He continued to watch as billions of years squeezed back. The turbulence of the explosion imparted a slight rotation, and this spin caused the majority of the lightballs to curl up in one direction, so that soon all of the oppositespinning balls were eliminated by cancellation and matter stopped destroying itself. The remaining matter coalesced into dusty masses, still rushing outward from the common center. The masses had their own rotations and formed into crude disks that solidified in the centers, compressing until the pressure was so great that ignition occurred, and suddenly they were quasars. Still the centers intensified, until they became black holes that expanded, swallowing much of the brilliance and sucking additional matter in long spiral trails. Now they were galaxies, structured as spiraling fodder for their central appetites. There was no hunger in the universe like that of a black hole!
Except, again, that this was backward. How could a black hole spew out matter continuously like that, until it disappeared? That simply was not the nature of such things! A black hole, with certain very limited exceptions, was strictly a one-way affair. What went in did not come out. Except, the Bemme had said, in the case of magic. And the force of magic did not reach out on galactic scale; it was confined to the radius of a typical planet, like Earth. Everyone knew that. That was why they used matter transmitters for interplanetary travel. Even ghosts had to use such modern conveniences, as Gawain had. Had the Bemme told him wrong?
This bothered him. If the alien had lied or been in error, he, Norton, had placed his trust in the wrong entity. He was reluctant to believe that, partly because he liked the Bemme and partly because that would leave him back on circle one. How, then, could he rationalize her statement about magic and black holes?
Aha! Black holes come in all sizes, from supergalactic to pinhead. A pinhead black hole could be used for experimental purpose, even moved about, provided one did not do anything foolish like poking a finger at it. The better laboratories had pinholes. Certainly it was possible to test magic on a hole. So the Bemme had not been refuted. That was a relief, and he could proceed with his current tour.
How could a black hole be reversed? Answer: not this way! Theoretically, a black hole could become overheated so that it exploded, but it could not pay out material a bit at a time. So either what he was seeing was wrong, or—
Or he was, in fact, seeing it backward.
He looked at the Hourglass. The sand was intense blue. He was supposed to be traveling backward, from normal future to normal past—but was he?
Then he had another revelation. Satan was the Father of Lies and the Master of Illusion; why couldn't he craft an illusion that changed the colors of the sand of the Hourglass? Obvious answer: he could—and he would! That would be far, far easier than creating a whole world that ran backward. That explained how Norton was able to relate one-to-one with the role players here—they were living forward, while he was living backward—for him.
He remembered how the sand of the Hourglass had shown green upon his return from a prior visit—the color of universal time. He had not set it there—not consciously: Obviously he had set it there—thinking the color was white, his normal backward course. Satan had tricked him into supposing green was white and red was blue. Black and yellow seemed to have been left alone; that change would have been too obvious. If he had gone to black to freeze time, and found himself careering through space instead, he would have known something was wrong. So only the directions of time had been changed—the normal and accelerated modes. Very neatly done; it had certainly fooled him. Each visit to the "contra-terrene" frame must, in fact, have been a reversal of time he had just spent on Earth. Satan had had to free him before he overlapped a prior reversal and ran afoul of the three-person limit.
How long did he have this time? He wasn't sure, because he had been operating in the drawkcab mode, undoing Satan's damage of eight years in the past. He had been about six hours between the departure of Satan's minion horn-demon and the onset of his effort to neutralize that minion; did these periods cancel out or add on, in the present? Evidently the latter, since he lived subjectively through both of them. But didn't some of that time already overlap his adventure with Excelsia and the Alicorn and the Sword Elf? He wasn't sure how to figure it, but suspected that Satan had made sure to allow enough time for this present diversion so that Norton would arrive back on Earth too late to foil his mischief. Probably if he got the null-psi amulet and took it to the Genius, the Genius would agree to transport him back to Earth just as his allotted time was up, anyway. What a conniving rogue was Satan!
Now he was zooming along the temporal length of the universe and knew that his perception of the sand of the Hourglass was wrong. Yet nothing had changed. How could he cancel the illusion?
Probably he had to be absolutely certain he was right, for uncertainty was the grist for exploitation by Satan. At the moment, he was not at all certain. He had figured out a theory to account for the discrepancies he had noted, but a theory was not a fact. He needed solid corroborative data.
Well, what in the universe was more solid than the universe itself? Suppose he explored it to the very end of time and satisfied himself that he knew its directions in time—shouldn't that be enough for certainty? If it wasn't, what was?
If he could not believe in the universe, he could not believe in anything. This chamber might be part of an illusion, but he suspected it was also a window to reality. He would travel to the end of the universe he saw here, seeking certainty.
He willed the sand to turn an even more intense blue, knowing that was reverse in color but correct in thrust. The universe accelerated, and Sning's squeezes came more and more rapidly, until the billions of years were passing in seconds and Sning became more of a shudder than a series of squeezes. The universe flew apart at an awesome rate, the galaxies separating so rapidly they appeared blurred. Soon the local section of space was clear. In a sphere ten billion light-years across, there was no longer any matter at all, and very little energy. The hole in the torus.
