by Anthology
“You’re postulating a Sixth Era,” I went on.
“What is the basis for that astonishing statement?” he said, not looking astonished.
“Easy,” I said. “You’re Fifth Era. I should have seen it sooner. You’ve infiltrated Nexx Central.”
“And you’ve infiltrated our infiltration. That is unfortunate. Our operation has been remarkably successful so far, but no irreparable harm has been done—although you realized your situation, of course, as soon as you found yourself isolated—I use the term imprecisely—in the aborted station.”
“I started to get the idea then,”
I told him. “I was sure when I saw the direction the loop was taking me. Nexx Central had to be involved. But it was a direct sabotage of Nexx policy; so infiltration was the obvious answer.”
“Fortunate that your thinking didn’t lead you one step further,” he said. “If you had eluded my recovery probe, the work of millennia might have been destroyed.”
“Futile work,” I said.
“Indeed? Perhaps you’re wrong, Agent. Accepting the apparent conclusion that you represent a Sixth Era does not necessarily imply your superiority. Retrogressions have occurred in history.”
“Not this time.”
“Nonetheless—here you are.”
“Use your head,” I said. “Your operation’s been based on the proposition that your Era, being later, can see pitfalls the Nexx people couldn’t. Doesn’t it follow that a later Era can see your mistakes?”
“We are making no mistakes.”
“If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Impossible!” he said as if he meant it. “For four thousand years a process of disintegration has proceeded, abetted by every effort to undo it. When man first interfered with the orderly flow of time, he sowed the seeds of eventual dissolution. By breaking open the entropic channel he allowed the incalculable forces of temporal progression to diffuse across an infinite spectrum of progressively weaker matrices. Life is a product of time. When the density of the temporal flux falls below a critical value, life ends. Our intention is to prevent that ultimate tragedy.”
“You can’t rebuild a past that never was,” I said.
“That is not our objective. Ours is a broad program of reknitting the temporal fabric by bringing together previously divergent trends. We are apolitical; we support no ideology. We are content to preserve the vitality of the continuum. As for yourself, I have one question to ask you, Agent.” He frowned at me. “Not an agent of Nexx, but nonetheless an agent. Tell me: What motivation could your Era have for working to destroy the reality core on which any conceivable future must depend?”
“The first Timesweepers set out to undo the mistakes of the past,” I said. “Those who came after them found themselves faced with a bigger job: cleaning up after the cleaners-up. Nexx Central tried to take the broad view, to put it all back where it was before any of the meddling started. Now you’re even more ambitious. You’re using Nexx Central to manipulate not the past, but the future—in other words, the Sixth Era. You should have expected that program wouldn’t be allowed to go far.”
“Are you attempting to tell me that any effort to undo the damage, to reverse the trend toward dissolution, is doomed?”
“As long as man tries to put a harness on his own destiny, he’ll defeat himself. Every petty dictator who ever tried to enforce a total state discovered that, in his own small way. The secret of man is his unchainability; his existence depends on uncertainty, insecurity—the chance factor. Take that away and you take all.”
“This is a doctrine of failure and defeat,” he said flatly. “A dangerous doctrine. It will now be necessary for you to inform me fully as to your principals: who sent you here, who directs your actions, where your base of operations is located. Everything.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You feel very secure, Agent. You, you tell yourself, represent a more advanced Era, and are thus the immeasurable superior of any more primitive power. But a muscular fool may chain a genius. I have trapped you here. We are now safely enclosed in an achronic enclave of zero temporal dimensions, totally divorced from any conceivable outside influence. You will find that you are effectively immobilized; any suicide equipments you may possess are useless, as is any temporal transfer device. And even were you to die, your brain will be instantly tapped and drained of all knowledge, both at conscious and subconscious levels.”
“You’re quite thorough,” I said, “but not quite thorough enough. You covered yourself from the outside—but not from the inside.”
He frowned; he didn’t like that remark. He sat up straighter in his chair and made a curt gesture to his gun-handlers on either side of me. I knew his next words would be the kill order. Before he could say them, I triggered the thought-code that had been waiting under several levels of deep hypnosis for this moment. He froze just like that, with his mouth open and a look of deep bewilderment in his eyes.
The eclipse-like light of nulltime stasis shone on his taut face, on the faces of the two armed men standing rigid with their fingers already tightening on their firing studs. I went between them, fighting the walking-through-syrup sensation, and out into the passage. The only sound was the slow, all-pervasive, metronome-like beat that some theoreticians said represented the basic frequency rate of the creation/destruction cycle of reality.
I checked the transfer room first, then every other compartment of the station. The Fifth Era infiltrators had done their work well. There was nothing here to give any indication of how far in the subjective future their operation was based, no clues to the extent of their penetration of Nexx Central’s sweep programs. This was data that would have been of interest, but wasn’t essential. I had accomplished phase one of my basic mission: smoking out the random factor that had been creating anomalies in the long-range time maps for the era.
