by Damon Knight
They climbed the hill in the deepening, silent dusk, shadows moving among shadows.
“Unlimited power,” Sam said hoarsely. “Omnipotent. It can move back and forth in time the way you cross a street.”
But it was not omnipotent, Victoria protested silently. It was stopped by the invisible barrier. It had no power to control, only to observe. An observer, she thought, that’s what it was, no more than an observer. It came only when the moon cleared the cliffs that were the eastern boundary of the valley, not when it wanted to. She had been able to get out in the right time, the right place once; it could be done again, if only she could remember how she had done it then. They were descending the hill now; it was a gentle slope, covered with waist high grass, no rocks, nothing to impede their progress. They might have been out for an evening stroll—if only she were not so hungry and so tired.
“You want to think of it as some kind of mechanism,” Sam went on, “subject to the same laws and limitations that restrict all the machines you’re used to. It isn’t like that. It’s an intelligent being, a godlike being, testing us, for some reason we can’t begin to grasp.”
Each time they had talked about it, he had refused to hear anything she said. Now she shrugged and they finished their walk into the valley.
“Where was it?” Sam demanded. “Exactly where?”
“I don’t know. Everything is changed again. The center I think, but I don’t know. Remember, we can’t believe anything we see or feel in here. Your Indian, my Reuben, the dog, none of it was real.”
He was no longer listening. He considered the valley for a few moments, selected a spot and spread his blanket on the ground.
“Here,” he said. “We’ll wait here. Don’t speak now. Just concentrate on it, call it. Okay?”
Helplessly Victoria sat down also. The Indian and Reuben were the clues, she thought. “Sam, before we start concentrating, just tell me one thing. When your Indian was guiding you, why were you zigzagging?”
“We were making our way among the rocks and boulders,” Sam snapped. “Now just shut up, will you? Go to sleep if you can.”
“But . . .”
Sam caught her wrist in a tight grip and she became quiet. After a moment he released her and they sat side by side in silence.
But there weren’t any rocks or boulders then, she had started to say. Not for her, she corrected. They had been together and still had seen different worlds.
Sam had invented the Indian, just as she had invented Reuben; if she had not interfered, would Sam’s Indian have led him to the safety of his own time? It was as if within each of them there existed a core of consciousness that would not be fooled by the shifting scenery, a part of the mind that knew where they belonged and how to get back to it. Come back! she wanted to cry. Reuben, Indian, anyone. Please come back!
The night had become very dark, and it was too hazy to see the stars. Maybe it would be too cloudy for the moon to light the valley later, she thought. What if there were weeks of cloudy weather? They would die. The land would change, the forests grow, fall, be buried in rocks from earthquakes and landslides, and somewhere deep in the earth their bones would lie never to be discovered.
In a little while she put on her jacket, and still later she stretched out on the blanket and dozed. She was awakened by an exclamation from Sam. She sat up. The valley was moonlit again, brilliant, sharply defined, and Sam was walking away from her, his arms outstretched, oblivious of her, of the need to stay together.
“Sam!” she cried, but he didn’t pause. From the corner of her eye she caught the flash of light coming down the hillside. She recoiled as the light dots touched her. Momentarily Sam was covered with them, a glowing crucifixion, and then he was gone.
“Sam!” She scrambled to her feet, and ran toward him, where he had been, and stumbled over rocks that had not been there only moments before. In panic she looked behind her: the blanket was gone, the pack; the valley was barren, with scattered clumps of desert grasses. In the distance there was a flare of light, and she thought of volcanoes, of earthquakes, and even as the thought formed, the earth shook beneath her, and she threw herself down, holding her breath. “No!” she said against the ground. “No!” She closed her eyes hard.
She didn’t open them again until she could smell forests and leaf mold and pungent odors of mushrooms and mosses and ferns. She was wet from the grasses under her. Very slowly, concentrating on forests, she got up. She could see only a few feet in any direction because of the trees, and she no longer knew the way out of the valley. She walked, accompanied by flickering lights which she ignored, and then she heard someone else walking through the forests.
“Sam!” she called. “Farley!” There was instant silence and she held her breath, remembering the sloth she had seen before. There might be bears, or wolves, or wildcats … She eased herself around a mammoth tree, darted from its shelter to another one, then to a third, and was starting to skirt it when across an open area, she stood face to face with an Indian, a young man, not the one-armed Indian Sam had talked about. He looked as frightened as she, and the unquiet lights were hovering about him. Before he could move, she ran, and could hear him running behind her. Suddenly before her there rose a rock wall, the cliff, and she turned to see the Indian no more than twenty yards away. She watched, frozen, until he had taken several more steps, almost leisurely, and the lights that had been with him vanished. The barrier, she realized, they had both crossed the barrier without knowing it. She darted back toward the trees, and after only a few paces, the forest was gone, and the valley was frost rimed, blasted by an icy wind shrieking like a witch.
She stopped, backed up until she felt the cliff behind her, then stepped forward again, into a different time, with warmer air and junipers and grass. Now she sank to the ground and sat, hugging her legs hard, keeping her eyes wide open.
