Vestiges of Time

by Richard C. Meredith

  Mathers knew that something was happening in the circuits, the wiring, the generators of the skudder under him. A scream to match his own, a yell, a roar of mechanical pain, came from them. Lights flickered erratically across the panels. His hands fell to the controls, but he did not know what to do.

  Ignoring Kjemi Stov, Tar-hortha had come to a stop only a short distance from the skudder, and looked at Mathers through the glasslike dome, a strange expression on his alien features.

  Even as one portion of the Shadowy Man’s mind worked to provide some small repair to the damaged skudder, to get it moving at least across a few Lines of Time, another portion of his mind again took air and light and formed them in a smoky, hazy form, a wraithlike shape between the skudder and Tar-hortha.

  The Krith showed momentary terror, stepped back, struggled with himself.

  From inside the skudder Mathers saw the Shadowy

  Man, but also felt the skudder’s attempts at moving out of this Line. Then, suddenly, the world outside the skudder grayed. It did not exactly flicker, but the world outside was gone—the Krith, his Timeliners, the bloody skudder pool-—and for a few'moments there was nothing, nothing at all but grayness.

  Mathers was moving across the Lines, but . . .

  The Shadowy Man withdrew. The skudder would not go far in paratime, but far enough. And the Krith would move with it, self-skudding until the skudder reached the Line that both Tar-hortha and the Shadowy Man knew it would reach, must reach, or both memory and precognition were wrong. As would the Krith after him, the Shadowy Man went there, across paratime, uptime a matter of minutes to ... .

  A large room in a huge building on a world known only to the Kriths, a secret kept even from their Timeliners. Into the room came Eric Mathers, forcing Tar- hortha before him, a pistol at the Krith’s back. With them were six machines of grayish metal, the building’s guardian robots, watching Mathers in a way that could almost be called suspicious. Inside the room they had entered were some half-dozen large cargo skudders.

  “We are here now, Eric,” Tar-hortha said, stopping and gesturing toward the skudders. “I suggest that you allow me to set the controls of one of them for you. It will carry you to our destination.”

  “I’ll do my own control setting,” Mathers said calmly.

  “It would be very unwise for you to do anything other than what I suggest.”

  “Your robots?” Mathers asked.

  “They will see that no harm comes to me.”

  Three of the devices moved closer to Mathers, raising their metal arms in a manner that could have been menacing.

  “Put the foolish pistol away and come with me,” Tar-hortha said.

  154 RICHARD C. MEREDITH The robots moved closer.

  “I’m going to have some answers,” Mathers told him. “Of course you are, but killing me will not give them to you.”

  “And if I do as you say . . . ?”

  “You will be my prisoner, of course.”

  “I won’t put myself in that position again, Tar- hortha.”

  “I believe you already have.”

  A metal hand shot out from one of the faceless machines and clamped down suddenly on Mathers’ right wrist. He tried to jerk away, to pull himself out of its grasp, but another of the machines came up behind him, grasped both his arms above the elbows, and pulled him backward.

  “Tar-hortha!” Mathers screamed in anger. Pain reddened his vision as he fought against the machines that held him, as he willed his right hand to' move against the pain, as he swung the barrel of the pistol a few inches to the left, as he pulled back on the trigger. . . .

  The roar of the pistol was sudden and loud in the room’s near silence, unexpected and terrible.

  Mathers felt the bone snap in his wrist and saw his fingers release their hold on the pistol. But, dammit, I’ve done something! he thought.

  Tar-hortha was screaming shrilly, staggering away, clutching at an arm broken between the wrist and elbow, red, manlike blood gushing from the open wound. He slowly dropped to his knees; in his eyes were only fear and horror, for he had been hurt, hurt by a human being, and that was something that never, never happened to a Krith.

  “You will die, Eric!” he cried, resting now on his knees, blood pooling below him. “You will die!”

  And with the words, the four gray robots moyed toward Mathers to aid the two that held him, one by his upper arms, one by his broken wrist.

  The pain was coming to him now, and along with it vertigo and nausea. So he’d never know. Now he’d . . .

  A grayness came over the room, which for a moment he thought was caused by the pain, by the coming loss of consciousness. He thought he was going under and would probably never awaken again. Yet. ..

  The Shadowy Man did not force air and light into the shape of a spectral figure. There was no need for that this time. The vibrations he had set up in the air would have to be sufficient, for there were other things he had to do.

  “This isn’t the way it should be done, Eric,” he forced the air to say, “but there’s no other way now.”

  Mathers attempted to speak; his mouth worked, but no sounds came from it.

  The Shadowy Man formed six projections of himself and aimed them toward each of the six machines. The repairs he had performed on the damaged skudder had been difficult enough, but this ... he had never done anything like this before, dividing himself into so many parts. He was uncertain of how to go about it, uncertain of how long he could remain so fragmented and still coordinate the six separate sets of activities. But there was nothing else he could do.

