The Overlords of War (22 page)

The man shook his head. “You were wrong. It is not we who have devised this plan.”

“But you do know what has been happening.”

“To some extent. For us, though, you’re a wild factor. You appeared at the appointed moment to resolve a crisis. We have always thought of you as the author of the plan.”

“Me?” Corson exclaimed.

“You and none other.”

“But I haven’t even finished formulating my plan!”

“You have time ahead of you,” the man said.

“But it’s already been put into effect.” “That means it will exist.”

“And if I fail?” Corson countered.

“You’ll know nothing about it. Nor shall we.”

At long last one of the women moved. She rolled over, sat up, noticed Corson, and smiled. She was about thirty. He did not recognize her. Her expression was absent, as though from overlong use of her inward sight.

“I can hardly believe it,” she said. “The famous Corson here among us!”

“I have as yet no reason to be famous,” Corson said curtly.

“Don’t be rude to him, Selma,” the man interjected. “He has a long way to go still, and he’s a little upset.”

“Oh, I’m not going to bite him,” Selma said.

“And,” the man concluded, “we all need him.”

“How far have you got?” Selma asked Corson.

“Well, I came here as an envoy, and—”

But she cut him short. “I know that. I heard you talking to Cid. But how far have you thought things through?”

“I can neutralize Veran by not sending him this message that everyone claims I sent. But to be candid I wouldn’t know how to draft it and still less how to get it to him.”

“That’s a simple matter of creodes,” Selma said. “I’ll arrange it whenever you like. And I think that Those of Aergistal will agree to relay it for us.”

“Suppose you don’t send it,” said the man who had just been referred to as Cid. “Who will deal with the Monster and the Prince of Uria? A solution must be sought elsewhere. Veran forms part of the plan. You can’t eliminate him so easily.”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Corson admitted. “And I even suspect it may be because I ran across him at Aergistal that I thought of making use of him. But I’m not sure yet. It’s an idea that won’t occur to me until much later.”

“He’s making a lot of progress for a primitive,” Selma said.

Cid frowned. “Corson is not primitive. Besides, he has been to Aergistal. He hasn’t made do with communion.”

“True,” Selma said. “I was forgetting.” Annoyed, she jumped up and ran toward the water.

Corson mused aloud, “Then who is to deal with Veran?”

“You,” Cid replied.

“I can’t attack him. I can’t even plan an action against him.” He

touched his security collar, and added as faint hope sprang up in his mind, “Can you take this thing off me?”

“No. Veran hails from our future. His technology is in advance of ours.”

“So there’s no way out.”

“Wrong. There must be a solution. Otherwise you would not be here. There exists at least one line of probability—one creode— according to which you’ve carried out the plan. I don’t know if you’ve grasped all the implications yet, Corson, but your future depends on you in the most literal sense.”

“I rather had the impression I depend on it.”

“Another way of saying the same thing. You see, for a long time men have wondered about the problem of continuity of existence. Was a man the same on waking as when he went to sleep the night before? Might not sleep be a complete break? Why did certain ideas and memories vanish altogether from consciousness, only to turn up again later on? Was there a unity, or a mere juxtaposition of existences? One day somebody stumbled on the truth. Since his beginnings man had lived in ignorance of the greater part of himself, his unconscious mind. Nowadays we are asking ourselves almost the same questions in almost the same terms. How are possibilities related to one another? What connects the past, present, and future of one’s existence? Does childhood determine maturity, or the other way around? We don’t yet comprehend our own essential nature, Corson, and we shall not do so for a long while yet. But we have to live with what we do know.”

Selma came back toward them, her body running with streams of water.

“Corson, you should sleep,” Cid advised. “You’re tired. May you foresee your future in your dreams.”

“I’ll try,” Corson said. “I promise you, I will try.”

And he let himself slump to the sand.

