For the breath of a second Eric glanced round him, snatching at straws in a frantic effort to find some way of saving her. On the platform behind him speechless amazement had stricken dumb a little party of men and women in brightly colored garments of 16th Century cut. They must have been nobles, viewing the burning from this favored seat. Eric wasted only one glance at their stupefied surprise. He swung round again, his desperate eyes raking the mob. No hope there. It clamored for the tall girl’s life in one tremendous, wolf-savage baying that ripped from every throat there in a single blending roar.
“Witch!” they yelled. “Death to the witch!” in an archaic English that he understood without too much difficulty, a blood-hungry baying that brooked no denial. They had not seen him yet. But the girl had.
Over their heads, through the little shimmering heat waves that were rising about her already in veils of scorching breath, her smoke-blue eyes met his. It was a meeting as tangible almost as the meeting of hands. And like the grip of hands so that gaze held, steady and unswerving for a long moment—burning witch of old England and tall young adventurer of modern America gazing with sure recognition in the eyes of each. Eric’s heart jumped into a quickened beating as he saw the sureness in those smoke-blue eyes he had gazed into so often. She knew him—without any question or doubt she recognized him.
Over the wolf-baying of the mob he heard her voice in one high, clear scream.
“You’ve come! I knew you’d come!”
At the sound of it silence dropped over the crowd. Almost in one motion they swung round to follow her ecstatic stare. And in the instant of their stricken surprise at the man they saw there, tall and golden against the sky, a figure out of no experience they had ever had before—the witch’s voice rang clear.
“You’ve come! O, I knew you would, in the end. They always said you would. They knew! And I must die for the knowledge I got from Them—but by that knowledge I know this is not the end. Somewhere, some day, we will meet again. Good-bye—good-bye, my dearest!”
Her voice had not faltered, though the flames were licking up about her, and now, in a great burst of crimson, they caught in the fagots and blazed up in a gush that enveloped her in raving inferno. Choked with horror, Eric swung up his gun-hand. The bark of the report sent half the crowd to its knees in terror, and he saw through the flames the girl’s tall figure slump suddenly against her bonds. This much at least he could do.
Then, in the midst of a silence so deep that the creak of the planks under his feet was loud as he moved, he sheathed the gun and closed his hands over the switches. Impatience boiled up in him as the prostrate crowd and the flame-wrapped witch and the whole ugly scene before him reeled into nothingness.
He was coming near the goal now. Each successive step found recognition surer in her eyes. She knew him in this incarnation, and he was full of confidence now that the end and the solution was near. For though in all their meetings there had been barriers, so that they two could never wholly know one another or come into the unity of love and comprehension which each meeting promised, yet he knew very surely that in the end they must. All this had not been in vain.
In the oblivion that washed over him was so sure a consciousness of her omnipresence—in all the centuries that were sweeping past, in all the lands those centuries washed over, throughout time and space and life itself, her ever-present loveliness—that he welcomed the darkness as if he embraced the girl herself. It was full of her, one with her. He could not lose her or be far from her or even miss her now. She was everywhere, always. And the end was coming. Very soon—very soon he would know—
He woke out of the oblivion, blindly into darkness. Like the fold of wings it engulfed him. If he was standing on solid earth, he did not know it. He was straining every faculty to pierce that blinding dark, and he could not. It was a living darkness, pulsing with anticipation. He waited in silence.
Presently she spoke.
“I have waited so long,” she said out of the blackness in her sweet, clear voice that he knew so well he did not need the evidence of his eyes to tell him who spoke.
“Is this the end?” he asked her breathlessly. “Is this the goal we’ve been traveling toward so long?”
“The end?” she murmured with a little catch of mirth in her voice. “Or the beginning, perhaps. Where in a circle is end or beginning? It is enough that we are together at last.”
“But what—why—”
“Something went wrong, somewhere,” she told him softly. “It doesn’t matter now. We have expiated the forgotten sins that kept us apart to the very end. Our troubled reflections upon the river of time sought each other and never wholly met. And we, who should have been time’s masters, struggled in the changing currents and knew only that everything was wrong with us, who did not know each other.
