Time Travel Omnibus, page 644
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 them—no 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 death—to 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 agony—of desire to go; of fear to go farther.
Of changes.
This age—did 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 need—but at whose instance? There might be some who knew. It might have come from the far end of time—in 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 was—very 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 Gate—let 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 her—for 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 much—so 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 say—knowing what he was, but never what he did.
He let her go. She went off to the hall and out the door—He 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 clothes—things 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 things—afraid. He had the notion never to leave again.
He had been to the Now most recently—5045, 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 so—while 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 him—this place, this home, this stability—He was very well to do. He had invested well—his 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 here—had 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 you—No, 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 boys—I 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.
NEBOGIPFEL AT THE END OF TIME
Richard A. Lupoff
The first of them to appear came from the sky. There was a flash like ball lightening, there was a clap of thunder, there was the rush and flutter of great heavy wings, and he was there—a gleaming, godlike figure with streaming golden hair, perfect features, a torso all sinew and strength.
With his wings he pressed himself upward through the thick, weary air, surveying the water and its gray, ragged rocks, the black graveled beach, and dun mazy dunes. A few horrid creatures slid through the dark oily waters, their sharp senses tuned, their quick brains devoted to the endless quest of nourishment gained ultimately at one another’s expense.
The gleaming newcomer tilted his pinions, banked, swept lower over the face of the water. Behind him, sunk perpetually half below the horizon, a fat misty sun glared redly across dim, dispirited ripples. Greedy tentacles whipped upward from beneath the surface of the sea. The tentacles were as thin as wires, as agile as wolf eels, as powerful as woven steel. The great winged man eluded them with casual ease, rose a short distance above the dark, coarse beach, and dropped softly onto the cinder-like gravel.
At once a spider crab the size of a man’s doubled hands sprang from its lair and shot at his softest parts, black pebbles clattering back against the beach. The man seemed not to notice the predator. Carelessly, he turned to stare in moody silence across the dull dunes, his shadow long and black before him outlined by the dim red glare of the dying sun. The man’s turning, easy and nonchalant, seemed somehow to disconcert the leaping predator. The man’s hand caught it an almost accidental blow and sent it skittering back onto the gravelish beach, where it landed with a clatter on its back and began at once to struggle frantically. Even so the crab had not righted itself before a dozen rival predators had attacked it from all sides, tearing away its waving claws and then boring through the exposed opening in its carapace to find the soft nourishment inside.
A hundred strides down the beach, there was a sudden pop as a globe like a shimmering great soap bubble appeared just over the black cinders, hovered and shook briefly, then exploded softly. From within it a couple set foot upon the strand. They stood, gazing tentatively for a while at the winged man, then began carefully on quivering pipestem legs to make their way toward him.
The winged man advanced to meet the newcomers, his great muscular strides devouring the distance that their tiny thin legs could barely nibble at. The couple seemed to be man and woman, but each showed only vestigial characteristics of gender—or of their animal nature at all. Their heads were huge and domelike, with only the lightest suggestion of down above the ears. Their ears were huge and moved as if of their own will; their eyes were tiny and deep sunken, but still they blinked and squinted in the dim red sunlight.
Above there was a screaming roar as a great black ellipsoid half-appeared, circling over the beach, growing alternately more and less solid in appearance. The noise that the object made faded and grew in concert with its growing and lessening solidity. Great aerial screws held the thing above the beach, and multi-faceted gemlike surfaces slowed and dimmed as it moved this way and that through the heavy air.
Slowly the machine seemed to stabilize in the air, then to lower itself carefully until it had come to rest on the strand. One of the jewels in its skin revolved slowly then, rolled away from the ellipsoid and lay against the black, dull surface of the machine.
A small party of people slowly emerged from the machine. They wore dark, form-fitting garments marked with red hexagonal insignia. Their outfits included black pointed hoods that largely concealed their faces; what could be seen of these showed them to be as black and dull as the clothing and the ship in which they had arrived.
For what seemed like hour upon hour they arrived. Some by strange, grotesque vehicles. Some by spectacularly announced projection. Some by chronion gas, or drugs, or spiritual exercise, or by sheer mental power. Some involuntarily. Some unknowingly. At one point not far inland from the beach, across the first row of dim, ugly dunes, there suddenly appeared an entire city. Its towers were of white marble and shining glass, its gates were of yellow horn and blackened teak. Its people had pale yellow skin and wore robes of indigo and gold.
When it appeared inland of the beach, the city’s rulers climbed to the highest point of its highest tower and gazed into the center of the glowing, half-hidden sun, and sent his chief advisor to have himself let out through the yellow horn and teakwood gates, and make his way to join the others on the beach, and confer with them.
We are here, the man from the city of towers said as he approached the others standing on the beach. It seemed a pointless comment; he did not himself know what he meant.
The nearest to him, a woman of the black ellipsoid, turned her black-hooded face toward him. She nodded. All, we are all here. Your master and your people will not leave their city?
The other shook his head in the universal sign, his indigo robes rustling.
It is time that he arrive, another voice said. The two turned to see whose it was. The speaker was one of the wizened couple. It is time, the speaker’s companion added. Time, the first said. They nodded.
He is coming, a voice asserted. There was a rustling all up and down the beach. He is coming, is coming, is coming, voices echoed, whispered, shivered back to silence.
It is time, the golden, winged man said. He raised a muscled arm, pointed across the oily sea. Where half the sun’s blood-red disk stood in changeless demi-sunset, a black circle had rolled along the horizon and now stood in the center of the sun like a black hole punctured in a red bull’s-eye target.
A chorus of intaken breaths were drawn.
The travelers on the beach—there were scores now—drew themselves into a great half-ring. The tiny, spindly-legged couple from the shimmering bubble stationed themselves facing each other, forty paces apart at the edge of the sea. Tiny wavelets lapped at the edges of their soft-shod feet, leaving a residue of pinkish foam on the pliant, leathery slippers that the wore.
