what I saw told me that it was no city I had ever seen before, no city ever built by humankind.

Despite the floating light globes, much of the alien city lay in darkness and shadow, and after a while, as my vision cleared, I saw movement in those shadows, furtive movement, stealthy and quiet, a figure here, another there, wrapped in dark clothing, but now and again betrayed by a glint of light from metal. All the moving figures in the quiet city carried weapons.

One of the dark-clad figures stepped briefly into light and for a moment I saw him clearly: a man in his thirties, tall and scarred from many battles, tanned, blond, wearing a short beard; he carried a Paratimer R-4 power pistol in his right hand, a knife in his left. This man, whom I shockingly recognized, turned as if facing me, as if peering into
my
eyes, and on his lips was a twisted, bitter smile of anger and hatred, of satis

faction and revenge. Then he turned away and vanished into shadows.

In another place another figure revealed itself momentarily. This too was a tall, scarred, blond, bearded man in his thirties, and he carried a large, heavy energy rifle in both hands.

And in still another place, stepping out of the shadows for a moment to make his way forward, was the same man. An army of men in the night, all identical, all perhaps cloned from a single person—so went my dream.

The army of raiders slipped silently through the night, all headed for a single destination wherein lay something they/he wished to destroy. In my dream there was a chill in me such as I’d never known before.

Time had gone by now, how much of it I didn’t know, and they had almost reached their goal when, in the sky above the nonhuman city, a great light burst, white and brilliant, destroying the shadows and revealing those who had hidden in them. For a moment the raiders stopped in their tracks, startled by the light; then, as if guided by a single mind, they darted forward, running through the streets and across the parklike areas toward the largest building of the city.

From the building gunfire opened, sending shot and flame into the streets and the parks, and from the portals of the building issued an army of men—they, too, all identical, or nearly so—and all of them looked very much like a man—no, a
being
whom I’d known as Mager, a being who was slender and wiry and had a face made of craggy planes and tiny white lines like scars, who had neural organs complex enough to be called “brains” in addition to the one he had in his head. His type was very hard to kill. . . .

The Mager-force rushed into the streets, automatic slug throwers in their hands, spitting leaden death into the attackers, whose leading element was within range

of the defenders’ weapons. One of the blond men took a bullet in the chest. ...

I staggered backward from the impact of the slug as it ripped through the right side of my chest just below the nipple, shattering ribs, puncturing a lung, exiting through my back, and tearing away great globs of flesh. I staggered backward more shocked than pained, stunned, dazed, knowing as the pain began that the wound was mortal and I was going to die.

I tried to raise my stolen R-4 power pistol, to take at least one of the Magers with me, but I didn’t have the strength; the pistol was too heavy, slipped from my weakened grip, fell to the earth, and in moments I followed it, darkness, pain, and death coming over me as I fell.

The first of
me
died, but more of
me
came on, a dozen, two dozen; and here and there, as the collective
I
rushed forward, the individual
I
took more wounds. One of me was hit in the head, my skull shattered. I died instantly.

But I’d also taken a gut wound, a
me
some yards away, and I lay in agony as blood seeped onto the ground.

And I ran forward, a different
me,
a stream of bullets ripping away my left arm, but somehow I still fired with my right until I collapsed in unbearable pain.

Yet still, dying here and there, others of
me
terribly wounded,
I
came on against the Magers and still they killed me, though I wouldn’t stop until they’d killed
me
all. . . .

And maybe they never would.

There my dream ended; it always ended there every time. And I wondered about it.

Oh, the Tromas in their wisdom had assured me that I had no psionic abilities, none at all, so I couldn’t possibly be precognitive, could I? The dream couldn’t

possibly be some dim vision of the future, seen through a glass darkly, could it? Well, could it?

Religion didn’t play a major role in the lives of the common people of NakrehVatee. It was there and was given lip service. The Bright Lords of Life and, more importantly, the Dark Lords of Death were given their due, but no more than that. Only among those of the higher castes, those who truly believed that through the cycles of reincarnation they had at last reached the point where they could hope to abandon the Wheel and look forward to an eternity in the land of the Blessed beyond the darkling waters of the Mountains of the West, was a great deal of thought given to the preparation and maintenance of the tombs in which their physical bodies would be preserved. Rather than a way of life, to most NakrehVatea religion was a mood, a coloring that seeped down to them from the higher reaches of the social pyramid, and really not much else.

And if most of the people of NakrehVatee had little regard for religion in their day-to-day lives, then the members of the BrathelLanza had even less. The revolutionary movement did not embrace atheism, didn’t exactly reject the idea of godhood itself, but if"'" did at least reject the polytheism tacitly accepted by the bulk of the nation’s population. Monotheism was the order of the day among the avant-garde of the BrathelLanza and, like so many other people who have traveled the long road from pan- to poly- to monotheism, they looked toward the sun as the physical manifestation of their concept of the deity—a la the golden sun disk of Aton introduced to the world by Ikhnaton some thirty-three centuries ago.

For this reason the BrathelLanza, along with the rest of the NakrehVatea on the surface world above, did celebrate at least one religious holiday each year, that of the Return of the Sun King from the Dark Re-