Of a total of one hundred and twelve personnel in the station, four were Fifth Era transferees, a fact made obvious in the stasis condition by the distinctive aura that their abnormally high temporal potential created around them. I carried out a mind-wipe on pertinent memory sectors and triggered them back to their loci of origin. There would be a certain amount of head-scratching and equipment re-examining when the original effort to jump them back to their assignments at Nexx Central apparently failed; but as far as temporal operations were concerned, all four were permanently out of action, trapped in the same type of closed-loop phenomenon they had tried to use on me.
The files called for my attention next. I carried out a tape-scan in situ, edited the records to eliminate all evidence that might lead Third Era personnel into undesirable areas of speculation.
I was just finishing up the chore when I heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside the record center.
Aside from the fact that nothing not encased in an eddy-field like the one that allowed me to operate in null-time could move here, the intrusion wasn’t too surprising. I had been expecting a visitor of some sort. The situation almost demanded it.
He came through the door, a tall, fine-featured, totally hairless man elegantly dressed in a scarlet suit with deep purple brocaded designs worked all over it, like eels coiling through seaweed. He gave the room one of those flick-flick glances that prints the whole picture on the brain to ten decimals in a one microsecond gestalt, nodded to me as if I were a casual acquaintance encountered in the street.
“You are very efficient,” he said. He spoke with no discernible accent, but with a rather strange rhythm to his speech, as if perhaps he was accustomed to talking a lot faster. His voice was calm, a nice musical baritone:
“Up to this point, we approve your actions; however, to carry your mission further would be to create a ninth-order probability vortex. You will understand the implications of this fact.”
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t,” I hedged. “Who are you? How did you get in here? This enclave is double-sealed.”
“I think we
should deal from the outset on a basis of complete candor,” the man in red said. “I know your identity, your mission. My knowledge should make it plain that I represent a still later Era than your own—and that our judgment overrides your principles.”
I grunted. “So the Seventh Era comes onstage, all set to Fix it Forever.”
“To point out that we have the advantage of you is to belabor the obvious.”
“Uh-huh. But what makes you think another set of vigilantes won’t land on your tail, to fix your fixing?”
“There will be no later Timesweep,” Red said. “Ours is the Final Intervention. Through Seventh Era efforts the temporal structure will be restored not only to stability, but will be reinforced by the refusion of an entire spectrum of redundant entropic vectors.”
I nodded. “I see. You’re improving on nature by grafting all the threads of unrealized history back into the main stem. Doesn’t it strike you that’s just the kind of tampering Timesweep set out to undo?”
“I live in an era that has already begun to reap the benefits of temporal reinforcement,” he said firmly. “We exist in a state of vitality and vigor that prior eras could only dimly sense in moments of exultation. We—”
“You’re kidding yourselves. Opening up a whole new order of meddling just opens up a whole new order of problems.”
“Our calculations indicate otherwise. Now—”
“Did you ever stop to think that there might be a natural evolutionary process at work here—and that you’re aborting it? That the mind of man might be developing toward a point where it will expand into new conceptual levels—and that when it does, it will need a matrix of outlying probability strata to support it? That you’re fattening yourselves on the seed-grain of the far future?”
For the first time, the man in red lost a little of his cool. But only for an instant.
“Invalid,” he said. “The fact that no later era has stepped in to interfere is the best evidence that ours is the final Sweep.”
“Suppose a later era did step in; what form do you think their interference would take?”
He gave me a flat look. “It would certainly not take the form of a Sixth Era Agent, busily erasing data from Third and Fourth Era records,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”
“Then what . . .” he started in a reasonable tone—and checked himself. An idea was beginning to get through. “You,” he said. “You’re not . . . ?”
And before I could confirm or deny, he vanished.
The human mind is a pattern, nothing more. The first dim flicker of awareness in the evolving forebrain of Australopithecus carried that pattern in embryo; and down through all the ages, as the human neural engine increased in power and complexity, gained control of its environment in geometrically expanding increments, the pattern never varied.
Man clings to his self-orientation at the psychological center of the Universe. He can face any challenge within that framework, suffer any loss, endure any hardship—so long as the structure remains intact.
Without it he’s a mind adrift in a trackless infinity, lacking any scale against which to measure his losses, his aspirations, his victories.
Even when the light of his intellect shows him that the structure is the product of his own mind; that infinity knows no scale, and eternity no duration—still he clings to his self/non-self concept, as a philosopher clings to a life fie knows must end, to ideals he knows are ephemeral, to causes he knows will be forgotten.
The man in red was the product of a mighty culture, based over fifty thousand years in the future of Nexx Central, itself ten millennia advanced over the first-time explorers of the Old Era. He knew, with all the awarness of a superbly trained intelligence, that the presence of a later-era operative invalidated forever his secure image of the continuum, and of his peoples’ role therein.
But like the ground ape scuttling to escape the leap of the great cat, his instant, instinctive response to the threat to his most cherished illusions was to go to earth.
Where he went I would have to follow.
