The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  Every jumper was able to leap further each time he or she went into stasis. At first, the increases were relatively small and apparently arbitrary, but a pattern began to emerge. For a while, the elapsed time of each jump increased according to an exponential curve. Then the curve began to fall back from ever-increasing steepness, until the rate of increase was steady.

  Eventually, the machine supposed, when he had calculated all the graphs for all the jumpers in the thirteenth millennium, the rate of increase would begin to slow. Either it would level off, so that each jumper was jumping the same timespan at each jump, although each one would be leaping through a span unique to himself, or it would begin to decrease, following the descending phase of the curve until each jumper was leaping only a few hundred years at a time, returning to the minimum represented by his or her first jump. Then, presumably, the curve would turn back on itself and continue in ceaseless oscillation.

  Assuming this to be the pattern, the machine calculated that the minimum point of the curve would occur approximately one thousand million years from the time of the first jump. At that time, those jumpers who were left would begin to converge in terms of the time-relations of their pauses, and some of them would actually coincide in their waking—something that could not possibly happen while each one was accelerating through time and covering tens of thousands of years at each leap.

  The main flaw in this particular calculation was that it assumed that there would still be enough jumpers living after a billion years to coincide with one another. When he removed from consideration those likely to die, and computed the number who would simply vanish, assuming that that particular “mortality rate” remained approximately constant, the assumption proved to be less than safe. He decided that it probably would not matter what happened to the curve tracing the progress of the jumpers through time once it was past the period of possible coincidence: it was highly unlikely that any traveler would get that far. The pilgrims were not going to reach the end of time, and the probability was that even the one who went furthest would have used up his life in spanning only a fifth of the period that the Earth had existed.

  When he discovered this, the machine sighed for the mortality of humankind and the ephemeral quality of human experience.

  The La who remained on Earth fared better than the humans, because they did not inherit the mutational load which condemned the descendants of Scapelhorn’s orphans. They built new cities, and a culture of their own, which was unlike the culture of their own forebears and unlike the culture of any of the ancient human nations. They never learned to leap through time, and turned away in time from the hopes they had entertained of the false alien messiah, Paul Heisenberg. They did not live beneath the domes, and for the most part they ignored the machine and all of his parts that existed in their realms. The machine, for his part, ignored them.

  For several millennia the La were the people of Earth, insofar as Earth could be said to have people at all. They reclaimed some land from the poisons, and fought wars among themselves for the better land. In the end, however, they came into contact with emergent third-phase life, and had to embark upon a long and futile struggle to preserve their world against its advances.

  That was one war they could not win, but they fought hard, as a species, and they fought for hundreds of thousands of years. It was not until nearly two million years after their arrival that the last of the La died. But that, too, was only the briefest of moments in the whole history of life on Earth, and even in the career of the time-travelers.

  The machine watched these changes impassively, not because he was emotionless, but because his emotional investments were made in a different way, on a different time-scale. When the foraging was done and the domes were sealed for the last time against the world outside, the machine laid much of himself to eternal rest, leaving many of his bodies inert. For long periods he “slept”, releasing his hold on consciousness for thousands of years between the periods when he roused himself to confront and converse with the time-jumpers as they landed briefly in their flight to eternity. It was only in those brief moments of communication and intercourse that there was any need for the invocation of consciousness and identity, and it was, indeed, only those brief moments that could sustain him in his sense of self.

  In that period, while he lived his life so sporadically, he learned to love the people he protected, and every time one failed to rematerialize, he was stricken by grief. Every time one died, he mourned. In those waking moments he dreaded the time when he would once again be alone, with immortality his prospect still.

  Paul Heisenberg had called the human race his playthings, and had accused him of wanting to play god, but he did not feel like a god and he could not relegate the time-travelers to the status of playthings to be put away and discarded when the time came. Frequently, he felt like a plaything himself: an enduring toy of fate, maintained against all meaningful change, condemned to be always himself, and at such times he envied the travelers their mortality, and the great gamble with destiny that was their pilgrimage.

  He built houses for the time-travelers, and then tore them down, and built pyramids: useless monuments that seemed to symbolize something but actually signified nothing at all. Then he built underground vaults, with stone sarcophagi for the jumpers to lie in while they fled through the dream, and he carved names in the stone that would last for millions of years, but even those he had to remodel and renew.

  Beneath his domes he preserved thousands of species of plants and animals. They became arks built to withstand the third-phase deluge that was slowly drowning the old world. Every species he preserved he chose, and he controlled their numbers, their environments and their relations. If he became a god at all it was not with respect to the travelers but in his dealings with the gardens that the land beneath his domes became, for they became his alternative Edens, and as time passed he became more and more involved with their maintenance and control, with the planning and the balance of their ecologies, and with the appreciation of their wonders.

