Bearing an Hourglass (43 page)

There followed a wait, while the Bemme and Sning communicated. Then she held out her tentacle, and the little snake returned to Norton.

“We must proceed to the third chamber,” the Bemme said, and Sning squeezed.

“But that’s the route for finding the amulet!” Norton cried. “You just told me the amulet wouldn’t—”

“It
looks
as if we’re searching for the amulet,” the Bemme explained. “That will keep the Eviler Sorceress off our tentacles until we accomplish our purpose.”

Good notion! “Very well—let’s go to the third chamber.”

“A precaution will be necessary,” the Bemme said. “You must be deprived of your senses.”

“What?” Norton demanded, partly outraged, partly nervous.

“In your culture there is the narrative of your historical figure Odysseus,” she said. “He wished to see and listen to the sirens, but to do so was death, for he would then throw himself into the savage sea and drown or wreck his ship with all aboard, trying to reach them. So his crewmen tied him to the mast, while they blocked their own hearing. In that fashion he heard the sirens and survived. Human beings are very foolish.”

“You mean I will see and hear things that will madden me?”

“And smell, taste, and feel them,” the Bemme added. “The Eviler Sorceress has saved her worst for last.”

“But we’re outside her formal maze! Between the walls! There shouldn’t be any—”

“We are merely in another aspect of it. We never left this maze.”

“Oh. But this business about—”

“Temporary. I will cover your head, shielding you from the blandishments, allowing only oxygen to pass in. You
will don Bat Dursten’s space gauntlets. That will protect you from the worst of it. You will ride the Alicorn, and Dursten and Excelsia will guard your flanks. That should get you through, if you heed Sning’s warnings.”

“But if it’s that dangerous, what about the rest of you?”

“We are all role players, here to facilitate your diversion. You are the target; the effects will not affect us.”

“This is the way it has to be, Sning?”

Squeeze.

Sning and the Bemme had certainly worked it out in that brief interval of private dialogue!

The Bemme assumed the form of a hood, which Norton put over his head. He was afraid it would feel suffocating, but she was true to her word: there was pure, sweet oxygen inside.

He donned the gauntlets, which were designed to protect hands from interstellar vacuum, and mounted the Alicorn with a boost from someone. He felt like a condemned criminal being hauled to the gallows.

The Alicorn moved. For a few paces everything was routine. Norton was aware only of motion, for no sound, light, or smell penetrated the living hood. Then the atmosphere changed.

First, something seemed to touch his gauntleted hands. It was the merest hint, filtered through the impermeable material, yet it suggested the sleek body of a beautiful and vibrant woman or the controls of a finely machined, high-performance racing car. He wanted to get a better feel, so he started to draw off one gauntlet.

Squeeze, squeeze!

Oh. The temptation of Odysseus was upon him! For the first time in his life Norton experienced some sympathy for the ancient Greek warrior. But he left the gloves alone.

Then something brushed about his head. It was a hint of perfumed music, ineffably sweet, as of a lovely garden glade with flowers blooming and a damsel with a dulcimer—the kind of place he longed to enter and remain in. But he could not perceive it clearly through the hood. So he reached up to pull it off—

SQUEEZE! SQUEEZE!

Damn! He had to desist, but he was furious at what he was giving up. That garden of delights—

The beast moved on—and somehow Norton felt the presence of a book or wise man or computer terminal containing the answers to all the most perplexing and fascinating riddles of the universe. All the myriad little mysteries that had nagged at him, from the punch line to a joke others had found uproarious and he had not quite heard, to the nature of Ultimate Reality. He had to see that book! He—

SQUEEZE! SQUEEZE!

“The hell with you!” he snapped, wrenching at the hood.

Something fettered his arms, so he could not pull, and the hood clenched itself stiflingly close about his head. He heaved off the encumbrances and grabbed the hood with both hands. It stretched like taffy, but did not come off. He clawed at it in a frenzy, but his gauntlets made him clumsy. Feverishly he tore them off.

The Alicorn leaped, almost dislodging him. He had to grab for the mane for support. That delayed his attack on the hood, and in a moment the desire waned.

Now the hood relaxed. It slid away from his face, coursed down to the ground, and re-formed into the Bemme.

