The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  There was a white face floating above him in the dim light of the vault, looking down at him. It took him a few seconds to bring it into focus. Then more seconds passed while he strove for recognition. To this face, he knew, there belonged a name—even though he knew that it was impossible.

  Finally, he said: “I preferred the plastic mask. This isn’t very funny.”

  “You don’t look so good, Paul,” said a low voice that rasped like a file on coarse paper. “I’m sorry if I startled you. I’m not the robot.”

  “Herdman,” said Paul, still unable to believe.

  “That’s right. You knew I was....” The other raised a hand to gesture at his surroundings. “...Among the brethren.”

  “You never communicated. Of all of them, only you never left a letter, or a tape. Not a word.”

  “It didn’t seem to be a sensible way to communicate. I thought I’d wait for something better.”

  Paul used his arms to pull himself up into a sitting position. He looked to one side, and saw the still, silver-shining body of Rebecca in the hollowed-out stone shelf to his right. To the left, the similar stone cavity was empty.

  “That’s impossible,” he said.

  “Nothing’s impossible,” replied Joseph Herdman.

  On the ledge that surrounded Paul’s resting place—a resting place built to accommodate a repose of millions of years—Herdman placed two small glasses. He produced a bottle from somewhere, containing a brown fluid, which he began to pour. One glass ended up nearly full, the other half-empty. It was the latter that he offered to Paul.

  Paul could already smell the alcohol on the other’s breath, and that, more than anything else, was what convinced him against the evidence of reason that it really was Joe Herdman, aged but hardly changed. His hair was still dark, his face still set firm. He had always looked to be immune from the ravages of time, as if preserved by the alcohol that had turned his complexion yellow and saturated his brain with the illusory clarity of intoxication. That look was with him still.

  “I’ve come to see you, Paul,” he said, softly. “In person. I knew it could be done, if only the matter were given a little thought. There are few limits to the ingenuity of our host, if only we would care to test them.”

  Paul took the glass and sipped at the liquid. He looked up in surprise.

  “Even whisky isn’t impossible,” purred Herdman, “if one can count on the resources of a friend like the machine.”

  “How?” asked Paul.

  “The grain was preserved in one of the other domes....”

  “Not that.”

  Herdman laughed. “Everything can be arranged, if you only have the time and the talent. I could always get things done—it was my one function in life. It was enough in the world that made me. It’s still enough. All it needed was the imagination and the determination, and maybe a little courage. It wasn’t a great way to travel, but in view of the way the dream has treated some of our erstwhile companions I decided that the risk was easily justifiable.”

  “How?” asked Paul, again.

  “Deep-freeze.”

  “The machine built a cryonic chamber—so that you could meet me in person, ahead of the point of coincidence?” Paul shook his head, quite dumbfounded. He threw back the remainder of the drink.

  “I wasn’t so sure of meeting you at the point of coincidence,” said Herdman. “It seemed to me that I might be one jump too late. Coincidence, you see, doesn’t quite mean the same thing for all of us. A hundred years may not seem like much at this stage—but I know the value of planning. My first jump was from 1994, less than two years after yours. But hers was from 2119, which was when you took your second jump. I wasn’t around then. Do you see the drift of my argument?”

  Paul hauled himself over the edge of his coffin and on to the floor of the vault. Herdman handed him sandals and clothing.

  “You could have written it down,” said Paul.

  “Written what down? I wanted to show you something, Paul. I wanted to show you that coincidences can be made—that we’re not at the mercy of circumstances. How else could I hammer home the point but by making one? Get those clothes on and let’s go to the house. There’s a good deal to talk about.”

  “Old times?” said Paul, as he put the glass down.

  Herdman shook his head, and poured himself another liberal shot. “The future,” he said, his voice crackling as he slurred the syllables of the second word.

  Together they came out into the open air. Paul glanced back just once at the dim-lit vault, and Herdman—without waiting for the question to be framed, said: “Twenty-four.”

