Those men were Heljanita’s men, and I grew to recognize them in every past, every present and every future. They did not always need Heljanita’s conquest to achieve dominance. In weak worlds under stress, they were always the winners. If a thing had to be done, they were the men who stood the best chance of doing it. They could not be bowed by bad fortune or ruled by cruel chance.
There were great men among them, men of all kinds. There were men I could admire, men that thousands did admire. But they were not all men. In order to exist and succeed, they needed weaker backs to climb upon. Their keynote was supremacy and not harmony. What they had, they had taken. And they were all lonely men, who made fortresses out of their brains and bodies with walls of achievement and victory.
But I saw Darkscar’s worlds as well, and Darkscar’s men.
Life in Darkscar’s worlds was lubricated, without friction. It flowed smoothly and peacefully. There was no struggle to exist. Existence was there for free, and every man had it by right. Every man had it from his birth to his death as a gift There was no need to compete, no need to be isolated.
In fact, isolation was impossible. No one was allowed to be alone. Everyone, by right of his existence, was a man and shared what all men were entitled to. These were worlds without loneliness. These were also worlds without privacy.
The existence of such worlds was not dependent upon Darkscar’s defeating Heljanita, nor were they the logical consequence of Adam December’s civilization. They were a function of the kind of people who could live in them, and who made others live in them. They were versions of Dark-scar’s Utopia, but they went against the fundamentals of his philosophy.
He had claimed that the reason for unity was that we should all be able to gain something from the association, that the degree of communication should lead to a symbiotic relationship. He was right when he said that happiness and harmony were necessary if we were to live together. But he was wrong when he claimed that happiness and harmony were the goals.
I was sure while I saw the fragments of the future that Darkscar had been as wrong as Heljanita. They had both made their means into their ends. Neither had reached the ultimate truth.
And neither could I. I could not see it in the future, nor in the past. I could see no basis on which to make my choice.
And the time for that decision was approaching quickly. Planet Despair warned us, but we could feel the Time Wave beginning to quiet. The galaxy had it under control. The whole series of images changed more and more slowly, and each change of events, each fading future and multiple past seemed languorously tedious.
I could feel my head spinning, dryness in my mouth. I was no nearer to a decision now than when my consciousness first expanded to cope with the sensory range of the alien. I had no idea at all what I ought to do, nor even what I wanted to do.
The seconds went by, and I could sense their flying. I could see the settling of the Time Wave, and I could see exactly when it would be too late. And I hesitated…
Then I knew what to do. Planet Despair accepted my decision without argument, and so did Dawnstar, who understood the reason for it. Adam December did not, and would not understand. He was appalled, accusing, angry. I expected the same from Moonglow, but Moonglow knew that it was my decision, and he believed it was right simply because of that fact.
“NOW!” screamed the face. I chose. There was no need for me to state my decision in words, because it was all there, complete, in the face.
For a moment, I was unsure of Adam December. I thought that he might rebel against what I had done. But he plucked my universe entire, straight out of the face, and he created it. I could feel the terrific pulse of power which leapt into our composite mind, building and building as Moonglow of Amia wove and united, without any lapse of time. And still in the same instant, Dawnstar of Home took the completed vision and the Time Wave shifted for the last time, mutable for only one more instant.
The power singed and surged, a sundering flood which threatened to split the composite mind apart.
A great wind howled and moaned on the surface of Despair, sending the colored cloud into black and white turmoil, whipping the water of the River of Tears into a black spray which lashed our corporeal bodies. The land of fire burned bright with flames twenty miles high, and Darkscar’s citadel toppled in ruins. The metal plates which had been his collection melted and cascaded into the cracking ground, losing the minds they had contained back into the mist of fast congealing time.
Dawnstar’s body bent double as pain shook her and the wind threatened to break her apart. The power flooded into the galaxy, out of control, insufficient.
I took the girl by the shoulders and jerked her erect. Her eyes were glowing, her lips split and bleeding.
“More power!” she screamed, but I read it in the face. The actual words were carried across Despair by the mighty wind.
There was no more power. We could see that.
