Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  Westermach stood his ground, the muscles in his neck cording with anger. “Can you kill a human? Can you? You are programmed against it.”

  “Monsieur Westermach,” said D’Artagnan with unwonted gentleness, “This night previous, I have killed beings who were far more real to me than you are. And you, sir, I hold responsible for the death of Maggie Archer; I know you,” D’Artagnan whispered, “Monsieur Cardinal.”

  Westermach turned with military precision, and left.

  When the doorfield had reformed, the voice of Maggie Archer said, “Prax? Could you? Kill a human?”

  The steel fist clenched again. “I do not know, madame. I think not.”

  “Then let us hope they never call our bluff.”

  “Yes, madame. Let us hope that.”

  And D’Artagnan’s form, in the bright yellow morning sunshine, faded, and vanished.

  THAT WAS NOT the end of it, of course, for there are no ends in realtime, only endless beginnings. It might be said, even, that it was not entirely a good thing, returning the stories to the world.

  Two centuries later, the scouts of the Human-Praxcelis Union ranged far and wide across the sea of alternate timelines. Those scouts found the time-line spanning Walks-Far Empire. It is possible that a less imaginative people might have better withstood the genegineered, insanity-causing viruses that the Walks-Far Empire loosed on them; but it is also possible that a less imaginative people would not have survived the conquest of the Empire. The Man-Praxcelis Union won that war; and the wars that followed.

  As time passed, the manchines of the Human-Praxcelis Union spread throughout spacetime, and grew in both power and prestige.

  And everywhere they went, they took their stories with them.

  But as I have said, that was not the end, for there are no ends in realtime.

  >Epilog

  CIA HUDDLED DEEP in her bedclothes when the story was over, almost asleep. She had closed her eyes halfway through the story, to avoid meeting those tired, grim eyes, the eyes of the Praxcelis. The story itself kept her awake, though, all the way to the end.

  “Endless beginnings. Thank you,” whispered Cia. “Will you come back tomorrow night?”

  “I will, if you wish it.”

  “I do. I want to hear some more.” She added, sleepily, “There is more?”

  The man looked at her. “I have said, the story is over.”

  Cia sat up at that, and opened her eyes, rubbing them. “You mean there’s no more?”

  “This story,” he said very gently, “this story is over. But I have not said there is no more. Child, there is always more.”

  Cia sank back into bed. “Good.”

  The image of the man flickered out, and only the voice remained. “Good night, Cia.”

  The little girl’s eyes were closed again, and her voice was almost muffled by the pillow. “Good night, D’Artagnan.”

  END

  From the February 1983 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  The Gray Maelstrom

  MY NAME IS Joel Gray. Or was. The Joel part, of course, is appropriately meaningless. That my surname is Gray I find meaninglessly appropriate, for it is so very, very gray.

  There are two shapes here. A mathematician from the place where I was born would tell you that the only meaningful numbers are zero, one, and infinity. But then, I have spent infinity, spent it twice over in this limbo of the gray, and I assure you that the number two is the only meaningful number.

  The first shape is the line; long, twisting and sinuous, lines weave themselves about my disembodied viewpoint in a multitude that halves forever; they pulse, and resonate, one to another, on those rare occasions when two lines come into close enough proximity to affect each other. They writhe like snakes embracing, exchange information the nature of which I am only now beginning to grasp, and then flash apart to resume their solitary lineness.

  The other shape is the sphere. They are perfect spheres, without grain or roughness, and all of a size, unlike the lines. With no reference points to judge against, the spheres may be very large or very small; impossible to say. When I first came here, I used them to measure the lines against.

  They are colored in shades of gray, subtle variations of grayness, from dark grays that almost remind me of the color, or lack of it, that I seem to remember as “black,” to pale, chalky grays that almost seem to be the color – or lack of it – that I recall as “white.”

  They move. The lines squirm through and above the spheres, and there is never the third element of empty space; all that I see is composed of the dancing spheres, the writhing lines, and the shifting shades of gray.

  (The dance was, I thought when I first came to this place, without meaning, but now I see it otherwise. Rather than simple Brownian motion, it harmonizes; the dance is of form and rhythm, with a complexity such that without eternity to contemplate it I should never have discovered it.)

  Sometimes, when with all the effort that my disembodied self is capable of expending, I am yet unable to concentrate on the gray maelstrom, I remember the time before I came here. I was a geologist, a professor of geology in a place called Arizona. As this timelessness has stretched on I have found myself more and more unable to recall events from that place. It seems to have been a curious world, a place of color and sensation, and most strangely, a place of others who were like myself; they did not bear the name Joel Gray, but they were like me nonetheless.

  I do remember the ending. Perhaps I shall never forget it. I was out in the field, collecting samples, and had set up camp as the night wore on. I intended to … sleep? … yes, sleep, and I had built a fire, for warmth.

