Vestiges of Time (16 page)

In spatial frameworks he selected a spot a few feet from where the consciousness was located. He moved toward that position, into it, projecting
something
of himself into the particular tiny fragment of all con- tinuua, all-space, all-time. He focused and focused again, grasping molecules of air, photons of light, adjusting them, bending them, twisting them, altering them, making out of them something that had not been there before. Not a significant thing, perhaps. No great alteration of the matter/energy of that place/ time. But enough.

Some portion of himself was in the same room with the other consciousness. He could now see, or do something akin to seeing, and he sensed a series of overlapping images broken from bits of the high end of the electromagnetic spectrum: an infrared image here, a yellow one there, an ultraviolet one at another place. And he sensed the twisting of the fabric of the universe, minor though it was, and the aura of power, the crackling of something not unlike electrical tension that filled the small concrete room. And he was aware of how
he,
this force he projected, would appear to the room’s physical occupant: hazy, smoky, wraithlike, a shadowy form with the figure of a man, no more than that.

And he saw this: A small room with damp concrete walls; moisture; a dimly glowing strip of light ran across the ceiling; a cot was the only .article of furniture in the room; Eric Mathers,
aka
HarkosNor, dressed in a robe that was an appropriate costume for the city of VarKhohs of NakrehVatee, sat on the cot, a pained expression on his face, a lump on the back of his head; the medicine given him by RyoNa had begun to do its work, but all the pain was not yet gone.

The
presence
he had created out of light and air waited for Mathers to become aware of it, of him.

Then Mathers
was
aware of the forces at play within

the room; he looked up toward the center point of those forces and saw the shape forming in the air.

There was silence in the room for long, dragging moments. He knew that Mathers was waiting for him to speak. He would do so; he thought he knew how. Grasping molecules of air, he took them in hand and set them to vibrating, to pulsing at carefully determined frequencies and amplitudes, to forming waves in the air that passed from his focal point toward that of Mathers. Yes, this seemed to be the right way. The sounds he created were: “Well, Eric, I hope you’re not feeling too badly now.”

The Erie Mathers who sat in the room and awaited the co
ming
of RyoNa’s “very important people” looked a little puzzled but not totally surprised. “I’m okay,” he said at last. “I was afraid the Tromas had destroyed you back in KHL-000.”

He could not suppress his feelings. That was
his
future of which Mathers spoke, something he was yet to encounter. But to Mathers,
this
Eric Mathers, it was something that had occurred some months in the past. Involuntarily he chuckled; the air carried his chuckle in waves across the room. How could he ever explain this to Mathers? “Damn,” he made the air say more expertly, focusing the sounds across the room, sounds identical with those the vocal cords and mouth and lips and tongue of Eric Mathers would have made, “this could get confusing.”

“What do you mean?” Mathers asked, still puzzled. “What you’re talking about is in your past, you see,” he made the air say, “but it’s in
my
future. It hasn’t happened to
me
yet, so I don’t know the outcome of our fight with the Krithian ladies any more than you do.” He wanted to tell Mathers a great deal more, but he knew he dared not.

“I see,” Mathers said.

“I hope you do, though I’m not positive I do. As I said, it
could
get confusing.” It already was, but per

haps he was beginning to understand more and more of it.

“Yeah.” Mathers grunted, that was all he did in way of reply.

He created sounds again: “Your head’s not hurting now, and don’t worry, you don’t have a concussion. The lump will go away in a few days.”

“That’s comforting,” Mathers replied grudgingly, unhappily.

More sounds he created, projected across the room: “And I suggest that the best thing for you will be to cooperate with the members of the BrathelLanza when they come to visit you.”

“The what?” Mathers asked.

“BrathelLanza. You’ll find out what it is in due time. For now, cooperate with them as fully as possible, for from cooperating with them will come answers to the questions you want to ask of me, and a means of action.”

“A means of action?” Mathers asked stupidly.

