Vestiges of Time (2 page)

A Visiting Shadow

I have only vague recollections of the next half hour or so, though I dimly recall being half dragged, half carried into the building to which RyoNa had led me, and down a long, dimly lighted corridor to the doors of what must have been a huge cargo elevator—at the time I could only vaguely wonder at the presence of the elevator in a decaying building in the city’s worst slums. The elevator doors closed behind us, I seem to remember, and then there was the sensation of dropping, going down, down, down. And that’s all I can remember for a while.

When I opened my eyes next I was lying on a cot in a small room illuminated by a single strip of light that ran across the ceiling, a dim light that revealed damp walls of concrete or stone. To my nostrils came the odors of stagnation and decay, as if this room had been long unused, and when it was used it wasn’t for the most pleasant of purposes.

RyoNa stood not far from the cot on which I lay, a vague-smile on his face. Behind him stood two of the black-clad apes, one on each side of the doorway, and they looked at me without kindness or sympathy. I thought that the big red bruise on the cheek of one of them might have something to do with their lack of friendliness.

At last RyoNa spoke, and the tone of his voice was more friendly than the looks I was getting from his companions. “It’s unfortunate that it had to be this way, Harkos.” HarkosNor was the name by which RyoNa knew me. “But I could hardly be certain of

your cooperation once—well, once you found out that I really have no connections with the chronal-dis- placement project at all.”

I suppose I should have been surprised, and if my head hadn’t hurt so much I might have been, but right then I was only disappointed. He’d lied to me, strung me along—not that such a thing seemed greatly out of character for
him
—but to what end I couldn’t then guess. As I was about to open my mouth and try to get my voice working so that I could ask him, he spoke again.

“Others will be coming soon to speak with you, some very important people, and they will answer your questions for you, so don’t even ask them of me. I was instructed to say that you are valued highly and that they would prefer that you suffer no more hurt.” “I’d prefer it that way myself,” I finally managed to say.

“I’m sure,” RyoNa said, then took a hesitant step forward and fished something out of the folds of his dark robe. “This may be of some help to you.” He bent forward, still more than an arm’s reach from the cot where I lay, and placed a small bottle on the floor. “Drink that. It won’t hurt you and may help to relieve the pain in your head.”

I looked at the bottle with suspicion and then back at RyoNa with the same feeling.

“If we wanted you dead, you would already be dead,” he said, with the hint of a smile on his lips. “And why should we waste time with poison?”

Maybe he had a point there.

Then he backed to the doorway and allowed one of the black-clad characters to open the door for him. As he disappeared between them, he said, “Please wait as patiently as you can, Harkos. The others should be here soon.”

The two men in black, still looking uglily at me, moved through the doorway and closed the door behind them. I heard the distinct sound of a heavy bolt sliding home.
Clack!
Sure, I’d wait. What else could I do?

I lay still for a while before I carefully lifted myself from the cot and went to get the little bottle of colorless liquid that RyoNa had left for me. Maybe it was something to help my head; with the passage of time the pain in it had not lessened much. It could have been something other than what he’d claimed, but, on the probability that it was a painkiller, I decided to take it. What did I have to lose now anyway?

The simple movement from the cot to the bottle and back again was enough to double the pounding in my head and make me wonder if the blow had caused a concussion, or worse. I drank the liquid— right then I might have taken it even if I’d strongly suspected it to be something worse than it actually was.

There was an oily, fruity taste to it and the tang of alcohol, and it burned my throat as it went down, but almost instantly I began to feel better, or thought I did.

In a few minutes I could sit up on the side of the cot, feeling something not greatly worse than a moderate hangover, and that too seemed to be passing. I silently thanked RyoNa for the medicine, if for nothing else.

With the passing of the pain I was able to examine my new surroundings a little more closely, though I found them of little interest. The cot was the room’s only article of furniture. Three of the walls were flat, damp concrete, I saw now, with a slightly slimy feel when I touched them with my fingertips. The fourth wall was different only in that a door had been cut in it, a heavy door that seemed to have been made from a single piece of wood, which I knew to be b
o
lted from the outside. The floor was made of the same concrete as the walls, and so was the ceiling, which was distinguished only by the dimly glowing

strip that ran from one of the side walls to the other. From inside the room there appeared no means either of turning off the light or of controlling its intensity. And exactly how the strip, which appeared to be made of translucent plastic maybe a quarter of an inch thick and three inches wide, produced its light, I didn’t know, nor did I concern myself greatly with it.

Having examined the room and discovered nothing that would help me out of my predicament, I went back to the cot, sat down, and was about to begin what I hoped to be a dispassionate analysis of my situation, when I became aware of something else in the room, something that had not been there a moment before.

In one of the two comers most remote from the door, in the shadows where the glowing strip illuminated to an even lesser extent, there seemed to be the beginning of the formation of a cloud of smoke, hazy wisps turning slowly in the air, extending from the floor nearly to the ceiling. There was also, in the atmosphere, even less tangible but nonetheless real, a sensation that had become an almost familiar one to me: a sense of electrical tension, a feeling such as one sometimes has at the approach of a thunderstorm, the sense of power that you can’t see or hear or touch or smell but that you know is there.

The smokiness in the comer grew thicker, more intense, more opaque, and now had begun to take on the shape I’d come to expect—from top to bottom the hazy form was about the height of a man, and, like a man, it had the outlines of two legs, a torso, two arms, a head set above shadowy shoulders, though within the head there could be discerned no facial features whatsoever. Now the shadow, the haze, had solidified as far as I thought it would, had become as substantial as it could.