  Paul was neither surprised nor pained by the answer. Each time he awoke, the number dwindled. He had long since grown used to that fact of life. He only prayed that Rebecca would survive long enough to make their predestined rendezvous. Until now, he had almost forgotten Herdman—the only other man known to him who still survived as a time-traveler. All the remaining statues were strangers.

  The scent of the preserved air, and the colored light that passed through the crystal of the dome, reassured Paul that everything was still normal up above, although none of the machine’s humanoid bodies was visible.

  The house was new—or had, at least, been remodeled since Paul’s last awakening. The machine built and rebuilt continually, always growing bored with his handiwork, impatient for something to do. This time the place prepared for his reception was a bungalow with an ornamental roof and a verandah. Inside, it was perfectly clean, decorated in plain pastel colors and furnished sparsely. Simplicity was obviously the current fashion.

  “You want another drink?” asked Herdman, when Paul had glanced inside and then returned to sit on the verandah.

  Paul shook his head. “Where’s the machine?”

  “All around us.”

  “I mean the robot.”

  “I told him that I would welcome you. The robots are elsewhere, attending to other business. The machine is no doubt keeping a benevolent eye on us, in some more discreet fashion.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes while Paul looked around. Then he got up and went into the house. It was some time before he reappeared to take his seat opposite Herdman. In the meantime, Herdman drank—not copiously, but steadily.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Paul. “It’s been so long since I last saw a human being. I’ve grown adjusted to being alone, and to a mechanical routine of waking up, going through the motions, and then jumping again. It’s set inside me...I’ve always been keyed up to meet people again at coincidence, but I’ve fallen into the habit of thinking of that as a rather distant prospect. This has thrown me, a little. You never wrote—you could have warned me.”

  “Not my way,” said Herdman, in an off-hand tone. “When I make a decision, I act on it. Plan quickly, execute soonest. It’s the only way to stay ahead.”

  “But we still have months of subjective time before coincidence. Over a year, in fact, assuming forty-eight hours a stopover. If you’re planning for coincidence....”

  He trailed off, realizing the implications of Herdman’s presence.

  “Coincidence is when we care to make it,” said the other, flatly. He replenished his glass, though it was not yet completely empty. “And if it isn’t soon, nobody’s going to make it at all.”

  “So what you want to do,” said Paul, slowly, “is to put an end to it all?”

  Herdman slapped the bottle down with unnecessary vehemence.

  “For Christ’s sake, Paul! What the hell is left to do?”

  “Have you been drunk every step of the way?” asked Paul, the note of censure in his voice concealing his avoidance of the other’s challenge. “Through nearly a thousand awakenings?”

  Herdman scowled. “That’d be something,” he said. “Soused for a billion years. While the human race and its successors die off, while the world undergoes a transfiguration such as no one in our own time could have imagined, while some alien machine herds time-tra
velers on a pointless pilgrimage to nowhen, Joe Herdman rides a hangover and a whisky high. No, Paul—this is the first bottle in a long time. For my first jump I jumped out of delirium tremens and came up a hundred years later still in it. It was a big let-down, considering where I spent the meantime. But I needed this one. I’ve been awake a few days, and thawing out is painful. Then the time began to hang heavy. And how could I meet such an old and valued friend without a drink in my hand?”

  “You wanted to be your old self,” said Paul.

  “Got it in one.”

  “Why? Are you thinking of taking up where we left off? Becoming my agent again?”

  Herdman laughed, the dark mood of a moment before vanishing like magic. “That’s what I’ve been missing all this time,” he said. “It wasn’t the whisky at all—it was the wisecracks. You don’t know how good it is to hear you.”

  Paul didn’t know how to take it. Some of the tension eased out of him, but not all. He couldn’t relax completely. In some strange way he felt that Herdman was here to do him harm, and no matter how his reason told him that the feeling was absurd it would not quite relinquish its hold on him.

