by Anthology
He removed his restraints. The chair’s metal base completed the circuit with the bottom of the craft. Ambient lighting flared around him. He depressed the control mechanism on the arm of the chair to open the outer door, and waited to see what lay beyond with baited breathe.
Cocooned within his sphere, it was only the barely perceptible purple aura of the ship’s unified field that prevented him from entering the timestream himself. It persistently occupied his thoughts during jumps. If he or any other object were to penetrate the field surrounding his chair, it would decay instantly. He had never seen the results with a human being, but during test flights he had seen a pocket watch suspended by a chain from the pod’s hull rust into nothing in seconds.
The pod’s oculus dilated without a sound to create an exit. When his chair had connected with the floor, the ship’s computers had automatically scanned the environment using tiny sensors on the machine’s outer skin. The readout on the screen attached to his chair informed him that the air outside was breathable, the conditions for an expedition optimum.
Even so, he grew nervous each time he left the pod—ever since that encounter with the Fascist Government of Greater Britannia in the twenty-second century. Not to mention the alligator population that plagued London after the Great Flood in the twenty-third. That had caught him completely unawares.
He chided himself. He had put his faith in machines enough to travel thousands, even millions of years into the future, yet he could not put his trust in a simple door.
The computer spoke to him. It revealed that his location had shifted as the planet orbited through space. He was now in downtown Chicago. But he knew better than to rely solely on that. The ship was as precise as it could be. It avoided rematerializing in space and would wait until the planet occupied the same location again. Sometimes this meant a gap in his voyages of several hundred years. Often it meant that when he did land, things were not in exactly the right spot.
He had found this out to his cost when visiting New York in the newly-named Mathesonian Period (approximately 3,500 A.D.). The city had fallen into the sea long before then. Humankind had been curiously absent. Fortunately the pod’s computer had warned him. He had been forced to jump forward a few more minutes (three hundred years in fact), by which time the planet had trundled onward. Had it been wrong, he would have found himself submerged at a depth of several hundred feet.
A much more unfortunate series of events had occurred on his last jump, when he travelled forward a few hundred thousand years. The exact date was somewhere around fifty thousand A.D. The air had been breathable then. But the ship hadn’t been able to detect the presence of enormous, intelligent arachnids that had taken over the world since mankind’s extinction. These carnivorous spiders had evolved to camouflage their body temperature from predators. Hence they were invisible to the pod’s heat sensors. He had been out of the pod only a few minutes before they attacked. He had barely escaped evisceration by the skin of his teeth.
Trying to put all this to the back of his mind, he stepped toward the oculus. On the lookout for more spiders, he descended the mechanically unfolding ramp, and found himself in an equally bare metal room.
He scanned his surroundings, wishing he had some kind of further protection. But this trip had been for academic study only. He had never dreamed he could get this far. Unwilling to take the chance that the pod would work twice, he had simply kept travelling further forward into the future before heading back for home.
The chamber was devoid of any kind of instrumentation. Only a giant viewing screen occupied one wall. It depicted an area of space replete with various stars and astronomical bodies. He watched the swirling arm of a spiral galaxy spin lazily through oblivion.
Then he saw it. Against the blackness of the screen, a solitary figure. His back was turned to Matheson—a long dark cloak draped over its body—while its head was topped by a polished jet skull cap. Fear gripped Matheson’s stomach.
The figure did not move. It gazed fixedly at the screen. Matheson now observed that the image in the monitor was advancing toward the viewer with a subtle forward motion. He grew convinced that he was on some kind of ship.
But if that was so, then where was Earth?
The oculus closed behind Matheson; a safety mechanism to ensure he brought no unwanted guests back with him.
At the slight metallic grating, the figure turned. It appeared to be human. It watched Matheson with bored interest, as if this was not the first time-traveler who had been here. And who was to say he was? He realized he had come so very far this time it was almost certainly probable. He had crossed millions, even billions of years. Indeed, the sphere was no longer capable of measuring the distance travelled. He had simply told it to go to the end of the line.
The figure took a step toward him. A faint glow from within the room’s semi-transparent walls illuminated the man. He was approximately six feet three tall. His skin radiated an intense paleness beneath his polished black skullcap. His age was indeterminable. He could have been very young or very old. His long, black cloak disguised the form underneath.
“Welcome,” it said, though its lips did not move.
“Hello,” he ventured. His words echoed in the vessel.
“You have travelled here in that?”
Matheson nodded.
“Through time?”
He nodded again.
“You must be one of the ancestors. They invented time travel. We never bothered with it. Far too dangerous to tamper with the timestream. And who wants to know what fate will eventually befall him?”
Matheson felt crestfallen. It was almost as though the man was accusing him of something.
“So you have come to witness the end of everything?” the man asked. “The end of time?”
The man took a step toward him. Matheson didn’t react. He noticed how fluid the man was. His movements graceful beyond compare. He glanced down two tunnels that lead off in opposite directions from each end of the chamber. Both were featureless.
“You haven’t seen any spiders, have you?” he asked.