I waited for the Shadowy Man to speak, as I knew he would.

“Well, Eric,” the voice said out of the haze, a voice uncertain at first, then more positive, a voice that I knew to sound exactly like my own, “I hope you’re not feeling too badly now.”

I shook my head. “I’m okay.” Then I said to him, “I was afraid the Tromas had destroyed you back in KHL-000.” He knew what I was talking about.

A chuckle came out of the shadowy haze. “Damn,” my voice said from the comer, “this could get confusing.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What you’re talking about is in your past, you see,” the Shadowy Man said, “but it’s in
my
future. It hasn’t happened to
me
yet, so I don’t know the outcome of our fight with the Krithian ladies any more than you do.”

“I see,” I said, though I wasn’t certain that I did.

“I hope you do, though I’m not positive I do. As I said, it
could
get confusing.”

“Yeah,” I said, and grunted, and then waited for him to tell me whatever it was he had to tell me. He’d come for a reason, I was certain of that.

“Your head’s not hurting now, and don’t worry, you don’t have a concussion. That lump will go away in a few days.”

“That’s comforting,” I said, despite myself feeling awe in
his
presence, and still wondering just what our relationship was/would be, for somehow in the confusion of time future and time past, the Shadowy Man and I were very closely linked, terribly closely.

, “And I suggest that the best thing for you will be to cooperate with the members of the BrathelLanza when they come to visit you.”

“The what?” That word again!

“The BrathelLanza,” he repeated. “You’ll find out what it is in due time. For now, cooperate with them as fully as possible, for from cooperating with them

will come answers to the questions you want to ask of me, and a means of action.”

“A means of action?” I asked stupidly.

“Yes, a means of action, the action that will bring . . . well, you’ll see,” he said, and chuckled as if he were playing a very funny joke on me.

“What in—” I started to ask, but it was already too late. The haziness in the comer was beginning to lose its manlike form, to become vague, mixing fogs that dissipated even more quickly than they had formed. The electrical tension was gone from the air.

“Damn!” I said aloud, and got up from the cot and walked to the corner. There was nothing there, of course. Nothing at all.

“Why do you have to be so damned mysterious?” I asked the empty air, and if I did hear a chuckle for answer, I was probably imagining it. Wasn’t I?

I sat back down on the cot, cursed the Shadowy Man—whoever, whatever, he was—wished for a cigarette, of which I had none, or a cup of coffee, of which I had as little, and wondered just exactly what it was this “BrathelLanza” had in store for me. Probably not a time machine—not if RyoNa had finally been telling me the truth. Then what? Answers? “A means of action.” Now what did that mean?

Damn, damn, damn, I said to myself, and sat on the edge of the cot and waited for the arrival of those “very important people” that RyoNa had promised were coming.

From the Far World to VarKhohs

While I waited in that dim, dank cell somewhere under the city of VarKhohs on a Timeline that the beings I called Kriths had been very secretive about— though not secretive enough, it seemed at the time—I found that despite myself I was reviewing the events of the past year or so, the sequence of events that had led me from what had been a rather comfortable if sometimes dangerous condition to one far less comfortable and perhaps even more dangerous, and I wondered about the wisdom of some of the decisions I’d made; even up until three or four months ago I could have stayed out of it—I think—and lived not a bad life with Sally way off there on a world of the far Temporal-East. But my curiosity, and maybe a taste for vengeance, wouldn’t let me . . . and here I was.

Thanks to the help of this mysterious Shadowy Man —whoever, whatever he is—Sally and I had escaped from the Tromas on KHL-000, had escaped to a place the Shadowy Man had picked out for us, a pleasant enough world a long way to the T-East where we probably could have spent the rest of our lives in comfort, if I hadn’t. been so damned stubborn, so damned curious, so damned determined to see if I could get in a lick against the Kriths.

The Shadowy Man had provided us with a skudder and I couldn’t resist, sooner or later, using it. Somewhere, somewhen in time, I was to be mixed up with the Shadowy Man again, was somehow to become a part of him, it seemed, and to do that I was going to

have to be able to move about in time itself, future time and past time. I had to have a time machine. So I thought.

Once I was certain that Sally would have no problems if I were gone, would live like a queen or a demi- goddess in the semibarbaric kingdoms of the world we’d found, I went back to the skudder in the woods, leaving her a note that told her what I was doing and why. I hoped she’d understand. And I was going to miss her like crazy, but I couldn’t let her risk her life again by going along with my insane ideas.
Maybe
I’d be able to come back to her.

So, like that thief in the night, I took'the skudder the Shadowy Man had provided for us, and set off across the Lines to see what I could find.

Specifically what I was looking for was the one known world that had developed/would develop a device capable of moving about in time. I was relatively certain that such a world did exist, although finding it wasn’t easy. ,

Like the spectrum of a beam of sunlight shown on paper through a prism, there is no sharp distinction from world to world, but only very subtle changes that over a vast number of parallel worlds can lead to surprising differences. World B might differ from world A only in something so minor as the first name of a head of state in a rather unimportant nation. In world C that same head of state might have a different last name, and in world D he might have a somewhat different personality that would give his nation a chance for success in a
min
or war that it wouldn’t have had in worlds A and B. By the time you get to world J, that nation might not be so minor and on world Z it might dominate the planet. Or destroy it.

So I had to search large areas of paratime, moving carefully from world to world, searching for clues that would tell me I was at least heading in the right direction.