The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  Shelters. . . shelters. . . shelters.

  Screams broke out. Chairs overturned.

  Alis went limp in her chair, felt Jim's cold, solid hand tugging at hers, saw his frightened face mouthing her name as he took her up into his arms, pulled her with him, started running.

  The cold air outside hit her, shocked her into sight of the ruins again, wraith figures pelting toward that chaos where the fires had been worst.

  And she knew.

  "No!" she cried, pulling at his arm. "No!" she insisted, and bodies half-seen buffeted them in a rush to destruction. He yielded to her sudden certainty, gripped her hand and fled with her against the crowds as the sirens wailed madness through the night—fled with her as she ran her sighted way through the ruin.

  And into Kingsley's, where cafe tables stood abandoned with food still on them, doors ajar, chairs overturned. Back they went into the kitchens and down and down into the cellar, the dark, the cold safety from the flames.

  No others found them there. At last the earth shook, too deep for sound. The sirens ceased and did not come on again.

  They lay in the dark and clutched each other and shivered, and above them for hours raged the sound of fire, smoke sometimes drifting in to sting their eyes and noses. There was the distant crash of brick, rumblings that shook the ground, that came near, but never touched their refuge.

  And in the morning, with the scent of fire still in the air, they crept up into the murky daylight.

  The ruins were still and hushed. The ghost buildings were solid now, mere shells. The wraiths were gone. It was the fires themselves that were strange, some true, some not, playing above dark, cold brick, and most were fading.

  Jim swore softly, over and over again, and wept.

  When she looked at him she was dry-eyed, for she had done her crying already.

  And she listened as he began to talk about food, about leaving the city, the two of them. "All right," she said.

  Then clamped her lips, shut her eyes against what she saw in his face. When she opened them it was still true, the sudden transparency, the wash of blood. She trembled, and he shook at her, his ghost-face distraught.

  "What's wrong?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

  She could not tell him, would not. She remembered the boy who had drowned, remembered the other ghosts. Of a sudden she tore from his hands and ran, dodging the maze of debris that, this morning, was solid.

  "Alis!" he cried and came after her.

  "No!" she cried suddenly, turning, seeing the unstable wall, the cascading brick. She started back and stopped, unable to force herself. She held out her hands to warn him back, saw them solid.

  The brick rumbled, fell. Dust came up, thick for a moment, obscuring everything.

  She stood still, hands at her sides, then wiped her sooty face and turned and started walking, keeping to the center of the dead streets.

  Overhead, clouds gathered, heavy with rain.

  She wandered at peace now, seeing the rain spot the pavement, not yet feeling it.

  In time the rain did fall, and the ruins became chill and cold. She visited the dead lake and the burned trees, the ruin of Graben's, out of which she gathered a string of crystal to wear.

  She smiled when, a day later, a looter drove her from her food supply. He had a wraith's look, and she laughed from a place he did not dare to climb and told him so.

  And recovered her cache later when it came true, and settled among the ruined shells that held no further threat, no other nightmares, with her crystal necklace and tomorrows that were the same as today.

  One could live in ruins, only so the fires were gone.

  And the ghosts were all in the past, invisible.

  II

  "I've been thinking about perceptions," you say. We sit again beneath the observation window. The ship is slowly outbound. The view is magnificent, all stars.

  "Oh?"

  "And time."

  "How so?"

  "Do you believe in timetravel?"

  "Time is all around us. Looking at the stars is looking into time. The light from that red one, say, left home a hundred years ago. Two hundred. If our own sun winked out this moment we would live in their eyes for two hundred years—if they had a powerful telescope to see us with. If the photons didn't scatter. If space didn't curve. Perhaps that star out there has already died, two hundred years ago." I entertain a brief thought of a nova. Of a Shockwave kicking dustclouds into swirls to birth new stars. "Perhaps our sun died eight minutes ago. We'd just now find it out. When we look at the stars we see into time. When we pass lightspeed we travel through the wavefront of a moment that left its star in lightscatter years ago, and we overtake the real, the present moment when we reach another star. But to surpass that moment and arrive before we left—that would be a difficult concept. That requires more than simultaneity. The causalties boggle the mind. If time is the motion of particles away from their origin, then timetravel locally requires us to reverse the entire motion of the universe, and the inertia of the moving universe is the most powerful thing I can think of. Besides, when we form the concept of travel in time, you and I, can we have pushed a button in our own future and come here knowing we pushed it? It all gives me a headache."

  "You wrote about timetravel."

  "You've been reading my books?"

  "Your first book was about timetravel."

  "Gate of Ivrel."

  "It was like a fantasy."

  "Or science fiction—depends on whose viewpoint you take. I wander over that dividing line now and again. It's part of that business of baggage, you understand. Past and future, fused. The ultimate meddling with history. But remember that what I write is always as true as history. And time travel never worked right in my future. I always distrusted it."

  "You're facetious again."