Norton turned his attention to the retreating outer fringe. Again he was able to adapt, to spread his awareness to perceive objects on a vaster scale than any human being had perceived them before. The torus of galactic motes was now a hundred billion light-years out, and still expanding. This was an open universe, seemingly without end.
But those galaxies were still evolving themselves, getting consumed by their black-hole centers. The process was slow while the available free matter diminished, but it continued. In due course the ring of galaxies became a ring of black holes, each spaced a hundred billion lightyears or more from its nearest neighbor. The holes were detectable only by their declining halos of radiation, and even that was doomed. Finally nothing was visible; Norton knew their paths only by inference. A trillion lightyears out, and still the torus expanded, for there was nothing to stop it. Would it ever end?
Then something happened. In the far, far, far distance he perceived a detonation. It was another Big Bang, the explosion of a monstrous black hole. A new universe was forming!
He realized that this Bang had occurred directly in the path of one of the local universe's far-flung holes. They had collided and overheated and burst apart. New energy and matter were generating in the region of this flux, as they had done so before.
He also realized that, just as some holes were pinhead size, so were some universe size. They were scattered through space (though space did not really exist in the absence of matter or energy—a quibble), rendered ever larger by the accumulation of stray radiation and dust and the debris from other worn-out universes, perhaps billions of such toruses. On occasion, a swiftly traveling galactic hole would collide with such a universe hole, like a neutron plowing into the nucleus of a uranium atom, and the impact would shatter both holes and cause the most massive possible explosion, augmented by the stress of space itself. In this manner were new universes born, his own included.
He continued to work it out as he watched the distant un
iverse expand. Obviously not all galaxies became neutrons, and not all neutrons would strike larger holes headon with sufficient force to shatter them. Most would be captured in orbit about the larger holes and eventually swallowed peacefully. Thus the masses of larger holes would steadily increase as their number diminished. Perhaps there was a critical mass, beyond which a hole became unstable, ready to be detonated. Thus the detonation of new universes would be a regular thing, occurring every trillion years or less, each expiring in a grand flash of a few tens of billions of years before its black-hole ashes were absorbed by still-accumulating universes. Perhaps new universes were flowering continuously, scattered over such a wide region that no entity could perceive more than one at a time, not even Chronos. Surely his own universe had developed in that fashion, not remarkable at all, just a single brief spark in eternity.
All it took was a little matter and antimatter—that was why the secondary explosions occurred around a new universe, because of the dexter and sinister curls of matter formation—and time. Time.
And he was Chronos, the Incarnation of Time. The one entity permitted to grasp the true nature of reality.
Norton shook his head. "Satan, compared to this truth, your lies are of no consequence!"
It was time to return to his own tiny portion of his particular spark. He brought out the Hourglass and focused on its flowing sand. He was still traveling forward, and the sand was still blue—but as he looked at that lie, the color changed to red and he saw truly at last. He had penetrated Satan's illusion and knew that he would never again be vulnerable to it.
He willed the sand blue again, this time to true blue, and the progress of time reversed. The distant universe began to contract. He wondered idly whether it had sapient creatures within it, living, loving, warring, and dreaming, performing minor exploits of science and magic, and whether any part of his long-gone physical body was incorporated into it, on the off chance that his own Milky Way Galaxy happened to be the neutron hole that had triggered this new effort. Perhaps a quark or two of him was there! "Good luck, you who follow us!" he cried.
Then that universe contracted back to its origin, and the hole from his own universe was ejected from it. It—and he—was on its way home.
Chapter 13 - MARS
Sning advised him when he arrived at his own time. He set the sand on green and reached for the sun. His hand caught a sunspot, and the sun clicked and swung outward, showing the walls beyond. He stepped out and closed the door behind him.
Dursten, Excelsia, the Alicorn, and the Bemme were there, watching him. They looked the same, but their surroundings did not. The walls were props, painted and buttressed, and outside the immediate stage area the paraphernalia of the set were visible.
He beckoned the Bemme, and she slid forward for a private dialogue. "I have penetrated the illusion," he told her. "Do the others know?"
"No."
"Would it be kind to tell them my version of reality?"
"No."
"May I visit any of you again, after this?"
"Since you live opposite to us in time, such opportunity is limited. We have to be briefed for each new act, because you return before we experience the last one. Soon we shall be beyond the time of your accession to office, and you will be able to visit us only discamately."
Norton found himself mildly shaken. Of course they could not have experienced his three visits in the same order he had! So they would proceed next to his Alicorn adventure, and finally to the space adventure, never telling him. Truly, he did not belong here! "Then I will bid appropriate farewell now," he decided. "I thank you, Bemme, for your invaluable advice."
"I only play my role according to the rules," she said. "You played and won when you had the wit to select me for advice and to fathom truth in the third chamber."
"All the same, I would like to call you friend."
"Friend," she agreed. "I do not have many of those among your kind. I understand you will do me a favor."
"Favor?"
"In the third act. Saving me from destruction by the spaceman. My briefing suggests something of the sort."
