Vestiges of Time

by Richard C. Meredith

  Of this I can speak only in analogies, for there are no words for what I experienced, not in any language I have ever known. If anyone has ever experienced this before, and if he has found a way of expressing it, I wish I could learn the way from him. As it was, no words. But it was something like this:

  I had fallen into the darkness, screaming for help, and in some unconscious, unknowing way, that call had been answered, not by gods or by the Shadowy Man but by my replicates, my clones; through resonance they knew that I had asked something of them, though they did not know what, and they answered the only way they could: they opened themselves for me.

  For the first seconds—read years, read centuries—I plunged, twisted, tumbled, turned, flew, soared. Out of the dark and fear-filled corridors of my own brain, I— whatever it is that is I, is me—swept into 337 sparkling new places, empty, virginal, untouched, waiting to be inhabited, waiting to be filled with sight and sound, with experience and memory.

  I recoiled, drew back into the dark caverns of my own skull, found them not so dark now, not so frightening, yet crowded full, filled with memories aching to be freed, with thoughts waiting to be thought, dreams to be dreamed, fantasies to be conjured up, nightmares to be screamed at. They all wanted out—and now, for the first time in my life, maybe for the first time in anyone’s life, there was a place for them to go, many places to go.

  I reached out cautiously, gently, trying to narrow the mental probe I extended, trying to use the theories taught me by KaphNo and SkorTho and GrelLo, tried to exercise response control and select a single brain of a single replicate. Somehow, I did it.

  On one level I knew, saw, felt, and sensed the organic brain of the replicate, the cerebral matter that provides the matrix from which the mind is built— from which a mind could be built, for as yet there had not evolved a mind from this raw cerebral material. This replicate had been deprived of all sensory data except on the lowest, most basic levels. The soil was fertile, rich, but no seeds had yet been planted.

  On another level: again, vast and empty corridors, halls and chambers of potential consciousness, potential awareness. Corridors crying to be filled, begging for my entry, as if my slightest touch had made them aware, if but barely, of the vast and remarkable world outside.

  I did not commit my next act vclitionally. Perhaps if I’d wanted to I couldn’t have accomplished it intentionally. But what happened, happened. . . .

  My eyelids opened and I peered out of the murky liquid in which I half floated, felt the flow of it around my naked flesh, tasted the strange, comforting flavor of it in my mouth and took oxygen from it as I breathed it in through my lungs, heard it carry into my ears the sounds of the machines that kept me alive and growing.

  Yet at the same time my eyes—my other eyes— looked around the recording room, saw the motionless corpse that had been MaLarba, saw out of their corners that the chronometer read only 12:05:02. Six seconds? And heard low rumblings that could have been only the swish of the air from the overhead vents and the slowed buzzing of the mnemonic recorder. It was something like being in X5 augmentation, but now the world was slowed by a factor much greater than five, slowed by powers of ten, by exponential factors.

  And beyond either set of scanty sensory data, through the crowded corridors of my own brain and the empty ones of the replicates, I felt ... I felt . . . Even analogies fail me here. As if I had expanded?

  As if I had grown to twice my size? As if a portion of godhood had touched me and become a part of me? Or as if I had become a portion of the godhood?

  I did expand—I am sure of that, if of nothing else. And out of the dim, dark rooms of my brain, out of the attics and cellars and closets of forgetfulness and of never having known, memory and unformed thoughts leaped free, dreams and visions jumped and gamboled across the connections, the junctions, the nexuses, spilling over, dancing free, running with the winds of a new freedom through fresh neural impulses.

  For a thousand years I basked and shivered alternately in all the experiences of my life, seeing everything I’d ever seen before, everything I’d ever heard, ever felt, ever thought . . . yet with a clarity and a detail of vision I’d never before experienced or even imagined possible.

  If not the fringes of godhood, then something terribly close to it.

  I felt more fully realized than a human being has ever felt before.