“Yes, a means of action, the action that will bring . . How much could he tell him? How much had
he
been told when he was Eric Mathers? “Well, you’ll see.” He could not repress another chuckle he created. There was some degree of humor in the situation. Mathers would see it. When he got here himself. In time.

He had said all he could. He had told Mathers enough. Now Mathers would do the rest of it himself. Mathers would do what had to be done so that the proper sequence of events would take place, so that months in the “future” Mathers would find himself in the recording studio when the police raided the Underground, so that he would be left alone and, with the aid of sense-altering drugs and mnemonic amplification, he would be forced to establish rapport
and
then resonance with the replicates and . . .

And the Shadowy Man would be bom.

The Shadowy Man withdrew from the damp cell that contained Eric Mathers, withdrew into the blackness that is both outside space and time and is the very stuff upon which they are built.

For moments during which the word “time” was a meaningless noise, the Shadowy Man hung suspended, thinking, understanding, knowing. There it was. All laid out before
him.
There were things he would have to do. Within himself he chuckled, remembered words spoken by the Tromas of KHL-000, words that had seemed like madness to the Eric Mathers who had heard them, words that now the Shadowy Man understood.

The Tromas had said: “What we see is some great power behind this Shadowy Man, some great power that may not yet have even come into existence, that is reaching back through time to alter events—perhaps it is altering events in order to bring itself into existence.”

The Tromas had said: “This is a universe of probabilities, Eric.
Probabilities.
Higher orders and lower orders of probability. It is a universe in which the
future
can reach back into the past in order to increase its
probability.
Lower orders of probability can become, through their own manipulation, higher orders of probability. This is so. Kriths know that.”

The Tromas had said: “This power is reaching back in time, we believe, in order to manipulate you and those you come in contact with toward some dark future end that is involved with, in some way we do not yet fathom, the
possible
destruction of the entire Krithian race!”

The Tromas had said: “Your Shadowy Man is trying to kill us, Eric.”

Yes, the Tromas had known, had understood.

Now
he
did too. He knew what he must do: bring about the past as he knew it, had experienced it as Eric Mathers, to force the past to bring about the

present, to force the past to create the Shadowy Man so that he could . . . undo other pasts.

There are no paradoxes in time, he told himself. It is just that no one before me has had any conception of what it is. Though the Tromas do have a glimmering, I have a little more than that.

He set out to do what he knew he would have to do> to assure his own creation. ..,

17

Downtime

Through a universe that earlier had seemed to be
a
blackness but now did not seem so black, for now he could discern in it more and more detail, various shades of blackness and innumerable fragments of light, pinpoints and glows of three-dimensional light as they had made/did make/would make their way through time and space; a void that was the very stuff of which continuua are made. Moving in it, through it, was everything that ever had been, everything that ever would be, everything that ever might have been.

The Shadowy Man moved himself, his awareness, his consciousness backward in time, outward in paratime, searching for a particular point in the multidimensional matrices of time and space and paratime, searching, finding. . . .

A plush villa outside a French town named Beau- gency on Timeline RTGB-307, the early morning of 6 April 1972.

During the night the Kriths had sent a contingent of their own Timeliners and local British forces up the River Loire toward the villa presently inhabited by Imperial Count Albert von Heinen and his wife. Under cover of darkness and a surprise British attack, the Timeliners were to capture Von Heinen and his American wife and return them to the Kriths for questioning.

All had gone well enough at first. The Timeliner mercenaries had captured Von Heinen, though only after wounding him, and had gotten his wife without injuring her. But a paratime craft of strange design and capabilities had moved against them, had forced

them into a pitched battle that required retreat back to RTGB-307 and the villa.

Now there was gunfire in the distance, the rapid sounds of automatic weapons, the slower noises of semiautomatic ones, the sound of a remote intemal- combustion engine dwindling in the distance. Some of the Timeliners had escaped, and in doing so had drawn away the unknown attackers.

As the light of dawn spread across the villa and the stables behind it, figures were moving toward the stables in which there were no horses now, but three staff motorcars of the army of the Holy Roman Empire, brightly polished and immaculately clean, ready for instant use by the officers should they be needed.

