Howes looked at the others and said, as if trying to win their support,
"See how the professor fancies himself as the prophet, bringing great
things to his people!"
"Wrong! Utterly wrong, Captain!" Silverstone said. "I see only that we
are the end of a great era when people saw the truth. For some reason, we
and those that come after us all the way to the Stone Age will be utterly
deluded. I -- I am merely the last man ever to remember the truth, for
me there is the special terror of knowing that I shall be outcast and
persecuted until I forget what everyone else has forgotten, that I shall
be reduced to agreeing to Wenlock's false theory of mind, and spend my
young manhood partly believing poor old Freud and his camp-followers!"
For a moment, he did indeed look a tragic figure, suddenly overcome with
the magnitude of what he was saying, so that he could say no more. It was
clear now where the look of the sell-mocking-bird came from.
Ann and Bush tried to cheer him up. Howes took the chance to speak to Borrow.
"It's getting dark. We ought to be away from this damned horror spot --
if I have much more of these riddles and these phantom people looking on,
I really shall be a nut case! What do you make of all this, Borrow? You
started by riding with it, I know, but you have been a bit silent lately
-- I thought that possibly you had bad second thoughts."
"Not exactly that. I think I accept what Norman says, though it's going
to take living with for full acceptance, obviously. My thought is 'Why?'
Why did this overmind come down over the true brain like a pair of
dark glasses and obscure everything? Why?"
"Ha! Silverstone hasn't managed to explain that! Silverstone!"
They turned to Norman Silverstone. Behind him, the great circle of shades
they were learning to think of as minders from the past was unbroken,
overlapping like the countless images in a crazy photograph. But in front
of them -- Bush caught a movement that did not belong among the ghosts.
A figure was emerging from the corner of one of the elephantine rocks.
He recognized it. Wildly incongruous in the Cryptozoic, if incongruity
existed any more, the man stepping from the rock still wore the grey silk
coat and fawn topper he had sported as disguise in Buckingham Palace.
Bush identified him at once. It was Grazley, the skilled assassin.
Grazley was at his trade now. His heavy mouth was set, he had a gun raised.
Bush still had ready the gun he had taken from Howes' pack, in case any
sort of trouble occurred. He swung it up reflexively.
"Down!" he yelled.
He fired. Even as he did so, he knew he was too late. The air beyond his
left cheek was briefly livid as the lasered beam pulsed from Grazley's gun.
He had missed Grazley. He fired again. The killer was fading, minding,
clearly still under the influence of CSD. Bush's pulse of light burned
into his left shoulder. Grazley spun slowly and fell, not changing his
rigid attitude; but, before he could hit the floor, he had vanished,
presumably to drift unconscious like a derelict ship throughout the eons
of mind-travel, sliding down the entropy slope through the unplumbed
geochrons of the Cryptozoic towards the dissolution of the Earth.
Dismissing Grazley from his mind, Bush turned, to see Silverstone dying
in Ann's care. His jacket still smoldered, and a charred patch spread
across his chest. There was no hope for him.
Howes was raving like a madman. "I'll be shot for this! You idiots!
Bush, this is your fault, you stole my gun -- how could I guard Silverstone
properly? Now what'll we do? To think Grazley got back here! In one way,
it was the logical place to look -- Silverstone ought to have seen that!
He signed his own death warrant!"
"You let Grazley live in the Palace -- you alone are to blame, Howes!"
Bush said.
He stood looking down at Silverstone and reflected on what a wonderful man
he had been, wonderful and unknown. The professor's eyes were staring now,
and be had ceased to breathe, although Ann still helplessly held his
shoulders. Borrow tugged at Bush's sleeve.
"Eddie, we've got another visitor!"
"Huh?" He looked up heavily, unwilling to face anything more.
The Dark Woman had stepped from the vast shadowy crowd. Now she was close
to them, standing next to Borrow. She raised her hand with an imperious
gesture, and quickly took on substance, until she was as real and solid
as they. The look that she cast on Bush was both loving and searching,
so that he shied from its intimacy.
"You can materialize into our continuum?" he said. "Then why didn't you stop
Grazley? There must be thousands of you here -- why the hell didn't you
intervene if you could?"
