Vestiges of Time

by Richard C. Meredith

  The smokiness in the comer grew thicker, more intense, more opaque, and now had begun to take on the shape I’d come to expect—from top to bottom the hazy form was about the height of a man, and, like a man, it had the outlines of two legs, a torso, two arms, a head set above shadowy shoulders, though within the head there could be discerned no facial features whatsoever. Now the shadow, the haze, had solidified as far as I thought it would, had become as substantial as it could.

  I waited for the Shadowy Man to speak, as I knew he would.

  “Well, Eric,” the voice said out of the haze, a voice uncertain at first, then more positive, a voice that I knew to sound exactly like my own, “I hope you’re not feeling too badly now.”

  I shook my head. “I’m okay.” Then I said to him, “I was afraid the Tromas had destroyed you back in KHL-000.” He knew what I was talking about.

  A chuckle came out of the shadowy haze. “Damn,” my voice said from the comer, “this could get confusing.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What you’re talking about is in your past, you see,” the Shadowy Man said, “but it’s in my future. It hasn’t happened to me yet, so I don’t know the outcome of our fight with the Krithian ladies any more than you do.”

  “I see,” I said, though I wasn’t certain that I did.

  “I hope you do, though I’m not positive I do. As I said, it could get confusing.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and grunted, and then waited for him to tell me whatever it was he had to tell me. He’d come for a reason, I was certain of that.

  “Your head’s not hurting now, and don’t worry, you don’t have a concussion. That lump will go away in a few days.”

  “That’s comforting,” I said, despite myself feeling awe in his presence, and still wondering just what our relationship was/would be, for somehow in the confusion of time future and time past, the Shadowy Man and I were very closely linked, terribly closely.

  , “And I suggest that the best thing for you will be to cooperate with the members of the BrathelLanza when they come to visit you.”

  “The what?” That word again!

  “The BrathelLanza,” he repeated. “You’ll find out what it is in due time. For now, cooperate with them as fully as possible, for from cooperating with them

  will come answers to the questions you want to ask of me, and a means of action.”

  “A means of action?” I asked stupidly.

  “Yes, a means of action, the action that will bring . . . well, you’ll see,” he said, and chuckled as if he were playing a very funny joke on me.

  “What in—” I started to ask, but it was already too late. The haziness in the comer was beginning to lose its manlike form, to become vague, mixing fogs that dissipated even more quickly than they had formed. The electrical tension was gone from the air.

  “Damn!” I said aloud, and got up from the cot and walked to the corner. There was nothing there, of course. Nothing at all.

  “Why do you have to be so damned mysterious?” I asked the empty air, and if I did hear a chuckle for answer, I was probably imagining it. Wasn’t I?

  I sat back down on the cot, cursed the Shadowy Man—whoever, whatever, he was—wished for a cigarette, of which I had none, or a cup of coffee, of which I had as little, and wondered just exactly what it was this “BrathelLanza” had in store for me. Probably not a time machine—not if RyoNa had finally been telling me the truth. Then what? Answers? “A means of action.” Now what did that mean?

  Damn, damn, damn, I said to myself, and sat on the edge of the cot and waited for the arrival of those “very important people” that RyoNa had promised were coming.

  From the Far World to VarKhohs

  While I waited in that dim, dank cell somewhere under the city of VarKhohs on a Timeline that the beings I called Kriths had been very secretive about— though not secretive enough, it seemed at the time—I found that despite myself I was reviewing the events of the past year or so, the sequence of events that had led me from what had been a rather comfortable if sometimes dangerous condition to one far less comfortable and perhaps even more dangerous, and I wondered about the wisdom of some of the decisions I’d made; even up until three or four months ago I could have stayed out of it—I think—and lived not a bad life with Sally way off there on a world of the far Temporal-East. But my curiosity, and maybe a taste for vengeance, wouldn’t let me . . . and here I was.

  Thanks to the help of this mysterious Shadowy Man —whoever, whatever he is—Sally and I had escaped from the Tromas on KHL-000, had escaped to a place the Shadowy Man had picked out for us, a pleasant enough world a long way to the T-East where we probably could have spent the rest of our lives in comfort, if I hadn’t. been so damned stubborn, so damned curious, so damned determined to see if I could get in a lick against the Kriths.

  The Shadowy Man had provided us with a skudder and I couldn’t resist, sooner or later, using it. Somewhere, somewhen in time, I was to be mixed up with the Shadowy Man again, was somehow to become a part of him, it seemed, and to do that I was going to

  have to be able to move about in time itself, future time and past time. I had to have a time machine. So I thought.

  Once I was certain that Sally would have no problems if I were gone, would live like a queen or a demi- goddess in the semibarbaric kingdoms of the world we’d found, I went back to the skudder in the woods, leaving her a note that told her what I was doing and why. I hoped she’d understand. And I was going to miss her like crazy, but I couldn’t let her risk her life again by going along with my insane ideas. Maybe I’d be able to come back to her.