One of the figures was a tall blond man in British uniform, who staggered slightly under the weight of the wounded man he carried. There was a determined, half-angry expression on his face, and now and again he glanced at the woman who accompanied him.

Dressed only in a heavy robe, she was a fair-haired woman of medium height, an attractive woman whose green eyes flashed anger and hatred, who glanced at the blond man with bitter lines around her eyes and mouth. She was doing as he told her, but reluctantly.

The man in the British uniform stopped just short of the stables, lowered the wounded man to the ground, ordered the woman to stay with him, and went into the stables to investigate. After a few moments of searching, he found the three motorcars, each decked out with the flag of a
Feldmarschall
of the Imperial Army. He smiled to himself for a moment before going back to where the woman and the wounded man waited.

The Shadowy Man once again took bits of material substance, molecules of air and pieces of floating dust, took them and shaped them with psionic force to create the hazy form that Mathers would later come to know so well. Back in the shadows of the cavernous

stables, he bent waves of light, photonic particles, created
himself,
and waited.

When Eric Mathers got back to where Sally Beall von Heinen sat on the ground beside the still figure of the man who was nominally her husband*- he hol- stered his pistol and bent to lift the unconscious man to his shoulder again. Then to Sally he said: “Go on. Get in the first car.”

With resignation on her face, the young countess preceded the mercenary along the front of the stables to where the cars were parked.

“Can you drive?” Mathers asked.

“No,” Sally von Heinen replied.

“I don’t believe you,” Mathers said with annoyance. “Get in front. Are the keys in it? Don’t He again.”

“Yes, they are.”

Mathers dumped the unconscious Von Heinen in the back seat and climbed in beside him. “Okay, let’s go,” he said.

The motorcar started at once. The Shadowy Man knew that Mathers was pleasantly surprised by this, considering the state of the art of motorcars on this Line. Sally shifted into gear and slowly pulled out of the stables and onto the driveway that led back around the villa’s main structures.

“Head toward Beaugency for the moment,” commanded the Timeliner mercenary.

He did not speak again for a moment, his eyes going back into the stables, a strange, puzzled expression on his face. For a few moments he peered at the smoky, hazy form in the shadows at the rear of the stables, seeing the image of a human form that the Shadowy Man had built out of air and dust and light. Something that may have been fear went over Mathers’ face and his hand reached for the weapon on his hip.

The Shadowy Man loosened his grip on the air, dust, and light. A movement of breeze. The hazy shape was gone.

“What is it?” Countess von Heinen was asking. “Nothing. Go on.”

The car moved on, away from the stables, around the main house, away.

The Shadowy Man smiled within himself, and withdrew. . . .

He moved. Not far through space and time now: a few miles across space, a few homs uptime, no motion at all across paratime. He would not speak yet, would not interfere. There was no need for interference yet. The crucial moments of time and paratime were yet to come. Now he would observe. And let Mathers gradually begin to become aware of him. Later he would speak, when it was necessary. For now . . .

Under Mathers’ direction, Sally had driven the German motorcar to a rural wooded area of wartom France remote from the scene of the battle of the night before. Leaving Sally and the wounded Count tied with ropes, Mathers had then slipped away into the forest, where he had assembled a compact radio transceiver and made contact with the Krithian-Time- liner base of operations in the Outer Hebrides.

“Eric?” asked a Krith’s voice from the radio earphone.

“Yes, Kar-hinter, late, but reporting.”

“Are you safe?”

“For the moment.”

“Count von Heinen?”

“Alive, the last time I looked. I don’t know how long he’ll last, though.” Then he asked about the other Timeliners who had survived the firefight with the strange men from the alien skudder.

“Safe. They managed to get through the Imperial lines just after dawn. Hillary is in a field hospital now. He will be fine, the doctors say.”

“Good. Did they tell you what happened?”

“Yes, but they could give no explanations. Can you?” The Shadowy Man was nothing more than a
pres-