“When they returned from the stars they wiped out the spiders,” the man replied. He turned back to the view on the screen. The galaxy was huge, bigger than any Matheson had ever seen, and it rotated with staggering swiftness.
“This is the end of it all,” he said.
Matheson found it peculiar the man could understand him—after all, he spoke what would now surely be a most ancient dialect of English.
“Telepathy transcends all barriers,” the man explained to the unasked question. “We are conversing in concepts and emotions. A much more civilized method of communication.”
Matheson regarded his host with newfound respect, and wariness. Obviously he was no match physically for this man. He was short and pudgy compared to the future man’s almost balletic athleticism. He studied the future man’s physiology. Two eyes with black corneas, a long, hooked nose, a narrow mouth, a prominent forehead. Large hands with long fingers. He noticed that the future man had four joints to each finger instead of three. He was puzzled. He had expected there would be more changes by now. Perhaps, like sharks, they had reached the perfect state of evolution. The man smiled, and the comparison made Matheson uneasy.
As the man watched him silently, he speculated upon the puzzle. Why hadn’t this man evolved further, if he was indeed one of the last vestiges of humanity? Why wasn’t he so much different from Matheson himself? Surely billions of years should have wreaked many more changes on the human body.
“You have many questions. I will attempt to answer them,” the future man thought to him.
“Can you read my entire mind?” Matheson asked. “Even my memories?”
“Indeed. I know all about you,” said the man. “And not just from your own rather interesting experiences. You are Matheson. I have read of you in the histories. You are the pioneer of time travel from the twenty-first century Anno Domini as you measure it. On your first ex
perimental journey in the time capsule, you visited various stages of humanity throughout the ages. It was your discovery of the means to generate the Unified Field that made this possible. Your breakthrough led to the destruction of several major superpowers and the creation of the global state twenty-nine years later. Your indisputable proof of the many wars, plagues, and disasters that would wipe out much of human civilization made many commonplace theosophical doctrines and political regimes redundant.”
So I did succeed, Matheson thought. A strange surge of pride elated him. “Yes, but I can only go forwards,” he said. “If I go backwards I will return to the exact moment when I left. I don’t yet know why.”
“And you never will,” the man said. The knowledge deflated him, despite his prophesized success.
Silence settled between them.
“So what is your name?” he finally asked.
“You may call me Racoczky Saint-Germain,” the man replied. “You are in my vessel.”
“A spacecraft?”
“No. It travels through space, but it is much more than that. I shall simply call it a vessel. We are in the spot the planet Earth occupied long ago, before its atmosphere perished and meteors tore its barren husk apart. Now there is only cosmic dust and fragments of the moon.”
Now Matheson knew what the feeling was that had gripped him the moment he had stepped off the pod. It was the feeling of being in an enormous tomb. He was in the graveyard of Earth. Although it shouldn’t have, the notion depressed him. All that effort, all that evolution gone to waste. All for nothing.
Racoczky stepped up to the sphere, feeling the texture of the craft with his elongated fingers. It looked nothing more than a large metal ball bearing. It bore no exterior controls whatsoever. Even the oculus was set to dilate upon his own biometric pattern.
“I see your machine is actually quite simplistic,” Racoczky said with a faint trace of distain. “Obviously the rapid motion of the exterior of the craft generates the unified field necessary for sustaining the tachyon shield, thereby folding the space-time manifold and allowing for travel in the fourth dimension. Primitive, but ingenious.”
Matheson did not like the man’s patronizing tone. Did they have no manners in the distant future?
“Are you alone here?” he thought to Racoczky. “Are there no others?”
“There were others. They all perished. Died or killed themselves or translated themselves into pure electronic hums. Only I stayed as I am.”
“How big is this vessel?” he asked. “Do you have museums? Artifacts of what went before? I’d be curious to see them.”
“There is nothing,” Racoczky held up a long-fingered hand. “We have no interest in the past. It is gone.”
Matheson staggered a pace backwards, stunned. “Surely there must be something?” he said. “Books? Music? Shakespeare? Beethoven?”
“Gone,” Racoczky answered. “We have no use for anything but technology.”
Matheson stammered. He’d had no idea of the effect this would have on him. Now it seemed that art, culture, everything he held dear, everything that made his life worth living, had gone, to be replaced by . . . what? Soulless machines? He began to eye Racoczky warily. Was the man himself some sort of mechanical construct?
Racoczky smiled grimly.
“I am flesh and blood,” he said, reading Matheson’s thoughts. “But this is all that remains. These empty walls. My vessel is what we call a way station—an object removed from the temporal plane of existence. Here, we exist beyond space-time, no longer subject to the vagaries of physical laws, or the passage of time. In that respect, this craft is a little like myself.”
His eyes widened, “You mean—”
“I am immortal,” Racoczky said. “I neither age nor die. None of us have, since the first treatment.”
“Treatment?” Matheson repeated. “Then this is a medical procedure? An advancement of science that I might take back with me?” he thought. “Please,” he pleaded, sensing the other’s hesitancy. “You must let me know. Men have sought a cure for ageing since time began.”