  So, like that thief in the night, I took'the skudder the Shadowy Man had provided for us, and set off across the Lines to see what I could find.

  Specifically what I was looking for was the one known world that had developed/would develop a device capable of moving about in time. I was relatively certain that such a world did exist, although finding it wasn’t easy. ,

  Like the spectrum of a beam of sunlight shown on paper through a prism, there is no sharp distinction from world to world, but only very subtle changes that over a vast number of parallel worlds can lead to surprising differences. World B might differ from world A only in something so minor as the first name of a head of state in a rather unimportant nation. In world C that same head of state might have a different last name, and in world D he might have a somewhat different personality that would give his nation a chance for success in a minor war that it wouldn’t have had in worlds A and B. By the time you get to world J, that nation might not be so minor and on world Z it might dominate the planet. Or destroy it.

  So I had to search large areas of paratime, moving carefully from world to world, searching for clues that would tell me I was at least heading in the right direction.

  And on one world where I spent more than a few days, a world with a more highly developed medical science than most, I found a not-too-scrupulous surgeon who removed the transmitter the Kriths had buried in my body long before. I gave the surgeon a large amount of gold and he gave me a local anesthetic, and while I watched, my hand resting on the butt of my energy pistol, he removed and destroyed the telltale. I thanked him and went on my way, hopeful that Kriths wouldn’t find me as easily as they had before, if they were still looking for me. And I suspected they were.

  At last, by following leads and hints and rumors too obscure to go into now, I found the world for which I had been searching, or at least I thought I had found it. I hoped I had.

  I skudded into that particular world when it was late at night in eastern North America and hid my skudder near a small town not too distant from what appeared to be the major city of the continent, VarKhohs, capital of NakrehVatee. The language here, called EKhona, was a remote kin of one I’d learned on another Line when in the service of the Kriths, so fortunately it didn’t take me too long to master the local speech. It took me a little longer to get the hang of local customs, but I man
aged to stay out of jail and trade some of the large quantity of finely worked gold I’d brought along for local currency. With that I was able to buy myself a computer identity that would account for my light skin, my accent, and my relative ignorance of the ways of the world: I was a mercenary soldier named HarkosNor from the Central European country of SteeMehseeh, who had bought his way out of indenture with loot gained in a brush- fire war in the Far East and who had applied for a visa to enter NakrehVatee, where he would seek permission to join the nation’s “foreign legion” and serve again as a mercenary. The man who sold me the

  identity, a shady type who I hoped was more trustworthy than he looked, assured me that HarkosNor was a real person, though dead now, and that my identity would hold up under the closest scrutiny. I hoped he wasn’t lying.

  So there I was, officially, if illegally, a member of the local culture. I was as ready as I’d ever be to go into the city of VarKhohs to try to find myself a time machine.

  Finding what I was searching for was just about as difficult as finding this world in the first place, but there are always people around who are ready to offer information about supposedly secret things if you cross their palms in the proper fashion. Thus it was that after several weeks in VarKhohs I began spending a great deal of time in a place with an unpronounceable name that was a combination restaurant, lounge, massage parlor, steam bath, and brothel, frequented by members of a moderately-high caste and their hangers- on—the caste given over to electronic engineering and other technologies. And it was there that I made the acquaintance of a certain RyoNa, not a technician himself, but a member of one of the administrative castes and supposedly a friend of the engineers and technicians.

  It would have been difficult to say exactly what time it was, getting on toward the wee hours, and both my new friend RyoNa and I were close to exhaustion. We’d eaten and drunk our fill in the lower levels of the elaborate and luxurious pleasure-house and then had moved upward to the levels devoted to the games and the girls. We’d gambled for a while, losing more than We won, and had picked up a brace of twins, girls even darker of skin than most of the locals, with long black hair and flashing black eyes, dressed in styles that revealed not only their profession but the lovely tools of their trade. As they led us off to their

  bedroom apartments in the towering building, I felt a pang of guilt at betraying Sally, again, and wondered if she was being as faithful to me as I was to her. I hoped not!

  We parted company, RyoNa and his girl, I and mine, and indulged ourselves in the wicked pleasures of the flesh—and I discovered that the dark-skinned girl, whose name I’d already forgotten, was a past mistress of the arts of sexual pleasure. When I’d finally told her good-bye, with a kiss and a handful of bank notes, I was totally exhausted and felt the beginnings of a hangover.

  Downstairs, in one of the lounges, I found my buddy RyoNa exactly where he’d said he would be, drinking a dark, heavy liquid from a tall tumbler. A similar tumbler, this one full, was on the opposite side of the table.

  “Sit down, Harkos,” RyoNa said, seemingly still amused by the outlandishness of my name. “I’ve already ordered for you.”

  “I see. What is it?” I asked as I sat down.

  “Try it.”

  I did, and found it to be a very pleasant fruit mixture that probably would have been rated ninety proof or better on a world that rated alcoholic content in that fashion.

  “Is it good?” RyoNa asked.

  I grunted, nodded.

  “And was she good?”

  I grunted, nodded again.

