Eschaton 03 Far Shore of Time

by Frederik Pohl

  He turned his back on me and limped over to gaze without much interest at his purple food. "You don't seem real happy about it," I offered.

  He put a small chunk of the stuff in his mouth, chewing unenthusiastically-and sloppily; crumbs were falling to the floor. Then, with his mouth full, he said, "You do not understand, Agent Dannerman. I have betrayed the Beloved Leaders. Their judgment will be sure."

  "Oh, maybe not," I said. "It might go the other way, you know. Maybe the Horch will win, and then you won't have to face your Beloved Leaders."

  He turned the cat eyes on me mournfully. "Do you think that would be better for me? Or for you, either?" He swallowed the rest of what was in his mouth, then put the remainder of the stuff down. "In any case, Agent Dannerman," he said, "I think I will find out which it is quite soon."

  Well, he was right about that.

  A few sessions later, when the Christmas trees released me for my pee-and-chow break, I discovered Dopey lying next to the table. His plume dragged limply on the floor. One of his kitten eyes was closed to a slit, and the other queerly distended. Neither was looking at me. And his body was cold.

  I shouted, but no one came. When one of the crystal robots did eventually appear, it paid no attention to my dead companion. It only hustled me off to my next interrogation, and when I came back to the room his body was gone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Never mind about the next while. The easy way to describe it is that it was more of the same, but that's not accurate. It was worse. Not only was I now alone, more alone than I had ever been in my life, but too little sleep for too long was doing me in. My thinking was getting fuzzy. Every time I got to the biological-needs room I fell asleep at once, without bothering to eat, and that was not improving my state.

  I can't say that I was giving up hope, because I hadn't had all that much hope to begin with, but I was getting too bleary even to think about a future.

  And then something did come along.

  The Christmas trees' questions had been getting sillier and more erratic than ever. Sometimes both machines stood silent for a few moments, apparently deep in thought, before coming up with some new asininity.

  Then, after a particularly lengthy period of cogitation, Pinkie rolled away from me and stood silently beside Green-glass, whose lenses began to disappear. Both machines seemed to shrink into themselves, retracting whole hordes of their finer needles.

  Remember, I was staggeringly weary. By the time it registered with me that the robots were in some sort of standby state, and thus in good condition to be attacked, it was too late to do anything about it. The door opened. Three living Horch came in- the one with the funny accent, the female I had seen before and an unfamiliar male, who wore the same gleaming metal belly helmet as the female.

  The female darted her head toward Green-glass, I suppose giving it an order I couldn't hear. I didn't have any trouble seeing the results, though. Both Christmas trees sprang into action. They advanced on me and grabbed me, but not as they had done before. This time not all their needles were retracted. They pricked (-me in a hundred places, and they hurt. I yelped in pain and surprise. That didn't stop them. They investigated most of the parts of my body with their sharp little spikes. Then, without a word, they dropped me to the floor and rolled back to the Horch at the door. There was a low-toned conversation while I was picking myself up, and then the two Horch with the metal belly plates left, the Christmas trees went into standby mode and the one with the embroidered fabric stomacher came toward me. "Bureau Agent James Daniel Dannerman," he said, "the interrogation is terminated. You have been given to me for disposal."

  It was the first time I had ever been close enough to a live Horch to touch, so I summoned all the energy I had and grabbed him by the throat. "Tell those robots not to interfere! You're going to take me out of here," I croaked, as menacingly as I could make it.

  He didn't seem worried. He didn't need to be. He was a lot stronger than I was. Both of the Christmas trees snapped out of their down mode and sprang forward, but he waved them away. Those ropy arms of his pulled my fingers from his throat without effort.

  "Yes, of course," he said. "Transportation has been arranged."

  He turned and left through the open door; and, carrying me, the green-glass Christmas tree rolled after him.