He became aware of a presence beside him. He opened his eyes and at once closed them again, blinded by the sun high overhead. He turned over and tried to doze off again, but two insistent noises prevented him, the hiss of the surf and the sound of light breathing. He looked again and saw sand at the level of his cheek, sand on which the wind had raised miniature dunes that it was now leveling again. He awoke completely and sat up. A girl was kneeling at his side, dressed in a short red tunic.

"Antonella!” he exclaimed.

"George Corson,” she said in a disbelieving voice.

He swept the beach with his gaze. Cid, Selma, and the other woman were nowhere in sight. And the girl—Antonella—had risen and taken a few steps back, as though embarrassed at having been caught staring at him.

“You know me?” he demanded.

“I never saw you before. But I’ve heard about you. You’re the man who has to save Uria.”

He looked her over more closely. The fact that she was clad while the others went naked suggested that she must come from a period when the life-style had not attained the ultimate simplicity preferred by the members of the Council. She was younger than he remembered her, almost a teenager. He could not tell how many

years had passed for her between their two meetings. For him it had been a matter of only a few months.

He recalled the other Antonella perfectly. How weird to meet someone you had shared all sorts of adventures with, but who did not know you yet! It was like being confronted with someone who had lost his memory.

“Have you been in a war?” she asked in a voice that mingled disapproval with curiosity.

“Yes. It was—unpleasant.”

She pondered. “I want to ask . . . But I don’t know if I can.”

“Go ahead.”

Flushing, she said, “Have you killed anybody yet, Mr. Corson?” What a nasty kid!

“No. I was a kind of engineer. I never personally stabbed or strangled anyone, if that’s what you wanted to know.”

With seeming satisfaction she said, “I was sure you couldn’t have!” “But I did press the buttons,” Corson said fiercely.

She didn’t understand that, apparently. At a loss, she felt in her tunic and produced a little case which he recognized. “Would you like some smoke?” she inquired.

“No thanks,” he said, although his mouth watered. “I haven’t smoked for a long time.”

“It’s real tobacco, not a synthetic,” she insisted. “I know they used it in your time . . . didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did. But I gave it up.”

“Same as everybody around here. I’m the only one who still does smoke.”

But she laid the case aside.

How could I have fallen in love with someone like this? Corson wondered. She seems so shallow, so hollow! Oh, it must be a matter of age and circumstances . . . When did I begin to fall in love with her?

He searched his memory, and episodes from the adventure they had shared came to the surface like bubbles of gas escaping from the depths of a marsh. Aergistal, the balloon, the recruiting officer, the mausoleum world, the escape, the brief stay at Veran’s camp . . . No, before all that. Long before. He struggled to work it out. It was when he kissed her. No, just before he did that. He remembered thinking she was the sexiest woman he had ever met in his life. And she had not made that impression on him at first glance.

He had fallen in love with her the moment that bright flash had sparked from her igniter. He had detected the hypnotic trick and believed she wanted to make him talk. But what she wanted was to make him fall for her. She had succeeded. No wonder she had given such a mocking answer when he asked why she had not precogged the failure of her trick. Was this a regular custom at Dyoto? He felt anger surge in him for a moment, then calmed down. Since the dawn of time women had set snares for men. It was one of the facts of human existence, and one couldn’t blame them.

He thought: I should have left her to rot in Veran’s camp and learn that men have tricks of their own! But he would not have done that. It was in the camp that he had genuinely come to love her, when she kept such a cool head, and still more on the mausoleum planet, when she had shown herself both human and terrified.

Besides, he had no choice. He would snatch her—and himself— from Veran’s grasp. He would set down a bag of provisions on a blue road. So far, his part was scripted. He could not avoid that without creating a timequake in his past. But afterward? When he had sent the message, would he still have to furnish the recruits and the equipment demanded by Veran, the fugitive from Aergistal?

It made no sense. Why should the other Corson, after their escape, have led them to the mausoleum world? Was that a compulsory stopover, the site of some kind of temporal interchange?

