The Overlords of War (26 page)

He trod on something. Bending down, he retrieved a little flat blade of blackened metal with a square notch at one end. He raised it to his neck and engaged the collar in the notch. No result. He began to turn the collar slowly. His hands shook and he almost had to stop. A block of ice exploded in his guts. Sweat poured into his eyes. The capillaries in his suit, overloaded, ceased to keep his back and armpits dry. He was suddenly very thirsty.

When he had turned the collar completely around, it fell apart in two sections. He caught them, looked them over for a moment—seeing that their edges were smooth, as though they had been no more than pressed together—and, in a futile gesture, hurled them far away.

He could see no sense in what Veran had done. Had he hoped to get clear so completely that Corson would never again be a threat to him? Had he detected a certain fellow feeling on Corson’s part?

An idea came to his mind. Maybe Veran had tried to take the pegasone in the hope of returning to Aergistal. That was the right place for him. And if indeed Aergistal was hell, he had no doubt succeeded.

Corson headed into the camp, hoping to find another pegasone there. The fighting had died down. In a few hours at most the Urians would have the situation in hand. They would meet hardly any resistance. The dying had been finished off. A few lightly injured men were trying to dress their wounds. Guns lay around here and there. But what Corson had been most afraid of was not happening. The soldiers were not maltreating the women. Some were walking about, rather shyly, in the company of three or four beauties, while others, sitting on the grass, were trying to strike up a conversation. They seemed surprised, almost frightened, at the willingness of the girls to cooperate. Maybe they were disappointed.

They would be even more so, Corson thought, forty-eight hours from now . . .

He spotted a soldier wearing a security collar, who sat grief-stricken on a gun carriage with his head in his hands. He touched the man’s shoulder.

“The key,” he said. “The key to your collar.”

The man looked up. Corson read in his eyes stupefaction and alarm. He repeated, “The key of your collar!”

He bent down and opened it, and handed the two pieces to the soldier, who gave a weary smile.

“Take the key,” Corson said. “Other men have collars on. See to them.”

The soldier nodded, but his expression remained absent. The collar might have left his neck, but no key could release him from the memory of Veran, from the ghost of his dead leader.

Corson picked out a pegasone without meeting any opposition. He strapped himself on with extreme care. He had done what he had to do and closed the loop in time. There remained one more jump for him to make, to the beach where—perhaps—Antonella was awaiting him.

And the Council of Uria, Selma, Cid, and Ana ... his friends.

On the beach a woman alone: blond, naked, lying face downward. She was either asleep or in communion. There were no footsteps on the sand except hers. Corson sat down nearby and waited for her to awaken. He had plenty of time. Ahead of him stretched a fragment of the eternity on which was founded Aergistal.

He relaxed. He had reached the end of his road. He could afford to stare at the sea and run sand between his fingers. Later, he too would learn to master time. He had already had a certain amount of practical experience.

The woman roused. She stretched, rolled over, rubbed her eyes. Corson recognized her.

“Floria Van Nelle,” he said.

She nodded and smiled, faintly and almost sadly.

“Where are they?” he demanded, and when she appeared not to understand, went on: “Cid, Selma, and Ana! I must make my report to the Council of Uria.”

“There has been a time slip,” Floria said softly. “Thanks to you, not a very grave one. But in this line of probability they do not exist.” “They’re dead?”

“They have never existed.”

“I’ve lost my way,” Corson said. “I’m in the wrong place—the wrong time—maybe the wrong universe!”

“You have erased them. They inhabited a parenthesis of history. Your intervention has abolished them.”

Corson felt himself turn pale. He clenched his fists. "They were my friends, and I’ve killed them!”

Floria shook her head. “No. They belonged to another possibility and you have brought about this better one. They knew what would become of them if you succeeded, and they hoped you would succeed.” Corson sighed. He had had friends and they had vanished, shadows now even fainter than those claimed by death. They had left nothing behind, not a footprint, not a scratch on a stone, not even a name in this universe which to them was forever closed. They had not been born. They were no more than a memory in Corson’s mind and abstract entries in the ghostly records of Aergistal.

What I touch I wipe away. I am the eraser of the gods.

