'I hate to spoil the party,' I sent, 'But they are still holding the Ambassador.'
The Primary of the S2 Council was soon in contact with the Convenor to reinforce that point. She was linked with all of us throughout the conversation, so I understood the emotions involved as well as receiving a translation. For once, the Primary had to communicate mentally, although his control of his barriers was impressive; he gave little away.
'My proposition to you is very simple. You will cease transporting humans to our new world. You will assign a number of your slider machines to us on various continents, in locations which we will specify. At each location, one machine will provide a direct link between our two worlds, while a transfer machine will link my world with the new one. You will provide geothermal power plants in each location, and housing for our technicians and soldiers. Once established, you will avoid approaching these locations within a radius of thirty kilometres. To ensure that you keep your side of the agreement, we will hold your ambassador until the arrangements are fully implemented. He will then be released unharmed and we will leave you alone. One other thing – we require an additional hostage; the creature you created, the mutant human. If you do not agree to these demands, I am sure that your ambassador will bear his protracted and painful death in a way which will bring credit to all of you.'
He abruptly cut the connection, leaving the Assembly mentally silent. I realised that they were in danger of going into collective shock; for all of their intelligence, wisdom and experience, they had never encountered a situation like this and they were sorely battered by recent events. This was no academic issue which they could debate dispassionately, the hard decisions were constantly jabbing their sharp edges into them.
The Convenor turned wearily to me. 'You seem to have a better idea of what to do in these circumstances than we have. Do you have any suggestions?'
'Yes. We need to get the Ambassador out of their hands. Can you locate him?'
'Yes. They have left him in contact with us, to increase the pressure on us I suppose. As long as they leave him his headnet, we will know exactly where he is.'
'Do they know that you have a slider machine aboard an airship?'
A pause for consideration. 'No, I don't think so. We didn't try to keep it from them, we just didn't think to mention it.'
'Then we have a chance! The sooner we move, the better, before they start to consider what we might do.'
That evening the great tandem airship set off in a south-easterly direction, towards what was Germany on my world. The saurians had not taken the Ambassador far, presumably in case they needed to produce him in a hurry. The city was situated on both banks of the Rhine, the capital of one of the S2 states which divided up this part of Europe. The Ruler still lived in a sprawling castle, parts of which seemed to be of great age although it had clearly been extended and modernised many times. The Ambassador's signal was coming from one of the older parts. The P.A.W. and I rode down together in the slider cabin while I kept my face glued to the viewscreen, which had a glowing green dot superimposed on it to mark the location of the Ambassador. He appeared to be asleep. It had been agreed that we would not try to contact him just in case his captors had a way of monitoring the communications, or detected a suspicious lightening in his mood. I stayed in close mental contact with the pilot and the winchman, guiding them with my mind as they made fine adjustments to the position of the ship and the height of the cabin. The green dot steadily brightened as the cabin plunged through the ghostly outlines of the castle. The signal was coming from a space deep within the basement area – nothing less than a traditional medieval dungeon, I realised, albeit the castle had wide, gently-sloping ramps rather than steep narrow stairs. Any frontal assault would have had great difficulty even in finding this place, assuming that the attackers had been able to fight their way through the soldiers who doubtless infested the upper levels. I reflected that it was as well that my scaly skin could not sweat, otherwise my grip on the P.A.W. would be becoming rather slippery at this point. Eventually, with painful slowness, we arrived. I looked through the viewer at the thermal image of the interior of the dark cell. The Ambassador was lying down on a mat, fast asleep. I gave the OK signal and the slider machine powered up. I felt my tension increasing; if they had any electromagnetic sensors in the vicinity, they would be beginning to pick this up. The hole popped into existence in front of me; there was not even enough light in the cell for my enhanced night vision to use, but I knew where he was. I walked through the hole, bent over his pad, and touched his head to deepen his slumbers. I picked him up, carried him back through the hole, and switched off the machine.
In the end, it had proved to be absurdly simple. I resisted the temptation to appear in the Ruler's apartments and carry him back as a trophy – that could wait for another day. The mid-night celebrations back at the settlement were loud with singing and awash with joy.
No morning-after hangovers, I thought. Over-indulgence on water did have some compensations after all. Unfortunately, one downside was a too-sharp memory of the previous night. I had discovered that it was possible to become somewhat intoxicated by the joyous emotions of the party; at least, I couldn't think of any other reason why I had allowed them to persuade me to sing. Unfortunately, my lack of vocal talent was only matched by the paucity of songs whose lyrics I knew – I had always preferred instrumental jazz. I had an awful memory of dredging up some old rugby songs from my youth. Fortunately, the general reaction had been one of bemusement rather than understanding; however, I thought I caught a flash of amused colour from Tertia.