  “Have you seen others?” asked Paul. “Or did you stay frozen through the other awakenings to get to me all the sooner?”

  “I wanted to see you,” replied Herdman. “The machine told me about the others. They didn’t seem like people I’d want to make a special effort to see. I’ll meet them all in due course, now we can all get off the roundabout.”

  Paul knew that there was a temptation, if not a challenge, in Herdman’s last few words. Herdman was watching him like a hawk for some kind of reaction. He said nothing, and deliberately looked away.

  “I know about the others,” said Herdman, in a low voice. “I asked. I dare say you never have—except about the girl.”

  “You know about Rebecca?”

  “Like I said, I asked. The machine knows a lot of answers. It’s beguilingly honest, if you approach it in the right way. But I dare say it’s discreet enough—I haven’t heard anything you wouldn’t have wanted me to hear. Did you ever ask about the others?”

  “I know their names—something about their lives before they became jumpers. What should I know about them?”

  “You should know what they’re like now, Paul. You should know what’s happened to them while they’ve lived their years a couple of days at a time, sometimes a week and sometimes a month, afraid of the dream and afraid of the machine, afraid of loneliness and afraid of death. I’ve seen them—not in the flesh but through the eyes of the machine. You could have seen them too, if only you wanted to, if only you’d thought about it.

  “They aren’t thinking any more, Paul. They’re just going through a routine, over and over. They want to get off but they can’t, because there’s nowhere for them to get off to. They’ve retreated from their fear into ritual, following it blindly—following you into the dim and distant and nonexistent future. What else can they do? When they can’t find the courage to jump back into hell they delay, for days and weeks, but what is there for them here, in the dome, with no one for company but the everpresent machine? They love you, Paul. They still have what hope they have left invested in you. Of course, you do have a kind of monopoly on hope now—there aren’t any alternatives any more. They’re good suckers, Paul—perfect disciples. They’d die for you...which is perhaps as well, because that’s all that you require from them now, isn’t it?”

  Paul stared at him for several seconds.

  “The machine didn’t tell me,” he said.

  “You didn’t want to know,” replied Herdman. “And you must know by now that it’s you the machine is interested in, far more than the rest of us. We’re just the hangers-on. You’re the one it loves, because you’re the one with the sense of mission. It’s you that’s keeping this whole thing going. It wasn’t about to tell you without you asking. But it has a curious sense of fair play that it never learned when it was fighting wars between the stars. It didn’t stop me when I asked it to bring me to you. It isn’t going to stop you listening to me. Maybe that’s just one more move in the game—one more aspect of the perennial fascination. Maybe its little circuits are positively thrilling with the uncertainty of not knowing what you’re going to do.”

  Paul looked up at the dome. The sun was no longer visible—evening came quickly to the dome because of the great wall of vegetation which had grown up alongside it, and which tried constantly to overwhelm it, to hide it from the light forever. So far, the machine had managed to keep Gaea at bay.

  “What exactly do you want?” he said to Herdman.

  “You know what I want,” replied the other, his voice harsh but measured. “It’s time to run down the curtain. I always admired you as a performer. I thought you were just right for the role, and that the role was just right for the moment. You’ve had the longest run in Creation. But the role’s not right any more, Paul, no matter how good you are at playing it. It’s got to finish. I want you to quit the business.”

  Paul felt his jaw clench with momentary anger.

  “It wasn’t a performance, Joe,” he said. “I meant it.”

  “I know that,” replied Herdman, with genuine sympathy in his tone, “but it doesn’t affect the point at issue. The fact is, it doesn’t matter how hard you mean it. It’s no good any more. It’s suicide for all of us to go on. I’ve shown you the way, and you have to take it. This is the time for us all to take a ride in the deep-freeze, until we can meet up when the last man’s due out, and finish this crazy pilgrimage forever.”

