Read At the Narrow Passage Online
Authors: Richard Meredith
At the Narrow Passage (5 page)
Kearns just smiled, nothing more, as if he had known all along that he
would be going with us.
Kar-hinter then nodded politely to Sir Gerald, to the rest of us.
"You will excuse me, gentlemen," be said. "I have work to do. I shall
be back by dark." He left the room with the black-uniformed Pall at
his heels.
Then we waited for our meal.
5
The Lines of Time
I suppose that Kar-hinter's intention in giving us so much wine was to
make us sleepy, to force us to rest some before the activities of the
coming night. Though, of course, that might not have been his intention
at all. You can only guess at what a Krith's purposes really are.
Still, if that was his idea, it worked. Three glasses of strong wine on
an empty stomach -- for I hadn't eaten all day -- had almost put me to
sleep when a mess steward came in with three tins of beef hash, bread,
and tea. It wasn't a particularly tasty meal, but it was nourishing and
filling, and I felt much better after eating, and even sleepier.
As Kar-hinter had said, there were beds in the back room of the house,
old metal-framed beds, worn and rusty, but supporting thick down mattresses.
It had gotten quite warm by afternoon, and the golden French sunlight
streamed in between the boards that covered the windows, illuminating
the motes of dust that swam in the air like galaxies of stars.
Tracy and Kearns fell asleep almost at once, and I lay back, half-dozing
as the afternoon came and slowly passed, moving toward night, not at all
concerned about what Kar-hinter had planned for us. I had been through
worse often enough not to be concerned. What would happen would happen.
You can call it Greek fatalism, if you like.
I don't know where Sir Gerald went. Shortly after Kar-hinter and Pall
left, the general got into his staff car, saying that he would be back
before dark, and drove off. I sort of suspected that he was going
somewhere to make another complaint about the Krithian plans, but I
doubted that it would do any good. Apparently the plans for the British
attack against the fortified German positions had come straight from the
top, the General Staff or maybe from the king himself. I was sorry that
it had to be that way -- so many lives expended just to get us into the
villa where Von Heinen was staying, but it had to be that way. There
wasn't a damned thing I could do about it, and I didn't think that Sir
Gerald could do any more.
So I rested and half slept and did something that was midway between
remember and dream. Fragments of images, half-forgotten events, a girl's
name, a glimpse of a childhood a long way and a long When from Here and
Now. A blond Greek boy who was big for his age and had a way of getting
into more trouble than he should have. At least I considered myself Greek,
even if my blood was half-Saxon and I had been born on an island that
is called Britain in a lot of Lines.
And I remember how my father had been hanged for treason by the governor
of North Ionnia and a girl named Kristin had been raped by a gang of
the governor's bullies and how I joined an underground student group in
college and nearly got myself hanged before the general revolution broke
out -- backed by the Kriths, thought I didn't know that until later --
and how the Kriths, when it was all over and we had won, asked me if I
wanted to join the Timeliners. My family was dead. Kristin had committed
suicide. Why the hell not?
And I remembered another girl named Marissa in one of the Carolingian
Lines and how she had died terribly slowly and terribly painfully and
how I had made the man who killed her die even more slowly and more
painfully because I had loved her and would have quit the 'Liners and
married her and settled down if it hadn't been for that goddamned war.
And I thought about the month I had once spent in one of the Rajaian
Timelines -- trying to forget about it all. That was a hedonistic Line
where machines did the work of men and left people with nothing to do but
spend their lifetimes in pursuit of pleasures of one sort of another. And
while I was there, I had tried just about all of them, except for some
that were even a little too perverted for me. Like the three girls and
the trained monkey and the goat who all got together and . . . Well,
never mind that.
But what I thought about mostly, for some reason, was the Kriths, who
and what they were, and why. My thoughts weren't in any kind of order,
but I'll try to present them as if they were. Maybe you can understand
a little bit of it.
Who exactly are the Kriths? Friend, I don't know. I'm not even sure
that they know themselves. They come from some Line a long, long way
to the T-East, so far across the Whens that men hadn't even evolved on
Earth. Whether the Kriths were even natives of Earth I don't know, but
I sort of doubt it. Or if they are they came from a Line that branched
off from ours millions of years ago, back when the first mammals were
developing, for there are some fundamental differences between them
and the mammals of our Lines that would take millions of years to
produce. More likely, I thought, they came from another planet, a lot
of Whens closer than a sixty-or-seventy-million-year old split.
Kriths are totally unable to do anything with machines. This is a fact --
or at least I thought it was then -- and I'd seen it proved countless times.
