The two explorers thought for a time. Then one said, “So important a decision cannot be argued. We must let another decide.”
“That could de dangerous!”
“Not to us.”
So they constructed a hermaphroditic machine to select fairly and randomly who would be the mother and who the father. And when that was done they turned with a good will to the land, and let the machine do as it desired, and where and when it desired.
The machine lived. With hideous self-awareness it knew itself and its destiny. Not even desire was spared the machine; not even a strange and absurd destiny connected inextricably with the act of a red crustacean creature, with the courage of a Roman soldier, and with the final decision of two explorers.
“The machine is dangerous,” the female explorer said.
“Not to us,” said the male explorer.
“Then to our children, or to their children.”’
“Would you have me destroy the machine?”
“No. Limit it, confine it, dedicate it!”
“Very well,” the male explorer said.
The machine, which no longer directly perceived itself as a machine, accepted the limit and the dedication with good grace. It could not blame the explorers, for the machine recognized its own danger inherent in its qualities of randomness. The built-in limit almost took care of that; but made much more difficult the task to which it had been dedicated. Perhaps now the task would be impossible; but the explorers didn’t care.
“Where is the machine?” the female explorer asked after a while.
“It has left us,” the male explorer answered. “It has gone in order to do its work.”
“And it didn’t even say goodbye,” the female explorer said thoughtfully. “I wonder if that means anything . . .” But then she had to take care of her two children, and there was no more time to think of the machine.
And Ban, lying in the coiled sea-mists, was dimly aware of all this. A red crustacean, a Roman soldier, a hermaphroditic machine . . . He fought to become as he had been, struggled, cursed. Slowly, inexorably, he began to succeed. He was becoming Ban again . . .
And then he heard the despairing wail of Knower, the simultaneous shriek of the Prophetess. It was too late. The lightning had struck, the sea-wall had collapsed, the last fraction of the fuse had flared. Just before unconsciousness struck him, Ban could feel the forces of chaos engulfing him much as storm clouds engulf the sky.
Part Four
By Murray Leinster
He did not exactly return to consciousness. Later, it seemed to him that he had not really become unconscious, but that the things he saw and heard and felt were so completely preposterous that his mind rejected them. Because it appeared that chaos had engulfed the universe and that time and space and reality had ceased to be. On the whole, that was a reasonable assumption.
Nevertheless he saw. He felt. He even heard. The hearing was a thin singing which did not form words at all, but muted wailings. The feeling was that the cosmos had turned askew, and the horizon had tilted so that what should have been the east was up, and what should have been the west was down—and he tended to fall toward it—and the beach was merely before him and the sky behind.
The seeing was unexpressable distortion of the beach. He saw it, but in a manner he could never have explained to anyone. An artist’s portrait of the beach and the waves would be something like it. But it would have to be a portrait, which differs from a photograph because a photograph is a picture of an instant and the sitter happens to be in it. But a portrait is of a person, and the moment is only a convention.
So Ban saw the beach, not as of this minute and second, but as a portrait shows a person. Somehow he saw it, all at once, shrouded in the fog that had come upon it since he was a boy, and also he saw it in bright sunshine. It was merely a pretense that he saw it between two breaths—at a given moment—because he could look inland and see smoke coming from the chimney of Ilbur the Robot, and he could see the beach empty as it was before there were either Cloud People or men. And he could see it as it would be aeons from now—
No. What he could see changed, even as he looked. He saw it, after a fashion, as a man in flight, and thousands of feet high, would see a winding highway in all its turnings in the same seeing. A man on foot on the same highway would see only a few hundred yards before him, and only remember what was behind. Ban saw the beach in such a strange perspective. He saw the beach from that dimension which is time. But it changed. There was an ending, which drew nearer. It was not unlike a highway seen from far above, with a cloud-mass moving to blot it out. Ban saw an ending of the beach, in time. There was a thing which was like a wall in the direction he knew to be the future. Nothing existed beyond that wall. The beach came to an end. There was no time beyond the wall. It was the end of everything—the solid world of men and the cloudy mist of the Cloud People alike. And the Cloud People wailed.
Ban could not actually see the wall because it was nothingness. Only nothingness could bring an end to time. And nothingness cannot be seen. Yet Ban knew it because it did not reflect the light that fell upon it, not yet absorb it. Nothingness cannot do either. It cannot do anything. If it could act it would not be nothingness, but something. Yet Ban knew that yonder real things ceased to be. Beyond that spot in time there was no time. There was a moment beyond which there was no next second. And this was what had made the Knower and the Prophetess cry out in horror, because Ban had brought it about.
Back in the city of the tall towers and living people, folk were apprehensive, but they feared the Cloud People. They did not fear this. But here with the east overhead and the west underfoot Ban knew that the Cloud People wailed because they could perceive what men could not, save Ban.
