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If space didn't curve. Perhaps that star out there has already died, two hundred years ago. "I entertain a brief thought of a nova. Of a Shockwave kicking dustclouds into swirls to birth new stars." Perhaps our sun died eight minutes ago. We'd just now find it out. When we look at the stars we see into time. When we pass lightspeed we travel through the wavefront of a moment that left its star in lightscatter years ago and we overtake the real, the present moment when we reach another star. But to surpass that moment and arrive before we leftthat would be a difficult concept. That requires more than simultaneity. The causalties boggle the mind. If time is the motion of particles away from their origin, then timetravel locally requires us to reverse the entire motion of the universe, and the inertia of the moving universe is the most powerful thing I can think of. Besides, when we form the concept of travel in time, you and I can we have pushed a button in our own future and come here knowing we pushed it? It all gives me a headache."
"You wrote about timetravel."
"You've been reading my books?"
"Your first book was about timetravel."
"Gate of Ivrel."
"It was like a fantasy."
"Or science fictiondepends on whose viewpoint you take. I wander over that dividing line now and again. It's part of that business of baggage, you understand. Past and future, fused. The ultimate meddling with history. But remember that what I write is always as true as history. And time travel never worked right in my future. I always distrusted it."
"You're facetious again."
"Often. Let me show you something." I flick on the computer and call up memory. "You wonder about perception and time and history. Gate was a very old story for meI began part of that story when I was fourteen. It went through a lot of sea-changes on its way. My students had something to do with it too when I was near thirty. We talked about time travel. And the motion of worlds in space and the distance between the stars. We talked about everything. Well, Gate, being fantasy-like, lost this little bit."
"You mean it got dropped out?"
"It needed to go. This bit starts in a very futuristic world; and Gate begins in what might be an ancient one. But if you have read that book, I can tell you that Harrh of this little fragment was Liell, long before the events in Gate; and that says enough. If you haven't, never mind: I won't give away who Liell was.
Just call it a story about timetravel, in the days when the Gates led across qhalur spacetime, and knit their empire together"
The Threads of Time
It was possible that the Gates were killing the qhal. They were everywhere, on every world, had been a fact of life for five thousand years, and linked the whole net of qhalur civilization into one present-tense coherency.
They had not, to be sure, invented the Gates. Chance gave them that gift& on a dead world of their own sun. One Gate stoodmade by unknown hands.
And the qhal made others, imitating what they found. The Gates were instantaneous transfer, not alone from place to place, but, because of the motion of worlds and suns and the traveling galaxies involving time.
There was an end of time. Ah, qhal could venture anything. If one supposed, if one believed, if one were very sure, one could step through a Gate to a Gate that would/might exist on some other distant world.
And if one were wrong?
If it did not exist?
If it never had?
Time warped in the Gate-passage. One could step across light-years, unaged; so it was possible to outrace light and time.
Did one not want to die, bound to a single lifespan? Go forward. See the future. Visit the world/worlds to come.
But never go back. Never tamper. Never alter the past.
There was an End of Time.
It was the place where qhal gathered, who had been farthest and lost their courage for traveling on. It was the point beyond which no one had courage, where descendants shared the world with living ancestors in greater and greater numbers, the jaded, the restless, who reached this age and felt their will erode away.
It was the place where hope ended. Oh, a few went farther, and the age saw themno more. They were gone. They did not return.
They went beyond, whispered those who had lost their courage. They went out a Gate and found nothing there.
They died.
Or was it deathto travel without end? And what was death? And was the universe finite at all?
Some went, and vanished, and the age knew nothing more of them.
Those who were left were in agonyof desire to go; of fear to go farther.
Of changes.
This agedid change. It rippled with possibilities. Memories deceived. One remembered, or remembered that one had remembered, and the fact grew strange and dim, contradicting what obviously was. People remembered things that never had been true.
And one must never go back to see. Backtiming had direst possibilities. It made paradox.
But some tried, seeking a time as close to their original exit point as possible. Some came too close, and involved themselves in time-loops, a particularly distressing kind of accident and unfortunate equally for those involved as bystanders.
Among qhal, between the finding of the first Gate and the End of Time, a new kind of specialist evolved: time-menders, who in most extreme cases of disturbance policed the Gates and carefully researched afflicted areas. They alone were licensed to violate the back-time barrier, passing back and forth under strict non-involvement regulations, exchanging intelligence only with each other, to minutely adjust reality.
Evolved.
Agents recruited other agents at needbut at whose instance? There might be some who knew. It might have come from the far end of timein that last (or was it last?) Age beyond which nothing seemed certain, when the years since the First Gate were more than five thousand, and the Now in which all Gates existed wasvery distant. Or it might have come from those who had found the Gate, overseeing their invention. Someone knew, somewhen, somewhere along the course of the stars toward the end of time.
But no one said.