“But all that is ended now. Our lives are lived out and we can escape time and space into our own place at last. Our love has been so great a thing that though it never fulfilled itself, yet it brimmed time and the void to overflowing, so that everywhere you adventured the knowledge of my present tormented you—and I waited for you in vain. Forget it now. It’s over. We have found ourselves at last.”
“If I could only see you,” he said fretfully, reaching out into the blackness. “It’s so dark here. Where are we?”
“Dark?” the gentle voice laughed softly. “Dark? My dearest—this is not darkness! Wait a moment—here!”
Out of the night a hand clasped his. “Come with me.”
Together they stepped forward.
Greater Than Gods
The desk was glass-clear steel, the mirror above it a window that opened upon distance and sight and sound whenever the televisor buzzer rang. The two crystal cubes on the desk were three-dimensional photographs of a sort undreamed of before the Twenty-third Century dawned. But between them on the desk lay a letter whose message was older that the history of writing itself.
“My darling—” it began in a man’s strongly slanting handwriting. But there Bill Cory had laid down his pen and run despairing fingers through his hair, looking from one crystal-cubed photograph to the other and swearing a little under his breath. It was fine stuff, he told himself savagely, when a man couldn’t even make up his mind which of two girls he wanted to marry. Biology House of Science City, that trusted so faithfully the keenness and clarity of Dr. William Cory’s decisions, would have shuddered to see him now.
For the hundredth time that afternoon he looked from one girl’s face to the other, smiling at him from the crystal cubes, and chewed his lip unhappily. On his left, in the translucent block that had captured an immortal moment when dark Marta Mayhew smiled, the three-dimensional picture looked out at him with a flash of violet eyes. Dr. Marta Mayhew of Chemistry House, ivory whiteness and satin blackness. Not at all the sort of picture the mind conjures up of a leading chemist in Science City which houses the greatest scientists in the world.
Bill Cory wrinkled his forehead and looked at the other girl. Sallie Carlisle dimpled at him out of the crystal, as real as life itself to the last flying tendril of fair curls that seemed to float on a breeze frozen eternally into glass. Bill reached out to turn the cube a little, bringing the delicate line of her profile into view, and it was as if time stood still in the crystalline deeps and pretty Sallie in the breathing flesh paused for an eternal moment with her profile turned away.
After a long moment Bill Cory sighed and picked up his pen. After the “darling” of the letter he wrote firmly, “Sallie.”
“Dr. Cory,” hesitated a voice at the door. Bill looked up, frowning. Miss Brown blinked at him nervously behind her glasses. “Dr. Ashley’s—”
“Don’t announce me, Brownie,” interrupted a languid voice behind her. “I want to catch him loafing. Ah, Bill, writing love letters? May I come in?”
“Could I stop you?” Bill’s grin erased the frown from his forehead. The tall and tousled young man in the doorway was Charles Ashley, head of Telepathy
House, and though their acquaintance had long been on terms of good-natured insult, behind it lay Bill’s deep recognition of a quality of genius in Ashley that few men ever attain. No one could have risen to the leadership of Telepathy House whose mind did not encompass many more levels of infinite understanding than the ordinary mind even recognizes.
“I’ve worked myself into a stupor,” announced the head of Telepathy House, yawning. “Come on up to the Gardens for a swim, huh?”
“Can’t.” Bill laid down his pen. “I’ve got to see the pups—”
“Damn the pups! You think Science City quivers every time those little mutts yap! Let Miss Brown look after ’em. She knows more than you do about genetics, anyhow. Some day the Council’s going to find it out and you’ll go back to working for a living.”
“Shut up,” requested Bill with a grin. “How are the pups, Miss Brown?”
“Perfectly normal, doctor. I just gave them their three o’clock feeding and they’re asleep now.”
“Do they seem happy?” inquired Ashley solicitously.
