At the Narrow Passage (26 page)

Just a few words about these people and their clothing. Like Sally and me,
they were dressed in sleeveless shirts and knee-length pants made of an
almost transparent material, transparent enough so that their excellent
bodies were quite visible. And every square inch of their skin was
artificially pigmented in bright, yet pleasant colors.
Dylla, the larger and more sensual of the girls, was sky-blue: her face,
her arms, her legs, her torso, even her hair were blue, but of a darker
shade, and her thin clothing was blue as well. She had an almost round,
though not moonlike, face, with deep, dark eyes and full lips. Her breasts
were large and it seemed as if they were about to tear through the thin
fabric of her blouse. My eyes were drawn on down her slender waist to
the triangle of dark-blue hair that grew between her thighs. I tore my
eyes away to look at the others.
Jocasta and her clothing were a canary-yellow. She was a shorter girl than
Dylla by several inches, and the proportions of her body were a little
less impressive, though not bad at all. She made up for this lack --
if it can be said to be a lack -- with one of the prettiest faces I've
ever seen and a smile that was simple, friendly, ingenuous. She was
like somebody's kid sister who had suddenly become a woman, but still
had the innocent openness of a child. I liked her instantly.
Dicton was the largest of the four, a red man well over six feet tall and
with the features and physique of an Adonis. He spoke rarely and then only
in short sentences, and I didn't know whether that was because he wasn't
too bright or because he was very bright and didn't want to waste time
with useless conversation.
Hallacy was shorter, stockier, more bullishly masculine in all respects
than Dicton -- an orange Hercules to his red Adonis -- and a loquacious
fellow with a keen sense of humor once he got started. He was a likable
person, but I suspected that he could be a hard man to deal with if you
ever got his temper up.
These were our guides.
Calethon I, they explained, once the formalities of introduction were
out of the way, was the most westward of all the Lines that made up the
Cross-Line Civilization. To the East forty-nine more Lines extended, all
interlinked and mutually interdependent, all differing phases, as it were,
of the same "world." There were a dozen Calethon Lines, then five Matthen
Lines, the sixteen Manshien Lines, and so on. Calethon I was, they told
us, the Westward Terminal Line for the Cross-Line worlds, a transfer and
processing world, in essence, though there was some light industry and
a number of Transtemporal research centers and universities specializing
in Timeline studies, history divergence and things of that sort.
"What will be first?" orange Hallacy asked. "A tour of Bershaw?"
"No, I think not," Kar-hinter said. "Let us save that until last. First
I would like to prove to our friends that what we are saying is all true.
Take us to the terminal head, please."
"Certainly," said Dylla, the girl of the big blue breasts. "We can take
our aircar into Bershaw and leave it there." Turning to me and smiling
a very warm -- and was it inviting? -- smile, she said, "That's the
largest terminal head in this hemisphere, you know."
I certainly didn't know. I didn't even know what a terminal head was.
But I smiled back, and then Sally and I followed the smiling foursome and
Kar-hinter across the field to one of the teardrop aircraft. Pall, silent
and enigmatic, brought up the rear, perhaps standing guard over us.
The crystal fairyland that I had noticed on arrival was the city of
Bershaw, or as near to a city as these people of Calethon I had. It was
a vast, intertwined complex of shops and open-air markets and government
offices and amusement centers, though it was not a city in the sense
of being a dwelling place for people. The natives of Calethon I lived
in isolated houses scattered across the world, never in tight clusters
like most of the Lines I knew. Someone, probably Hallacy, told me that
the permanent population of Calethon I was somewhere in the neighborhood
of eight hundred million, and there was plenty of room for everyone to
have privacy. There were certainly no population problems here.
Jocasta, the little canary girl who piloted the aircar, set us down in
another green field in the very center of the city, directly in front
of a long, colorful building of glass and metal and stone that must have
covered an area equal to a dozen city blocks in Sally's world. The front
of the building showed a long series of doors through which a constant
stream of people moved, in and out, many of them in costumes differing
wildly from those worn by ourselves and our guides or in no costumes
at all. It reminded me a little of the mixture of cultures I had seen
in Staunton and seemed to remind Sally of the same. At least her face
clouded, though she did not speak.