A flash of light caught her eye and she watched the swarm settle over something small, possibly a mouse; it moved erratically, stopped, moved again, and the lights withdrew, flowed back through the valley, up the cliff and disappeared.
She stared. Up the hill? She had assumed they came from somewhere near the center of the valley. She got up and began to walk toward the cliff. She could think only: there must have been a time before it was like this. Momentarily she was aware of a kaleidoscopic effect, of moving through layers of time, of ceaseless change. She paused, closing her eyes, then moved on.
A knoll rose like a gentle swell before her, and she began to ascend. When she stopped, it was because standing before her, filling her field of vision was a glowing shape that was indefinable. Smaller shapes, higher than she, glided over the ground toward her, came to rest in the air a short distance away. They were oval, or nearly so, glowing as the lights glowed, without illumination; behind the glowing surfaces she could almost see other shapes, darker shadows. She blinked rapidly, but was unable to resolve the shadows within the ovals. From one of the shapes there came a swarm of the restless light dots, a cloud large enough to envelop her completely. She did not flinch when the swarm settled over her like a suffocating net.
She was aware that the large oval shape was sinking into the ground, and distantly she thought: they are placing it now, without trying to understand who they were or what they were placing. She was aware when the motion of the oval stopped, and she thought: they realize they already have me, wherever they store information—computers made of glowing dots?, an information pool in the ground? wherever. She was aware of a heavier blanket of lights all over her, inside her, draining her, using up the air so that she could no longer breathe.
“God Almighty!” She heard the voice, opened her eyes.
“Reuben!” He stood before her with his hands on his hips.
“You again? The little lost girl again. What in hell are you wandering out here for this time?”
“I've lost a friend. I’m looking for him.”
Reuben scowled. “Bearded fellow? Some kind of religious nut?
"
Victoria nodded. “Is he still in the valley?”
“Come on, I’ll take you to him. Can’t understand why in tarnation this part of the world is worse than a big city suddenly, people wandering about all night where they got no business being.”
Victoria knew she didn’t have to hold his hand, knew he would not leave her until she was ready. They started down the steep, dangerous cliff.
A motion caught her eye. Across the valley, silhouetted against the sky, she saw a man’s figure, and recognized Farley. He was climbing down the opposite cliff. The lights flashed toward him and he turned and scurried back up. She took a step toward him and he was gone. In the valley she could make out boxes.
Concentrating on them, she let Reuben lead her across the valley until they stood before the boxes.
Dynamite! Farley was going to blow up the valley!
And somewhere within a few feet of where she stood, in another time, Sam sat and waited for something he could not even name. She blinked hard and saw Sam, almost hidden by the high lush grass. He was sitting crosslegged, his hands on his knees, staring ahead fixedly; he was covered with lights. He wouldn’t hear her, see her, be aware of her at all, she knew; but the blast? Would the blast jolt him back into his own time?
She hurried back up the cliff that became a gentle slope under her feet. The large oval had not moved, was still partially in the ground; around it there were now a dozen or more of the smaller ovals. She stopped and was aware that from all sides the lights were streaming toward her. Before they reached her, she realized that she had lost them before; she had moved from one time to another and left them behind. Now she felt almost a physical assault as they touched her, thicker and thicker clouds of them settling over her, then entering her, becoming part of her.
She visualized mushroom clouds and lasers; moon-landing vehicles and satellites; the skyline of New York and a hologram of a DNA model; computers that extended for city blocks deep underground and missiles in their silos; undersea explorer crafts and a surgeon’s hands inside a chest cavity mending a faulty heart . . .
A core sample, she thought, taken through time, to be collected at a later date, to be wandered through by beings she could not even see well enough to know what she had seen.
And when they came to collect their sample, a great gaping wound in the earth would remain and the earth would heave and tremble and restore equilibrium with earthquakes and volcanoes.
Her head felt hot, throbbing; it was harder and harder to hold the images she formed. If only she could rest now, sleep a few minutes, she thought yearningly, just let it all go and sleep.
Reuben’s grumble roused her again. “This is going to take a hell of a long time if you lollygag like that. Come on, get it over. I got me a sleeping bag and a fire and I sure would like to get back to them sometime before morning.”
She thought of men aiming polarized lights that were indistinguishable from moonlight, calling forth the lights that streamed out into nets that would contain them. She thought of men excavating the hillside, studying the energy source they found. She thought of low white buildings hugging the hills, high-voltage fences outlining the enchanted three hundred acres.
The large oval shimmered and started to rise. The small ovals clustered about it.
Victoria felt leaden, unable to move. She looked down at herself and saw that the lights no longer surrounded her, but had become part of her; she was filled with light.
“Give me your hand,” Reuben said patiently. “Telling you, honey, it’s time.”
He led her to the boulders where she looked down at the valley and waited for the shifting landscape to become the right one, with high grass and the figure of a man, sitting, waiting.
The lights were streaking back now from the valley, the hills, abandoning the objects they studied. Farley would see them and know it was time.
Sam waited. As random images formed, words sounded in his inner ear, he acknowledged and banished them. He might wait all night, all the next day, forever.