He recalled Touray, a good comrade, doubtless tossed back into the crazy chaos of unending battle. He thought of Ngal R’nda, last Prince of Uria, torn to bits by his own devoted followers, and Veran, the cunning mercenary, struck down by his own companions. He thought, with terror, of Antonella. He wanted to ask a question, but words would not come.

“On the other creode I did not exist,” Floria said. “And I was assigned to welcome you when you arrived on Uria. Did you think I turned up by chance? Here I exist, thanks to you. Don’t say you’re sorry.”

Bitterly Corson said, “So we are ripples on the surface of reality, to be reshaped or dispersed by a puff of wind according to the whim of the gods. I’ve been a toy for Those of Aergistal, the puppeteers who are making over history.”

‘They are not gods, even if they are somewhat more than we are. They do not act merely from caprice.”

“I know,” Corson rasped. “They work for the best. They are eliminating war. They’re rearranging history so that it will climax with them. I heard all that at Aergistal. To eliminate war, comprehend war, preserve war . . . There they cower like rats at the end of time, scared of the Outside.”

“That’s only half the story,” Floria said patiently. “They are ourselves.”

“They’re our descendants. They mock us from their billion-year vantage point.”

“They are ourselves, Corson,” Floria repeated. “We are Those of Aergistal. But we don’t know that we are. We have to discover and grasp that truth. They are the sum of everything that’s possible, for their kind, for ours, for all others, even for species you cannot dream of and that could not dream of you. They are all the fragments of the universe and all the perceptions of the universe. We are not the ancestors of the gods, nor are they our descendants, but we are one part of them, cut off from our origins or rather from our completion. Each of us is one of their possibilities, a detail, a creode, aspiring in our muddled way to achieve union with them, yet struggling blindly in the dark to assert our separate existence. Something has happened somewhere in space and time which I myself don’t understand, though I know it was neither at the beginning nor the end of time. There is no ‘before’ or ‘after.’ To them, and already to a tiny extent to us, time is a dimension along which events coexist like objects laid side by side. We are one moment of the long path that leads to Aergistal, toward the union of all possible consciousness, and Those of Aergistal are each and every one of the beings who have ever taken and will ever take that path.”

“Gods with schizophrenia,” Corson grunted.

“Yes, if that helps you to understand them. Sometimes I tell myself that they must have set out to explore the full range of what is possible, and got lost on the way and became us, and that’s the reason for war, this splitting and cracking and crumpling of history which they are so carefully smoothing out. The fact that it has been broken prevents them, despite their great power, from instantly and completely setting the universe to rights. For what they are, we are also. War is part of them. And we must grope about to rediscover the long, the very long road that leads to them, that’s to say to ourselves. They were bom of war, Corson, from this dreadful tumult that shakes our lives, and they will only exist if they abolish it. Here and there they repair a fault, reknot the mesh. We do it, sometimes with their help. You have done it. Do you regret that?”

“No,” Corson said.

“To eliminate war,” Floria went on, “Those of Aergistal make use of people who have waged it. They know what it’s like. Sometimes they come to hate it enough to want to abolish it—really to want that, no matter what the cost. Those who do not immediately arrive at this conclusion spend a certain while at Aergistal. Eventually they understand. In the long run they all understand.”

“Even someone like Veran?” Corson said sceptically.

“Even someone like Veran. Right now he’s canceling a flare-up in the Lyra region.”

“But he’s dead,” Corson said.

“No one dies,” Floria countered. “A life is like a page in a book. There’s another next to it. Not after it—next to it.”

Corson rose and took a few steps toward the sea. He halted at the edge of the surf.

“It’s a great story. Who’s to tell me if it’s true?”

“Nobody. You’ll find that out by snatches. Maybe what you’ll find out will be a little different. No one has the monopoly of truth.” Without turning, Corson said—forcefully, almost violently—“I came back to learn the mastery of time, and how to commune with Those of Aergistal. And—”

“You’ll learn. Everything you’re capable of learning. We need people like you. There are so many outbreaks of war to be put out, like so many fires.”

“But I hoped to find peace,” Corson said. “And—and I came back for Antonella.”

Floria drew close and set her hands on his shoulders. “I beg you—” she began. He cut her short.