From the rear of the building or perhaps from a landing deck on its top
rose dozens of large aircars, or perhaps airlorries would be a better term
since they appeared to be cargo-carrying vehicles. An equal number came
dropping out of the sky to replace those that rose, all moving easily,
silently, even gracefully.
We all climbed out of the aircar, crossed the grassy field, and stepped
onto a moving sidewalk that carried us effortlessly toward the gaping
doors of what our guides had called a terminal head.
"Just exactly what is this place?" I asked Hallacy, who was standing at
my side.
Before the orange man could answer, Kar-hinter interrupted, saying,
"Wait a moment, Eric, and we shall show you. That would be more effective
than telling you. Would it not?" he asked of Hallacy.
The orange Hercules nodded, and I said, "Okay."
"Where shall we go?" the lovely blue Dylla asked.
"You make the choice," Kar-hinter answered. "Merely make it interesting
for our guests."
"Very well."
With Dylla leading us with her swinging buttocks, we stepped off the
moving sidewalk just outside the building, stepped onto another, and
were carried into the terminal head.
The building was interesting in the way that many public buildings are
interesting, decorated with vast, colorful murals and exotic statuary,
but all in all it wasn't too unlike many other buildings that I had seen
before. Except, that is, for the conveyors.
The far wall of the enormous room consisted of rows of booths that
extended dozens of yards in both directions, small rooms that reminded
me more of elevators than anything else, and my first impression was
that that was exactly what they were. People in the line ahead of us
stepped into the booths, punched a series of buttons, and the doors
closed. Moments later the doors opened and the booths were empty.
I noticed that just the opposite seemed to be happening at the booths
at the far end of the row. People got out, but no one got in.
"What is this?" Sally asked, perhaps with a touch of fear in her voice.
And then we were entering a booth ourselves; all eight of us, and the
doors were closing behind us as Dylla punched on the button panel. I had
an instant of fear myself, the thought that perhaps Kar-hinter had
taken us all this way to . . .
Don't be foolish,
I said to
myself.
He's only doing what you requested.
"Calethon IV, I think, would be a good place," the blue girl was saying.
Then flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
Exactly like being in a skudder, I thought. Then, by God, that's what
it is. A skudder!
The doors opened and we were back in the terminal head. Or, rather,
a
terminal head. One very similar to the one we had just left, but differing
in some respects, minor things that were hard to pin down. Except for the
people. Most of them were lighter-skinned than those we had encountered
before, and their clothing was of a different cut, more elaborate and
decorative, though there was a liberal sprinkling of other costumes,
not a few clothed as we were and with brightly pigmented skin like that
of our guides. I still had not seen a single Krith besides Kar-hinter
in the Cross-Line worlds.
"This is Calethon IV," Dylla said, "one of our heavy industry Lines.
Let's go outside for a moment; then we'll go on to Matthen II."
Following the blue girl's swaying butt and then stepping onto a sliding
sidewalk, we moved out of the terminal head and out into a city that
looked more like what I thought a city should look like: regular streets,
buildings of steel and stone and glass, moving vehicles that stayed on or
near the surface. Beyond the city, from an observation deck located on top
of the terminal head, we saw the dark structures of factories stretching
toward the horizon, belching thin, filtered smoke into a sky that was
still very blue. Somehow the factories had an esthetic charm of their own,
but I would find it hard to describe. It wasn't at all unpleasant.
"There are more skudders produced here in a day than on all the other
Lines combined," red Dicton said proudly.
Then, a little while later, after stopping for drinks in a luxurious
lounge in the terminal head building, we reentered one of the conveyor
booths and flickered again.