  "Often. Let me show you something." I flick on the computer and call up memory. "You wonder about perception and time and history. Gate was a very old story for me—I began part of that story when I was fourteen. It went through a lot of sea-changes on its way. My students had something to do with it too— when I was near thirty. We talked about time travel. And the motion of worlds in space and the distance between the stars. We talked about everything. Well, Gate, being fantasy-like, lost this little bit."

  "You mean it got dropped out?"

  "It needed to go. This bit starts in a very futuristic world; and Gate begins in what might be an ancient one. But if you have read that book, I can tell you that Harrh of this little fragment was Liell, long before the events in Gate; and that says enough. If you haven't, never mind: I won't give away who Liell was. Just call it a story about timetravel, in the days when the Gates led across qhalur spacetime, and knit their empire together—"

  1981

  THE THREADS OF TIME

  It was possible that the Gates were killing the qhal. They were everywhere, on every world, had been a fact of life for five thousand years, and linked the whole net of qhalur civilization into one present-tense coherency.

  They had not, to be sure, invented the Gates. Chance gave them that gift. . . on a dead world of their own sun. One Gate stood—made by unknown hands.

  And the qhal made others, imitating what they found. The Gates were instantaneous transfer, not alone from place to place, but, because of the motion of worlds and suns and the traveling galaxies— involving time.

  There was an end of time. Ah, qhal could venture anything. If one supposed, if one believed, if one were very sure, one could step through a Gate to a Gate that would/might exist on some other distant world.

  And if one were wrong?

  If it did not exist?

  If it never had?

  Time warped in the Gate-passage. One could step across light-years, unaged; so it was possible to outrace light and time.

  Did one not want to die, bound to a single lifespan? Go forward. See the future. Visit the world/worlds to come.

  But never go back. Never tamper. Never alter t
he past.

  There was an End of Time.

  It was the place where qhal gathered, who had been farthest and lost their courage for traveling on. It was the point beyond which no one had courage, where descendants shared the world with living ancestors in greater and greater numbers, the jaded, the restless, who reached this age and felt their will erode away.

  It was the place where hope ended. Oh, a few went farther, and the age saw them—no more. They were gone. They did not return.

  They went beyond, whispered those who had lost their courage. They went out a Gate and found nothing there.

  They died.

  Or was it death—to travel without end? And what was death? And was the universe finite at all?

  Some went, and vanished, and the age knew nothing more of them.

  Those who were left were in agony—of desire to go; of fear to go farther.

  Of changes.

  This age—did change. It rippled with possibilities. Memories deceived. One remembered, or remembered that one had remembered, and the fact grew strange and dim, contradicting what obviously was. People remembered things that never had been true.

  And one must never go back to see. Backtiming— had direst possibilities. It made paradox.

  But some tried, seeking a time as close to their original exit point as possible. Some came too close, and involved themselves in time-loops, a particularly distressing kind of accident and unfortunate equally for those involved as bystanders.

  Among qhal, between the finding of the first Gate and the End of Time, a new kind of specialist evolved: time-menders, who in most extreme cases of disturbance policed the Gates and carefully researched afflicted areas. They alone were licensed to violate the back-time barrier, passing back and forth under strict non-involvement regulations, exchanging intelligence only with each other, to minutely adjust reality.

  Evolved.

  Agents recruited other agents at need—but at whose instance? There might be some who knew. It might have come from the far end of time—in that last (or was it last?) age beyond which nothing seemed certain, when the years since the First Gate were more than five thousand, and the Now in which all Gates existed was—very distant. Or it might have come from those who had found the Gate, overseeing their invention. Someone knew, somewhen, somewhere along the course of the stars toward the end of time.

  But no one said.

  It was hazardous business, this time-mending, in all senses. Precisely what was done was something virtually unknowable after it was done, for alterations in the past produced (one believed) changes in future reality. Whole time-fields, whose events could be wiped and redone, with effects which widened the farther down the timeline they proceeded. Detection of time-tampering was almost impossible.

  A stranger wanted something to eat, a long time ago. He shot himself his dinner.

  A small creature was not where it had been, when it had been.

  A predator missed a meal and took another. . . likewise small.

  A child lost a pet. And found another.

  And a friend she would not have had. She was happier for it.

  She met many people she had never/would never meet.

  A man in a different age had breakfast in a house on a hill.

  Agent Harrh had acquired a sense about disruptions, a kind of extrasensory queasiness about a just completed timewarp. He was not alone in this. But the time-menders (Harrh knew three others of his own age) never reported such experiences outside their own special group. Such reports would have been meaningless to his own time, involving a past which (as a result of the warp) was neither real nor valid nor perceptible to those in Time Present. Some time-menders would reach the verge of insanity because of this. This was future fact. Harrh knew this.

  He had been there.

  And he refused to go again to Now, that Now to which time had advanced since the discovery of the Gate—let alone to the End of Time, which was the farthest that anyone imagined. He was one of a few, a very few, licensed to do so, but he refused.

