Vestiges of Time (20 page)

he had awareness, more awareness than any mere human being could ever have had.

Again he moved outside the framework of ordinary dimensions, outside length, breadth, height, outside chronological time, outside parallel time. Now these terms were all but meaningless, save that he could move about and select whatever dimensional coordinates he might wish, pick out a 'spot in the continuua, touch it, freeze it, place himself there.

But he did not yet choose to do that. For a while, which could not be measured in terms of the passage of time, he remained without motion, without time, and once more assessed what knowledge he had gained since he had come into existence.

Most of what went through his composite mind could not be expressed in words, perhaps could not be expressed by the symbols of any human mathematics, but one line of thought, the conclusion of his mentation, might have been something like this, had he been using words:

It is obvious that I cannot defeat the Tromas on their own ground, on their own terms. Another encounter such as the last, even with what I have learned, could destroy me. So, I must find a way to meet them on more nearly equal terms. I must find conditions more favorable to me, find the Tromas less ready to fight back against me, find them ignorant of the threat

am to them and ignorant of the powers I possess, perhaps ignorant even of the powers they the
m
selves possess. But where? When?

There were other hazards, he knew. The farther he moved from his time/place of origin, the more tenuous would become the link between himself and his corporeal bodies and weaker would become the powers he could summon. He could not move too far away, but . . .

The Shadowy Man moved outward in space, across paratime, backward in chronological time, downtime

to . . . KHL-000 in the chronological past . . . pausing along the way to freeze a fragment of the continuua, to reach into four-dimensional space/time and touch the electronic workings of a vast library computer on a world dominated by the Kriths and their Timeliners. It took him moments or aeons to learn the computer’s language, and more moments or aeons to seek out the data he wanted, to separate the truth from the hes. Then, satisfied that he knew what he wished to know—for the moment, at least—the Shadowy Man once more moved downtime. . . .

Years downtime now, centuries into the past as Eric Mathers would have understood the structure of time, back to the year
a.d.
1610.

Eric Mathers had visited KHL-000 and had spoken with the ruling females of the Krithian race in the month of February,
a.d.
1972, as the calendar was kept on some worlds.

Yet, in some spacio-temporal frameworks, from certain viewpoints, the Kriths themselves did not come into being until the year
a.d.
2214, the product of genetic engineering on a Timeline the coordinates of which the Shadowy Man had not yet discovered. The Kriths had been “grown” from human genetic material, engineered to survive on a world very different from any of the Earths across the Lines, a planet of another star, light-years remote in space.

And
it
had been nearly two centuries later,
a.d.
2404, before the descendants of the colonists of UR-427-51- IV fully assessed the power that resided within themselves, commandeered a spaceship and returned to Earth, then self-skudded across the Lines until they found a world to their liking, an Earth they could take over as their own, which they called KHL-000, their first headquarters in paratime.

Close to a century had gone by before the Kriths had decided to go downtime. After finding KHL-000, the few thousand members of the race had lived there

for nearly a century before they became aware of the enormity of what would happen when the parachronal potential of the universe would be forced to reorder itself toward simplicity, or cease to exist. Around
a.d.
2500 the Kriths somehow brought a chronal-displace- ment device to KHL-000. And from the KHL-000 of circa
a.d.
2500, the entire Krithian race had migrated downtime to circa
a.d.
1600, still on KHL-000. And from this vantage point in the “past” they had begun gradually increasing their strength, recruiting humans and then forming the Timeliners to do their work for them. Three and a half centuries later, a vast number of worlds lay under their sway, and more were poised to fall into their orbit.

The Shadowy Man knew his destination: in paratime, KHL-000, once more, in chronotime about the year
a.d.
1610. The Kriths would be there, nearly every member of their race, just now beginning to move across the Lines of Time. This would be the place/time to strike, before they had begun their remodeling of tomorrow, perhaps before the Tromas had matured sufficiently to be fully cognizant of their powers.