Matthen II was the spaceport Line of the Cross-Line worlds, where huge,
silvery, needle-thin spaceships rose silently into the sky, bound for the
Moon and Mars and Venus and the asteroids, there to discharge passengers
and cargo and reload with raw materials and a few finished products from
the extraterrestrial colonies and return them to Earth. Space travel
was comparatively rare across the Timelines; it was generally far more
expensive than skudding, but even here in the Cross-Lines there were
a few products that were cheaper to get from the Solar planets than to
try to collect across the Lines.
Hallacy told me that a fantastically huge spaceship with a faster-than-light
drive was being built in orbit, around Earth. Soon it would carry a load
of colonists across the light-years to a very Earth-like world that scouts
had recently discovered some three hundred lightyears away. And he said
that he was sorry that we could not wait around an hour or so until it got
dark and then have a chance to see the ship. Even though it orbited rather
far out, it was large enough to be easily seen from Earth after dark.
I was impressed.
After that, just before we returned to the terminal head, Dylla whispered
something to me about Manshein IX which I didn't fully understand,
but left me with a pleasant, excited feeling of anticipation.
Our next stop was Matthen V, the "Sea World," they called it, where
most of mankind had moved into the oceans, leaving the land little more
than a carefully landscaped playground, a world where men talked with
dolphins, had learned to live in their aquatic environment, breathing
through surgically implanted gills. Together, men and dolphins, they were
building a culture unlike any on any other Timeline known to the Kriths.
Manshein III was a Timeline devoted entirely to the arts. Here there were
settlements of writers where the greatest literature of all the Lines
was slowly coming into being, we were told: artists' colonies where
painting and sculpture were reaching unparalleled heights; groups of
musicians who were evolving new and exciting forms of musical expression;
photographers and holographers, engravers and printers and lithographers
and dancers. You name it. We had no more than a few minutes to glimpse
something of each, though even then our senses were overwhelmed with
the sound and color and beauty of it all.
I hated to leave there, and that may sound odd coming from a professional
killer like me, but it was true.
Manshein IX -- the one blue Dylla had hinted about -- was a Line devoted
to nothing less than pure sexual hedonism, a world of constant Saturnalia,
a place to which people came from the other Lines to spend a few days --
or perhaps years -- in erotic escape.
It was here, in the city that occupied Bershaw's place on this world,
as darkness was beginning to fall, that our party became divided. And I
was sure that it was by intent, though who engineered it I didn't know,
nor did I really care.
Dylla and I found ourselves alone, wandering down a wide avenue filled
with people and one or two Kriths. The humans wore the most exotic
and erotic dress I have ever seen, and the evening air was filled with
pleasant, sensual odors and sounds and sights.
"We have a few moments together," Dylla said, looking at me with an
inviting smile in her eyes. "Shall we spend them in pleasure?"
I looked back at her, my eyes following the full length of her blue-dyed
body, nodded, felt a familiar urge rising in me.
"Come then," she said, leading me across the wide street and. down a
narrower one into a great green park that consisted of labyrinthine hedges
and soft, yielding grass and the odor of flowering plants. Around us
were the soft, rustling sounds of body against body and subdued cries
and moans of pleasure and excitement, though the producers of those
sounds were hidden from us by the growth of hedges and flowers.
"Here," Dylla said after a while, leading me into a hedge-surrounded
recess as large as a medium-size bedroom and covered by soft grass.
"Now, dear Eric, do you want me?"
I didn't speak, and there was no need to. Dylla quickly undressed us both
and then lay back on the grass and opened herself to me. I moved above
her and entered her easily, finding her warm and moist and passionately
ready for me.
It just didn't last long enough -- but then does it ever?
The universe shattered with our orgasms.
Then, after a while, we rose, dressed, and returned to find our companions
near where we had last seen them.
Into the terminal head and then back out again -- into Manshein XIV, the
university world, an earth given over to study, research, contemplation,
to vast library computers that cataloged and reffned all the knowledge of
the other Lines, where men sought the ultimate answers to the ultimate
questions about the nature of time and space and man and Krith and the
"what" and "why" of the universe -- but for some reason I didn't think
that even here they had found the answers to those questions, not really.