  But this was only one of them, only one of the replicates. And there were over 330 more of them. . . .

  After another thousand years of reviewing only the most pleasurable of my life’s experiences, I reached out again, probed with a more careful, wiser, more experienced touch. And there was another of the virginal brains, potential minds, more bright and empty corridors, and all waiting for me. I spilled into those empty places.

  I had the same sensations as before, but this time I could experience them more critically, know them more intimately, all the beauty and ugliness, all the pain and pleasure. And again there were those feelings of expansion, of power. Again there were sensations of new, empty expanses of consciousness opening up-before me, to be filled as fully as possible from the wells of my memory.

  Now I was three. Not exactly HarkosNor/Eric Mathers anymore, but perhaps something bigger, better than he had ever been, something with at least the potential of being wiser, more intelligent, more able to grasp and understand the vastness of the worlds of my past experience.

  I resonated between my own body and the bodies of the two replicates. Awaiting me were 335 more brains, more possible minds.

  I reached out again.

  And again.

  And again ...

  15

  Genesis

  All I have now is my own memory, a memory confined and shackled by my very finite limitations. I am only one man now, as I record these things out of the past, and I can speak of them only as remembrances of once having been a part of that creation, a part of that existence, a part of that being who came into the universe when my mind and the personalityless minds of the replicates resonated together, operated as a single, thinking entity.

  I am not that amalgam. But I was once a part of it.

  And since I am not what it was, I cannot continue to use the first-person singular. I, Eric Mathers, will speak of it, of him, what I can still recall of Mm and of that existence.

  All but one of the replicates were now joined in psionic resonance with the entity that had been their senior—had been, for now they were one, with 337 bodies, one of them drugged, strapped into a chair, the others still half floating in the solutions that filled their encanters. They comprised a single mind that was then the mind of Eric Mathers; during those first few moments, at least, it was the mind of Erie Mathers, for all his memories, his experiences, his opinions, and his beliefs had not yet changed; it was merely that there were more vessels to carry him, and like a gas under high pressure he had expanded to fill them, although in that very process he had begun to become something other than what he had been, something that no man had ever been before.

  Of the 337 replicates, all but one were now component parts of this new yet nameless entity. One of the replicates, the victim of previously undiscovered brain damage, was incapable of entering into the union, was little more than a vegetable whose autonomic nervous system kept his body alive, but who had virtually no capacity for cerebral growth, for consciousness, for thought. That body was left alone, to continue its maturation as best it could.

  The others that were now one: After aeons of wonder and visions, he paused for what seemed to him to be still more aeons, though now he had lost all contact with the outside material world and had no real means of reckoning the passage of external time, if the passage of time had any real meaning for him then, of which he was not yet certain. Time was something about which he would speculate, he told himself. There was much he could learn about the nature of time, much to be drawn from the experiences of the past, things Eric Mathers had seen and heard and read and done that relate
d to the nature of time itself. He decided he would do that, determine the nature of time. But not just yet. There was no hurry.

  He rested then, gathered his strength, composed mental forces the immensity and nature of which he had hardly begun to comprehend. He pondered that strength and found himself almost frightened by it. In a sense, he thought, the doors of the universe might be open to him. Some of the doors at least. But not all of them, perhaps.

  He remembered, in clarity and detail he still found startling:

  Back across time and space, to a Timeline called KHL-000 in the month of February, over a year before . . . The Palace of the Tromas. The Place wherein Dwell the All-Wise Mothers.

  And of the Tromas themselves: female Kriths, a

  dozen of them, ancient, deformed, scarcely hominid in their obesity.

  In the air about them was an almost electrical aura, a sensation of power held in tight check, of vast forces unseeable and perhaps unknowable, psionic powers that the Tromas and their ancestors had utilized to build the power of the Krithian race, to allow them to expand across the Timelines, to bend even time itself to their uses.