  Each psionic extension found a robot, slipped through its metal skin, sought out its central control system, its computer, its brain, studied it, examined it, tried to find ways of deflecting flows of electrons, of creating pathways within the solid-state modules, of finding a means of temporarily incapacitating the various devices. He found them, the ways of doing what he wished, and the six fragments of his composite personality pushed subatomic particles into places where they had not been before, made electrons flow in pathways not designed for them. But he had not imagined how difficult it would be.

  “Quickly now,” he forced the air to say. “I can hold them only for moments!”

  Mathers extricated himself from the machines as they stopped, then reversed their motion. He dragged himself, to his feet, looked at his limp right hand dangling from the broken wrist, then looked at the Krith who knelt in a pool of his own blood.

  “The gun, Eric!” the Shadowy Man said with vibrations of air.

  Mathers nodded, seemed to regain some control of himself, and bent to grasp the gun in his left hand.

  “Hurry!” the air said. “We haven’t long.”

  Mathers stood up, holding the pistol awkwardly. “Into that skudder,” he told the Krith, shaking his head to clear it as he moved toward Tar-hortha.

  The Kirth shook his head in a very human fashion.

  Mathers pointed the revolver at the Krith’s face, only inches away. Tar-hortha sighed deeply through wide, wet lips, then he slowly came to his feet.

  For a few moments more the Shadowy Man held the six machines immobile, long enough for Mathers to force the wounded Krith into the skudder and then climb in himself. That was long enough. Mathers could make it now. He let the robots go.

  With a mental sigh, he relaxed for a moment, watched as the robots approached the skudder, as the skudder hummed and then, with a clap like thunder, slipped out of that universe and into another and then another, skudding across the Lines of Time.

  The Shadowy Man relaxed, but not for long. There was one more encounter, one more place in time and space where his destiny was fixed, where he must go, for the memory of Eric Mathers told him that he must go there, must do things there, must fight and perhaps . . . Well, there was no knowing the outcome. He would learn.

  Summoning his strength, he pulled himself out into the speckled blackness of Notever, Nowhen, and prepared to move uptime again, acr
oss the Lines to KHL-

  and the confrontation with the Tromas, who ruled the race of Kriths.

  The First Confrontation

  KHL-000. The Krithian Homeline. The most prime of all the Prime Lines. The fountainhead from which issued the decisions and the commands that altered uncounted worlds across the Lines, that affected billions upon billions of human beings across those worlds. The seat and source of the power of the Kriths. And the residence world of the Tromas, the twelve females of the race who were its guiding force.

  It was toward KHL-000 that the Shadowy Man moved, toward a place in time where Eric Mathers was now a captive of the Kriths. In exchange for answers to his questions and his reunion with Sally, the Tromas expected him to lure the Shadowy Man to KHL-000. In truth, the Shadowy Man knew, they wished him to come to KHL-000 so that they might hold him and destroy him, forever ridding themselves of the danger to their plans that he represented.

  Yet he went there. There may have been fear in him, but if there was he submerged it, pushed it away from himself. There was no time for fear now. He knew that he must go to KHL-000: his going there was in Mathers’ memory, his going there had enabled Mathers and Sally to escape the Kriths, had allowed Mathers to complete the circuit that had brought the Shadowy Man into existence. He had no choice but to go there and risk exposing himself to the Kriths: And if there existed in Mathers’ memory something that indicated the defeat and destruction of the Shadowy Man, there was-not absolute certitude in it; Mathers had not known that the Shadowy Man was destroyed, but

  158

  merely that his presence, after a terrible battle with the Tromas, was no longer there upon KHL-000. What might have become of him then, Mathers' had not known, had had no way of knowing. So there was the hope in him, as he pushed his intelligence across time and space and paratime once more, that .his defeat might not be total. Perhaps Mathers had known nothing of the final outcome of the battle between the Shadowy Man and the Tromas. He felt deep within the essence of himself that there was a great deal more to come that neither Mathers nor himself had yet suspected. He would see. . . .

  Now: A room in a towering building, a spire that climbed toward the sky; a bedroom that was part of the suite that the Kriths had given Sally Beall von Heinen after bringing her across the Timelines and using her as bait to bring Eric Mathers to them.

  Within the room was a bed on which lay Mathers and Sally, now sensing the approach of something.

  In a far corner of the bedroom, a manlike shape formed, a thing only half visible in the gloom, hazy, ghostly, half immaterial, but it was a presence and the two people in the room were aware of it.

  He collected himself, forced concentrations of himself into the modified air, the bending light. It had been harder to enter KHL-000 than he had anticipated; it had been farther across the Lines than he had realized, and there were forces here, powers and protections, that he had not realized could exist. But he had overcome them and he was there. He made the air speak:

  “It was very difficult this time, getting here. I didn’t think it would be that hard.”

  “Eric!” Sally cried, as she dropped the sheet she had pulled around herself and drew herself toward Mathers.

  “It’s okay,” the man said. “I know who it is.”

  “That—that’s your voice, Eric,” Sally stammered, whispering.

  Hie Shadowy Man. again made the air speak for him: “There is little time. And the forces involved in this are beyond your present comprehension. In moments, if not already, the Tromas will know I’m here, and then ... Well, you’ve got to get out of-here, the two of you.”