  He lived scattered lives in ages to come, and remembered the future with increasing melancholy.

  He had visited the End of Time, and left it in the most profound despair. He had seen what was there, and when he had contemplated going beyond, that most natural step out the Gate which stood and beckoned—

  He fled. He had never run from anything but that. It remained, a recollection of shame at his fear.

  A sense of a limit which he had never had before.

  And this in itself was terrible, to a man who had thought time infinite and himself immortal.

  In his own present of 1003 since the First Gate, Harrh had breakfast, a quiet meal. The children were off to the beach. His wife shared tea with him and thought it would be a fine morning.

  "Yes," he said. "Shall we take the boat out? We can fish a little, take the sun."

  "Marvelous," she said. Her gray eyes shone. He loved her—for herself, for her patience. He caught her hand on the crystal table, held slender fingers, not speaking his thoughts, which were far too somber for the morning.

  They spent their mornings and their days together. He came back to her, time after shifting time. He might be gone a month; and home a week; and gone two months next time. He never dared cut it too close. They lost a great deal of each other's lives, and so much—so much he could not share with her.

  "The island," he said. "Mhreihrrinn, I'd like to see it again."

  "I'll pack," she said.

  And went away.

  He came back to her never aged; and she bore their two sons; and reared them; and managed the accounts: and explained his absences to relatives and the world. He travels, she would say, with that right amount of secrecy that protected secrets.

  And even to her he could never confide what he knew.

  "I trust you," she would say—knowing what he was, but never what he did.

  He let her go. She went off to the hall and out the door—He imagined happy faces, holiday, the boys making haste to run the boat out and put on the bright colored sail. She would keep them busy carrying this and that, fetching food and clothes—things happened in shortest order when Mhreihrrinn set her hand to them.

  He wanted that, wanted the familiar, the orderly, the homely. He was, if he let his mind dwell on things—afraid. He had the notion never to leave again.

  He had been to the Now most recently—5045, and his flesh crawled at the memory. There was recklessness there. There was disquiet. The Now had traveled two decades and more since he had first begun, and he felt it more and more. The whole decade of the 5040's had a queasiness about it, ripples of instability as if the whole fabric of the Now were shifting like a kaleidoscope.

  And it headed for the End of Time. It had become more and more like that age, confirming it by its very collapse.

  People had illusions in the Now. They perceived what had not been true.

  And yet it was when he came home.

  It had grown to be so—while he was gone.

  A university stood in Morurir, which he did not remember.

  A hedge of trees grew where a building had been in Morurir.

  A man was in the Council who had died.

  He would not go back to Now. He had resolved that this morning. He had children, begotten before his first time-traveling. He had so very much to keep him—this place, this home, this stability—He was very well to do. He had invested well—his own small tampering. He had no lack, no need. He was mad to go on and on. He was done.

  But a light distracted him, an opal shimmering beyond his breakfast nook, arrival in that receptor which his fine home afforded, linked to the master gate at Pyvrrhn.

  A young man materialized there, opal and light and then solidity, a distraught young man.

  "Harrh," the youth said, disregarding the decencies of meeting, and strode forward unasked. "Harrh, is everything all right here?"

  Harrh arose from the crystal table even before the shimmer died, beset
by that old queasiness of things out of joint. This was Alhir from 390 Since the Gate, an experienced man in the force: he had used a Master Key to come here—had such access, being what he was.

  "Alhir," Harrh said, perplexed. "What's wrong?"

  "You don't know." Alhir came as far as the door. "A cup of tea?" Harrh said. Alhir had been here before. They were friends. There were oases along' the course of suns, friendly years, places where houses served as rest-stops. In this too Mhreihrrinn was patient. "I've got to tell you—No, don't tell me. I don't want to know. I'm through. I've made up my mind. You can carry that where you're going.—But if you want the breakfast—"

  "There's been an accident."

  "I don't want to hear."

  "He got past us."

  "I don't want to know." He walked over to the cupboard, took another cup. "Mhreihrrinn's with the boys down at the beach. You just caught us." He set the cup down and poured the tea, where Mhreihrrinn had sat. "Won't you? You're always welcome here. Mhreihrrinn has no idea what you are. My young friend, she calls you. She doesn't know. Or she suspects. She'd never say. —Sit down."

  Alhir had strayed aside, where a display case sat along the wall, a lighted case of mementoes, of treasures, of crystal. "Harrh, there was a potsherd here."

  "No," Harrh said, less and less comfortable. "Just the glasses. I'm quite sure."

  "Harrh, it was very old."

  "No," he said. "—I promised Mhreihrrinn and the boys—I mean it. I'm through. I don't want to know."

  "It came from Silen. From the digs at the First Gate, Harrh. It was a very valuable piece. You valued it very highly. —You don't remember."

  "No," Harrh said, feeling fear thick about him, like a change in atmosphere. "I don't know of such a piece. I never had such a thing. Check your memory, Alhir."

  "It was from the ruins by the First Gate, don't you understand?"