"Oh. Yes," Norton agreed awkwardly, remembering how he had talked Dursten into adopting the orphan. But he also remembered the cause of the Bemme's orphaning and winced. It was all a play, yet... "I wish I could take you away from this."
"You do have that power, Chronos. But that would be pointless, for my service to you is finished from your perspective, and, if I departed this frame, who would take care of Dursten? When the occasion is appropriate, I will depart of my own accord."
She made uncompromising sense. "Good-bye, then, friend," he said sadly, shaking her tentacle.
He turned to Dursten. "Bat, I have found the way back to my planet of Earth. I thank you for risking your gallant life to help me, and wish you every success here."
"Shux, 'tweren't nothing," the spaceman said, abashed in his handsome, rough-hewn, manly way. His eyes flicked toward the woman. "You ain't coming back?"
In a sense he was, since his space scene was in Dursten's future. But that wasn't the essence. "I'm not coming back," Norton agreed. "I'm trusting you to keep an eye on Excelsia."
"Shore will!" Dursten said enthusiastically.
Norton turned to the Alicorn. "Thank you for carrying me those two times," he said. "Without that help, I couldn't have made it through."
The Alicorn snorted, swished his tail, and fluttered his wings, embarrassed. Then he nuzzled Norton's ear with his velvety-soft nose. Trot well, good man!
Now it was Excelsia's turn. Norton took her in his arms and kissed her. She was a bit like Heaven itself, though her destiny lay closer to Hell; but, as with Orlene and Agleh, he knew he could not continue with her.
The Damsel smiled through her tears as they separated. That was all; she understood.
Then he turned and walked along the wall until he came to the edge of the prop. He circled it and found himself in a motion-picture studio, with cameras, workmen, a director, and a general atmosphere of rushed chaos.
An attractive, mature woman approached him. "You were a fine star, Chronos," she said. "I am only sorry the play did not reach its climactic scene."
"The confrontation with—?"
"The Eviler Sorceress," she said. "Yours Truly. I was to seduce you and strip you of your magic ring so you could not escape my clutches. I'm not sure the latter would have been successful, but the former would have been intriguing."
Indeed it might have been, for she had a figure very like his Hourglass and was obviously an experienced star. "Better luck with the next leading man," he said.
"It's hardly luck," she breathed. "It's magic."
He moved on past the personnel and props, finding the exit. When he left the building, he turned back to read the sign above it: SATANIC STUDIOS. Yes, that was what he had thought.
This was Hollywood, of course, where Satan could field excellent actors and facilities and be able to operate freely without interference. Probably there were some pretty good motion pictures released under the Satanic imprint, for he was certainly adept at invention. It had been quite an experience, and the Father of Lies' expertise was impressive, but now Norton had broken free of the deception and would be able to balk whatever plot the Prince of Evil had brewing.
He turned the sand of the Hourglass yellow and traveled spatially to his mansion in Purgatory. What a relief to be home!
But he couldn't rest yet; he had to find out what the Father of Lies was up to, which made the absence of Chronos so important. "Summon Lachesis," he told the butler. "I'd like to talk to her at her earliest convenience." He noted that the mansion clock showed him to be back at the time he had started the third antimatter adventure; the three-person limitation had prevented him from living those hours a third time and slid him smoothly past them.
"Immediately, sir," the butler said.
Indeed, a spider was swinging down along a thread when he entered the sitting room. She expanded and formed
into Lachesis as Norton sat in his easy chair. "Something special on your mind, Chronos?" she asked.
"I've been away a few hours," he told her. "I understand Satan is planning something, and I hurried back to balk his mischief. Do you know what it is?"
She glanced at him with evident perplexity. "Why should Satan do anything to disturb the status quo?"
"Are you teasing me? He wants to win political power on Earth!"
"But he already has the inside track on that. All he needs to do is wait."
"He has it? When did he get it?"
"Sometimes it is difficult for me to untangle my skein enough to isolate significant threads. But the key is political. In about two years there will be a crucial vote in Congress—and though it will be close, it seems Satan has the votes to prevail. From then on, things will go his way, and there is nothing we can do that won't simply make the situation worse. Satan knows that, which is why he isn't worried."
"But what about Luna? She won't support him, and—"
"Who?"
"Luna. Senator Kaftan. Thanatos' woman."
"Oh, her. I had forgotten her name. Yes, that woman does keep company with Thanatos, but she's no Senator. She runs a magic shop in Kilvarough."
Norton stared at her. "Not a Senator?"
"Never was. Never held any political office at all. Are you sure you have the right name?"
Norton realized that something was seriously amiss. "I must have misremembered. I'm sorry I bothered you for nothing."
She smiled and became Clotho, in a revealing gown. "You don't need to use a pretext, Chronos. I understand your situation."
Oops. "This time it was an honest confusion. Let's postpone it for a few hours. I have an errand of business I must attend to first."
"Business before pleasure," she agreed. "I have a backlog of my own, and no excuse now not to get to it." She shifted back to arachnid form, ascended her thread, and vanished.
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