Vestiges of Time (25 page)

He had won; in a very real sense he had accomplished what he had set out to do. . . .

And what of himself?

He too was a creature of the Kriths—Eric Mathers was a creature of the Kriths, so thus was he. And so was Sally. So were . . .

Amid the numbness that spread across his consciousness, amid the questions and the fear, there came another realization. . . .

He himself had come/would come into being on 4 March 1973. Before that there had been no Shadowy Man.

Then . . . did he/would he exist?

Feeling a terror that could only be called mortal, the Shadowy Man hurled himself through nothingness, uptime, toward the Underground and the immobile body of Eric Mathers, the motionless replicates, his very existence. . . .

22

The Last Encounter

Once more the Underground of the BrathelLanza enveloped the Shadowy Man. He settled into the individual bodies and into the resonance patterns that existed among those bodies, feeling almost as a human might feel, returning to the comfort and security of his mother’s womb, for this was the womb from which the Shadowy Man had been bom.

The sense of terror partially slipped Irom him, receding from the front of his consciousness, although he did not forget that the end was approaching—the end of the universe as he had known it, the end of the Kriths and the Timeliners and all the things they had done, and the end of the mysterious Paratimers and their efforts across the Lines. How soon, he did not know. Now? An hour from now? Anytime . . . He could not calculate the time of sundering with that precision; yet, within the next six to eight hours at the most, he thought.

And still there were things he had to do, things that might be totally futile now, but he must make every effort to complete the past as Eric Mathers had experienced it—if he did not, he suddenly asked himself, how would that affect things? If the universal reorganization came before he had completed his work, what would that do to his participation in the chronological past? Wipe it out? Alter things in the Kriths’ favor? Paradoxes . . .

He was not certain of any of this, but he could take no chances. He knew that he must complete Eric Mathers’ experiences, down to the last detail he could

cull from his memory, and then—if at all possible— make some provisions for the continued existence of Eric Mathers, should he still exist after the reordering of the universe. The continuation of his own existence, that of himself as the Shadowy Man, he knew to be considerably unlikely. But if he could save at least the Eric Mathers portion of himself, that would be enough. If the universe didn’t destroy
him . . .

Once again he looked out through the eyes of Mathers and saw the chronometer in the recording room. More time had gone by, to the motionless figure strapped in the chair—over an hour since he had last looked out through those eyes. The chronometer read 13:50:17. Early afternoon. Perhaps the universe still had a few hours before it altered itself, before the parachronal subtime wavefront swept this far uptime and demanded that the universe reorder itself toward greater simplicity, or cease to exist altogether.

A few hours, perhaps . . .

Now, he told himself, there are three things I must do.

First: he must provide for the “parachronal convolution” through which Eric Mathers and Sally had escaped KHL-000, the sphere of blackness that had awaited them on the roof of the apartment building toward which they had fled as the Shadowy Man battled the Tromas in their own place/time, the first and perhaps the worst of his encounters with the Krithian females. While Mathers was under attack by the Tromas, after the Shadowy Man’s defeat by them, Sally had dragged him into the black sphere and through it they had plunged across space and time, to the Far World where they had lived for some time, where Sally still lived on 4 March 1973, and from which Mathers had begun the adventures, some eleven months before, that had led him to the Underground of the BrathelLanza and to evolution into the Shadowy Man.

Mathers and Sally had been told that they had

passed through a “parachronal convolution,” a term that had meant nothing to them, though now the Shadowy Man was beginning to have some inkling of what it might be.

Second: he must provide them with a skudder at their destination. It had been there and the Shadowy Man had provided it. So he must now do it; otherwise Mathers could never have left the Far World and come across the Lines to this place that the Shadowy Man presently occupied.

And finally: he must provide for the escape of the corporeal'body of Eric Mathers, get him out of this place and into another, safer one; a place where he
might
survive the reordering, if it was possible for him to survive, if it was possible for him to
exist
once the Kriths no longer existed anywhere, on any Line.

Once more the Shadowy Man set out on quest, and in learning how to accomplish the first of his objectives he learned how to accomplish the others.

Time was lost, time that he could not regain, for, as he had suspected, he found that he could not return to the Underground in a time/place he already had occupied. But as time was lost, knowledge was gained.

The composite mind of the senior and his replicates swept back and forth across time and space, searching out bits and pieces of knowledge that the Shadowy Man was now capable of using, always terribly aware that he was in the moments of time just before the reordering of the universe.

He found: esoteric bits of knowledge; fragments of theories about the nature of space/time; ways of manipulating the unraveling of fabric of the universe; means of twisting that fabric into unusual and intricate shapes; processes through which one segment of space/ time/paratime could be linked with another, momentarily, tenuously, but sufficiently for a material object to pass from one point to another in the five-sided references; learned how to bring into being a para-

chronal convolution, a tunnel through time and space and paratime.

He was astonished by the powers he found he could use, and wished that he had learned these tricks earlier, or that the universe would give him more time to fully exploit their value. But now there was a linear progression of subtime, or perhaps a paralinear progression of subtime—the holocaust of the moving wavefront sweeping uptime—that even he could do nothing to alter. He was caught in subtime as fully as any man had ever been caught in the inexorable movement of time in the conventional universe. He could not hold back the hands of
that
clock.

But he could at least do what he had set out to do.