They could never have developed spaceships, but with their built-in
Line-skudding ability they could easily have come across someone who
had
developed spaceships, men or some other beings, and in those come
to Earth. Hell, I know that doesn't sound much more likely than their
having evolved here. So let's drop the subject. I don't know When and
Where they came from, but they are. And the fact that they are is very
important. Maybe one of the most important things in all the universes.
Let me tell you about
that
. Given a nearly infinite number of universes
-- at least I'm told that the number is nearly infinite, if that means
anything, all beginning back when the first universe was created, if it
ever was created. But the Lines are there, stretching East and West
further than any Krith has ever gone, extending almost forever. I've seen
a few hundred of them myself, but that's nothing, absolutely nothing.
But to get back to the point I was trying to make: Given an almost infinite
number of Timelines, just about anything is possible. Even Kriths.
The Kriths have a nervous system that isn't very much like ours.
Oh, they have a brain, of course, three of them in fact. One is for,
well,
thinking
, conscious thoughts like those you and I think. The
second is for involuntary actions, the general running of the body,
and it's located somewhere in the chest area so that a Krith can go on
living for a hell of a long time with its head blown off, and I've seen
it happen. Of course without his head a Krith isn't good for very much,
but that's the way things are.
The third brain isn't really a brain at all; it's more a series of nervous
ganglions extending the length of the spine, but well inside the body
cavity, pretty well protected. What this setup was first evolved for,
I don't know. I can't even guess, but then I have no idea what kind of
environment the Kriths evolved in. Maybe it was originally a protection
against, well, magnetic fields or something, or maybe it was a means of
radio communications -- for they do have that or something like it. As I
said, I don't know why it ever started evolving. I just know where it led.
It led to cross-Lines.
The Kriths have their own built-in skudder. They can, at will, cross
the Timelines from one universe to another.
Impossible? Damned near, maybe, but not quite. They exist and they do it.
I don't know whether they evolved intelligence before or after they
developed their skudding ability. Maybe they both developed together.
I suspect that maybe you can't have the ability to skud without a rational
faculty to guide it, but that's only a guess. And sometimes I wonder just
how rational the Kriths are. I mean, they can talk and think and act
rationally, but they have no mechanical ability at all. They can't even
build their own shelters. In other ways they're bright enough, so I don't
know. I suppose they had to sacrifice a great deal to develop skudding
to the level they they have.
Anyhow, they did learn to skud, and they began jumping across the Lines,
into the parallel universes. I don't know what they found to the East
of wherever they started, but to the West they found men.
At first the Kriths didn't interfere with humans. They just dropped
in, so to speak, saw things they liked, and finally found a means of
communicating. Shangalis was developed, either by them or by men, and
a cross-Line language was born.
At some point men began to investigate the Kriths' means of skudding, but
whether the Kriths prompted them to do it or whether men did it on their
own, I don't know. Probably both in different Lines. And eventually men
built skudders and the Kriths began to use them with human pilots. When
the Kriths used their own built-in mechanisms to cross the Lines, all
they could take with them was their own physical bodies. If they wanted
to take anything else -- men, machines, - weapons, books, tapes --
they had to have mechanical help. They got it when men built skudders
and the Kriths took advantage of them.
So, a long, long way East of here, cross-Line trading began to take place,
cultures of parallel worlds began to mingle, merge, change, and a whole new
kind of civilization was built.
Still, all this doesn't explain much, doesn't explain, for example,
why a mercenary soldier from a Europo-Macedonian Line was fighting a
war in a Romano-British Line. Let me try to explain that to you.
Time travel is impossible.
I mean, travel into the future or the past. A lot of places have tried
it, and they have always failed. It simply can't be done. Don't ask me
why. I'm not mathematician. It just can't be done.
However, they tell me there is a way that communications from the future
to the past can take place. It's pretty complicated and awfully costly,
but it can be done. At least the Kriths have said it can and has been
done. But you can judge for yourself.
A long way East, so the story goes, there's an Indus Line where technology
developed early and reached a high level some hundreds of years ago. They
had even got so far as building spaceships and exploring the nearer stars.
It was there that the first future-to-past communication was attempted.
The Kriths were in on it, so I'm told; they helped finance it by bringing
in a great deal of Outtime wealth and materials to try the experiment.
A huge transmitting station was built on the Moon. From what I've been
told it was the biggest transmitter ever constructed in any Line, more
watts of energy than would be needed to run a dozen high-level-technology
worlds. They tell me that the energy of the sun was somehow drained to
power the station -- and I don't mean by solar cells or something like
that. They tapped the sun and poured its energy directly into the station.