  Now he recognized the Tromas for what they were. In some ways he was very much like them. But he had many more bodies, many more brains than their dozen —but they had centuries of experience and accumulated skill behind them. How great were the similarities? How great the differences?

  As with the questions he had raised about time itself, he left these questions about the Tromas hanging, filed away in a place from which they could easily be retrieved when the time came to fully investigate.

  Now, like the playful child he was, the composite mind of the man and his replicates began to search again, to explore, to probe outside itself, to see what it could find outside the complex universe it was building for itself in the resonance patterns that existed between its members.

  He probed outward this time, not inward, out into the vast gulf of psionic darkness, out into an empty universe lighted only here and there by remote brilliances, galaxies far away in the darkness of that emptiness, quasars on the very limits of observation.

  He reached out across the expanses ... and touched another mind.

  He recoiled for a moment, held back, for he was not certain whether he wanted to enter this mind, whether he could if he wanted to, whether the resonance patterns there coincided enough for there to be the full response control of level three. He paused, held, pondered, decided: response-level two would be sufficient,

  might be the best he could do no matter how hard he tried. He moved forward, looked. . ..

  Lieutenant Colonel Eric Mathers sat on a bunk, a cigarette between his lips, an energy pistol disassembled in his lap. He was the only person in the room.

  *For furniture there was the bunk he sat on, another, similar bunk, a desk between them, a battered old dresser opposite the desk, on the dresser a pile of soiled clothing. Beside the dresser was a lavatory, above the lavatory a shelf on which sat two sets of shaving gear, folded towels, a cracked mirror.

  *As he slowly put the weapon back together, apparently bored with the operation, apparently finding it merely something to do while he waited, Lieutenant Colonel Mathers could hear from outside the room, from outside the small, frame building, the passage of motorized vehicles on a dirt road, the rumbling of laboring engines, the complaining of metal, the yells and curses of tired men.

  *Then there was a knock on the door. Mathers looked up, said, “Yes?”

  *The door opened just enough to allow the head of a young soldier to slip through. His mouth said, “Colonel, he’s on his way here now. The Krith, sir.” The language the young soldier spoke was Timeliners’ Shangalis.

  *“Very good, Corporal. Thanks.”

  “Right, sir.”

  *The head retreated; the door closed.

  ^Lieutenant Colonel Mathers completed reassembling the energy pistol, snapped its power cartridge into place, slipped the weapon into the holster on his hip, rose to his feet, brushed off his clothing, and stuffed his shirttails into his pants. After taking a quick glance around the room, he snuffed out his cigarette and went toward the door.

  *He opened it just in time to see a naked, ugly,

  brownish, alien Krith come around the back of the jeep in which he had arrived, his brown-marble eyes bright, his long tail swinging in the air like an interrogation point.

  *“Eric, my friend,” the Krith said.

  *“Mar-masco,” Mathers said in reply, bowing in Krithian fashion as the alien did the same. “Come in,” Mathers said, gesturing toward the doorway behind him.

  *The Krith nodded and followed him.

  *Mathers had seen the brown folder in his hand. The Krith had brought what Mathers was hoping he would bring.

  Inside, Mar-masco sat down on one of the beds, Mathers on the other.

  *“I have brought exactly what you wanted of me, Eric.”

  ^“Exactly?” Mathers asked.

  ^“Exactly,” the Krith repeated, opening the folder and then spreading sheets of paper out on the rough woolen blanket on the bed. “The new contract confirms your rank and pay scale and bonus, all in order. I have a check here too.”

  *“Very good.”

  *“You will be granted a month’s leave on one of the Rajaian Lines, as you requested, expenses paid— that part took some doing, I grant you, but we felt that your services to the Timeliners warranted it Your next assignment, when your leave is up, will be to . .

  He withdrew, pulled back into the psionic darkness, reviewed things for a moment.