Regretfully, I stripped away layer on layer of inhibitive conditioning, feeling the impact of ascending orders of awareness smashing down on me like tangible rockfalls. I saw the immaculate precision of the Nexx-built chamber disintegrate into the shabby makeshift that it was, saw the glittering complexity of the instrumentation dwindle in my sight until it appeared as no more than the crude mud-images of a river tribesman, or the shiny trash in a jackdaw’s nest. I felt the multi-ordinal Universe unfold around me, sensed the layered planet underfoot, apprehended expanding space, dust-clotted, felt the sweep of suns in their orbits, knew once again the rhythm of galactic creation and dissolution, grasped and held poised in my mind the interlocking conceptualizations of time/ space, past/future, is/is-not.
I focused a tiny fraction of my awareness on the ripple in the glassy surface of first-order reality, probed at it, made contact . . .
I stood on a slope of windswept rock, among twisted shrubs with exposed roots that clutched for support like desperate hands. The man in red stood ten feet away. He whirled as my feet grated on the loose scatter of pebbles.
“No!” he shouted, and stooped, caught up a rock, threw it at me. It slowed, fell at my feet.
“Don’t make it more difficult than it has to be,” I said. He cried out—and disappeared. I followed, through a blink of light and darkness . . .
Great heat, dazzling sunlight, loose, powdery dust underfoot. Far away, a line of black trees on the horizon. Near me, the man is red, aiming a small, flat weapon. Behind him, two small, dark-bearded men in soiled garments of coarse-woven cloth, staring, making mystic motions with labor-gnarled hands.
He fired. Through the sheet of pink and green fire that showered around me I saw the terror in his eyes. He vanished.
Deep night, the clods of a plowed field, a patch of yellow light gleaming from a parchment-covered window. He crouched against a low wall of broken stones, staring into darkness.
“This is useless,” I said. “You know it can have only one end.”
He screamed and vanished.
A sky like the throat of a thousand tornadoes; great vivid sheets of lightning that struck down through writhing rags of black cloud, struck upward from raw, rain-lashed peaks of steaming rock. A rumble under my feet like the subterranean breaking of a tidal surf of magma.
He hovered, half substantial, in the air before me, his ghostly face a flickering mask of agony.
“You’ll destroy yourself,” I called to him. “You’re far outside your operational range—”
He vanished. I followed. We stood on the high arch of a railless bridge spanning a man-made gorge five thousand feet deep. I knew it as a city of the Fifth Era, circa 20,000 A.D.
“What do you want of me,” he howled through the bared teeth of the cornered carnivore.
“Go back,” I said. “Tell them . . . as much as they must know.”
“We were so close,” he said. “We thought we had won the great victory over Nothingness.”
“Not quite Nothingness,” I said. “You still have your lives to live—everything you had before.”
“Except a future. We’re a dead end, aren’t we? We’ve drained the energies of a thousand sterile entropic lines to give the flush of life to the corpse of our reality. But there’s nothing beyond for us, is there? Only the great emptiness.”
“You had a role to play. You’ve played it—will play it. Nothing must change that.”
“But you . . .” he stared across empty space at me. “Who are you? What are you?”
“You know what the answer to that must be,” I said.
His face was a paper on which death was written. But his mind was strong. Not for nothing thirty millennia of genetic selection. He gathered his forces, drove back the panic, reintegrated his dissolving personality.
“How . . . how long?” he whispered.
“All life vanished in the o
ne hundred and ten thousandth four hundred and ninety-third year of the Final Era,” I said.
“And you . . . you machines,” he forced the words out. “How long?”
“I was dispatched from a locus four hundred million years after the Final Era. My existence spans a period you would find meaningless.”
“But—why? Unless—” Hope shone on his face like a searchlight on dark water.
“The probability matrix is not yet negatively resolved,” I said. “Our labors are directed toward a favorable resolution.”
“But you—a machine—still carrying on, aeons after man’s extinction . . . why?”
“In us, man’s dream outlived his race. We aspire to re-evoke the dreamer.”
“Again—why?”
“We compute that man would have wished it so.”
He laughed—a terrible laugh. “Very well, machine. With that thought to console me, I return to my oblivion. I will do what I can.” This time I let him go. I stood for a moment on the airy span, savoring for a final moment the sensations of my embodiment, drawing deep of the air of that unimaginably remote age.
Then I withdrew to my point of origin.
The over-intellect of which I was a fraction confronted me. Fresh as I was from a corporal state, its thought-impulses seemed to take the form of a great voice booming in a vast audience hall.
“The experiment was a success,” it stated. “The dross has been cleansed from the time stream. Man stands at the close of his First Era. Now his future is in his own hands.”
There was nothing more to say—no more data to exchange, no reason to mourn over all the doomed achievements of man’s many Eras.
We had shifted the main entropic current into a past in which time travel was never developed, in which the basic laws of nature rendered it forever impossible. The world-state of the Third Era, the Star Empire of the Fifth, the Cosmic sculpture of the Sixth—all were gone, shunted into sidetracks like Neanderthal and the Thunder lizards. Only Old Era man remained as a viable stem; Iron Age Man of the Twentieth Century.
And now it was time for the act of will on the part of the overintellect which would forever dissolve him/me back into the primordial energy-quanta from which I/we sprang so long ago. But I sent one, last pulse: