The Overlords of War (11 page)

“You must have noticed something right away,” Touray went on. “Nobody around here is using nuclear bombs, right? I imagine that puzzles you. But on the other side of those mountains atom bombs do go off now and then. Big ones at that!”

Corson recalled the pillars of fire and mushrooms of smoke which they had seen beyond the mountains. He nodded.

“And who makes sure the rules are obeyed?”

“If only I knew, I’d file a polite request for him to get me out of here! Oh, probably a god—or a devil!”

“Do you really think we might be in hell?”

Corson used the word readily enough, but it had little personal meaning for him. By his time, in an age dominated by cold and calculating pragmatism, its only referent was half-forgotten mythologies. And the nearest term available to match it in the galactic tongue meant no more than somewhere especially unpleasant.

Still, Touray took his point. “I’ve been wondering a lot about that,” he admitted. “But this strikes me as a pretty material kind of hell, if it is one. I managed to make some sightings on the sky as I went up and down with this balloon, and I’m convinced the ceiling is only about ten or twelve kilometers above us. Of course, even if it is made of ordinary matter, this place doesn’t look much like a natural planet. No horizon, an absolutely level surface ... Or if the planet were big enough to give this impression, we ought to have been squashed flat by the gravity in the first minute.”

Corson agreed, surprised that this man from a period so long before his own should know so much.

“I don’t think we’re in normal space at all,” Antonella said. “I can’t cog anything—not a thing. At first I wasn’t worried because our foresight does fade away now and then. But never so completely. Here it’s as though I were . . . well, as though I were blind.”

Corson stared at her. “When does your talent let you down?”

She flushed. “For a few days every month, that’s one thing. But that’s not what’s happening at the moment. And during a space flight, but I haven’t flown space very often. And when I’ve just made a jump across time, but that never lasts for long. And lastly when the probabilities in favor of several different outcomes are almost exactly balanced. But I always retain at least the ghost of the power. Here, there’s nothing at all.”

“What power is she talking about?” Touray demanded.

“Antonella’s people have a certain ability to see into the future. They call it ‘cogging’, from precognition. They can foretell events before they happen, usually a couple of minutes ahead.”

“I see. It must be like having a periscope capable of breaking through the surface of the present. But it sounds like a pretty shortsighted kind of periscope. Two minutes—that isn’t very long.”

Corson sought to organize what Antonella had told him into a pattern that would make sense. He knew that if prescience were possible—and it was—it must be dependent in some way on Mach’s cosmogonic principle, the uniqueness of each point in the universe in relation to the whole. Would a total breakdown of the power imply that they were no longer in the universe to which Antonella’s nervous system was attuned? Were they in fact dead, without remembering that they had been killed?

“You know, it’s very funny,” Touray said. “In Africa, long before I was born, there were witch doctors who claimed they could foresee the future. Nobody believed that any longer, in my day. Yet that wasn’t in the past; it was in the future they claimed they could look into!”

“What about this bread?” Corson asked, brandishing the remains of his sandwich. “Where does it come from?”

“Oh, from whoever runs this place. Now you mention it, I must say I haven’t seen plowed land anywhere, let alone factories or bakeries. But it’s always like that in wartime, isn’t it? Guns, uniforms, medicines, rations, all come from far, far away, in what might as well be a mythical country. If the war lasts long enough, you just stop wondering about that sort of thing. The only fields you see are the ones you bum over because they’re in enemy hands.”

“Where are the high command? Why do they carry on with these crazy battles?”

“Oh, they’re a long way up the ladder from you. A long, long way. In the normal course of events you’ll never see them.”

“But what if they get killed?”

“They’re replaced,” Touray said. “By those who come next in line. You see, in a really all-out war you go on fighting because for one thing there’s the enemy and for another you don’t have any alternative. Maybe the brass hats have reasons of their own, but those must be—well, brass-type.”

Corson drew a deep breath.

“But where the hell are we?” he shouted.

Touray gave him a steady stare. “I could say we’re in a balloon above a calm ocean. But that might be a delusion. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I can only offer three possible explanations. See which you prefer, or come up with another.”

“What are they?”

“First off, then: we’re good and dead and we’ve arrived in some kind of hell or purgatory, and we’re stuck here for goodness knows how long, maybe for all eternity, with no hope of escape even by getting killed. The Breathers take care of that.”

“The Breathers?”

“You haven’t been through one of those yet? No, of course you haven’t—you only just got here. I’ll tell you about those later, then. My second theory is that we don’t actually exist. We just have the illusion of existence. We may be nothing more than data, tape perforations or punched cards or electrons whizzing around in some gigantic machine, and someone’s playing a war game with us, or a Kriegsspiel, or whatever they call it where you come from, trying to find out what went on in such-and-such a battle. Or maybe what would happen if all the wars in the universe took place at once. In that case we’d simply be tin soldiers, if you get me.”

“I get you,” Corson said from a dry mouth.

“A variant of that notion would be that we do exist, but not in this world. Maybe we’re all stacked up in a vault somewhere, wired into a machine, and just imagine that we’re alive here. It could be a sort of therapy, to make us sick of the very idea of war, or it could be a show put on for somebody, or it could be an experiment.”

“How about your third theory?”

“That this universe is in fact real. Weird, by our standards, but genuine enough. And built by someone, possibly by humans—though I doubt it—to serve some purpose I daren’t even guess at. That’s the theory I prefer. Because if it’s correct, there might be a way of escaping and still being yourself.”

“There’s one thing in common between your three theories,” Corson said. “They could equally well apply to the worlds we’ve left behind.”

“The ones we remember,” Touray corrected. “Not necessarily the same thing. Are you sure we both come from the same universe? Besides, something else holds good for this world as well as the others. We have the same feeling of free will, and we’re just as incapable as we were back there of running our lives the way we’d like to.”

There was a short silence.

“How did you get here?” Corson asked at length.

“I’d rather ask you the same question. Don’t you think I’ve been talking too much?”

“Well, I don’t know whether you’d believe me.”

The black man said wryly, “Oh, I’ve learned to believe six impossible things before breakfast.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

So Corson briefly recounted their wanderings since leaving Veran’s camp, although he offered no details of the mausoleum world.

“Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring you here,” Touray decided. “One of them, probably. It fits my third theory best, doesn’t it?”

And he added, “This is the first I’ve heard about—did you call them pegasones? The animals that can move through time, I mean. But I’d certainly begun to suspect that there must be a means of jumping from one century to another.”

“What about you?”

The black man leaned over the gondola and spat into the sea. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t recall very clearly. I’ve been through four, five, maybe ten Breathers since.” The capital letter could be heard in his voice. “I was gunning down everything I could see from my old Gadfly Five, when I felt a blast of heat and blacked out. And here I was, still in the copter, over what looked like the same sort of country. I didn’t notice the differences until I landed and realized I didn’t know anybody at the base. I said so. They took me to the M.O., and he said something about shock and gave me a needle and sent me back into action. After a while I gave up trying to be certain about anything. I simply decided to stay alive.”

“One thing puzzles the hell out of me,” Corson said. “The body count must be terrible in these wars. Why don’t they stop because they’ve run out of manpower? Or does a fresh supply of soldiers keep pouring in non-stop from all time and all space?”

Touray shook his head. “I told you. There are Breathers. The dead come back.”

“Somebody revives them?”

“No. But when a Breather is in the offing, the sky goes dark. Everything becomes sort of numb, time runs slower and slower, any kind of light burns dim—flames, electric lamps, anything. You feel as though you’re turning to stone. For a second or two you find yourself in an awful silence. Then everything starts over. Sometimes you’re still where you were before the Breather, but that’s not common. Usually you’re in another army doing another job. You don’t recall very clearly what was happening before the Breather; it’s as though someone started telling another story, or—or changed the record! That’s what led me to my second theory. And the dead come back and take on new roles. But they never remember having been killed. As far as they’re concerned the Breather began just before

they died. So maybe the Breathers are purely individual events. But I don’t really believe that. You get the impression that they involve the entire universe. I’m sure that the people who run this place, or manage it, must know how to travel in time and simply go back and collect the people who are about to die. Nothing supernatural about it.”

“No, of course not,” Corson said.

His beard had begun to grow out. Tugging at it, he reflected on the amazing fact that this man, this primitive soldier from the very dawn of the space age, was quite prepared to accept the idea of time travel. Still, he himself had made a pretty quick adjustment to Dyoto. And what would you expect of a soldier who was accustomed to being tossed from one theater of war to another for reasons the high brass didn’t condescend to explain? If you didn’t adapt, you didn’t last.

He was about to ask for more information about the Breathers when a vast explosion slammed at his eardrums, fiercer than any thunderclap, like two dagger points driven into his head. It was as though the universe were breaking apart.

On unseen rails the balloon swerved across the mirror-smooth sea beneath that improbable but unchanging sky. The breeze was at most fresh. But the explosion went on, grew louder, evolved through a dull rumbling into a vibration which made the suspension ropes twang, and then seemed to divide into two pure notes like a tree trunk being split by lightning: one climbed into the treble, racing up the octaves—a thousand hertz, two thousand, five, ten, and at last into the ultrasonic, still so loud it seemed to be drilling into their skulls—while another deepened, as though a giant had clutched at them, and became a hammering, then a panting noise, like the breathing of a tortured god.

The ocean . . . wrinkled. Touray shouted something, but the desperate movements of his lips were like the mouthings of someone struck deaf and dumb. Antonella clapped her hands over her ears, frightened and in pain. Corson felt tears start to his eyes, as though pressed from his very brain by the vise of the twin vibrations.

A squall grabbed at the balloon. It climbed several hundred meters and the ambient pressure diminished cruelly. The gondola tossed like a cork. Corson caught hold of Antonella and pressed her against the suspension ropes, which he clung to with both hands. The wicker creaked. The wind was so fierce now, it flattened one side of the balloon as though a giant hand were pushing it along.

Touray caught the end of a rope and lashed himself as firmly as he could. Bending double, he managed to pass the other end to Corson, who secured Antonella and himself as best he could. This was worse than riding a pegasone, he thought, fumbling to tie the knots.

Above the roar of the storm he screamed, “Is this the beginning of a Breather?”

Touray shook his head. Ashen-faced, he called back, “I—never— saw—anything like it!”

The squalls gave over, but the wind blew on. Now it was steadier, but it grew stronger by the minute, pressing Corson against Antonella; he heard—or felt—her panting. He himself was breathing quicker and deeper than usual. It was owing to lack of air. The atmospheric pressure had dropped still further.

He signaled to Touray, pointing first at the balloon, then at the ocean. The black man understood and turned his valves. The balloon dropped several hundred meters, but without the air becoming perceptibly more dense. Below, long white crests embroidered the tops of waves laden with wrecked ships. A halo of oil spread on the sea created an unlikely oasis of calm.

Hours went by. The balloon sped onward. Corson and Touray agreed that they must be traveling at a good thousand k.p.h. if the latter had correctly estimated the height of the pulsating veins that served not so much as landmarks but as skymarks. Tumbled together in the bottom of the gondola, all three of them drowsed, half suffocated.

Corson was vaguely aware that if they had been on Earth they would already have been blown a quarter of the way around it. Still the wind was not dropping. Now, it was pushing before it mountains of water so high and so solid that they might have been carved out of glass. It was insane, as crazy as everything that had gone before. They might sail on forever above this boundless ocean. They might starve to death, die of thirst or exhaustion in the gondola, but their bodies would continue on their mad career unless the suspension ropes broke and ditched them in the sea, or the balloon, leaking its hydrogen—helium—whatever—lost so much height that it stuck like a wart to the side of a rolling dune of water . . .