But how could he know? What had happened to him? The Knower had said bewildering things, each one specific but all of them confusion. The Knower said that Ban had stretched himself across an immeasurable distance of time. He had made a short-circuit, a discontinuity, perhaps a hole or a puncture in time, rather, a gap in time and space together. While the different parts of his body were child and man and doddering ancient all at once, he had created a weakness in the fabric of the universe. And somewhere, somewhen, reality began to collapse. These things were the only possible explanation, but Ban found himself objecting. A thing cannot collapse unless by so doing it releases energy. A thing is not destroyed unless its destruction releases some tension. Yet it was old, old knowledge that the universe of suns and stars and matter—and of Cloud People and men—exists only because it is held in existence. It did not create itself, and it does not sustain itself. And in some strange fashion Ban’s blind fumbling had broken one small spot in the fabric of being. It could be likened to a puncture. And it spread.
But why could he see through time as the Cloud People did? And why was the east now overhead and the beach before him and the west beneath his feet? He noticed, suddenly, the tugging which pulled at him. He tended to fall. Downward. Toward the west. He fought the fall automatically, struggling to sum up this experience to know what to do. But he did not incline to fall toward the beach, any more than a man beside the Needle or Alpha or the Arsenal would be drawn toward those vast structures. Down, to Ban, was westward.
Why? There had to be an explanation.
He struggled to grasp his situation to do battle with it. In his absorption he unconsciously lessened his conflict with the westward pull. He reminded himself of a bird that had flown against a window in one of the City’s towers. All windows and all outer doors were screened by force-fields like bubble-films, which allowed air to pass in or out gently, but resisted any fast-moving solid object or any strong wind. Sometimes a bird in full flight struck such a screen. Then the screen which was meant to act gently became violent. The bird was flung away, spinning and reeling and toppling helplessly. Sometimes the circuit-breaker clicked off and the bubble-field ceased to be unless someone restored the circuit. Yet one could reach a hand gently thr
ough the field, and the field ceased until the hand was removed. A man could walk through. But a running man would be flung back with violence.
That was it! Normally a man travelled slowly through the bubble-films which were instants of time. They let him pass slowly and gently through to the future, and age, and death. The boy and girl of the Cloud People had transported Ban through innumerable such films. Where the mists of the Cloud People hung, there was less impediment to time-movement than where clean sunshine shone upon the City. But when Ban became partly capable of time-motion, yet erratically; when Ban’s legs were in one time-film and his body in another; when his body violated the laws of time and space, he shorted out the time-films as a hand through the bubble-screen destroys the screen until the hand is removed.
In effect, his body thus impossibly stretched through time acted as a man’s body across an open screened doorway. It would destroy the screen; so that tornado-winds might roar through with nothing to stop them. And those tornado-winds would beat with terrific violence upon the man. He might be flung crazily away, like a bird trying to fly through a window.
This would explain everything. Partly instructed and partly capable of motion through time like the Cloud People, Ban had destroyed the time-films of unguessable centuries. And this caused the terror of the Knower and the Prophetess. Some part of him, some trivial part perhaps, remained remote from its proper place in time. There was a connection between it and now. There could be no time-films between while that connection lasted. So there could be no time. And through that gap came nothingness, to spread as a break in a soap-bubble spreads . . .
And Ban was beaten upon by the forces of the cosmos, trying to hold to what held it in being, like a force-bubble with a man lying across a door while a tornado raged. He was flung crazily about like a bird which has tried to pierce a window’s bubble-field. He moved in no normal direction; he had no secure link either to space or time, and therefore the east was up and the west was down—but where was the past and future?—and the sky was behind him and the beach before. At least that was so.
But the beach was not before him! There was water, rippling like a vertical wall. There was stone. He looked ahead and saw down upon the rocky pinnacles of that small island halfway between Mwyrland and the City. There was no mist upon it now. He had forgotten to resist the pull upon him, and he fell, but not toward ancientness and death, nor toward the ground or sea, nor even skyward.
He fell toward the west. He gazed downward and saw that his motion was a retracing of the path he had flown, from the Oracles to Mwyrland. He fell headlong.
And then he noticed his body. It had changed again. He was a gangling boy of fifteen. He cried out angrily, and his voice broke. It was partly treble and partly the discordant croak of early adolescence, and then Ban realized what the tugging at him was, and what was its consequence. He was not only in a new relationship to the things of space, but of time. He no longer had an inherent tendency to fall toward the future and increasing age. Now he fell toward infancy. And the direction of infancy was the west.
He checked his fall by a terrific exercise of will, to look at his hands. They were not thin as a youth’s hands are. They tended toward chubbiness like the hands of a child. The first phalange of each finger was rounded. His finger-joints were smooth.
It was exhausting to hold himself still, and not to fall toward the west. The pull was not as strong as it had been at first. He was a boy now, and the Cloud People children had said of him as a child that he was not as timevy—as time-heavy—as an old man. But as a boy he had not the strength of manhood. Yet now it was a man’s mind that demanded the impossible of a child’s body.
And that man’s mind despaired, while still he fought the pull of time toward infancy, which lay to the west. He needed help. He needed knowledge. He raised his face toward the beach and cried out shrilly for the Cloud People to come and help him, however great their desperation.