  It had come out of the sky, with fear strong in the thoughts of those contained inside. They were not like me; they were not named Joel Gray, but even more than those who were like me but did not bear my name, these differed.

  They thought of their craft as an inverspace ship, and it was crippled by an impact with an antimatter micrometeor. They needed to land their ship and make repairs, but they could not do that without turning off the inverspace drive field. It was their great bad fortune that the micrometeor had destroyed the controls that would allow them to shatter the integrity of the inverspace drive field. They had a way out, though; their drive field, when taken deep into the gravity well of a sufficiently massive planet, would of its own accord attenuate and flicker out.

  They knew a very good reason why they should not do this – it had something to do with their religion, or beliefs – but they were weak, and they wanted to live. They took the ship down, to the planet whose name was, I think, Earth.

  Thou shalt not activate an inverspace drive within the atmosphere of a potentially inhabited planet.

  I learned all of these things as the landing ship’s drive field washed over me, and then, in the instant before I learned from the mind of the drive engineer why an inverspace field must not be used in the atmosphere of a potentially inhabited planet, I was here.

  That was two eternities ago.

  Damn this grayness.

  THE STORM OF line and sphere plays about me. I am certain, now, that there is a pattern to it all. And sometimes … when I concentrate very hard … it seems that I can make the dance shift and do what I will it.

  Of this much I am sure: I am growing. With each pulse of graying eternity, the complexities and intricacies of the dance become plainer, easier to encompass.

  With this growth comes a feeling of power, raw, exultant power.

  Perhaps some timeless time I shall have grown to such extent that I am able to shed the storm like a snake shedding its skin, and return to the place where I was a man named Joel Gray.

  I know, with a certainty that passes description, that the power
shall not desert me, if ever I leave the gray maelstrom.

  And if this should come to pass, I think I shall ask the drive engineer of the people who are not like me just why an inverspace drive must not be activated within the atmosphere of a potentially inhabited planet.

  I am more certain than ever that the dance bends to my will.

  THERE IS A story I remember. It concerns a creature called a jinn.

  This jinn was imprisoned within a bottle. He was a creature of great power.

  After a thousand years in the bottle, he had decided to grant three wishes to whoever unstopped the bottle and let him out.

  After two thousand years he had decided to serve forever whoever unstopped the bottle and let him out.

  After three thousand years he had decided to spend the rest of eternity torturing the luckless creature who released him.

  It amazes me now, how easily the dance shapes itself to my will.

  THE ALIEN STARSHIP sat squat and holed on the cold sands of the Arizona desert. Some forty yards from where the ship landed, a geologist slept beside his fire.

  Within just a few seconds, the flickering, dying inverspace field would withdraw from the shape of the sleeping man.

  THE VERY LAST sight any of the aliens had was of a tall, gray demon, stalking patiently toward their ship, a bare few feet beyond the edge of the shrinking inverspace field.

  END

  The cover story of Aboriginal Science Fiction Magazine, Nov-Dec 1990

  Given the Game

  DAWN OF THE last day was clear.

  The sun lifted up over the hills to the east just before seven a.m. Down on the beach, Costigan knelt in the sand with the sun to his back, his shadow striking out over the ocean in the long low light of morning.

  When he had finished praying, Costigan rose, picked up his weapons, and began dressing. The forest here reached down toward the beach; a strip of sand fifty meters wide separated the water and the trees. Costigan glanced at the locator. His opponent was still two squares away on the grid. The opponent – Costigan thought it was probably the Latino named Roseleaf – would be here within an hour at the outside.

  He made the rounds of his booby traps and prepared to wait.

  It was the last day, and finally, thank God finally, the Game was nearly over.

  IN THE DARKNESS near Tau Ceti God heard their distant prayers, the music of the water creatures. It listened to their exquisite pain, to the tales they sang of death in the nets, death brought by the water-fouling, weapon-carrying, net-wielding land creatures.

  The Game was well under way at Tau Ceti. The natives were a squat, slow-moving race with little natural propensity toward violence. God hardly cared. They were Players nonetheless, and if the being who won the Game at Tau Ceti was less formidable than the victors of other Games, so be it. The Game had been old when God was young, in a time when the universe itself had been hotter and smaller. God had Played many thousands of species, and Its early rages at Games that went poorly had long since vanished.

  God was old, and It handled disappointment well.

  The Game at Tau Ceti would finish itself. Late in 1962, God ignited the fusion fires in Its belly, and began the long journey to the water world called Earth.

  THE LINE WAS silent.

  It hardly mattered; for months now Costigan had hardly noticed the Line when it did speak to him. The voice of God had been growing quieter for a long time now. Costigan didn’t know for sure how long. His sense of time had vanished – well, some time ago.