Racoczky’s thoughts were suddenly shrouded from Matheson—a trick he supposed one learned through countless years of practice. He thought he saw a look of pity in the other man’s dark, piercing eyes.
“The treatment, yes. A vaccine against ageing,” Racoczky said. “We discovered it by accident. Reactivated dormant stem cells by the use of a retrovirus. It was offered to all countries in the Western world.”
Again, Racoczky tuned his back on Matheson to observe the final agonized throws of a dying solar flare from a nearby sun.
“Forgive me if I do not give you my full attention,” he said. “But it’s not every day one sees the final moments of an entire universe.”
“What?” Matheson gaped.
He had not noticed before, but across the vast gulf of space, stars were winking out. One by one, they disappeared in faint explosion.
“This is the moment you have waited for,” Racoczsky told him. “The end of the universe is here.”
Matheson stepped right up to the screen. As he watched, two of the spiral arms of a galaxy collided with each other. The whirlpool-like structure broke apart. In the process, an impossible number of worlds were wiped out.
“Look at that,” Racoczky smiled at the screen. “The last of the universe. Dying. Two hundred million years ago, the milky way merged with the Andromeda galaxy. Throughout the universe, galaxies had died, creating supermassive black holes that pulled the debris and space dust across the cosmos into this—one last, final black hole. Now it is dragging the last remaining star systems toward each other. In a few hours, they will reach critical mass and explode, just like all the others have done. I have been watching this for thousands of your millennia. I have seen countless burgeoning civilizations destroyed. Innumerable stars perish. We call it Charybdis.”
“But what about the immortalization treatment?” Matheson pressed.
“Oh, it worked,” Racoczky turned back to him with a somber face. “Our stem cells constantly replenish themselves, forever turned on. The body does not die, does not age. But let me ask you this: once every cell in your body is replaced, are you really the same person, or are you something different altogether?”
Matheson listened as Racoczky went on. He had heard his argument before, and had never been able to answer it.
“Do you stop being yourself? And if you are not yourself, has the old “you” ceased to exist? Each day, your body sheds thousands of skin cells to make way for new ones. Do you not then continually die each day? Can you say with certainty that you are that same Arthur Matheson who stepped out of that ship several minutes ago?”
“I—I don’t know,” he replied truthfully.
“I have had time to ponder these questions.” Racoczky said with an enigmatic frown.
“Where are the others of your race?” Matheson asked.
“As I said, I am the last,” Racoczky answered. “Those that went to the stars did not return. I think they have merged with the universe, which has become their final resting place. Perhaps they are at peace. Who knows? They may still exist in one form or another.”
“But you didn’t go?”
“I like my body. I enjoy the immediacy of physical experience. Every thousand years or so I download my memories into this ship—so that I do not forget anything when my brain reaches its maximum biological capacity. Would you like to see?”
He waved his hand over one of the glowing lights inside the walls. An instant later, a three-dimensional image flashed before Matheson’s mind’s eye. Another thought transmission.
Suddenly he thought he saw vast cityscapes—the like of which no mortal man had ever seen—huge boiling oceans of metal churning across distant planets. And men and women, reduced to a pre-Eden-like state, scampering through unruly jungles populated by gigantic fruits and vines.
It resembled Paradise.
It made him sad. Sad in a way he could not d
escribe. He missed all the people he had known who had now died. All the girlfriends who had perished, all the relatives now turned to dust. It made him think of the cruelty of Time. He resolved that when he returned, he would give away his invention for free, to everyone who needed it. They would seed the stars of the future and the past.
One last question bothered him.
“How do you know that galaxy is the last, Racoczky? The universe is infinite. There could be more star systems, more planets out there.”
“My ship detects no more,” Racoczky laughed. “Our instruments are limitless in scope. Our wormholes can take us anywhere. Distance is no object. Yet now all my devices tell me there simply is nowhere else. The universe may be infinite—but its infinity is simply the absence of matter. Matter itself can have an end. And in seven hundred billion years, you’d be surprised how many planets you can explore.”
Seven hundred billion. So that was how far he’d come—to the end of it all.
It seemed so final, that he could put a figure on the end of time.
“Excuse me,” said Racoczky, “I must feed.”
He waved his hand over the console. The wall warped open to reveal a thin, transparent tumbler. Dark red liquid splashed into it from a faucet hidden in the ship’s mechanism.
“An unfortunate side-effect of the treatment is that I can no longer imbibe drink or food. I must have the raw nutrients direct from source.”
Racoczky took a sip.
Matheson felt his stomach drop. “That’s blood,” he said.
“A synthetic compound, yes. Cloned from my existing supply based on the DNA pattern of a human being.”
Realization rocked Matheson. He took a startled step away from his host.
“My god, you’re a vampire.”
Racoczky smiled, surprised. “In your terminology.”
Appalled, Matheson backed up toward the pod. But he knew it was futile; Saint-Germain could cross the distance between them in an instant. He knew it from the man’s mind. Unpleasant thoughts were creeping to its surface. The inheritors of man’s empire were its destroyers—these evil things had become the rulers of the universe!