A week passed with no contact from S2; the Rulers were no doubt plotting something, but it was hard to see what harm they could do with no access to a slider machine. The transfer of the starving human refugees proceeded apace, and was commencing in second-priority areas in order to spread the load and avoid concentrating too many people in one place; the organisers of the transfers were determined to tread lightly on the land. Israel and the Palestinians were locked in dispute, as usual; each thought it was a great idea for the other to move their entire population to New Earth, except of course for the usual zealots on both sides who wanted control of both Temple Mounts. But they were at least talking to each other about it, instead of killing each other. Mind-linking could force even the most intransigent to see their opponents' point of view.
In that week some of the slider scientists came to see me – both saurian and human, to my surprise. They had used healers at both ends of their machine to transport the humans through, in order to improve still further their ability to co-operate. Apparently this had happened almost as soon as the transfer problem had been resolved but, being scientists, they hadn't bothered to tell anyone. What they were determined to do now was to find out why I could pass through the slider hole without suffering the agonies and unconsciousness which afflicted other people with mind-linking abilities.
Their approach was straightforward. They fitted me with a more advanced type of headnet, able to map brain activity with great precision, then asked me to keep walking through the settlement's slider machine (recalibrated to connect with New Earth) again and again, and to concentrate on what I experienced. I found that the more I did it, the more the nausea receded; I was evidently becoming accustomed to it. It seemed to be caused by a strange twisting sensation at the moment of transfer. The process became a little tedious as they consulted and mentally muttered over their instruments, so I focused as closely as I could on the blurred flash of light I saw each time, moving more and more slowly through the hole, then stopping afterwards to replay the memory step by step, trying to analyse what was happening. I suddenly realised that it consisted of hundreds, even thousands, of images, flickering through my mind almost too rapidly for me to comprehend. I slowed down my movement through the hole even more, concentrating on breaking down this vision into the smallest possible increments, until I could play the show through, one frame at a time. At first I was puzzled; some
of the views seemed to be just variations on the one I could see in the arena, others were quite different. Some featured humans, some saurians, most neither. It took a few minutes before the reality sank in; it was the view of an abandoned saurian encampment, tents being removed, which finally made the penny drop – I was seeing the parallel worlds!
Scientists are normally a methodical and cautious lot, but there was no restraining their excitement at this news. The problem was that despite my science background I had great difficulty in understanding what they were saying, even though they were supposedly communicating in English; they seemed to have cobbled together their own hybrid vocabulary to describe slider theory and related brain activity. Evidently a particular area of my brain – or rather, a combination of areas – was activated when I went through the slider hole, but they were having problems in relating that to similar scans of human and saurian brains passing through the hole. Yes, I discovered, in the interests of research, volunteers from the scientists had indeed passed through the hole while conscious, despite the agony and unconsciousness which followed. I regarded them with a deeper respect.
My head had begun to ache so I left them to debate among themselves. I was beginning to feel restless and impatient, with no obvious role to play. The Assembly made the slider ship available to me so I visited Luke on New Earth; everything was going well, the area for dozens of kilometres around the transfer point had been divided up into farms and the transfer of population at this place was being wound down and switched to other areas. A start was being made on a permanent settlement to replace the tents, with a school being the first priority. The larger and more aggressive wild animals had begun to present problems and requests for hunting rifles had been made, but the saurians came up with something better; a device which projected an intense field which directly affected the nervous system, causing the animals to retreat in panic. The beauty was that this effect could easily be blocked by people with mind-linking powers, so the device could not be used for nefarious purposes.
A different group of scientists came to visit me (the others having determined what I could do, although they were no closer to finding a way to replicate it). The new group wanted to catalogue and describe every one of the parallel worlds I could see. Ultimately they hoped to draw up a kind of genealogical map of the worlds, showing their relationships and branching points, but I guessed that would be the work of a lifetime – even a saurian one. Still, I tried to help them to make a start. After much head-aching experimentation I discovered that the images did come in a logical relationship sequence. From a starting point in S1, the first few worlds I saw were all saurian ones; interestingly, there were many more than the S1 scientists were aware of, the additional ones not having developed means of propagating electro-magnetic signals. Some of the saurians were clearly of a different species to the ones I knew. Similarly, a long sequence of worlds came in which I spotted only humans. At one edge of this group, I caught a brief glimpse of what seemed to be Neanderthals. There were groups of worlds in which there was no obvious evidence of organised activity although, as the scientists pointed out, that did not necessarily mean that there was no intelligent life present. My view into each world was restricted to my normal field of vision at that one spot, which meant that I only caught occasional, random glimpses of life. Saurians had a different attitude to time; these scientists didn't spend a few days on intensive research before rushing off to write their reports, they settled in indefinitely, so on most days I set aside some time to spend with them.