“That’s right, scoff,” sighed Bill. “Those pups and I will go ringing down the corridors of time, you mark my words.”
Ashley nodded, half seriously. He knew it might well be true. The pups were the living proof of Bill’s success in prenatal sex determination—six litters of squirming maleness with no female among them. They represented the fruit of long, painstaking experiments in the X-ray bombardment of chromosomes to separate and identify the genes carrying the factors of sex determination, of countless failures and immeasurable patience. If the pups grew into normal dogs—well, it would be one long, sure stride nearer the day when, through Bill’s own handiwork, the world would be perfectly balanced between male and female in exact proportion to the changing need.
Miss Brown vanished with a shy, self-effacing smile. As the door closed behind her, Ashley, who had been regarding the two photograph cubes on Bill’s desk with a lifted eyebrow, arranged his long length on the couch against the wall and was heard to murmur: “Eenie-meenie-minie-mo. Which is it going to be, Will-yum?”
They were on terms too intimate for Bill to misunderstand, or pretend to.
“I don’t know,” he admitted miserably, glancing down in some hesitation at the letter beginning, “My darling Sallie—”
Ashley yawned again and fumbled for a cigarette. “You know,” he murmured comfortably, “it’s interesting to speculate on your possible futures. With Marta or Sallie, I mean. Maybe some day somebody will find a way to look ahead down the branching paths of the future and deliberately select the turning points that will carry him toward the goal he chooses. Now if you could know beforehand where life with Sallie would lead, or life with Marta, you might alter the whole course of human history. That is, if you’re half as important as you think you are.”
“Huh-uh,” grunted Bill. “If you predicate a fixed future, then it’s fixed already, isn’t it? And you’d have no real choice.”
Ashley scratched a match deliberately and set his cigarette aglow before he said: “I think of the future as an infinite reservoir of an infinite number of futures, each of them fixed, yet malleable as clay. Do you see what I mean? At every point along our way we confront crossroads at which we make choices among the many possible things we may do the next moment. Each crossroad leads to a different future, all of them possible, all of them fixed, waiting for our choice to give them reality. Perhaps there’s a—call it a Plane of Probability—where all these possible results of our possible choices exist simultaneously. Blueprints of things to come. When the physical time of matter catches up with, and fills in, any one particular plan, it becomes fixed in the present.
“But before time has caught up with it, while our choice at the crossroads is still unmade, an infinite number of possible futures must exist as it were in suspension, waiting for us in some unimaginable, dimensionless infinity. Can you imagine what it would be like to open a window upon that Probability Plane, look out into the infinities of the future, trace the consequences of future actions before we make them? We could mold the destiny of mankind! We could do what the gods must do, Bill! We’d be greater than gods! We could look into the Cosmic Mind—the very brain that planned us—and of our own will choose among those plans!”
“Wake up, Ash,” said Bill softly.
“You think I’m dreaming? It’s not a new idea, really. The old philosopher, Berkeley, had a glimpse of it when he taught his theories of subjective idealism, that we’re aware of the cosmos only through a greater awareness all around us, an infinite mind—
“Listen, Bill. If you vision these…these blueprints of possible futures, you’ve got to picture countless generations, finite as ourselves, existing simultaneously and completely in all the circumstances of their entire lives—yet all of them still unborn, still even uncertain of birth if the course of the present is diverted from their particular path. To themselves, they must seem as real as we to each other.
“Somewhere on the Plane of Probability, Bill, there may be two diverging lines of your descendants, unborn generations whose very existence hinges on your choice here at the crossroads. Projections of yourself, really, their lives and deaths trembling in the balance. Think well before you choose!”
Bill grinned. “Suppose you go back to the Slum and dope out a way for me to look into the Cosmic Plan,” he suggested.
Ashley shook his head.