It was hazardous business, this time-mending, in all senses. Precisely what was done was something virtually unknowable after it was done, for alterations in the past produced (one believed) changes in future reality. Whole time-fields, whose events could be wiped and redone, with effects which widened the farther down the timeline they proceeded. Detection of time-tampering was almost impossible.
A stranger wanted something to eat, a long time ago. He shot himself his dinner.
A small creature was not where it had been, when it had been.
A predator missed a meal and took another& likewise small.
A child lost a pet. And found another.
And a friend she would not have had. She was happier for it.
She met many people she had never/would never meet.
A man in a different age had breakfast in a house on a hill.
Agent Harrh had acquired a sense about disruptions, a kind of extrasensory queasiness about a just completed timewarp. He was not alone in this. But the time-menders (Harrh knew three others of his own age) never reported such experiences outside their own special group. Such reports would have been meaningless to his own time, involving a past which (as a result of the warp) was neither real nor valid nor perceptible to those in Time Present. Some time-menders would reach the verge of insanity because of this. This was future fact. Harrh knew this.
He had been there.
And he refused to go again to Now, that Now to which time had advanced since the discovery of the Gatelet alone to the End of Time, which was the farthest that anyone imagined. He was one of a few, a very few, licensed to do so, but he refused.
He lived scattered lives in ages to come, and remembered the future with increasing melancholy.
He had visited the End of Time, and left it in the most profound despair. He had seen what was there, and when he had contemplated going beyond, that most natural step out the Gate which stood and beckoned He fled. He had never run from anything but that. It remained, a recollection of shame at his fear.
A sense of a limit which he had never had before.
And this in itself was terrible, to a man who had thought time infinite and himself immortal.
In his own present of 1003 since the First Gate, Harrh had breakfast, a quiet meal. The children were off to the beach. His wife shared tea with him and thought it would be a fine morning.
"Yes," he said. "Shall we take the boat out? We can fish a little, take the sun."
"Marvelous," she said. Her gray eyes shone. He loved herfor herself, for her patience. He caught her hand on the crystal table, held slender fingers, not speaking his thoughts, which were far too somber for the morning.
They spent their mornings and their days together. He came back to her, time after shifting time. He might be gone a month; and home a week; and gone two months next time. He never dared cut it too close. They lost a great deal of each other's lives, and so muchso much he could not share with her.
"The island," he said. "Mhreihrrinn, I'd like to see it again."
"I'll pack," she said.
And went away.
He came back to her never aged; and she bore their two sons; and reared them; and managed the accounts: and explained his absences to relatives and the world. He travels, she would say, with that right amount of secrecy that protected secrets.
And even to her he could never confide what he knew.
"I trust you," she would sayknowing what he was, but never what he did.
He let her go. She went off to the hall and out the doorHe imagined happy faces, holiday, the boys making haste to run the boat out and put on the bright colored sail. She would keep them busy carrying this and that, fetching food and clothesthings happened in shortest order when Mhreihrrinn set her hand to them.
He wanted that, wanted the familiar, the orderly, the homely. He was, if he let his mind dwell on thingsafraid. He had the notion never to leave again.
He had been to the Now most recently5045, and his flesh crawled at the memory. There was recklessness there. There was disquiet. The Now had traveled two decades and more since he had first begun, and he felt it more and more. The whole decade of the 5040 's had a queasiness about it, ripples of instability as if the whole fabric of the Now were shifting like a kaleidoscope.
And it headed for the End of Time. It had become more and more like that age, confirming it by its very collapse.
People had illusions in the Now. They perceived what had not been true.
And yet it was when he came home.
It had grown to be sowhile he was gone.
A university stood in Morurir, which he did not remember.
A hedge of trees grew where a building had been in Morurir.
A man was in the Council who had died.
He would not go back to Now. He had resolved that this morning. He had children, begotten before his first time-traveling. He had so very much to keep himthis place, this home, this stabilityHe was very well to do. He had invested wellhis own small tampering. He had no lack, no need. He was mad to go on and on. He was done.
But a light distracted him, an opal shimmering beyond his breakfast nook, arrival in that receptor which his fine home afforded, linked to the master gate at Pyvrrhn.
A young man materialized there, opal and light and then solidity, a distraught young man.
"Harrh," the youth said, disregarding the decencies of meeting, and strode forward unasked. "Harrh, is everything all right here?"
Harrh arose from the crystal table even before the shimmer died, beset by that old queasiness of things out of joint. This was Alhir from 390 Since the Gate, an experienced man in the force: he had used a Master Key to come herehad such access, being what he was.
"Alhir," Harrh said, perplexed. "What's wrong?"
"You don't know." Alhir came as far as the door. "A cup of tea?" Harrh said. Alhir had been here before.
They were friends. There were oases along 'the course of suns, friendly years, places where houses served as rest-stops. In this too Mhreihrrinn was patient. "I've got to tell youNo, don't tell me. I don't want to know. I'm through. I've made up my mind. You can carry that where you're going. But if you want the breakfast"
"There's been an accident."