  “I told you she would be. Those EstarSimirian girls are just about the best around. Raised from childhood to master the arts of bed pleasure, you know.”

  “I certainly wasn’t disappointed,” I told him with a weary sigh.

  “And what did she think of you?”

  “Me?”

  RyoNa nodded, and smiled with a wicked gleam

  in his eyes. “It is very rare for a fair-skinned barbarian to bed with the girls of a VarKhohs pleasure-house.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I sighed, and sipped my drink again.

  Though I hadn’t yet really begun to sort out the, history of this world and its many cultures, I had some idea of what he was referring to. The fair-skinned people of northern Europe, on this Line, were not the first ones to develop a technological civilization. That fell to the darker people of the eastern Mediterranean, western Asia, and northern Africa. It was they who first sailed the “Inland Sea” and learned to tack against the wind and who finally set out into the great oceans of the West and of the Southeast, who circumnavigated the globe for the first time and then began to colonize the New World, who built steam engines and invented things like the telegraph and telephone and the airplane, and who ignited the first atomic bomb somewhere in Africa and burned away the better part of a great city.

  The blue-eyed blonds, of which I am one even though as a child I spoke a version of Greek, had been to the Asians as the American Indians had been to the Europeans who colonized North America in Sally’s world: savages to be dispossessed of their land for the benefit of the “more civilized” people from the South and the East. Long years of warfare followed, during which most of the natives of northern Europe were exterminated, though when the wars came to an end, the surviving Europeans, by then hardened by decades of combat, came to be a warrior caste among the spreading colonists, a people apart, to be used to wage their wars.

  Such a one to them I seemed, accepted now as nearly an equal by the “enlightened modems,” but still—was I feared, or respected, or looked upon with a kind of awe by people to whom active participation in warfare was a thing of the past?

  “I don’t suppose I greatly disappointed her,” I said at last, finishing my drink.'

  “Another,” RyoNa said, a statement, not a question, and punched out another set of drinks on the table’s ordering keys. “I doubt you did disappoint her. By Themfo-Okketho, what a pair you two must have been! I wish I could have watched.”

  “I’m exhausted,” I said.

  “No doubt the girl is too.”

  “She may be.”

  “Oh, when I go to my tomb and journey to the Dark Lands, I’d like to take an EstarSimirian whore with me, the Dark Lords willing.”

  When the drinks came, delivered by a waitress of low caste, clad as revealingly as the dark girls had been, RyoNa was silent for a while, then cast his eyes about the darkened room in a conspiratorial manner.

  “I will name no names, friend Harkos,” he said, “nor state any facts. But I believe I know where to find the man you seek.”

  “The man I seek? What do you mean?”

  “No names. No facts. But you have let slip to me that there is a certain thing you would like to have access to. Is this not so?”

  “Yes, there is a thing I need.”

  “A thing the very existence of which is supposed to be known to only a few, is this not so?”

  I nodded. We were talking about a prototype of one of the chronal-displacement devices, and we both knew it. My hints in the past had been sufficient to establish that.

  “It is one of the earlier models, you know,” he said softly. “Not as refined as the ones now being tested, but it seems to do the job for which it was designed.” “Where is it?”

  “Ah.” He sighed. “That I cannot say. But let me say this: it is not where it is supposed to be. It was to be sent to one of the nations allied to NakrehVatee,

  a nation whose name I cannot speak. It was shipped, but it never arrived at its destination. A—shall we say, a friend of mine knows its present location.”

  “Can you take me to this friend?” I asked.

  “It may be possible. I must visit him myself and discuss with him the arrangements. It will be very costly.”

  “I had anticipated that.”

  “Very costly.”

  “How much?”

  He stated a figure that would be meaningless without a knowled
ge of the local currency, but it was a high one, one that I thought I could just barely meet. I’d brought a lot- of gold with me.

  “Very well,” RyoNa said, once I’d nodded in agreement. “When I go to visit my friend I will need a token of your good faith.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten per cent should suffice.”

  “When?”

  “The day after tomorrow, mid-afternoon. Meet me here. It must be in hard currency. No paper.”

  “It will be.”

  “Very good.”

  We finished our drinks in silence and then departed the pleasure-house.

  At the appointed time I sat in the pleasure-house lounge with a sack that held the hard currency, small, flat bars of platinum embossed with the symbols of the highest castes of VarKhohs. I had just finished my drink when RyoNa entered, took a seat across from me, and waited while I ordered drinks for us. “You have it?”

  I passed the leather sack to him under the table. I felt like a fool. What did I know of this RyoNa? How far could I trust him?

  “Good,” he said. “I will drink my drink and then

  I must go. Wait here for me. I should be back shortly before dark. I will then have the arrangements.” “Okay.” I sighed, and sipped my fresh drink, while he swallowed his in a single gulp and then rose and left the lounge.

  After a short wait I rose to follow him. He probably expected me to.

  Damned right he’d expected me to!

  That’s how I’d ended up in a cell, remembering all this while I waited for his “veiy important people” to Vfeit me.