She spoke, gesturing down at the still body of Silverstone. "We assembled
here to attend the birth of a great man."
Chapter 8
WALKERS OF THE CRYPTOZOIC
She was a fine woman, seen close to. Bush estimated her to be no more
than twenty-five, with blemishless brown skin, clear grey-blue eyes,
and midnight black hair. Her figure and carriage were good, while her
sumptuous long legs were well displayed by her short tunic-skirt. But it
was her commanding presence that particularly impressed, even subdued,
them.
As Bush stared at her, she grasped his hand and smiled at him. "We have
known each other for a long while, Eddie Bush! My name is Wygelia Say.
At this moment only, just before the birth of Norman Silverstone, we have
Central Authority's permission to speak with you and your friends."
Although she spoke in English, it was not entirely easy to understand
what she said, so curious was her intonation.
Disarmed though he was, Bush could not help asking, "Why did you let
Silverstone die like that if you could intervene? You must have known
the killer was coming."
"We think differently from you, my friend. There is human intervention,
but there is also fate."
"But he was necessary!"
"You four have his ideas now. Shall I tell you what has happened in what
you think of as your future? You have returned to 2093, as you call it --
we use a different system of dating -- and have announced the birth of
Silverstone. Everyone is upset. Wenlock escapes with your aid. You seize
a broadcasting station and start to tell people the truth. Revolutions
begin -- "
She was interrupted by Howes, who came pushing angrily forward.
"You can't talk your way out of this, young lady!
If you allowed Silverstone -- "
He stopped in mid-sentence. A look of puzzlement filtered slowly on to
his face. Wygelia had lifted a hand in a sign towards him and uttered
a few words that echoed in Bush's brain.
"What did you say?"
"It's just a special phrase -- a spell, it might be called a few centuries
after your day. A degenerate version of it will be incorporated in the
Wenlock discipline a few years from now. It will fill the motor areas
of David Howes' brain for a few minutes, although the time will seem
only a split second to him."
She turned calmly and gracefully, smiling at Borrow and Ann and introducing
herself to them. Meanwhile, a change was taking place in the scene about
them. The shades of dusk were creeping in; and, at the same time, the
multitudes of minders from the past were gathering to watch the birth
of Silverstone -- though to Bush, still saddled with his overmind,
it seemed as if they were now departing, leaving the huge landscape
occupied only with its own bemusing structures.
Bush moved some way apart from the others, wishing to think things out
for himself. As he stood there, the great crowd dispersed. The view
became empty, seeming vacant alike of scale and meaning.
At length, Ann called to him and he went back to the group. Ann and Borrow
looked decidedly more cheerful; Wygelia was good for morale and had clearly
said something encouraging to them. Even Howes, now recovering from his
trance, looked happier than he had done for a long while.
"Wygelia's a darling," Ann said, taking Bush's arm. "She told me that for us
to understand her, she has been trained for years to speak backwards!
Now I really do believe that all Norman Silverstone told us was gospel
truth!"
Four men from the past had materialized beside Wygelia, each dressed in
a similar uniform. They carried a bier on which the body of Silverstone
had been reverently laid, and now stood with it between them, awaiting
a signal from Wygelia.
"You have made one more journey after you returned to 2093," she told Bush.
"No, I have that mixed -- excuse me, it is still difficult to put things
as you see them. You still have one more journey to make before you return
to 2093. Yes! Because our birth and death signify somewhat differently
to you, the ceremonies concerning them vary on either side of what our
friend Silverstone rightly called the Himalayan generation. We want you
to come with us and witness, as his first companions, the birth of his
body -- what you will think of as his funeral, although with us it
is a glad occasion." She sensed a protest in them and quickly added,
"And at the same time, I will clear up any questions you may ask. Some
I can answer that Silverstone will not be able to."
"We'd be glad to come," Bush said.
"Are you taking us into your world -- the past?" Borrow asked.
She shook her head. "That is not possible; nor, if it were possible,
would it be permissible. In any case, we have a more suitable birthplace
for Silverstone."
They prepared to inject themselves with CSD, but Wygelia waved the notion
away. The Wenlock discipline needed such material aids; in her day they had
more effective disciplines -- of which Wenlock's was really a degenerate
memory.