“Wish I could. Boy, would you eat that word ‘Slum’ then! Telepathy House wouldn’t be the orphan child around the City any longer if I could really open a window onto the Probability Plane. But I wouldn’t bother with you and your pint-sized problems. I’d look ahead into the future of the City. It’s the heart of the world, now. Some day it may rule the world. And we’re biased, you know. We can’t help being. With all the sciences housed here under one city-wide roof, wielding powers that kings never dreamed of—No, it may go to our heads. We may overbalance into…into…well, I’d like to look ahead and prevent it. And if this be treason—” He shrugged and got up. “Sure you won’t join me?”
“Go on—get out. I’m a busy man.”
“So I see.” Ashley twitched an eyebrow at the two crystal cubes. “Maybe it’s good you can’t look ahead. The responsibility of choosing might be heavier than you could bear. After all, we aren’t gods and it must be dangerous to usurp a god’s prerogative. Well, see you later.”
Bill leaned in the doorway watching the lounging figure down the hall toward the landing platform where crystal cars waited to go flashing along the great tubes which artery Science City. Beyond, at the platform’s edge, the great central plaza of the City dropped away in a breath-taking void a hundred stories deep. He stood looking out blind-eyed, wondering if Sallie or Marta would walk this hall in years to come.
Life would be more truly companionship with Marta, perhaps. But did a family need two scientists? A man wanted relaxation at home, and who could make life gayer than pretty Sallie with her genius for entertainment, her bubbling laughter? Yes, let it be Sallie. If there were indeed a Probability Plane where other possible futures hung suspended, halfway between waking and oblivion, let them wink out into nothingness.
He shut the door with a little slam to wake himself out of the dream, greeting the crystal-shrined girl on his desk with a smile. She was so real—the breeze blowing those curls was a breeze in motion. The lashes should flutter against the soft fullness of her lids—
Bill squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head to clear it. There was something wrong—the crystal was clouding—
A ringing in his ears grew louder in company with that curious blurring of vision. From infinitely far away, yet strangely in his own ears, a tiny voice came crying. A child’s voice calling, “Daddy…daddy!” A girl’s voice, coming nearer, “Father—” A woman’s voice saying over and over in a smooth, sweet monotone, “Dr. Cory…Dr. William Cory—”
Upon the darkness behind his closed lids a streaked and shifting light
moved blurrily. He thought he saw towers in the sun, forests, robed people walking leisurely—and it all seemed to rush away from his closed eyes so bewilderingly—he lifted his lids to stare at—
To stare at the cube where Sallie smiled. Only this was not Sallie. He gaped with the blankness of a man confronting impossibilities. It was not wholly Sallie now, but there was a look of Sallie upon the lovely, sun-touched features in the cube. All of her sweetness and softness, but with it—something more. Something familiar. What upon this living, lovely face, with its level brown eyes and courageous mouth, reminded Bill of—himself?
His hands began to shake a little. He thrust them into his pockets and sat down without once taking his eyes from the living stare in the cube. There was amazement in that other stare, too, and a half-incredulous delight that brightened as he gazed.
Then the sweet curved lips moved—lips with the softness of Sallie’s closing on the firm, strong line of Bill’s. They said distinctly, in a sound that might have come from the cube itself or from somewhere deep within his own brain: “Dr. Cory…Dr. Cory, do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he heard himself saying hoarsely, like a man talking in a dream. “But—”
The face that was Sallie’s and his blended blazed into joyful recognition, dimples denting the smooth cheeks with delicious mirth. “Oh, thank Heaven it is you! I’ve reached through at last. I’ve tried so hard, so long—”
“But who…what—” Bill choked a little on his own amazement and fell silent, marveling at the strange warm tenderness that was flooding up in him as he watched this familiar face he had never seen before. A tenderness more melting and protective and passionately selfless than he had ever imagined a man could feel. Dizzy with complete bewilderment, too confused to wonder if he dreamed, he tried again. “Who are you? What are you doing here? How did—”
“But I’m not there—not really.” The sweet face smiled again, and Bill’s heart swelled until his throat almost closed with a warmth of pride and tenderness he was too dizzy to analyze now. “I’m here—here at home in Eden, talking to you across the millennium! Look—”
The Best of C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner Page 18