  At times, he became impatient. He asked himself what he was doing and why, and as often as not could find no answer, but he was never tempted to abandon his course. He was always aware that there were other projects on which he might have embarked, other purposes that he might have discovered, other tasks that he might have allocated to himself, but he also knew that there was an element of fascination in his present task that he might never find again.

  The essence of that fascination was not simply that it was something strange, with an element of the inexplicable about it, but the fact that it was something entirely beyond him. The principal attraction that had led him to the time-travelers, to the support of their cause and intricate involvement with their sense of mission, was the fact that—try as he might—he could no more jump through time himself than the La.

  In truth there seemed to be little in the talent to envy. It had no possible advantages to offer him. But the simple fact that he could not do it was sufficient to make it, for him, into one of the great mysteries,

  For the time being, it was for him the focal point of the search for the ineffable, which is the impossible quest of all curious intelligences.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “I think the worst of it is the dream,” said Rebecca, speaking across a hundred thousand years, in a voice which existed in his mind as fully and as powerfully as if she was standing beside him. “The loneliness isn’t so bad. Most of the time I don’t really feel lonely at all, because knowing that there isn’t any alternative to being alone helps me not to mind too much. It would be bad, except that I can talk to you through these letters, and I know that if things work out right there’ll be a point in time where we’ll come together again. But the dream is something else, and it gets no better. I thought I’d get used to it, but I haven’t. If anything, it gets worse. I think the reason that people disappear is that the dream swallows them. I could almost believe that old story about the dream be
ing some kind of net which something uses to fish for us.

  “The more I visit that world of the dream the more I feel convinced that it’s a real world, not like ours—so much unlike ours that we can’t even perceive how unlike ours it is. We can only see what there is for creatures like us to see, and we can only feel what there is for creatures like us to feel. The dream world doesn’t really make sense in those terms. It’s beyond our understanding. And there is something predatory about it—something that wants to hurt us and consume us. It isn’t a person or an animal, and maybe not even a thing, but when we’re there the danger is real, and I think it may get us all in the end. There aren’t so many of us left now, are there? If it weren’t for the coincidence and knowing that if I can only keep going I’ll see you again, I don’t think I could carry on. I’m not very brave, and it isn’t courage that makes me go back every time—it’s being more afraid of staying alive and growing old and shriveling up while you’re still flying through time. I feel that there’s nothing for me to do but keep flying after you, always thousands of years behind, hoping that I can fly long enough and far enough to catch up with you. I know it’s the same for you, too; every time you wake up I’m frozen, incapable of stopping, in free fall.

  “The new world frightens me, too. Outside the domes, everything is different. You can’t really see it, if you just look through the glass, but if you look through the machine’s eyes—the eyes it sends out to watch the world—you can begin to sense just how different it really is. Because of what’s outside, the world inside the domes has come to seem that much more strange, as if the little forests are ghosts of the dead world where I was born. Sometimes I think this is the dream, and the other world is where we really exist. Perhaps everything is a dream and we’ll have to wake up some day to find reality, if there’s anything at all, anywhere or anywhen, that isn’t made of dreams.

  “I’m almost afraid to ask what will happen when we meet up again—and afterwards. I can’t help thinking about it, though, and I can’t help telling you about it. I don’t want you to answer me, even if you can. At the moment, I’d rather have that be the end than the beginning of something else. It’s all I have left to want, and all I have left to need. It’s the only thing I have to live for. It must be different for you—you’ve always seemed to know what it was all for; you think in bigger terms than I do, and even if the things I think about are the only ones that are really important, you still have more.

  “I talk to the machine a lot. I need to do that, and he seems to need it to. He never used to talk about himself, but now he does. He talks about what’s going on under the domes, not just describing it, but as if he were involved in every moment and every event. It’s as if he’s frozen a piece of the world in time, and he’s pushing it along like some kind of landing stage, to catch us every time we reach the bottom of a fall. But it’s not just mechanical—in some sense he’s more a part of it all than we can imagine.

  “Even the stars are beginning to change now. The machine showed me a new one this time—a nova somewhere not too far from our own sun. Its light will have died by the time you wake up. Sometimes I wonder what happened to the La, and whether they kept expanding through the galaxy, or whether something went wrong with it all. I didn’t know much about them when they were on Earth. I was just passing through. Most of what I know the machine told me. Most of what I know about everything, the machine told me.

  “I don’t know what else there is to say, although I want to keep writing just for the sake of writing. How can there be anything new to write when there’s nothing new to happen? Is there even anything new to think? I don’t know. I do know that I love you, with all of my heart....

  The voice faltered inside Paul’s head, and for a few moments he stared at the last few words and the signature without being able to hear anything, or to make sense of what was written there. Then he folded the letter, and searched for a pocket in which to put it. There was nothing; the garments the machine had given to him had no such provision. In a way, it was absurd that there should be garments at all; there was no one to see him, the temperature was carefully regulated, and he could, if he wished, walk through the forest as a naked, shameless Adam. But he didn’t want to be Adam, and there was some small aspect of his self-image that was irrevocably involved with the idea of clothing.