  “I understand all that,” answered Paul. “But the question is: what then?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Herdman did the cooking, although the machine could have delivered everything fully prepared as easily as providing the ingredients. He was trying to make some kind of point. There was no sign of the robot and the machine’s ever-presence was unobtrusive; it did not speak. Even though Paul knew that the house and its walls were the machine, just as much part of its body as the robot or the domes themselves, Herdman managed to make everything seem ordinary...an echo of a long-dead world.

  After supper, they played chess. The machine had made a handsome ornamental set of pieces and a polished wooden board, which looked for all the world like products of loving human craftsmanship. Herdman was still riding the tide of incipient intoxication, maintaining himself by steady and unhurried drinking at the point of balance antecedent to loss of control.

  Herdman won the first game when Paul resigned on the nineteenth move, a piece and a pawn down with no way to combat the other’s king-side attack.

  “You’ve gone rusty,” observed Herdman.

  “I suppose you’ve been playing the machine.”

  “We usually have a game or two.”

  “Who wins?”

  “He does, most of the time. It must be millions of years since I last beat him.”

  They set up the pieces again.

  “What kind of risk is there in this freezing process?” asked Paul.

  “It’s difficult to say. The machine’s experiments on small mammals indicate that if the thing’s done properly, cell death is virtually negligible...and most of the cells that do die are replaceable. Only the death of the neurons is really serious, unless something actually goes wrong. What kind of risk is there in your mode of time travel?”

  He played pawn to king four and offered Paul another drink. Paul declined, and replied with pawn to queen four.

  “That’s weak,” said Herdman. “I always used to tell you that it’s weak, but you kept right on doing it, as if you were determined to prove that I was wrong, or that you didn’t much care. You shouldn’t do it.”

  “It’s the way I prefer to play,” answered Paul.

  Herdman played pawn to queen four.

  “That’s just as bad,” said Paul.

  “It’s the way I prefer to play.”

  “Is the machine switched off? I mean in the sense
that its higher mental faculties aren’t functioning—asleep, or unconscious is probably a better way of putting it.”

  “Hardly,” replied Herdman. “It’s watching us with unwavering attention.”

  “What does he think of your plan?”

  “About the induced coincidence? He’d go along with it, if that’s what you decided—just as the other jumpers would go along with it on your say so. He wouldn’t like it if we then chose to live out our lives in his little garden of Eden, because it would end things prematurely from his point of view. It doesn’t really matter, though—it has to end some time, and some time soon. I think the idea of getting off the cycle offends his aesthetic sensibilities rather than his reason. He’d like you to go on through another cycle, you know—and then another. You have a good many billion years in you, if you don’t die. He wants someone to sit with him while he watches the evolution of the new life, and tries to stop it invading or destroying his domes. When you come down to it, it’s simply a matter of isolation and the intolerability of being alone.”

  “Suppose he won’t help,” said Paul. “Your plan is entirely dependent on him.”

  “He will. He has to leave us our independence of will, or we’d be simply caged animals. We have to be free of constraints imposed by him, or we’d be no answer to his problem.”

  “Somehow,” said Paul, “there’s something about your proposal that I don’t like. I’m not altogether sure why, but there’s an essential wrongness about it. I think it’s more than just aesthetic sensibilities.”

  “Shall I tell you what you don’t like?” said Herdman. His voice was cold, implying that Paul wouldn’t like hearing the analysis of his reasons.

  “Go ahead,” said Paul, looking down at the chessboard and concentrating on the position.

  Herdman poured himself another drink, but not a large one.

  “Because of the question you asked earlier—what then? You don’t know any answer to that question. You don’t even believe that there can be an answer. It applies just as much to your point of coincidence as to mine, and it’s a question that frightens you. The reason my plan makes you apprehensive is that it would force you to face that problem immediately, instead of allowing you to put it off for a few more weeks of subjective time. It isn’t that you’ve still got any faint hope of there being a destination for us to flee through time towards—I think you realized the falseness of that hope a long time ago. It’s just that you’re afraid to face up to the responsibility of deciding what you’re going to do instead of chasing mirages.”