Vestiges of Time (27 page)

hand, and the look that he gave Mathers was of even greater hatred.

Both their energy pistols were now leveled at the motionless form, at Eric Mathers’ chest, and it would have taken only a few ounces of pull on the weapons’ triggers to reduce this corporeal body to charred organic ruin.

Neither of the men spoke.

Next into the room came the Krith, a tall, sable- colored being Mathers had known by the name Cal- sarlin, a minister to the Tromas back on KHL-000. He was naked, as his kind almost always were, and he smiled.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” he said in the French- descended language of the Paratimers. OrDjina let her pistol fall from limp fingers, G’lendal now began to come out of her shock, though she looked at the Krith with incredulity. “And good afternoon to you, Eric.” He smiled wickedly. “I can only say that I am glad we have caught you again—and saved you from your Paratimer friends. This time, well, we shall see that you do not escape us again.”

Outside, in the corridor, above the four ruined corpses, now stood a stocky, redheaded man who could have been a caricature of an Irishman, but was anything but that. Mathers had known him by the name Kjemi Stov. And if there was hatred on his face, it was well hidden by a nonco
mmi
ttal look of Timeliner efficiency.

Cal-sarlin glanced over his shoulder toward Stov.

“Shall I go on?” the red-haired man asked in Shangalis.

“You know where they are, I believe,” the Krith replied in the same language. “See that they are all destroyed.”

Stov nodded curtly and went off down the hallway, and as he did so the Shadowy Man saw that he led half a dozen almost-men, Mager-types in dark, harsh

uniforms, and each of them carried an automatic weapon.

“I regret what happened to your friends, ladies,” Cal-sarlin said politely in the language of the Paratimers. “But they did present us something of a problem. If you can see your way clearly to cooperate with us, no harm will come to you.”

OrDjina spoke an obscenity, then spit on the floor near-the Krith’s unshod feet.

G’lendal merely looked at the Krith’s brown, marble- round eyes. Her face was devoid of expression, though there may have been hatred in her eyes.

“We do not customarily persecute women,” Cal- sarlin told them. “But you must consider yourselves prisoners of war and conduct yourselves accordingly.” OrDjina repeated herself. G’lendal did nothing. “And as for you, friend Eric,” the Krith said carefully, “we are not yet certain what you are, or what you have become. Given time, the Tromas will be able to determine that, I am certain. But that will be after the fact, I am afraid. A postmortem, shall we say?”

He stepped closer to the motionless figure. The two Turothians, Pall and Marth, flanked him, the aim of their weapons never faltering.

“I know you can hear me, Eric,” Cal-sarlin said, switching to Shangalis. “The Tromas at least know your physical condition and its relationship to your, ah, replicates. We will see to them. And to you.”

He paused, ruminated, scratched himself, then said, “We do not think you can harm us, either you or your Shadowy Man. But even if you could, it would be useless. More of us will come here—are coming here already. So, if we fail, Eric, others who follow us will not fail.

“I do wish we had more time to speak with you, Eric, but . . .”

The Krith’s voice was interrupted by the remote

chattering of automatic weapons, the sounds of shattering glass and spilling liquids.

“Your replicates, you know,” Cal-sarlin said. “Pall, Marth, you may now see to his . . .”

Even while the fingers of the black-clad men were pulling back on triggers, the Shadowy Man felt himself dying, dissolving, disrupting as leaden slugs tore through the bodies of his replicates, felt the horrible agonies of their dying, a prelude to his own. . . .

One of the fourteen-year-old bodies was all but cut in half, its entrails spilling out, wet and bloody, through gashes in its abdomen. A huge, jagged sliver of glass tore into the chest of another replicate, slashing into heart and lungs as nutrient fluid, now reddened with blood, spilled out of the shattered encanter. A bullet pierced the eye of a third replicate, stunning it but not yet'
killin
g
it, throwing it against the back of the cylinder, which shattered with the impact, impaling the body on stalagmites of glass. . . .

As the triggers of the Turothians’ energy weapons completed their travel and electrical circuits closed inside the weapons, the Shadowy Man began what he knew to be the last act of his existence.

Psionic fingers grasped the fabric of space/time that surrounded the physical form of Eric Mathers, tightened, pulled, jerked, flexed, tore, retreated. One last parachronal convolution was opening, one last spot of blackness swelling to encompass the man who soon would be all that was left of the Shadowy Man.

He pulled the bubble out of its context, still not fully understanding how he was doing it, but knowing that he was doing it. The bubble crossed the nothingness of everything, touched another strand of space/ time, and joined the convolution through which the skudder had recently gone. He released his grip on the bubble, left it to fall, twist, spin, and snap through the joined convolutions across time and space and paratime to the Far World. Eric Mathers was safe,

as safe as he could be in a universe about to undergo cataclysmic reorganization.

Then he flickered his dying awareness back into the Underground, back to where enough replicates still lived to sustain some portion of himself, back to where the Krith and the two black-clad men and the two women who had worked for the Paratimers now stood, all in dumbfounded astonishment as they struggled with .the after-effects of the implosion caused by the sudden disappearance of the physical matter of Eric Mathers’ body. The sphere of blackness had appeared and then vanished so quickly that none of them could have really seen it.

“Damn you!” Cal-sarlin cried as he picked
him
self up ofi the floor, his Krithian dignity hurt more than anything else. “Damn you, Eric Mathers, damn you . .

Pall and Marth looked at each other with incomprehension on their faces. Their energy blasts had done nothing but sear the far wall.

The implosion had ripped OrDjina’s thin gown, half torn it from her body, but she hardly seemed aware that her breasts were exposed and her beautiful coiffure destroyed. Her face showed only fear.