  He looked about him at the ancient, gnarled trees. When he had last walked this way their remote ancestors had been seeds on the branch, but still their senescence made him feel young and ephemeral. It was late summer, but he did not know the date, and in any case, the days were no longer the same length, so that the machine would have had to make adjustments to the calendar, interposing extra leap years. The rotation of the Earth had been slowed by the tidal drag of the moon. When several billion more years had passed, it would turn the same face perpetually to the moon, just as the moon did to the Earth. Even that would not be the end, for solar tides would continue to drag upon the Earth’s axial rotation. There would be no end, even when the moon spiraled closer and disintegrated into a system of rings.

  He wondered whether the alien orbital defense system would make war against the shards of the moon.

  Among the branches of the trees, tiny birds were playing, and their play seemed unnatural because it was so very familiar. They had no fear of him. They were used to the presence of the machine’s humanoid robots, and they knew that presence to be benign. When winter came—and the machine maintained the cycle of the seasons as he maintained everything else—the robots would come to scatter food for them.

  The words of Rebecca’s letter echoed in his mind: you’ve always seemed to know what it was all for. An illusion, of course. It was a thought put into her head by a sense of propriety, not by any experience. What is it for? he asked, meaning the forest first and foremost, and then everything that was implied by its existence. The domes, the time-jumping.

  He couldn’t quite remember all that had passed before his eyes and across his mind in 2119 and 2472, but looking back it seemed that he had never really taken a decision and therefore had never really taken proper account of the reasons influencing the decision. If there was one thing which had sealed his resolve it had not been anything that he had done—it had been Rebecca’s first letter, or the machine’s attack on the cities of the La, or Scapelhorn’s farm in the valley.

  You speak truer than you know, he thought, when you say that as you’re pursuing me through time, I’m pursuing you.

  He tried to think about the fatal question: the question of what might happen after the point of coincidence, if anyone survived to make that rendezvous; but he found that he could not. It was as if knowledge of the impending coincidence had introduced a horizon into his imagination, and, try as he might, he could not peep over that horizon into the territories beyond. It was a barrier to his mind, and he lacked the courage or the means to knock it down.

  It was, in some ways, a frightening realization that he did not know why he had done what he had done, or why he was doing what he was doing. If challenged, he would have been able to produce rationalizations in plenty, but when it was him who issued the challenge, he knew that the rationalizations would be seen for what they were.

  Deliberately, he shut his eyes and called up the images of the dream: the bare red rock, the screaming wind, the time-stream, the snake-identity that tried insistently to impose itself upon him, from within or without. It no longer made him sweat or shudder when he brought it into the real world—he had conquered it to that extent—but he was no nearer to a knowledge of what it really was and what it really meant.

  The universe, he thought, is no more and no less than Brahma’s dream. But how many dreams is he dreaming?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The little airplane flew over the ocean, only a few hundred meters above the crests of the sluggish waves. There was little wind to ruffle the surface but it would not quite be still. It quivered and quaked as if some tremendous force trapped within w
as straining to be free.

  “It is curiously appropriate,” said the machine, “that the ocean, the womb of your life-system, should be its last stronghold. The new life came from the land, where your kind of life was poisoned, and it has virtually exterminated the species of the old system across the entire land surface of the planet, but the ocean still cradles the life to which it gave birth, and will provide the last battleground for that life to fight its rearguard action. The littoral zones were absorbed very quickly, but the conquest of the depths is a different matter. Soon, the grotesque deep-sea fish will be your nearest kin on Earth—except for the gardens preserved beneath the domes. That must surely be a sobering thought: the only cousins you still have in the natural world will be twisted, perverted creatures living so far beneath the surface that humans never saw more than a tiny fraction of the number of species that exist.”

  “Curiously enough,” said Paul, ironically, “I don’t find the thought awe-inspiring, or even particularly disturbing.”

  “Within a few million years, even the fish will have gone. Your only relatives then will be holothuridians living in the deepest ocean ooze like great fat pentamerous slugs. When they’re gone, there will only be nematode worms, then protozoans, and then nothing but bacteria. Your whole world will be gone—utterly swallowed up. There will be nothing alive on Earth to suggest that the entire evolutionary chain of which you are a part ever existed. Only fossils in the rocks, and perhaps the occasional ghost of an artifact in metal or stone.”

  “There are the domes,” said Paul.

  “But for how long? At present Gaea is still an infant. She is still reclaiming the flesh of the old life-system. When that job is finished the only way she will be able to grow is to find new ways of growing. She will not be content with the carbon that your life-system owned; she will find ways to exploit all the sources of carbon on Earth. It will take her millions of years—tens and hundreds of millions—to discover methods by the slow process of accumulating mutations and new faculties, but she has all the time in the world. She is potentially far more powerful and more efficient than your system ever was.”