As he moved through the darkness that he no longer considered black, as he swept across the multidimensional fabric of the universes and neared a destination that could only have been expressed in five or more separate sets of coordinates, certain things for which he was not looking impinged on the Shadowy Man’s awareness, things he sought now to ignore—for he did not wish to be distracted from his goal—but which he found he could not totally disregard:

There was a distortion of the universal matrix through which he passed, a confusion, a series of anomalies; in terms of human senses, if such analogies are justifiable: shrieking sounds came out of the s
tilln
ess, rising along an alien musical scale to vanish and then reappear; splashes of light and color coming and then

going, yellows and oranges, explosions of bloody crimson; a flow here of space/time that seemed to turn about upon itself, moaning as it did so, leaking yellows and greens into the blackness, a loop in the stuff of the universe, or perhaps becoming a spiral, a purple, sighing whirlpool. And there was another, spinning off from the first, flashing silver and gold, touched with red, screaming and moaning, creating new and different, unknown and unexpected currents through the nonmatter/nonenergy of the continuua. And farther on downtime, still another: vortexes of color and light, of infrared and ultraviolet, of sound and motion, vortexes of confusion wherein time and space and paratime followed not the multibranched, quasilinear progression, but doubled back, meeting themselves again, producing still more eddies in space/time. Then there was a wavefront sweeping forward in time, black and silvery, roaring as does an avalanche, spreading out from a single point in the five-dimensional context, producing still more confusion.

For a few moments, caught up in the bending, looping, swirling stuff upon which the universes are built, he lost his bearings, was unable to pinpoint himself within the five-sided references, felt a weakening not so much of himself as of the medium through which he swam, found it difficult to propel himself through the miasma, as if here, in this Nonplace, Nowhen, there was something that might be described as a tear, a flaw in the matrix.

A kind of fear swept through him. For a moment he was near panic. Was it possible that he might get caught in one of these eddies and be unable to escape, captured forever in a loop in time that had no beginning and no end, that forever doubled back on itself meaninglessly?

Then he regained control of himself, steadied, studied as well as he could the forces at work, and the lack of working forces in other places. For an infinite moment

he paused, then charted himself a path. Drifted for a moment. Then propelled himself again across the Nothingness, the Everything.

He was free, and again paused, wondered, speculated. What had happened, what could possibly have taken place here to so disturb the basis of all time and space and paratime? And did he have time to try to determine the answers?

Although “time” was very largely a meaningless term in this context, there was a subjective passage of time to the Shadowy Man, an urgency within him. There were things he had to do, and the sooner he got them done, the better. He realized that despite the powers he had gained in evolving from Eric Mathers into the Shadowy Man, he was still very much a human being in his psychology, still very much hampered by a psychological point of view that saw time as a steady progression from past to present to future, and his consciousness still continued to function as if that progression were true. Perhaps that was the only way a human or human-evolved mind could function. But then, perhaps, once his quest was completed, once his mind was at ease, he could more fully explore this, could come to
feel
as well as
know
that such terms as “past,” “present,” and “future” really have very little meaning at all.

Later, he told himself, later—and realized that it would be a difficult thing indeed, even for
him
, to ever fully comprehend a no
nlin
ear view of time.

Again he oriented himself, established once more his five-dimensional position, moved toward his goal, KHL-000,
a.d.
1610.

Through the Nowhere, Nowhen, he moved, again, passing out of the worst of the confusion and entering into relative blackness, relative silence, across time, space, and paratime, and arriving. ...

Now, with a mental sigh of relief, the Shadowy Man once more was able to freeze a point in space/time, to

focus
hims
elf on a single place/event, to involve himself with three-dimensional space, the passage of chronological time.

The spatial viewpoint that the Shadowy Man initially established for
him
self was akin to that of alow-orbiting satellite above Earth as it existed on Line KHL-000. Below him, the planet turned slowly, a cloud-whitened world, a world of oceans and land, rivers and mountains, forests and deserts.