Again there was a change. He still saw the beach as from time, but the distance through which he could look future-ward had dwindled. The wall-which-was-not-a-wall was nearer. The end of existing things was closer. As a standing forest grows small while a forest fire rages across it, time-to-come grew less as nothingness swallowed it. Yet nothingness cannot swallow anything. The beach and the sky and the sea were not devoured, but bit by bit they ceased to act; to reflect light or absorb it, to pull together or push apart, to move or to resist motion.
They ceased to be real. They became one with all those things which are merely possible and are not actual. There remained, in theory, a link to actuality in that they could exist if they could affect each other, if they could do anything, if they could perform any action of any sort. But for a thing to operate there must be time. Time is the arrangement by which things are able to happen. Without time nothing can occur. And there must be space. Space is the arrangement by which things can consist of parts which are side by side. But time and space were broken and breaking together like a punctured bubble, and the universe grew smaller.
There was no longer a cloud-bank over Mwyrland. Ban had gone back to a time in his childhood before the Cloud People formed their mist over Mwyrland and slowly, slowly, slowly deepened it until ageing men and women fled their homes and the war with the Cloud People began. But though Ban went back toward days long past, he still could see the vast encroachment of nothingness upon all things that were.
He knew very bitterly that he had brought the catastrophe about. He’d not intended it, to be sure. He hadn’t done it alone, even, two Cloud-Children really began it, and the Knower was aware and thought their behavior only unkind. There had been no awareness that there was danger in the playful investigation, by Cloud-Children, of the nature of mere man. Yet the Cloud-People could travel back and forth in time from past to future. They could see the future. Then there had been a future, but now it grew less and less, so that there must be some dimension beyond the three of space and the fourth of time in which alterations of those four could come about. And of this dimension neither the Knower nor the Prophetess had any inkling. So there was a limit to prophecy.
And now he understood his present estate and the topsy-turviness of up and down and past and future. The universe attempted to use him—who had begun it—to bring an end to its destruction. The cosmos strove to heal itself. Had Ban died on the beach as an incredibly aged and futile dodderer, the sun would not shine on Mwyrland, to be sure, but it would still shine on the City, for a while. Had Ban not extended himself through time, there would not now be a gap blocked by his still-displaced body in which time could not exist as bubble-films which make the endless succession of seconds and minutes and hours and years. If Ban could restore himself to what he had been—withdrawing every atom of himself from any other time but the present—the crack in the cosmos would heal itself, like a force-bubble across a door or window. But it was impossible. He could not do it. There was only one thing he could do, which would have the same effect. He could repair the fabric of reality by not ever having been.
It was this that he must consent to, in yielding to the westward tugging. His body was fourteen years old, now. Perhaps thirteen. To him, childhood lay to the west and maturity to the east. He was drawn backward through a displaced time toward infancy. This tugging, this pull, was the result of the laws of existence, because existence could not continue while his body contravened the laws of existence. If he let himself fall past ten years of age, and six, and two, and infancy itself . . . If he let himself fall back into the time before he was, then there would no longer be a break in the unity of time and space. He who had never been could not create a flaw. His body which had never existed could not short-circuit time. There could not be a break where he had never existed to make it.
Ban raged. It is not too bad a thing to die. All men face it sooner or later, and there is a secret knowledge which comes to every man at such moments. The knowledge is that it is not the end. But Ban was required to make a greater sacr
ifice than death. It was demanded of him that he surrender ever having been. He was required to embrace extinction.
He raged. But he was the Warden’s son, and the City must be defended. He could not survive, but he could make extinction count. With somehow an air of scorn, he let himself fall. And it was dramatic, as he fell, to remember bitterly such unrelated things as a girl who shyly gave him a bowl of milk in the home of Ilbur the Robot, and Urmuz scolding him respectfully for some unrecalled fault, and the Prophetess with the strong hands and strangely indefinite face beneath her hood, and the girl who was to be her successor, who denied that she had a name and yet looked wistfully at Ban when he was in the prime of his strength and arrogance.
He remembered innumerable things, and now not one of them would ever have been real. Because he would never have been, and Urmuz would not teach him soldier-craft, nor his companions ever sing or drink with him, nor his father try to hide his pride in a swaggering son who would be Warden after him.
These things would be worse than forgotten. They would never be thought of. They would go into that limbo of possible things from which so few ever emerge to become actual. When Ban had never been born—why—things would start fresh. Perhaps his father would have another son, whom Urmuz would guide and scoldingly cherish. His friends would not miss him. How could they miss someone who never was? Perhaps they would choose another in his place, not knowing that it was a place that could have been filled otherwise. The girl at the Oracles would not think of him. How could she? She would think wistfully of someone else entirely. The Prophetess would not guide him, nor the Cloud-People children.
Then Ban revolted. In midair, he abruptly fought his own descent to infancy. His mind was still a man’s mind, in a body perhaps four years old. The disparity, in fact, was very probably the reason for the disaster to all things. But he was required to make a greater sacrifice than any other man was ever asked to make. And it was not a reasonable bargain. He would accomplish nothing worth the sacrifice if he ceased to exist.
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