"I don't want to hear."
"He got past us."
"I don't want to know." He walked over to the cupboard, took another cup. "Mhreihrrinn's with the boys down at the beach. You just caught us." He set the cup down and poured the tea, where Mhreihrrinn had sat." Won't you? You're always welcome here. Mhreihrrinn has no idea what you are. My young friend she calls you. She doesn't know. Or she suspects. She'd never say. Sit down."
Alhir had strayed aside, where a display case sat along the wall, a lighted case of mementoes, of treasures, of crystal. "Harrh, there was a potsherd here."
"No," Harrh said, less and less comfortable. "Just the glasses. I'm quite sure."
"Harrh, it was very old."
"No," he said. "I promised Mhreihrrinn and the boysI mean it. I'm through. I don't want to know."
"It came from Silen. From the digs at the First Gate, Harrh. It was a very valuable piece. You valued it very highly. You don't remember."
"No," Harrh said, feeling fear thick about him, like a change in atmosphere. "I don't know of such a piece. I never had such a thing. Check your memory, Alhir."
"It was from the ruins by the First Gate, don't you understand?"
And then Alhir did not exist.
Harrh blinked, remembered pouring a cup of tea. But he was sitting in the chair, his breakfast before him.
He poured the tea and drank.
He was sitting on rock, amid the grasses blowing gently in the wind, on a clifftop by the sea.
He was standing there. "Mhreihrrinn," he said, in the first chill touch of fear.
But that memory faded. He had never had a wife, nor children. He forgot the house as well.
Trees grew and faded.
Rocks moved at random.
The time-menders were in most instances the only ones who survived even a little while.
Wrenched loose from time and with lives rooted in many parts of it, they felt it first and lived it longest and not a few were trapped in back-time and did not die, but survived the horror of it and begot children who further confounded the time-line.
Time, stretched thin in possibilities, adjusted itself.
He was Harrh.
But he was many possibilities and many names.
In time none of them mattered.
He was many names; he lived. He had many bodies; and the souls stained his own.
In the end he remembered nothing at all, except the drive to live.
And the dreams.
And none of the dreams were true.
III
"Is it easy to get your first story published?"
"Why?" I ask. It is computer games tonight in the rec room. I am quite good at the ones which involve blowing up things and very bad at the word games. My mind goes on holiday when I am not writing, and declares moratorium in logic. "Are you thinking of writing one?"
"Oh, no. I just wondered whether it's easy."
"It isn't. Or if it is, and it happens too soon, you don't have all the calluses you need. And you can get hurt. Writing is a risky business." We are some time into our acquaintance. We have passed from that intimacy of strangers into a different kind of truth. "Too, sometimes a story just misbehaves. Sometimes one seems to turn out at an inconvenient length, or the topic isn't fashionable. An inexperienced writer is most likely to do a story that's over-long or too short& and of course in the inscrutable justice of the System, a new writer is also the least likely to get an odd-length story published. Sometimes a young writer can be very naive about the system. There was a story I wrote back in the sixties, in the hope I could get it serialized in a major magazine. Now, there's really about as much chance of a break-in writer doing that as there is of a particular star out there going nova while we watch.
"And to compound matters, I sent a half-page summary to the magazine in question and asked them if they wanted it on that basis. They said what any sane editors would have said. No. So I tossed it into the drawer, since I had arrived at sanity in the meanwhile and knew my chances."
"Just gave up?"
"I had two novels circulating. I pinned my hopes on those. One eventually made it. Rewritten, to be sure.
But, no, I never gave up on this story. I thought about making it into a novel and I'd take it out and try now and again. Now I tell you a truth about what this age and the system has done to storytellers we're prisoners of bookcovers. Bookcovers must come along at just exactly such a time so a certain number of books will fit into a rack and cost a certain amount. So people who have a long tale to tell have to interrupt it with a great many bookcovers (and re-explanations) and alas, if you birth a tale inconveniently small you'll spend as much creativity finding a home for it as it took to write it in the first place.
"But sometimes there is a story, as an old tale used to say quite properly, just so long and no longer.
"So 'Companions' never grew and never shrank; and it languished in that drawer until someone had just the right space for it. Also rewritten, of course. It's a ghost story. Of sorts."
"Fantasy?"
"Science fiction."
"Perceptions again?"
"In a way." I lose a playing-piece and am regenerated on the screen. "I was rather fond of the concept.
Count the characters when you've read it. Tell me how many there areexcept the beginning."
"Tricks."
"It's perceptions, remember."
Companions
I
The ship lay behind them, improbable in so rich a land, so earthlike a world, a silver egg in paradise, an egg more accustomed to stellar distances, to crouching on barren, hellish moons, probing for whatever she could find, her people and her brain calculating survival margins for potential bases whether mining and manufacture might be enough, given x number of ship-calls per year, to make development worth the while, for ships on their way to Somewhere, as a staging point for humans on their way to Somewhere in the deep.