Her glowing eyes flared like twin suns, and an urgent, insane appeal for help burst across the face—the distillation of a whole life of needing help and having it always denied. But this time there was help. Not just from Moonglow, or from Planet Despair, but from all four of us. We joined together for an instant—the all important instant—and we gave Dawnstar everything we had to give.
The Time Gap imploded, and the composite mind shattered into nothing, releasing just that fraction of power which had held it together. As my mind flowed away from the face, back into a small, absurd body which stood by the bank of the River of Tears, I felt the Time Wave shudder into the right configuration.
Dawnstar had completed the creation.
She was no longer beside me, and neither were Adam December and Moonglow of Amia. They had returned to death, somewhere back along the twisted path of time.
For one moment, I was all alone. I was cold and very frightened, locked inside my tiny body with the purple sun and the furious sky threatening me from above. But the wind had dropped, leaving my clothing caked with the mud which the river water had thrown. The silence was terrifying.
Then I felt the touch again.
It was easier this time. It was a comfort to have that weird hand creep up my spine and into my skull. This time it was not a fusion. It was only a contact, a communication. We had both learned enough to do that much.
“Why did you do it?” asked Planet Despair, and it seemed almost as though the face was whispering.
“Do what?” I answered, although I knew.
“Why did you refuse the opportunity to be a god? Why, when you had the chance to determine the future of your race, did you make nonsense of the choice?”
“I made a choice,” I said. “I made the only choice I could.”
“Was that all that your years of war and wandering taught you? Was that all that came out of the people you knew? I helped you to see everything. You knew more than any other man, dead or alive. And yet you chose to do nothing.”
“Don’t you see?” I said. “All those other times—times which never were, events which never happened—they were all unreal. None of them had any real connection, any real identity with the futures we glimpsed.
“The people in those other times weren’t people as they really existed. Eagleheart had to die on Chrysocyon because he was who he was, and Gloriana was Gloriana. Stormwind had to succeed in shooting Blackstar down over the desert, and he had to send Slavesdream out to save the Beasts in the Kamak system. The ghosts from that other Kamak, where Stormwind himself left Diadema with the Ursides, they weren’t real. They faded away, back into nowhere. They never had any real existence. They were just dreams of the Time Wave.
“It wasn’t Heljanita’s crooked wheel which made history happen the way it did. It was the people. Heljanita was important as a man, and it was what he did as a man, not what his crooked wheel made others do, that altered the path of time and distorted the Time Wave. History is not based on illusions. That’s why Heljanita failed, why Dark-scar’s Utopia faile
d. I couldn’t choose to reinstate what ought to have been the path of time, or what I would have liked the path of time to be.
“I did the only thing I could, made the only meaningful choice, and I chose the universe which could work. I told Adam December to put things back exactly as they were in the instant that time went mad. Darkscar is dead in Helianita’s fortress. Heljanita rode his time machine into the sun. I stand here in the mud of the River of Tears. Cain Rayshade and Martin Hawkangel won the battle of Saraca. The ghosts are gone. The galaxy is in the hands of the men who survived Saraca and the men who did not fight there.
“Everything is as it was. The universe goes on from where it stopped.
“It can work out its own future.”
“And is that your idea of an ending?” asked Planet Despair. “Is that your concept of creation?”
“There is never an ending,” I replied. “And there can never be a new creation. There is only change.”
“You speak confidently,” said the alien. “Do you still refuse to believe?”
“I believe in what I experienced as a part of the composite mind: that there is a great benefit to be derived from cooperation and unity. But whether I can achieve that as a man and not as a part of an entity I can no longer understand, I do not know. There is a great deal that I still do not know, nor can I understand.”
“And what will you do now?”
I knew. I had already made that decision.’
“Go back home,” I said. ’To the only home I have known since I became Mark Chaos—to Ciona. And that will not be an ending either. It will only be a step in working out my future.”
EPILOGUE
Two tears formed in two pale blue eyes. The tears were large and filled the beautiful eyes with reflected light. The liquid surfaces began to ooze out of the comers of the eye-wells, on to the sweat-stained cheeks which were vast expanses of fat-cushioned skin.
A mother was crying for her children.
ANDRE NORTON
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