“We made it!” Dursten said. “But you shore fought that there hood, Nort, like you was suffocating!”

Norton’s head cleared. “If that was the filtered siren song, I never would have made it through the unfiltered one! Even now, I’d like to go back and—”

Squeeze, squeeze.

“Shux, Nort, it’s just quicksand and maggots there,” Dursten said. “You’d just sink in over your head.”

“I can’t believe that! That beautiful music—”

“Here, I’ll show you. Bemme, make like a danged floodlight.”

The Bemme convoluted into a floodlight mounted on a stand. The spaceman flicked the switch to ON and the
beam of light speared out, striking a distant wall. Dursten swiveled the beam down to the ground where the tracks of the Alicorn showed.

A hundred feet back, those traces disappeared into a monstrous roiling bog. Tiny highlights of white showed, wriggling in and out of the muck—the maggots.

“We had to walk right through that. Ugh!” Excelsia said, wrinkling her nose. “Fortunately, the Alicorn was able to pick the shallowest point to cross. He couldn’t fly, because we had to stay close enough to stop you from taking off the hood. One misstep, and we all would have been drowned in it.”

Now Norton saw the caked, maggoty mud on their legs and shoes. They had done it, all right. Excelsia and the Alicorn especially had made a sacrifice, for otherwise they could have flown over the muck. “Thank you, friends!” he said humbly.

“We’re not really your friends,” the Bemme murmured. “We are simply playing our assigned roles.”

“Maybe you are,” Norton replied. “But
they
don’t realize they are playing roles, you said. So they’re as good friends as any other kind, aren’t they?”

“I stand corrected,” the alien agreed. “It is a human nuance of interpretation.”

Norton turned to face the other way. There was the third chamber; a door in a wall was marked: 3
-D CHAMBER
. “Well, let’s go in.”

“This you must do alone,” the Bemme said, returning to her natural bug-eyed state. She had spoken before from a speaker grille in the floodlight. “Our perceptions are not precisely yours. Even Sning’s are not yours, though he understands what you perceive. You must align your perception of reality yourself by your own effort; only then will you be in control. We wish you well.”

“Shore do,” Dursten said.

“If you succeed,” Excelsia said, “promise you will return at least to say good-bye.” There was a delicate tear in her eye.

“I will,” Norton agreed.

He put his hand on the knob and turned it. The round door opened in the old-fashioned way, swiveling out on hinges. Beyond the circular port that was revealed was only blackness.

He stepped through—and found himself suspended in deep space as the door swung closed behind him. Its closure cut off Excelsia’s candlelight; with the darkness, the stars shone all around with preternatural clarity, and the ribbon of the Milky Way wound its snaky course in a great circle. To the rear, where the door had been, the sun blazed—but somehow it did not wipe out the other stars. He could see everything in a way never before possible.

“What do I do now?” he asked, noting that his cloak had spread out to protect him from the vacuum and radiation of deep space. It didn’t seem to matter whether he was in reality or illusion; he was comfortable.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

Oh, yes—he had to figure it out for himself. “But I am safe here, whatever I do?”

Squeeze.

What he had to do was align his perception to reality. Evidently this chamber provided the mechanism, if only he could figure out how to use it.

Well, this was the naked universe. He was Chronos. He could take a better look at it, traveling in time. Since he knew he would have to travel far to see any significant change, he willed the Hourglass to virtually maximum effect, turning the sand to its most intense red. “Forward in time—to the end of the universe!” he proclaimed grandly. “Sning, give me a squeeze when each billion years passes, just so I know.”

He started off. The location-spell remained on, so he remained where he was in the galaxy—but it changed about him. Individual stars waxed and waned, some becoming brighter, some dimmer, and their constellations distorted into unrecognizability. New constellations formed, flexed, and dissolved. He knew it was all in his perspective, as stars shifted positions relative to his location,
but it did make for an effect of almost-living animation.