  PART THREE

  The Compound

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Outside the interrogation room the Christmas tree waited for a moment while the Horch climbed onto a funny-looking kind of three-wheeled velocipede. He flopped onto it on his back, belly up, with his long neck twisting around so he could see where he was going. Then he whizzed away and we followed.

  As before, it wasn't a sight-seeing trip. The machine carried me hugged to its bristly needles, my face pressed so that I could get only gimpses of the scenery, but I recognized it. Dopey was right. The last time I'd seen any of this, it had been shattered and smoking junk, but it was definitely the old Beloved Leaders base, the fires out now and here and there a Christmas tree diligently taking the ruined machinery apart.

  The Horch made better time on his tricycle than we did. He was waiting beside it when we arrived and the Christmas tree set me down.

  We were at the edge of the built-up base, with that vast, empty, ocher-colored desert in front of us. A different kind of vehicle was parked there, with an alien standing next to it. I recognized the creature as one of the huge, pale, multiarmed ones we called "Docs," but there was something odd about it. It took me a moment to realize what it was; all the Docs I had seen before wore nothing but a kind of jockstrap, while this one was fully clothed.

  I turned as I heard a skitter of wheels on pavement behind me-the Christmas tree was skating away, its work here evidently finished-and when I turned back the Horch was looking me over. He sniffed at me with the little nostril slits in his pointy snake nose, then drew his head back to stare into my eyes. "You will be all right, I think," he said. "This medical sapient will take you to a safe place and care for you."

  He signaled to the Doc, who picked me up, more gently than the machine, and held me as the Horch came over for a last word. I could feel the breath from its mouth as his head stretched toward me. "Perhaps you will want a name for me. You can call me Beert-" trilling the r, clipping the final t. "It is the short form of my name, as yours is Dan. Another one called me that before he died."

  I was practicing saying the name for myself when he got to the last part. Then I opened my mouth to ask about this "other one," but Beert wasn't listening. "Yes, you say my name quite well. No questions now, please. I have duties to attend to, but I will come to you when I can. In any case, everything will be explained to you, if you survive."

  If you survive. These creatures from other planets were great at dropping conversation-stoppers on me.

  Helping me to survive appeared to be the Doc's job. He didn't speak, but he laid me down on a bench in the vehicle and began to palp my throat, belly, groin, skull. I didn't see him do anything to make the vehicle start, but while he was poking at me the door closed, the car lurched and, evidently on autopilot, we began to glide away on its air cushion.

  The Doc rolled me over and began doing something radical to the small of my back. It didn't hurt, but it felt unwelcome. Then it began to feel a little better.

  If I had been a little less bone-weary-frazzled, I might have tried to see where we were going. I didn't. There were no windows operating in the car, and besides, the Doc's ministrations were making me feel a little bit relaxed, for the first time in quite a while.

  So I suppose I fell asleep. At least I was surprised when the door opened and I realized the car had stopped.

  Another Doc peered in. The two of them, my medic and the new one, mewed at each other in a high-pitched language I had never heard before. Then they helped me out of the car.

  I was standing in bright sunshine, with half a dozen of the Docs gathered around to stare at me. The new one spoke. "You are Dannerman,
" he informed me-well, more accurately, she informed me; it wasn't until a little later that I got the genders straight. "My name is…"

  Was something I had a lot of trouble pronouncing, much less writing down; it started with a kind of baritone purring sound, then something like clearing the throat, and at the end finishing with a deep-toned hiss; the closest I can come is "Pirraghiz." "You are safe here," she went on. "Do you know what this place is?"

  I frowned at her. She was rapidly making my pleasant languor evaporate, and that struck me as a stupid question. How would I know what it was?

  Then I looked around more carefully, and I did.

  There were a couple of strange-looking buildings that I knew I had never seen before. Shiny. Yellow, like the chinaware walls of the interrogation room. Five or six meters high and sort of elliptical in plan, with sides that tapered up from the ground. What they reminded me of mostly was pictures I had seen of the ancient Civil War ironclad, the Merrimac, and they were not in the least familiar.