  He sat up in the top of a redwood. Roseleaf – or D’Amato, if D’Amato had survived, which Costigan did not think likely – would be coming by either plane or helicopter; nothing else moved as fast as the locator said his opponent was coming. Costigan had prepared for that eventuality; he was set up with a marksman’s rifle and heat-seeking anti-aircraft artillery he’d taken from March Air Force Base after killing Gifford Kirkwood there. He didn’t really think God was going to let him blow his opponent out of the air, but it was worth his while to make the attempt.

  Costigan waited. When the blip that was the sole remaining human being on Earth entered the locator’s central square, he dropped the locator, let it fall like a stone to the forest’s floor, thirty meters below. The opponent had entered the arena, and would not leave it again unless Costigan was dead. At close range the locator was useless; dead weight. Let it go.

  Let it go.

  IT WAS, THE government said, an alien ship. That was during the first week, while the ship was still outside the orbit of Jupiter, decelerating toward an Earth orbit. Humanity wondered at God’s approach, that first week, until the relativistic effects of God’s long journey had shrunk to the point that God and humanity experienced time at the same speed.

  And God Spoke.

  THE LAST THING that Martin Costigan remembered from the world before the Game was a live broadcast where two evangelists were arguing over whether the aliens – if they were aliens – had souls. If they had souls, the evangelists wondered, were the souls of the same type as human souls? Could they be saved in Jesus as a human could?

  And on and on.

  Martin Costigan was drinking coffee and thinking quite calmly that if the likes of the two on his television screen were allowed to have souls then he, for one, was not going to disqualify anything out of hand, when the Line came bursting down into his skull.

  He crawled back to consciousness slowly. He lay face down on the living room rug. The back of his skull throbbed as though it had been split by a cleaver. Without shifting position he reached up with his right hand and touched the back of his head. There was no blood, no wound, just hair that had not been cut recently enough.

  He sat up slowly, numb with shock. He watched the television screen for a moment without comprehension. One of the evangelists, the short, rather chubby one, had the older silver-haired one down on the floor and was methodically bashing his brains out against the cement of the sound stage. Off-camera Martin heard the sound of gunshots, and a dull roaring mob sound that was quickly replaced by individual screams.

  There was sound upstairs, and Martin turned away from the television screen. He heard his wife’s footstep on the stairs, and suddenly understood the scene on the television. With the old reflexes he found the nearest weapon, picked up their coffee table and threw it at Caroline as she entered the living room. She carried their .38 revolver and managed two shots before the coffee table crushed her.

  Neither of the shots struck Martin. He took the revolver from Caroline’s outstretched hand, and went back upstairs. The twins, Tina and Sharon, were fighting in bed. Both of them had nasty scratches but did not seem to have harmed one another otherwise. Martin shoved them apart, shot Tina in the forehead as she lay on the bed, and then shot Sharon twice in the chest as she was picking up a stuffed animal to throw at him.

  Then he went into his son’s bedroom and killed Timmy. Timmy did better than the twins; he struck Martin with a baseball bat as Martin entered his bedroom. It left a nasty bruise the next day. Martin took the baseball bat away from his son and beat him to death with it.

  Martin stood over the broken, almost unrecognizable shape of his child, and for the first time there came a voice over the Line, and the voice was God and God shouted in terror and death and insanity, and in the madness of Its words It said, Well done.

  AT FIRST COSTIGAN was not certain whether the sound was real or merely imagination. He brought his binoculars to hi
s eyes and scanned the treetops to the south, the direction from which the locator had said his opponent was coming.

  Southwest; a glint of metal in the sun. He must have been following the coast, as close to the sacred water as Instinct would let him get. He was surrendering any real chance of surprising Costigan in exchange for assurance that he would still be able to find Costigan if his plane failed and he had to make a landing before he arrived. That was a very real possibility. The Game was twelve years old and finding anything that still worked after twelve years of utter neglect was rare.

  Except weapons. Where there had been people, weapons had been cared for.

  Costigan followed the glint of light as it approached. Cessna, he noted, a single-engine Cessna 182; not military aircraft after all. That did not surprise him; the Cessna was one of the most trustworthy planes ever built.

  It looked as though the plane was going to pass within a kilometer of Costigan’s tree. Costigan lifted the rocket launcher to his shoulder and activated the sights. A flashing red dot followed the Cessna for a moment on the display and then stabilized. In the lower right-hand corner of the display, the words Locked On flashed bright green. Costigan tried to pull the trigger. Nothing. His finger would not move. God was not going to let things end so simply; Costigan had not expected It to. He sighed, touched the snapclasp that held the rocket launcher’s restraining strap around his shoulders, and dropped the launcher to the forest floor.