Returning briefly to the Underground, he rested, went over what he had just learned, then launched himself outward again, backward in chronological time and across paratime to the world of the Kriths, KHL- 000,
a.d.
February 1972.

For a moment he poised his consciousness above the top of the apartment building that he had visited before. It was night Here and Now, and from the top of the spire the lights of the vast capital city of the Kriths spread out below him toward the horizon on one side, the dark sea on the other. In the building below, from the open doorway at the top of the stairwell, he could already hear gunfire and the yells of the Mager-guards who pursued Mathers and Sally as they made their attempt to escape. Farther below, in the apartment Sally had occupied, a great struggle had just terminated. His previous self, an earlier Shadowy Man, had just been vanquished by the Tromas and had fled, screaming in pain, back toward the Underground. For a few moments the Tromas would be occupied with their own problems, assessing their victory, seeing to their own minor psionic wounds. If he acted quickly enough, they would never become aware of him. He thought they would not recognize the para-

chronal convolution for what it was, even if they were to notice it. He hoped.

Mathers and Sally, naked but not unarmed, firing behind them as they came, were about to reach the top of the stairs.

There was no more time for thought. With mental probes, with Waldos of psionic force, he reached out and grabbed a piece of the space/time stuff of Here and Now, held it in an unrelenting grasp; and then, with all the force he could muster, he tore a strand loose and withdrew with it across time and space and paratime, drawing the strand with him.

This is how it works, isn’t it? he asked himself, and thought that it was.

Pulling a dimple of time/space/paratime deeper and deeper into nothingness, he drew it toward and finally to his destination, a few weeks downtime, a very short distance relative to spatial distances, but a long, long way across the dimension he called paratime.

There! He had reached it, pulled another pucker out of another world’s framework, connected them together.

How long the connection would hold, in terms of chronological time, he did not know. Not long. Minutes at the most. But time enough. Mathers and Sally would see the blackness that the convolution presented to their senses, would realize it to be their means of escape, and, in desperation, would use it. Through it they would pass across to the Far World and there they would be safe. From there Mathers would later follow the path that led him, eventually, to the BrathelLanza and their underground laboratories.

Accomplished! he said to himself, a sense of relief coming over him. He had done this much. He could do the rest. And he could hope that in the end it all would have meant something.

Pausing only momentarily, he then moved to accomplish the second of his three objectives. Once again

he propelled himself into the future, leaped a few Lines horizontally in paratime until he located a world where the Kriths and the Timeliners had established themselves, searched for a skudder pool or its equivalent on that world, and found one.

The year was
a.d.
2004, as chronological time is measured, a few miles from a place occupied by Atlanta, Georgia, on some worlds, where the Timeliners had set up a large, well-equipped base. Into this base the Shadowy Man went, to a large depot building that contained nearly a score of brand-new skudders, just recently arrived there from the Line of their manufacture. Blue-clad Timeliner technicians were completing their final checks of the craft before sending them out into the field. One of these skudders would do perfectly for Mathers’ future needs.

The Shadowy Man was feeling almost happy as he moved into the fabric of space/time around one of the new skudders, as he extended psionic appendages to grasp that fabric. The fact that this was a “future” world that would soon cease to exist, with the coming of the universal reorganization, did not bother him in the least; in fact, there seemed to be something very funny about it. As long as the skudder stayed downtime of 4 March 1973, it would have
some
probability— enough, at least, to serve his purposes and Mathers’.

And there was something very funny about the expressions on the faces of the technicians as the skudder vanished before their eyes, as the depot reverberated with the sound of imploding air, rushing in to fill the vacuum left by the skudder’s sudden and unexpected departure.

With the skudder nestled in a capsule of detached space/time, the Shadowy Man drew it across nothingness until he reached the Far World again and completed the convolution. The skudder then sat but a short distance from where Mathers and Sally would come out of their escape route.

There was a feeling within him that would have been a smile on a human face, a satisfaction with this stage of his work, when the Shadowy Man retreated back to the Underground for what he anticipated to be the next to last time, back to where he could check the passage of chronological time as seen by Eric Mathers and decide how to go about the last, final phase of his labors.

He was astonished at what he found there, though he knew he should not have been. He should have anticipated it. For all the vast mental powers he had, he knew that he was but an infant in his knowledge of their use. And it was very unlikely that he would be given the opportunity to complete his maturation.

Eric Mathers and the replicates were no longer alone in the Underground. People had entered, more than one kind of
people. . . .

Through the eyes of Mathers the Shadowy Man. looked, and with Mathers’ ears he heard.

There was the sound of several pairs of feet moving in the corridor outside the recording room, and distant voices speaking a language Eric Mathers had heard before, a variation of Middle French as spoken by the so-called Albigensian Paratimers, male voices and female voices he soon recognized. One of those voices—one he had heard quite recently—was saying, as its owner approached the door of the recording room:

“In all likelihood, Scoti, he was in one of the mnemonic-recording rooms when the raid took place. If that is so, he may well still be in one of them, and alive. At least the police do not have him, and his body does not appear to be among the dead. I’m certain no one escaped.”

“You said he might be under the influence of drugs, OrDjina,” said a voice that Eric Mathers hadn’t heard in quite some time, the voice of a man named Scoti Hauser Angelus, who had been the- second in com