Every so often there were supernovas, flashing with phenomenal brilliance and vanishing. He realized that his accelerated time travel made them as brief to him as the flashes of flashbulbs, but still they were bright in passing! He began to perceive a pattern to the changing positions of the more stable stars, patches of stars, and clouds of gas and dust. The galaxy was rotating, turning more rapidly in the center than at the edge, as if stirred by a cosmic spoon. Once he realized that, his perception became truly three-dimensional, and he saw himself as part of the giant, viscous mix of material. The galaxy had seemed stationary when he had been fixed in time; now he saw it as a porridge of stars and dust. In fact, the dust was stretched out in great spirals, moving outward from the center, and at the fringes of those bands of dust the stars were thickest and brightest, for the dust was their raw material. Stars did not form from mere contractions of gas amidst vacuum; they were squeezed into life by the tidal fluxes of the galaxy itself, like eddy whorls against the shifting dust.

Squeeze.

Oh, yes—a billion years had passed! Entranced, he continued to watch. Having analyzed the pattern of the great rotating galactic disk, he was now able to perceive the broader universe beyond, the neighboring galaxies, moving and spinning in their own courses and gradually drawing together. Stars kept moving in on their dust banks and disappearing into them, while the bands themselves snaked out toward the extremes. The galactic centers grew brighter.

Squeeze.

Another billion years already! He was still accelerating in time, but also becoming more absorbed by the wonder of the universe about him, so that time seemed to pass faster, anyway. Objective, subjective—what was the truer definition of time? Fascinated by the moving panorama of space, Norton began to trace the patterns of whole galactic clusters. His perspective kept expanding as he
came to understand the more fundamental motions of the universe.

Squeeze.

Now it was easier to see how the galaxies were all converging on a single region of space, like shining pin-wheels rolling in to a rendezvous. And the galaxies themselves were changing as they went, their centers becoming brighter despite the flow of dust and stars out from them.

Squeeze.

After that he pretty much ignored the squeeze markers, for they were coming faster as his sphere of awareness expanded. It almost seemed as if the universe were shrinking.

Suddenly a band of dust and gas passed across his region, momentarily blotting out his vision. When it passed, the sun was gone. Startled, he cast about for it; he had tuned it out in his effort to perceive the patterns of motion of the farther galactic clusters. It was definitely gone.

Well, how many billions of years had passed now? Six, eight? Mankind would not feel the loss! He let the sun go with momentary regret and refocused on the universe at large, which was really more interesting.

It was definitely shrinking. He verified this by fixing his attention on one particular spot and gauging the contraction of galactic groups around it. His perception seemed to have accommodated the enormous distances separating galaxies, so that he could know where they were even though, theoretically, it took billions of years for the light of the farthest ones to reach him. Perhaps this was because he himself was traveling rapidly in time; he didn’t have to wait on the normal speed of light. Or maybe it was simply another facet of the magic of the Hourglass.

Shrinking? How could that be? The universe was supposed to be expanding!

Yet as the billions of years squeezed by, ten, eleven, twelve, he became certain; the universe was indeed contracting. It became small enough for him to see completely, then smaller yet. Dismayed and enthralled, he watched it form into a giant globe perhaps four billion
light-years across. The galaxies were becoming quasars, with hugely radiating centers and tenuous umbras of dust and gas, and these dissolved into formless waves, much as the individual stars had dissolved into the dust clouds before. The universe became a great ball of gases and energy that then compressed into a mass of plasma less than a billion light-years in diameter, a super-duper nova.

It shrank into the size of a single quasar, then, so rapidly it was an eyeblink, into the size of a single planet, and disappeared.

Norton stared at the distant point of nothingness. If this was to be the way the universe ended, winking out in fifteen billion years or so, how did that differ from the manner in which it had begun? Perplexed, Norton reversed directions, turning the sand its most intense blue, and willed himself back in time.

The universe reversed. The ball of plasma reappeared from nothing, expanding ferociously. He was unable to distinguish energy radiation from matter; they were inextricably mixed. Now Norton noticed some things he had missed before. In this version, a great deal of energy seemed to be forming from nothing, even as the expansion occurred, so that, though the ball was exploding at light-speed, the universe itself was multiplying much faster than that. It was as if a shock wave were traveling out ahead of the light, triggering the condensation of energy from whatever unknowable recess it had hidden in. But, of course, he was traveling backward in time now, which meant that that energy had actually converted into nothing before the remainder squeezed into the singularity of the black hole and winked out entirely.