  However, that wasn't all that was in sight. There was a little stream not far away, crossed by stepping-stones. There were trees in the distance. There was something that looked like a primitive stone fireplace. And there was a tepeelike thing that wasn't exactly a tepee. The last time I'd seen any of those, Jimmy Lin had given them a name. He called them "yurts."

  "Oh, my God," I said, because, yes, it was a very familiar place. "I lived in those yurts when I was a captive of the Beloved Leaders."

  "That is correct," Pirraghiz told me gently. "You lived here before. Now you will stay here again while we feed you and try to make you well."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I spent most of the next few days sleeping. As far as I could tell, Pirraghiz never slept at all. Every time I woke up she was there, carrying me to a toilet, spoon-feeding me more of the foods I had been eating for so long, rubbing the small of my back with that special little touch of hers that seemed to be meant to put me back to sleep, and always did.

  So for the next forty-eight hours at least, it could have been more, I was pretty much out of it. I was hazily aware that sometimes she was doing other things to me-massaging, poking, cupping my head in her two largest hands-but I didn't know why, except that it felt good. Now and then I know others came into the room to look at me, mostly other Docs, but once or twice, I think, the Horch. Those fuzzy periods of nearly waking didn't last. When Pirraghiz saw that I was wakeful she touched me with one gentle talon and I was gone again.

  When the time came that I was very nearly wide-awake, for very nearly an hour or so at a time, I took a closer look at my surroundings.

  The bed I was in was comfortable enough, except for being maybe a little firmer than I would have preferred. However, it was built to Doc dimensions, nearly four meters long and more than half that in width. The room was in the same statuesque scale. On the walls there were a couple of mural-like paintings- or still photographs, I couldn't decide which. One was a group of Doc infants at play, the other a misty, idealized scene of a seashore with gentle waves breaking on a pink-sand beach. Elsewhere along the walls were shelves that contained clothes and things-Pirraghiz's, I supposed-and others with spools of a glassy sort of ribbon (the Horch equivalent of books, I found out later). A squat cylindrical thing by the window blew air at me, I supposed for comfort. In recesses in the walls there was a thing like a chromium soup bowl a meter across that was standing on one edge-for what purpose, I did not know-and a couple of smaller bowls of a different kind that were filled with a kind of peat moss. Unfamiliar blue-green buds poked out of the moss. The whole place had a lived-in look. Naturally enough. It was Pirraghiz's own room. She had given it up for me.

  When she came to check up on me she was astonished to find me standing up. Before she said anything she carefully felt me all over. Then, more or less satisfied, she allowed me to walk to the toilet on my own.

  I haven't said what the toilet was like. There were three of them lined up, huge, Doc-sized things that looked like Chic Sale outhouses on pilings. They were built right over the flowing stream and you got to them by a small bridge. I must have said something that Pirraghiz hadn't expected, because she looked at me curiously. "Are you dissatisfied with the sanitary arrangements?"

  "No, of course not. Well, a little surprised, anyway. It's just that the sanitary arrangements don't seem very sanitary. On Earth a lot of people get very upset if they find anyone using the streams for toilets, because of the risk of spreading infection."

  That stopped her cold. The snowy, mossy eyebrows went up in astonishment. "Are you telling me," she asked, sounding scandalized, "that your excrement may contain live pathogens?"

  "Doesn't everybody's?"

  The great bland face was wearing an expression of revulsion. "That is a disgusting concept, Dannerman. No. We will have to provide you with other facilities, for the protection of other species who are downstream from us… and you must not excrete into the river anymore."

  By the time Pirraghiz was finally letting me feed myself, and did not immediately put me back to sleep as soon as I was finished, I was remembering the lessons my old DI had beaten into me. I had a duty. It was time for me to start scoping this place out, so I insisted on being allowed to go outside.