She spoke to them, making a curious sign over them, and they were conspiring,
riding, mind-traveling, stretching their minds at her behest, moving rapidly
towards what they had learned to know as the beginning of the world.
More. They were in limbo, but thought could pass between them. Or, it was
more accurate to say, they were in a limbo where they took on shapes of
thought. What they thought, they momentarily were. Since they were in
each other's mental flow, they had no existence except as thought-shapes.
"All mind communicates," came Wygelia's thought, spraying out to them
like a great shrub in blossom. "It is by drawing on a fraction of that
vast power that we can mind-travel at all. Did you never wonder where
the forces behind mind-travel lurked? Once, there was a time when the
race of man always communicated mind to mind, as we do at present; but
now -- I mean in my day, which is separated by only a few years from
yours -- humanity is past the full glory and sinking into the sunset:
or the Himalayas, to use that telling phrase."
But the pallid metaphors of speech here became the thing itself, so that
for a timeless moment they were embodied in the untiring myriad generations
of men and women who trooped down into the dull cindery glow beyond the
clouds over the highest mountains.
Ann's thoughts came small and lonely, but alive, like dancing shoes on an
empty dance floor. "Wygella, you are part of the splendid reality Norman
Silverstone only glimpsed!" Behind the dancing shoes trailed streamers,
speaking of her admiration for the younger woman and her abilities;
and behind the streamers, a silver boomerang, singing, "And I don't even
feel jealous of your special relationship with Eddie."
Back came Wygelia's thought, complex as a snowflake but spinning with her
humor and colored with her laughter and mischief: "You shouldn't feel jealous
-- I am what you would call the granddaughter of your union with Eddie!"
And they were all full of a concerto of shapes that expressed the mixed
emotions, delight, and some embarrassment and surprise -- and here some
little obsidian cubes of protest -- originating from Ann and Bush,
coalescing with a sort of nuptial sprightliness.
This whole amazing experience was rendered more amazing because Borrow was
filling enormous multi-dimensional spaces with abstract thought, turning
himself into replicated bars of mental energy that formed an enormous
and transient art work; and at the same time, Howes was conducting a
separate thought-exchange with Wygelia. His question, flowing like gravel,
demanded to know where they were going; her answer, vivid and electric,
meant: "You know we are already many thousands of millions of years
beyond your present. But those of us who walk the Cryptozoic have more
space than that to exercise in. We are now far beyond Phanerozoic time,
and into Decompositional time, where only chemicals battle with each
other for existence. You will see that Silverstone comes from the last
days of the world."
And back came Howes' tiny reflection, soft and enduring as a grain of pollen:
"Then we shall die . . ."
They were standing they scarcely knew where, after experiencing they scarcely
knew what.
At once Howes, and then Borrow, Ann, and Bush, clutched at their throats;
no oxygen was seeping through their air-leakers. They were so many geochrons
back towards the end -- the beginning -- of the world, that the gases on
which human life depended were now locked away in the groaning interior of
the globe in non-volatile combinations.
"You are safe!" Wygelia cried, pointing at the four pallbearers. Each had
erected hollow rods like aerials from the cases on their backs; these rods
now fumed fiercely like half-lit torches of tar. "We have our own means of
supplying oxygen and nitrogen in these barren places," she said. "We are
further protected from the conditions outside by a sphere of force operating
within the entropy barrier, so we are free from all harm here."
As she reassured them, they could draw the air into their lungs and take
time to view their surroundings.
The Earth, sinking towards its end, was in a semi-molten state.
The temperature beyond their protective sphere and beyond the entropy wall
was several thousand degrees Centigrade. It seemed to be the hour of dawn,
but there had surely been no proper night on this deliquescing planet.
All about them was a sea of ash, patched with streaks of broken light
which radiated upwards. The sea heaved; the ash was but a thin crust,
covering an unending gleet of molten rock.
Their little party, with the body of Silverstone central among them,
stood on the generalized floor of mind-travel which roughly coincided with
the surface of an enormous slab of rock perhaps half a mile wide. Like
the sea, the rock had a slow, uneasy motion; it floated like an iceberg
on the magma; like an iceberg, it would dissolve and be gone.