  “Out of here?” Mathers asked stupidly.

  In exasperation the Shadowy Man said: “That’s why I came—to rescue the two of you! There’s a way to escape, and if you’ll listen to me I’ll tell you how to do it.”

  “We’re listening,” Mathers , replied from the bed.

  “Very well,” the Shadowy Man said; and, selecting fragments from the Mathers-memory he held, he told them how to get from Sally’s apartment to the roof of the towering spire, of a half-secret stairway that would take them up to where there would be “a means of escape” awaiting them—best not yet to further confuse them with the nature of their escape route, which the Shadowy Man himself did not yet fully understand. He told them that there would be guards and obstacles before them but that he would do everything he could to pave the way for them.

  “And then what?” Mathers asked, an awkward, strained sound to his voice.

  “You escape. What you do after that is up to you, Eric, and you, Sally. I can’t tell you what to do once you escape this Line. I’ve already done far more than I should have. I’m not yet certain just where in the orders of probability—or improbability—” He found that he could not help but chuckle at the confusion he felt in himself and was passing on to Mathers and Sally. “—all this hes anyway—we may one day find out that none of it has happened anyway.”

  “What do you mean?” Mathers asked in confusion.

  “Nothing,” answered the Shadowy Man, now becoming certain that the Tromas were aware of his presence

  in KHL-000, and that they would certainly be doing something about it soon, terribly soon.

  Even as he prepared to speak again he could feel something moving in the world outside the apartment, a force swelling, expanding, probing toward him, carefully at first, hesitant, then more certain of itself.

  “Now you must work out some simple ruse to distract the guards outside the doors of the apartment,” he told them quickly. “Sally, you can help in this. Draw them into the room. Get their attention. Then perhaps Eric can do something. And remember, they have no women of their own.” He thought briefly of the Magers, as Mathers had called them, riot Kriths in disguise as he had once believed, but something else, almost men, but not quite men, something more, or perhaps something less, maybe a hybrid of man and Krith, certainly not the product of any known evolutionary process. But then neither were the Kriths. “And remember, they have no women of their own,” he had said; “they’re drawn to human women, pome of them.” Sally made a motion as if to speak, but then did not, suddenly aware of a second presence, a new and terrible force gathering around the Shadowy Man.

  He felt it too, a touch, lightly at first, no more than a brushing, then a first contact, a quick and ruthless examination. A pause. A flickering of fire across an endless sky. A swelling of anger and hatred. A rushing toward him. A further swelling. Then the lash of a whip of great psionic force across his consciousness.

  He almost lost control of the air for a moment, then made it speak for him.: “They know!”

  The lash came again, and with it the swelling of pain, psychic pain of an intensity such as he had never before known or imagined. Then a momentary pause. He looked within himself to see what defenses he had, what weapons with which to strike back.

  And with it all was a momentary sense of resonance

  with the Eric Mathers who was still on the bed with Sally. A brief sharing of pain and awareness.

  Mathers gasped aloud in that common pain.

  “Eric!” Sally cried.

  A momentary respite, the raising of a mental shield. The Tromas withdrew for instants, preparing to strike again, and harder.

  “You’re me,” Mathers said.

  The Shadowy Man made the air speak again: “In a sense. You might be me. You might become me, given time.”

  Mathers was there with him for instants more: Mathers looking forward in time, backward through the Shadowy Man’s own memories. Fear!

  Then he pushed Mathers away, out of him, knowing that Mathers could never withstand what he could feel sweeping toward him across space from the palace of the Tromas.

  Lightning flashed in the bedroom, leaping from some point near the ceiling toward the focus of his consciousness. And with it the blow of a psionic ax, the cutting, ripping, tearing through him of a sharpened blade of mental force. He erected his shields, strengthen
ed them, struggled to hold himself together until the swift and terrible pressure subsided.

  Blazing with a halo of light and invisible radiation, the Shadowy Man made the air say: “I will fight them as long as I can, but I don’t know how long that will be. I’m a long way from home. . . .” Another blow was coming. Lightning crackled through the room. “Hurry!” the air cried.

  Mathers pulled himself from the bed, drew Sally after him, and, both of them naked, they stumbled from the bedroom as forces swept through it, blasting, shattering, rending.

  “Come on,” Mathers called, his voice dwindling as the blow came toward the Shadowy Man, sweeping toward him; then across him, battering again at his

  shield, being partly held this time, only portions of the psionic attack bursting through to shatter, to shake him, to rip through him and fill him with pain.

  He forced the shields up once more, swung them forward to deflect streams of psionic flame, sought again for weapons, found them, curled balls of coruscating energy within himself, outside the universe, and sucked them into space/time to hurl them at the Tromas.

  With the shields before him he advanced, feet, miles, light-years; the terms are meaningless. He advanced toward the Tromas.

  The Krithian females drew together their own strength, united again, raised their own shields, and moved forward to meet him.

  Through space and time he hurled the particles/ waves/balls/stars/novas/quasars of psionic force toward the advancing Tromas . . . who caught them and hurled them back at him, splashing across his shields, sending him reeling backward, ripping again through his consciousness.