The members of the Planetary Assembly had returned to their homes at the end of the crisis but I stayed on at the settlement, as did my three saurian friends. For them, taking a few years out for some activity was as nothing, in a lifetime of centuries. Genetic tests had confirmed that I could expect to live for at least as long; their scientists couldn't be totally sure, since they had no one else with my particular genetic heritage to compare me with. I mulled over what Richards had last said, and I had to admit that although I did not feel that I really belonged anywhere, I felt most comfortable with the saurians of S1. Their particular attitude to life meshed with my own, like a kind of ideal which humans could only aspire to. In part, I realised, this was due to the long perspective that their life expectancy gave them. At its simplest, it meant that if you were planning to live in a place for centuries, you didn't mess it up.
I spent some time learning the S1 spoken and written languages, a process made much easier by my enhanced memory. Out of curiosity, I learned the S2 variation on this; over many millennia of civilisation they had evolved a common tongue (albeit with regional dialects), despite the lack of mind-linking among the general population. I had an uneasy feeling that we had not heard the last of them, although even in my most paranoid moments I couldn't work out what kind of threat they could pose; the S1 scientists were certain that the scientific understanding and technological capabilities of their S2 opposite numbers lagged so far behind that there was no chance of them designing and constructing a slider machine for centuries, if ever. Their Rulers' rejection of mind-linking for their scientists put severe limitations on their potential. Still, I knew that such problems wouldn't stop human scientists from trying – once they knew that something could be done, they wouldn't rest until they did it.
The saurians of S1 had commenced another project; to help those human worlds in which civilisation had collapsed. The first essential was to provide a power supply, to which they found an ingenious solution. Secundo explained that they had some space elevators – thick ribbons of immensely strong material which were stretched from the surface of the Earth to a massive space station in an orbit that would have flung it into space if not restrained by the ribbon. The theory of these was well understood on Old Earth, but sufficiently strong materials for the ribbon were not yet available. Elevator cars rode the ribbons up into space, and a slider machine had been transported to the orbital station. They were using this to transfer beam power stations into orbit above collapsed worlds. While the assembled power stations were huge, with solar panels stretching for kilometres, the individual elements were small enough to pass through the slider hole. The same applied to the beam collectors on the ground. It would take a very long time to restart the lost civilisations, but the saurians had that time.
I was interested to learn of scientific expeditions from Old to New Earth, mainly to search for any surviving humans on remote islands. So far they had found a few groups, in places such as Tristan da Cunha and Pitcairn Island. Some wildlife researchers had also visited, one group triumphantly returning to Old Earth with a breeding population of dodos to restock Mauritius, and other such recoveries from extinction were planned.
One unexpected development made me wonder even more who I was, and what I was becoming. At the end of one session with my genealogical scientists they were prodding me to focus as closely as possible on a particular memory, to try to describe more accurately something – person or animal – I had only caught a brief glimpse of. I riffled through the index of worlds in my mind, selected the right one and concentrated all of my attention on it. Oddly, as I focused more closely my viewpoint seemed to change and, as I watched, a couple of saurian-like animals wandered past, far closer than I had seen them before. I snapped back into the present, and caught the scientists staring at me, their colours and mental states indicating their shock.
'What happened? You look as if you've seen a ghost!' (A difficult concept, this, but my saurian was now good enough to find an equivalent.)
'Your eyes, they just silvered over – there was no pupil visible at all!'
It was clear that they were not joking, and it dawned on me what I had done. I was no longer accessing my memory of the view, but the view itself – I could look directly into the parallel worlds without needing a slider machine.
This caused huge excitement once more and the original slider scientists ran or hopped into view as soon as they could. More tests with the headnets follow
ed, but they only confirmed what they had already surmised – that my mental state when viewing the parallel worlds showed the same baffling pattern as when I went through the slider machine. Eventually they went away, theorising and debating. As far as I was concerned my new ability was an interesting party trick, but I didn't initially see much practical use for it.
Spring had now turned into summer, and to get away from the persistent attentions of the world genealogists (who had come to regard me as an inexhaustible data source) I spent many long days exploring ever further from the settlement, sometimes disappearing by myself for several days at a time. I felt myself slowing, taking the saurian long view, my human impatience gradually dissipating. The interlinked network of marshes and lakes was ideal to lose myself in both physically and mentally, my focus on encompassing in my mind as much of the teeming life as I could. I was returning to the settlement from such a day out when:
'Matt! Come quickly – the saurians are here on New Earth – they are killing the settlers!'
The message from Luke ran through me like an electric shock, shattering my mood.
'How, Luke – what happened?'
There was only silence. I sent an urgent message to my friends and the Convenor, an equally urgent call to the slider ship – never far away – to rendezvous as quickly as possible, and ran to the settlement and into my room. The case of the P.A.W. was dusty with disuse. I pulled out the gun; one of the convenient saurian harnesses took the magazines and the spare ammunition. As I left the dwelling I saw Secundo and Tertia hopping rapidly towards me – Primo was off visiting relatives somewhere. All of the time I was trying to contact Luke, with no success. I turned to the saurians in exasperation. 'How could they do this? It's supposed to be impossible!'
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