  That was me, he thought, a version of Eric Mathers, a parallel Eric Mathers . .. still working for the Kriths as a Timeliner mercenary, as I once did, still loyal to them, still unquestioning of them, still waging their wars for them and helping them alter the histories of the parallel Earths so that they would fit into what

  ever master plan it was tlie Kriths had for the universe.

  There were other stars in the darkness; he sought out one of them, found . . .

  *Pain and darkness, one eye seeing dimly the walls of the hospital room to which he was confined. Eric Mathers tried to stir on his bed, tried to- use the stump of an arm to relieve the pressure on the sores on his back, caused himself only more pain, fell back, groaned, tried to remember what it was like when he had been a whole man, when every moment was not one of agony, but found that he could not.

  *With that same grotesque stump, he fumbled, pushed a button that rang a remote bell, sent current pulsing through a distant, incandescent bulb. A nurse would hear the bell, see the light, and eventually would come to see what he wanted. A bedpan? A bath? A drink of water? And then he would try to tell her, try to make her understand, for the nurse on duty now was one of the new ones and had not yet learned to decipher the gagged sounds that passed for speech, the noises that came from the twisted throat of Eric Mathers, ex-Timeliner, hopelessly injured beyond repair, another casualty of the endless wars across the Lines of Time. . . .*

  Again he withdrew into the darkness of psionic space, shuddering within the resonance patterns of himself. The horror had been too great; he was not ready for that yet, for he knew exactly what it was . . . himself, a parallel version of Eric Mathers, so seriously injured in the explosion that had wrecked a place called Staunton on Line RTGB-307, where he had discovered the presence of a second alien race moving across the Timelines, altering worlds to suit their purposes, that he was now little more than a basket case, a painful distortion of a man confined to a hospital bed for the rest of his life. Mercifully, it would be a short one.

  He rallied himself, collected the various components of himself, looked across the darkness once more at other points of psionic light, hesitant at first about approaching another, finally doing so, reaching out, probing, seeing. . . .

  This was not quite as bad as the last one, though bad enough. . . .

  *A tall blond man who appeared to be in his sixties, but who was actually less than forty years old, h
is face covered with a full beard, his emaciated frame covered with filthy prison garments, huddled in his gray stone cell, chewing a crust of bread, gazing up at the narrow window above his head, which was the cell’s only source of light. A bright beam of sunlight passed through the window, illuminating motes of dust in the air, splashing a narrow rectangle of light, bright and yellow, against the far wall, obscuring the wall’s many scribblings, executed over the years with bits of charred wood.

  *The man in the cell was named Thimbron Parnassos; that was the only name he had ever known in his life. He had never been approached by the Timeliners, had never joined them, had never moved across the Lines of Time, waging the wars of the Kriths to change tomorrow, had never been given the name Eric Mathers during an assignment in an English-speaking country on a Line labeled by the Kriths RTGB-307.

  ♦Parnassos continued to stare at the beam of sunlight, wondering what the world was like outside the prison now, for it had been more years than he could remember sipce he had seen anything outside the four gray walls that enclosed him. He did not think of it now, but the memory was always there, just below the surface, the memory of the last time he had seen the outside world: it had been a gallows yard, where he and a dozen other students waited for their turns to come, their turns to mount the steps and place their

  heads within the sweat-stained nooses, for the traps to be opened under them and for their bodies to fall, for their necks to be snapped as the ropes burned into their flesh. They had been convicted of sedition and treason against the government of North Ionia, and they were to die. But they did not die. A cruel quirk of fate. In celebration of a major victory over the rebellious forces, the governor of North Ionia had commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, solitary confinement, no chance of parole. Death would have been preferable. The boys were taken back into the gray prison, never to see the outside world again.

  *Pamassos rocked on his knees on the floor of the cell, his crust of bread eaten, his stomach still empty. He rocked on his knees and hummed to himself an old, old song his father had taught him as a child. His father had been very lucky. He had been hanged. But he didn’t think of that very often either. He didn’t think of very much at all. . . .*