“I love her! Or ... or I used to love her. She has vanished too, hasn’t she?”

“She never existed. She had been dead for a long time. We took her from the mausoleum world, from that warlord’s collection, and equipped her with an artificial personality, just as you did with Veran’s recruits. It was essential, Corson. Without her you would not have acted as you did. But a real human being could not have entered Aergistal.”

“Without being a war criminal,” Corson said.

“She was no more than a machine.”

“You mean she was bait.”

“I’m desperately sorry. I will do whatever you wish. I will love you, George Corson, if that is what you want.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he muttered, recalling what Cid had told him: he must not hold against them what they had been forced to do. Cid had been expunged. He had known what was in store for him, yet he had pitied Corson . . .

“No one dies,” Corson said. “Perhaps I’ll find her again in another existence.”

“Perhaps,” Floria sighed.

Corson took a step into the sea. “So nothing is left to me—neither friendship nor love. My universe disappeared six thousand years ago. I’ve been cheated.”

"You are still free to choose. You can wipe it all away, return to square one. But remember! Aboard the Archimedes you were about to die.”

“Free to choose?” Corson echoed disbelievingly.

He heard her move away; when he turned he saw she was delving in the sand at the spot where it still bore the imprint of her body. When she came back she held an opalescent phial the size of a pigeon’s egg.

‘There is one more thing you must do in order to become completely one of us. Wild pegasones are no more capable of time travel than a caveman of advanced mathematics. At best they can move a few seconds back or forth. This phial contains an accelerator which multiplies their embryonic power billions of times over. You must administer it yourself at the proper moment. The dose has been carefully calculated. Its introduction into the past will cause no appreciable timequakes from your point of view. So far as your date of emergence is concerned, the margin for error is narrow, but we have taken that into account. A pegasone carries a certain volume of space along when it jumps through time. Now you know all that’s necessary. The decision is up to you, George Corson.”

He heard and understood. One last thing to be done. The keystone to be set on the arch. His own hand to be outstretched to himself across a gulf of six thousand years.

“Thank you,” he said. “But I don’t yet know what I’ll do.”

He took the phial and headed for his pegasone.

Corson jumped more than six thousand years into the past, groped around to get his bearings, made a spatial correction . . . and the pegasone locked into the present. The planet spun around him for a moment until he managed to stabilize himself. He was in a very elongated orbit, the sort which a warship would adopt if it wanted to brush past the planet, spending minimal time close to its surface but needing to discharge something under the best possible conditions and out of the eye of the sun.

He waited, musing. The universe was spread out before him, yet he saw practically nothing of it. It was like a well, infinitely deep and infinitely wide, whereas all that any human—or alien—eye could perceive was the narrow borehole of its own awareness. Tangled together, but never uniting, all those pipelike strands led to the skin of the universe, toward its ultimate surface, where they all at last united at Aergistal. Each point in the universe, so Cid had claimed, possessed its own ecological universe. So must any given observer, any given maker of decisions.

Everyone tries to read his own destiny on the walls of the well. Everyone, if he can, seeks to alter the design of his life. Unaware, we burrow away and distort the shafts our neighbors are sinking . . .

But not at Aergistal. Not on the surface of the cosmos. For Those of Aergistal there was no distinction between the ecological universe and the plenum. They could not neglect anything. They could not be unaware of anybody.

Below Corson, Urian scanners were searching the sky. They voiced the fears of another segment of this complicated history. But at this distance the combined masses of pegasone and rider were too small to unleash a reaction from the gun batteries.

Corson hesitated. He could make off, in which case he would most likely be killed in the explosion of the ship. He might perhaps reach the ground in company with the Monster; then, sooner or later, he would fall into the clutches of the Urians. Few prisoners had returned from Uria and none in good shape. He could let Lieutenant George Corson, part-time soldier, specialist in Monsters and ignorant of almost everything about them, continue to the term of his natural destiny. Then he, the other Corson, the time traveler, would be obliterated. Was it worth dooming the other Corson to all those trials which would culminate in the frustration of continuous check and the gall of loneliness? He wondered what the other Corson would decide at the conclusion of his journeyings. Then he recalled that he was that Corson.