For a long while he drank in. with pleasure the sight of this Earth below him, reveling in the beauty of it. From this height it appeared to be a virgin world, an untouched, unspoiled near-paradise. He was still very much a human being, he thought, as he considered his love for this planet.

Then he began to move his viewpoint, the focus "of his consciousness, his vision. Like a spaceship returning from a trip to the stars, he lowered himself toward the planet, entered the atmosphere, and approached the landmasses below.

Even as he came in and then momentarily held himself still, poised but a few miles up, he could see no signs of human habitation—or, in this case, Krithian habitation. Yes, he told himself, they have been here but a few years now, they will have only a few centers of their culture, for theirs is still a very small race, a few thousand individuals now. Their works would hardly be visible from any great distance.

And on Sally’s world of
a.d.
1610, what works of man would have been visible from this altitude? The Great Wall of China, perhaps. A few of the largest cities, their dim nighttime lights, their daytime smoke, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Peking perhaps, few more, little else.

As he swept closer, now moving like a great-winged bird of prey above the virgin landscape, he wondered where the Kriths would have established their initial

settlements. He delved into Ms memories, the memories of Eric Mathers, and sought.

Remembered . . . that when Mathers had arrived on KHL-000 of
a.d.
1972 he had been in North America and it was there that he had been taken captive by the Kriths and their companions, the Mager-types, as he had called them. But a period of unconsciousness had followed his capture and during it he could have been taken just about anywhere on the planet. But had he been?

He dug further into the Mathers-memories. There was no reason to believe that he had been taken from North America, so for the moment he would assume that he had not been. Then what had been the weather, the climate, when Mathers awoke? Warm, pleasant, a day in spring or summer it had seemed, although it should have been late winter, the month of February. Therefore, if he had still been in North America, it must have been in the southern part, perhaps in one of the areas known as Florida or Mexico or California on some worlds.

Poised above the great landmass of Asia, the Shadowy Man turned his consciousness eastward, swept across the Pacific Ocean, approached North America, angled toward the southern coastline. As the water gave way to land, he slowed, stopped, poised, hovered again. TTien he slipped a portion of himself out of the electromagnetic spectrum, entered into the semidarkness of psionic awareness, and probed for consciousness: dozens of minds, not the kinds of minds with which he was more familiar, but minds nonetheless— Krithian minds.

And were they aware of him as well, some of them?

He probed again, and found one particular cluster of minds shining more brightly than the others, eleven of them, glowing with psionic awareness, dimly conscious of his presence, he was now convinced, yet not knowing what he was.

With electromagnetic vision again he looked, and correlated this viewpoint with his psionic one. Then he knew where they were.

South he moved along the coastline. Saw them

Not far from the sandy, rocky shore was a clearing in the trees and brush, not a city by any standards he cared to recall, hardly more than a village, a series of primitive, temporary structures in jumbled, unplanned arrangement. Only two of the structures appeared to have been built with any permanence in mind, and these were hardly more than crudely baked brick, with rough-hewn wooden beams and windows glazed with glass of poor quality. Hardly the majestic cities of KHL-000 that Eric Mathers had envisioned.

But then, he reminded himself again, they were but newly come to this world and as yet had not recruited their vast armies of human assistants. Kriths were a people never given to- the building of technological things—a very unmechanical people, the Kriths—and he knew that the cities and the great landscaped parks of KHL-000 that Eric Mathers had seen would not come into being until large numbers of humans worked for the Kriths, until their companions—the semihuman, semi-Krithian Magers—were among them. Now the Kriths dwelt on a technologically primitive level. But, he told himself, it would be very unwise to underestimate them just because they did not have the artifacts of high technology. They had their minds, their ability to self-skud from Line to Line, and they had the Tromas—not yet so ancient and wise in their powers, but the powers were there, and could be used.

He quickly probed toward the two more-permanent- appearing structures.

What he found in the first of them was surprising, though it should not have been. He should have anticipated something like this. It would have been their first order of business.

Inside the structure, which had a primitive look from