This transmitter, though, was never connected to a real antenna. All its
power was fed into dummy loads, huge chunks of the lunar surface converted
into resistors just to drain off the transmitter's power. They set up this
monstrous station and burned up half the Moon just to get rid of the power
it produced.
All this was done just to get a standing wave on a huge bank of
solid-state devices. A gigantic quasi-modulator was fed by the power,
and it just sat there and waited . . . but not for long.
The idea goes something like this, as well as I can explain it: The signal
is generated, and it exists and will continue to be generated and continue
to exist for centuries. The quasi-modulator will be -- is -- was waiting
for a signal to be fed back to it from the future.
They tell me that there are certain activites of subatomic particles that
get cause-and-effect backward. A thing, they say, can happen
before
the cause of it takes place. They go on a to say that if a radio signal
is existing in a certain type of solid-state quasi-modulator it can be
affected by this backward effect and cause, that a whole chain of these
backward effects and causes can happen in this quasi-modulator.
Now it's like this. Somewhere way in the future they decide it's time
to send a message back to the past. They feed this message into the
quasi-modulator -- and somewhere down in the subatomic particles,
down even below where the radio energy is bouncing around, this
effect-before-the-cause chain will begin. The cause has happened, but a
nanosecond before that the effect had already taken place; this effect
had, even prior to that, been the cause for another effect even another
nanosecond before, and so on. Backward through time the effect and then
the cause, the effect and the cause, until it finally gets back down
the chain of time to the beginning.
Okay, now you can forget all that. The Kriths say it works, and you can
take their word for it if you like. I once did.
So, the Indus Line people built this station on the Moon, drove all this
power into it and sat back and let it operate for the next half million
years, if that's what it would take to get a message coming the wrong
way in time.
Well, even before the station had gotten up to full power, a message
came in. From the future!
Translated into local English the message read something like this:
would be going with us.
Kar-hinter then nodded politely to Sir Gerald, to the rest of us.
"You will excuse me, gentlemen," be said. "I have work to do. I shall
be back by dark." He left the room with the black-uniformed Pall at
his heels.
Then we waited for our meal.
5
The Lines of Time
I suppose that Kar-hinter's intention in giving us so much wine was to
make us sleepy, to force us to rest some before the activities of the
coming night. Though, of course, that might not have been his intention
at all. You can only guess at what a Krith's purposes really are.
Still, if that was his idea, it worked. Three glasses of strong wine on
an empty stomach -- for I hadn't eaten all day -- had almost put me to
sleep when a mess steward came in with three tins of beef hash, bread,
and tea. It wasn't a particularly tasty meal, but it was nourishing and
filling, and I felt much better after eating, and even sleepier.
As Kar-hinter had said, there were beds in the back room of the house,
old metal-framed beds, worn and rusty, but supporting thick down mattresses.
It had gotten quite warm by afternoon, and the golden French sunlight
streamed in between the boards that covered the windows, illuminating
the motes of dust that swam in the air like galaxies of stars.
Tracy and Kearns fell asleep almost at once, and I lay back, half-dozing
as the afternoon came and slowly passed, moving toward night, not at all
concerned about what Kar-hinter had planned for us. I had been through
worse often enough not to be concerned. What would happen would happen.
You can call it Greek fatalism, if you like.
I don't know where Sir Gerald went. Shortly after Kar-hinter and Pall
left, the general got into his staff car, saying that he would be back
before dark, and drove off. I sort of suspected that he was going
somewhere to make another complaint about the Krithian plans, but I
doubted that it would do any good. Apparently the plans for the British
attack against the fortified German positions had come straight from the
top, the General Staff or maybe from the king himself. I was sorry that
it had to be that way -- so many lives expended just to get us into the
villa where Von Heinen was staying, but it had to be that way. There
wasn't a damned thing I could do about it, and I didn't think that Sir
Gerald could do any more.
So I rested and half slept and did something that was midway between
remember and dream. Fragments of images, half-forgotten events, a girl's
name, a glimpse of a childhood a long way and a long When from Here and
Now. A blond Greek boy who was big for his age and had a way of getting
into more trouble than he should have. At least I considered myself Greek,
even if my blood was half-Saxon and I had been born on an island that
is called Britain in a lot of Lines.
And I remember how my father had been hanged for treason by the governor
of North Ionnia and a girl named Kristin had been raped by a gang of
the governor's bullies and how I joined an underground student group in
college and nearly got myself hanged before the general revolution broke
out -- backed by the Kriths, thought I didn't know that until later --
and how the Kriths, when it was all over and we had won, asked me if I
wanted to join the Timeliners. My family was dead. Kristin had committed
suicide. Why the hell not?