But Corson was coming to know the paths of time well, and he was fairly certain nothing of the kind existed. When he carried out his rescue operation he could just as well bring the escapees here to this beach where the Council was based and leave for Aergistal by himself if his stay there proved to be indispensable. He knew that it was. He had changed at Aergistal. And he had learned much which was necessary to the success of his plans.

He recalled the metal plate laid so conspicuously on the ration bag before the mausoleum door. At the time its message had seemed unclear to him. Searching the pockets of his suit, he found the plate was there even though he had changed clothes many times. Sheer habit must have made him transfer it from one outfit to another.

Part of the text had been erased, although the letters appeared to be deeply incised in the metal.

EVEN EMPTY WRAPPINGS CAN STILL BE USEFUL. THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO MAKE WAR. REMEMBER THAT.

He whistled softly between his teeth. Just suppose “empty wrappings” meant the undead women in the mausoleum!

He had wondered whether they might be endowed with artificial personalities and used like robots. He had even thought they might be plastoids until he realized they were too perfectly detailed. They had been alive. Now they were dead, even though the slow activity of their bodies might make one assume the contrary. He had estimated there might be a million of them even in the small part of the mausoleum he had seen. They represented a formidable potential army, numerous enough to match the maddest ambitions of Veran. Bar one thing—they were women. The colonel had judged it necessary to tighten discipline when Antonella entered his camp. He trusted his men only up to a certain point. He did not expect them to betray him for money or by ambition. But there were biological imperatives he dared not infringe.

Corson put his hands to his neck. The collar was there still, so light he often nearly forgot about it. Solid—cold—motionless, yet more dangerous than a cobra. But the snake slumbered. The idea of using the undead as recruits ought not to amount to an overt declaration of hostility.

Shaken by nausea, he bowed down to the sand, aware of Antonella watching him. The idea of making use of the undead appalled him. But it was much in the style of Those of Aergistal to make use of the leftovers, the war criminals or their victims, to avert a far worse calamity. They were casuists who adhered to the principle of the lesser evil—or rather they were total realists. Because those women were dead, dead for good and all. Empty wrappings! No longer capable of reason, or imagination, or even of suffering except on the most basic level. Perhaps they could still breed; that was a point he’d have to bear in mind. But to give them artificial personalities would be a crime far pettier than to annihilate a city full of intelligent beings by pressing a button. On reflection, it was no worse a transgression than an organ transplant, and surgeons on Earth had settled that problem long ago: the dead must serve the living.

He scraped sand over what he had vomited, swallowed painfully, wiped the corners of his mouth.

“I’m better now,” he told Antonella, who was still staring at him in dismay. “It’s nothing. A—a fit.”

She had offered no help, or even sympathy. She had not made a move.

Too young, maybe, he thought. Brought up in the silken safety of a world unaware of disease and pain. Hardly more than a pretty flower. Experience will change her. Then I shall be able to love her. By the gods, l'll take Aergistal to pieces stone by stone to find her again! They can’t keep her there. She has never soiled her hands with any crime.

And that justified Corson’s presence here. Antonella could not do what he had done, nor what remained for him to do. Neither Selma, nor Cid, nor anyone from their period could do it. They were not hardened as he was. They belonged to another world and fought on a different front. Unluckily for them, it was not free from danger. And it was the role of people like Corson to minimize their peril.

What we are, he said to himself, we’re the road sweepers of history, the sewermen. We paddle in shit so that the way will be clean for the feet of our descendants.

“Are you going for a swim?” the girl asked.

He nodded, not having recovered enough to speak. The sea would make him feel clean again. The entire ocean might not be too much.

Cid was back when Corson came out of the water. He found an excuse to get rid of Antonella and described his plan. The general outline fitted together, but certain details remained unclear: the collar, for instance, which he still did not know how to take off. Maybe he would find out at Aergistal. or during a journey into the future. But for the moment it represented only a minor inconvenience.

Arranging the escape would be quite easy. Veran himself had given Corson a whole range of weapons after he had been fitted with the collar; assuming he had no more to fear from that quarter, he concluded that every available man was indispensable in time of war.