  Physically I was feeling pretty good-no, more than that; I was feeling better than I had in a long time. I was still weak, though. When we came to a short flight of stairs I wasn't really ready for-tall, Doc-sized stairs, they were-Pirraghiz didn't stop to ask permission. She just picked me up and carried me to the outside door, and I was glad she had.

  I had not expected it to be night outside.

  If I had had any uncertainty about where we were, the sight of that night sky removed it. My dearly beloved astronomy expert, Pat, had suspected that the prison planet we were on was in the middle of a globular cluster which, she said, was a collection of maybe thousands of stars crowded so close together that the whole clutter of them was bound by each other's gravity, sailing around in complex orbits and all very, very near all the rest. There were certainly hundreds in that overhead night sky that were very near to us: giant brilliant lightbulbs hanging in the heavens, blue and red and yellow and white and all the shades in between. At least a dozen of them were as bright as the Moon from Earth, and a couple so incredibly bright that I squinted when I looked at them. In one corner of the sky there was a cobwebby film of white, brighter than the Milky Way. It wasn't anything like the Milky Way, though, according to Pat. The Milky Way was made up of millions and billions of individual stars, so distant that their light smeared together into a luminous blur. This stuff, she thought, was masses of gas and plasma that some of the stars were stealing from each other.

  Pat had had something else to say about this display. According to her, in a globular cluster novas and supernovas might be relatively common, and when a star exploded in one of those ways it was likely to release floods of seriously damaging radiation, with very bad results for any living thing nearby.

  When I said something about that to Pirraghiz, she said, "Of course that is so, Dannerman. Showers of deadly radiation are quite frequent. That is why the Horch restored the protective shield over this planet as soon as they finished occupying the base. It was down for only a few days, but in that time many persons of many species died from it." Then she touched my throat with one of her lesser arms and frowned. "You are being too active for your first time out. Come back. You can eat, and then you should rest some more. There will be plenty of time to explore."

  I didn't actually need to do a lot of exploring. I already knew this place very well.

  Before we escaped back to Earth-I mean, before the ones of us that did successfully escape did-we had spent a lot of time here. It was a prison, or zoo, where the Beloved Leaders kept a few samples of the sentient races they had met-and, often, exterminated. We lived in the yurts, but we didn't build them. Some others had lived here before us and, we guessed, died here too, because all that remained of them was th
eir works.

  Now the compound belonged to the liberated Docs, or at least to the thirty or so surviving ones that had managed to escape being killed in the fighting. The Docs looked a lot different now. The ones I had been used to seeing were silent; they obeyed orders, and when no orders were given they stood frozen, waiting for the next command. These present Docs were never still, as they worked around the compound, chattering back and forth in their high, chirpy voices. And they were fully clothed. They wore decorous trousers over their lower parts, and above the waist a sort of loose, gaily colored blouse, with sleeves for all six of their arms. Each wore a huge, floppy hat to keep the sun away.

  As I peered inside the surviving yurt-it looked like the one we had kept our food in, but it was empty now-I felt that gentle touch on my neck. I turned. It was Pirraghiz, of course, once more taking my pulse or whatever it was she did when she touched me there. "Are you getting tired?" she asked anxiously.

  I assured her I wasn't, though I was pretty certain she knew my condition better than I did. I pointed to the yurt. "How come you left this one standing?"

  She looked faintly embarrassed, or as much so as a creature with a great, moss-covered moon of a face could look. "It did not seem right to remove them all. The people who built them are gone, and there was no other way to remember them. I know this is not a sensible thing, Dannerman." Then she patted my shoulder with a lesser hand. It wasn't a medicinal touch, this one, or even a particularly affectionate one. It was the way your mother might put her hand on your shoulder when she wants your full attention. "I have a question for you, Dannerman. You have been all over this area, looking at everything. Yet you have seen almost everything here before, so what is it that you are looking for?"