And I remembered another girl named Marissa in one of the Carolingian
Lines and how she had died terribly slowly and terribly painfully and
how I had made the man who killed her die even more slowly and more
painfully because I had loved her and would have quit the 'Liners and
married her and settled down if it hadn't been for that goddamned war.
And I thought about the month I had once spent in one of the Rajaian
Timelines -- trying to forget about it all. That was a hedonistic Line
where machines did the work of men and left people with nothing to do but
spend their lifetimes in pursuit of pleasures of one sort of another. And
while I was there, I had tried just about all of them, except for some
that were even a little too perverted for me. Like the three girls and
the trained monkey and the goat who all got together and . . . Well,
never mind that.
But what I thought about mostly, for some reason, was the Kriths, who
and what they were, and why. My thoughts weren't in any kind of order,
but I'll try to present them as if they were. Maybe you can understand
a little bit of it.
Who exactly are the Kriths? Friend, I don't know. I'm not even sure
that they know themselves. They come from some Line a long, long way
to the T-East, so far across the Whens that men hadn't even evolved on
Earth. Whether the Kriths were even natives of Earth I don't know, but
I sort of doubt it. Or if they are they came from a Line that branched
off from ours millions of years ago, back when the first mammals were
developing, for there are some fundamental differences between them
and the mammals of our Lines that would take millions of years to
produce. More likely, I thought, they came from another planet, a lot
of Whens closer than a sixty-or-seventy-million-year old split.
Kriths are totally unable to do anything with machines. This is a fact --
or at least I thought it was then -- and I'd seen it proved countless times.
They could never have developed spaceships, but with their built-in
Line-skudding ability they could easily have come across someone who
had
developed spaceships, men or some other beings, and in those come
to Earth. Hell, I know that doesn't sound much more likely than their
having evolved here. So let's drop the subject. I don't know When and
Where they came from, but they are. And the fact that they are is very
important. Maybe one of the most important things in all the universes.
Let me tell you about
that
. Given a nearly infinite number of universes
-- at least I'm told that the number is nearly infinite, if that means
anything, all beginning back when the first universe was created, if it
ever was created. But the Lines are there, stretching East and West
further than any Krith has ever gone, extending almost forever. I've seen
a few hundred of them myself, but that's nothing, absolutely nothing.
But to get back to the point I was trying to make: Given an almost infinite
number of Timelines, just about anything is possible. Even Kriths.
The Kriths have a nervous system that isn't very much like ours.
Oh, they have a brain, of course, three of them in fact. One is for,
well,
thinking
, conscious thoughts like those you and I think. The
second is for involuntary actions, the general running of the body,
and it's located somewhere in the chest area so that a Krith can go on
living for a hell of a long time with its head blown off, and I've seen
it happen. Of course without his head a Krith isn't good for very much,
but that's the way things are.
The third brain isn't really a brain at all; it's more a series of nervous
ganglions extending the length of the spine, but well inside the body
cavity, pretty well protected. What this setup was first evolved for,
I don't know. I can't even guess, but then I have no idea what kind of
environment the Kriths evolved in. Maybe it was originally a protection
against, well, magnetic fields or something, or maybe it was a means of
radio communications -- for they do have that or something like it. As I
said, I don't know why it ever started evolving. I just know where it led.
It led to cross-Lines.
The Kriths have their own built-in skudder. They can, at will, cross
the Timelines from one universe to another.
Impossible? Damned near, maybe, but not quite. They exist and they do it.
I don't know whether they evolved intelligence before or after they
developed their skudding ability. Maybe they both developed together.
I suspect that maybe you can't have the ability to skud without a rational
faculty to guide it, but that's only a guess. And sometimes I wonder just
how rational the Kriths are. I mean, they can talk and think and act
rationally, but they have no mechanical ability at all. They can't even
build their own shelters. In other ways they're bright enough, so I don't
know. I suppose they had to sacrifice a great deal to develop skudding
to the level they they have.
Anyhow, they did learn to skud, and they began jumping across the Lines,
into the parallel universes. I don't know what they found to the East
of wherever they started, but to the West they found men.
At first the Kriths didn't interfere with humans. They just dropped
in, so to speak, saw things they liked, and finally found a means of
communicating. Shangalis was developed, either by them or by men, and
a cross-Line language was born.
At some point men began to investigate the Kriths' means of skudding, but
whether the Kriths prompted them to do it or whether men did it on their
own, I don't know. Probably both in different Lines. And eventually men
built skudders and the Kriths began to use them with human pilots. When
the Kriths used their own built-in mechanisms to cross the Lines, all
they could take with them was their own physical bodies. If they wanted
to take anything else -- men, machines, - weapons, books, tapes --
they had to have mechanical help. They got it when men built skudders
and the Kriths took advantage of them.