Against the console that housed the still-operating mnemonic recorder leaned.G’lendal, gasping for breath, but on her face there was a tiny smile, as if she understood better than any of the others what had happened, and her smile was given to the common enemy of the Kriths and the Paratimers, who was winning this very last battle of them all.

Although his strength was fading rapidly, his exis- tence'winking out as replicate after replicate died under the bullets of Kjemi Stov and the Magers, the Shadowy Man found the strength within what was left of himseif to make the air speak Qne last time.

“Cal-sarlin,” said the voice out of the air, the voice of Eric Mathers, “we have come to, the end of the

road, all of us. There is not the strength within me now to tell you all of it, so this will have to do: you and your kind, and the Paratimers too, all of you have lost, lost now and forever. Tell your Tromas that. If there is still time.”

Fear now replaced incomprehension on the Krith’s face. His voice was weak and faltering when he said, “W-what do you mean?”

“The end of the world is at hand,” the Shadowy Man said, and laughed, and died.

G’lendal laughed with him, a laughter that bordered on hysteria.

OrDjina screamed.

Cal-sarlin’s hands made and then unmade fists. But he never had the time to begin to comprehend the meaning of the Shadowy Man’s last words.

The reorganization of the universe had already begun. And in moments there was not/never would be any such thing as a Krith.

It was 14:07:21, 4 March 1973.

23

The Far World

It was morning, 15 January 1972, as time is recorded on some worlds, when I awoke and found out who I was.

Even as I started to pull myself to my knees and rise enough to observe my surroundings, once again wholly and only Eric Mathers, I was struck by an appalling sense of loss, a terrible poignancy, and a realization of my own human limitations. I, who had once been a part of the Shadowy Man—or would be, if you want to look at time that way—was now just a man again, and after the experience through which I had just passed, that didn’t seem like a great deal to be: human and so terribly finite.

From my knees I finally drew myself to my feet, pulling myself up with my hands around the trunk of a slender, graceful tree, something a bit like a willow, which grew beside a small, quickly flowing stream. A breeze moved along with the stream, across my naked hips, and I realized that I had arrived there, wherever
there
was, without clothing. And this realization came too: I had arrived without the chair I had been in, without the straps that had held me in the chair while drugged. Somehow the Shadowy Man had discarded them along the way, along with my clothing. I silently thanked
him
for getting me out of the Underground alive and well, and found my eyes moving toward the sky, as if now I identified
him
with some sort of heavenly deity. But I knew he hadn’t been that. Less than a god. But, if he’d had the time . . .

It was a morning sky that was above me. Somehow
230

I was certain of that. A clear blue sky with wispy patches of clouds here and there. In my nudity the sun was comfortably warm.

Around me were forest and meadow. Graceful, thin- leafed trees, not quite like any I’d ever known anywhere else, clustering clumps of grasses, scattered mushroomlike growths, some of which might have been as much as ten feet tall. Remotely, a birdlike creature sang from the limb of a tree, calling his mate or maybe marking the limits of his territory, I thought And I now knew where I was. I’d been there before. And an earlier version of me, along with Sally, would be coming soon.

And I knew what the Shadowy Man had left for me to do. A couple of little things he hadn’t been able to do
hims
elf, just to round out what
I
remembered of the past. I could do that much for him, couldn’t I?

After a quick dip in the cold, clear water of the creek, I set out to do those things.

The skudder sat not far from the little stream, a few hundred feet, no more, a bright and untarnished craft, the product of a “future” world that would soon cease to exist,
soon
being March of next year. The skudder wouldn’t be built until years after that, but that didn’t matter. Until next March that future would exist, at least in potentiality, and for now that was enough for me. If the Shadowy Man hadn’t been able to fully understand Time, how could I ever hope to?

I went into the skudder he had delivered there, and for a moment sat before the controls, wondering what would happen if I were to start it up and in it leave this world. What would have become of that other Eric Mathers if he had had no skudder? How could he ever have gone to the world of the BrathelLanza and become the Shadowy Man? But then, would it even be possible for me to use the skudder if I wanted to? Possibly. Probably. For this is a universe of probabilities, never of certainties.

Inside one of the skudder’s lockers I found clothing, and dressed, and then had myself a quick meal from the skudder’s provisions, which were decidedly better than skudder fare usually is.

As I ate, I thought: Some distance to the west of where the skudder sat was a small, rather primitive village inhabited by people who could have been called civilized. The village was on the frontier of a small kingdom of people who were just beginning to work iron into weapons and jewelry, the smelting of iron a newly discovered art Here and Now. Although semibarbarians, they weren’t a bad lot. I’d lived with them for a while—or I would. Sally and I hadn’t been— wouldn’t be-—really uncomfortable there, but then they had treated us like godlings. They’d been expecting us, I remembered. And how had they known we were coming? I’d told them, I suppose. Or I was about to tell them.

The Shadowy Man was right. This business of time travel can be very confusing.

So my first order of business was to go to the village and give the people there a little speech; I knew their language, of course. I’d tell them I was an emissary of a pair of deities who would be arriving in a few days— and with an energy pistol and a couple of other gadgets from the skudder, it shouldn’t be too hard for me to convince them that I was something of a god myself. Then I’d prepare them for the man and woman, dazed and battered, naked and tired, who would come into their village soon. By the time I was finished I’d have them convinced that they were about to have a major miracle occur in their hometown, something that would really put it on the map. And when the next (or first) Eric Mathers got there, with Sally along with him, there would be no problem. At least that’s how it had been with Sally and
me
when I’d come here the first time.,

Then, when that was done, I would go back to the skudder and compose a note for the two fugitives from