He no longer knew how long he had been there; he felt no discomfort or sense of passing time. When he heard his name called from behind him, up the hillside, he denied it, but the call came again and he turned to see.
And now his heart thumped wildly in his chest and he was overwhelmed by exultation and reverence. With tears on his cheeks, he extended his arms and moved toward the figure that burned and was not consumed by the flames, that was light and gave no light, that was motionless in the air above the slope he started to climb.
“My God!” he whispered, and then cried the words. “My God! My God!”
Victoria felt a wrench when the lights flowed out of her. She swayed and groped for the boulder; her head felt afire, and a terrible weakness paralyzed her; her vision dimmed, blurred, failed.
“Let’s get the hell outa here," Reuben said, and his hand was warm and firm on her elbow as he guided her, blind now, up the slope that was rocky and steep.
The blast shook them, echoed round and round in the valley, echoed from the gorge walls, from rocks and hills and sky. It echoed in Victoria’s head and bones. She found herself on the ground. The noises faded and the desert was quiet, the air cool, the sky milky blue with moonlight.
She waited for a second blast, and when none came, she pulled herself up. She was on the gorge side of the cliff, protected by the ridge from the force of the explosion. Slowly she began to pick her way up the cliff. At the top she paused.
Across the valley, on the cliff opposite her, she could see Farley in the moonlight. His gaze was upward, intent on the sky. Victoria thought: He has seen evil depart on giant bat-wings, recalled to hell from whence it came. She smiled slightly.
Midway down the cliff she could now see Sam getting to his hands and knees, shaking his head. He stood up slowly. And he, she thought, had come face to face with his god.
They made a triangle, three fixed points forever separated, forever bound together by what had happened here.
Farley had seen her, was waving to her. She waved back, and pointed down toward Sam. No one would believe them, she knew, there would be endless talk, and it wouldn’t matter. They would reappear together and stay together, as they had to now, and the talk would subside, and people would even come to regard them as inseparable, as they were. She thought she heard a growly whisper, “No more little Miss Goody?” She laughed and held out her hand to Sam, who was drawing close; he was laughing too. Hand in hand they picked their way down the cliff to join Farley at the gate.
THE NOVELLA RACE
We looked terrific in the stadium, holding our quill pens, clothed in azure jumpsuits with the flags of our countries over our chests. . . . No one read what we wrote, but a lot of people enjoyed our public displays. At least one writer was sure to crack up before the Games were over, and occasionally there was a suicide.
Pamela Sargent
Anyone who wants to be a contender has to start training at an early age. Because competitions are always in Standard, my parents insisted that I speak Standard instead of our local dialect. I couldn’t use an autocompositor. We never owned a dictator either. “You’ll only have a typewriter during the race,” my mother would say. “You’d better get used to it now.”
I had few friends as a child. You can’t have friends while training in writing, or any other sport for that matter. The other kids plugged in, swallowed RNA doses, or were hypnotized in order to learn the skills they would need as adults. I had to master the difficult arts of reading and writing. At times I hated my typewriter, the endless sentence-long exercises, and the juvenile competitions. I envied other kids and wished that I too could romp carelessly through life.
Some people think being an athlete keeps you in shape. Everyone should take a few minutes each day to sit down and think. But competitive sports usually damage the body and torment the mind. A champion is almost always distorted in some way.
As I grew older, I noticed that others simply marked time.
They were good spectators, consumers, and socializes, but they went to their graves without attempting anything extraordinary. I wanted a gold medal, honor, and fame. Even when I wanted to quit, I knew I’d gone too far to turn back.
By the time I was sixteen I knew I was neither a sprinter nor a distance runner. My short stories were incomplete and I did not have the endurance for the novel competition. Poetry was beyond me, although my grandmother had taken a bronze medal in the poetry race of 2024. I would have to train in the novella.
My parents wanted me to train with Phaedon Karath, who had won four Olympic gold medals before turning professional, thus disqualifying himself from further competition. Karath was hard on his trainees, but they did well in contests. I would have preferred going to Lalia Grasso, whose students were devoted to her. But those accustomed to her gentle ways often messed up during races; they did not develop the necessary streak of cruelty nor the essential quality of egotism.
Everyone knew about Eli Shankquist, her most talented trainee and a three-time Pan-American gold medalist as well. During the Olympic race, the only one that matters, he became involved with the notoriously insecure Maliah Senbok. Touched by her misery, he spent a lot of time encouraging her. And what did he get? He didn’t finish his own novella and Senbok took a bronze. A lot of spectators sympathized with Shankquist, but most writers thought he was a fool.
None of Karath’s students would have been in such a fix. So I sent off my file of fiction and waited long months for an answer. Just before my seventeenth birthday, a reply arrived on the telex. Karath wanted a personal interview. I left on the shuttle the next day.
Karath lived in a large villa overlooking the Adriatic. As I entered, I looked around the hallway. Several green beanbag chairs stood next to heavy Victorian tables covered with illuminated manuscripts. Colorful tapestries depicting minstrels and scribes hung on the walls. The servo, a friendly silver ball with cylindrical limbs, ushered me to the study.