So, a long, long way East of here, cross-Line trading began to take place,
cultures of parallel worlds began to mingle, merge, change, and a whole new
kind of civilization was built.
Still, all this doesn't explain much, doesn't explain, for example,
why a mercenary soldier from a Europo-Macedonian Line was fighting a
war in a Romano-British Line. Let me try to explain that to you.
Time travel is impossible.
I mean, travel into the future or the past. A lot of places have tried
it, and they have always failed. It simply can't be done. Don't ask me
why. I'm not mathematician. It just can't be done.
However, they tell me there is a way that communications from the future
to the past can take place. It's pretty complicated and awfully costly,
but it can be done. At least the Kriths have said it can and has been
done. But you can judge for yourself.
A long way East, so the story goes, there's an Indus Line where technology
developed early and reached a high level some hundreds of years ago. They
had even got so far as building spaceships and exploring the nearer stars.
It was there that the first future-to-past communication was attempted.
The Kriths were in on it, so I'm told; they helped finance it by bringing
in a great deal of Outtime wealth and materials to try the experiment.
A huge transmitting station was built on the Moon. From what I've been
told it was the biggest transmitter ever constructed in any Line, more
watts of energy than would be needed to run a dozen high-level-technology
worlds. They tell me that the energy of the sun was somehow drained to
power the station -- and I don't mean by solar cells or something like
that. They tapped the sun and poured its energy directly into the station.
This transmitter, though, was never connected to a real antenna. All its
power was fed into dummy loads, huge chunks of the lunar surface converted
into resistors just to drain off the transmitter's power. They set up this
monstrous station and burned up half the Moon just to get rid of the power
it produced.
All this was done just to get a standing wave on a huge bank of
solid-state devices. A gigantic quasi-modulator was fed by the power,
and it just sat there and waited . . . but not for long.
The idea goes something like this, as well as I can explain it: The signal
is generated, and it exists and will continue to be generated and continue
to exist for centuries. The quasi-modulator will be -- is -- was waiting
for a signal to be fed back to it from the future.
They tell me that there are certain activites of subatomic particles that
get cause-and-effect backward. A thing, they say, can happen
before
the cause of it takes place. They go on a to say that if a radio signal
is existing in a certain type of solid-state quasi-modulator it can be
affected by this backward effect and cause, that a whole chain of these
backward effects and causes can happen in this quasi-modulator.
Now it's like this. Somewhere way in the future they decide it's time
to send a message back to the past. They feed this message into the
quasi-modulator -- and somewhere down in the subatomic particles,
down even below where the radio energy is bouncing around, this
effect-before-the-cause chain will begin. The cause has happened, but a
nanosecond before that the effect had already taken place; this effect
had, even prior to that, been the cause for another effect even another
nanosecond before, and so on. Backward through time the effect and then
the cause, the effect and the cause, until it finally gets back down
the chain of time to the beginning.
Okay, now you can forget all that. The Kriths say it works, and you can
take their word for it if you like. I once did.
So, the Indus Line people built this station on the Moon, drove all this
power into it and sat back and let it operate for the next half million
years, if that's what it would take to get a message coming the wrong
way in time.
Well, even before the station had gotten up to full power, a message
came in. From the future!
Translated into local English the message read something like this:
FROM THE YEAR 7093 [which is about two thousand years from now by the
reckoning of time in that Indus Line]. GREETINGS. WE HAVE WAITED UNTIL
THE LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT TO SEND THIS BACK TO YOU. BUT WE KNOW THAT
WE CAN WAIT NO LONGER. WE ARE DOOMED. WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME LET
US TELL YOU WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US ALL.
THERE IS A CIVILIZATION OP BEINGS ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE GALAXY. THEY
ARE TOTALLY ALIEN, INIMICAL TO ALL THAT IS HUMAN AND KRITH. THEY
HAVE BEEN BIDING THEIR TIME, AWARE OF US, BUILDING A GREAT ARMADA
OF INTERSTELLAR WARSHIPS TO COME AND DESTROY US ALL.
WHY THEY HATE US WE DO NOT KNOW. NOR DO WE KNOW HOW TO FIGHT THEM.
HUMANITY AND KIRTH STAND ALONE AGAINST THE ALIEN HORDES THAT ARE
COMING TO DESTROY US. AND WE ARE ALL BUT DEFENSELESS AGAINST THEIR
WEAPONS.
ALL THE WORKS OF OUR GREAT MUTUAL CIVILIZATIONS SHALL PERISH UNLESS
. . .
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