The Overlords of War (27 page)

Well—was it worth it?

That night of terror in the forest beside the wailing Monster. Floria Van Nelle. She must have known he was going to attack her. Or could she really sense nothing beyond that fringe of a few seconds where the future loomed into certainty? Dyoto, the city he knew to be doomed, and his comical wanderings among its vertical streets. Antonella, who seemed to have sprung from nowhere and in fact had done so. Veran. His captivity. The house of the dead at the end of the blue road. Aergistal, that caldron of war where death itself was no more than a respite. And this web of intrigue, this mad to-and-froing of fanatics and warmakers in which time tore itself apart.

If he did nothing, if he went away . . . The Monster would reach its destination. It had proved how tough it was. It would bear its offspring. In due time Earth would win the war. She would dress her wounds. She would control, by cunning or by force of arms, the nascent Confederation. There would be rebellions, and further wars.

But this, he realized, was ancient history. A warmed-over tale from six thousand years ago. In the future where he had lived, the war between the Solar Powers and the Princes of Uria had been filed and forgotten. Nobody had won, and in the final analysis both sides had lost. Whatever he did, that would be the outcome. It was no longer important to him, anyhow. He had ceased to be Lieutenant Corson of the Archimedes, worried about the course of the war and the safety of his own hide. He had turned into another person altogether.

Process ... He looked at the stars spangling the sides of the universal well, more numerous here than in the sky of Earth. In six thousand years they would still shine in virtually the same places. Each held a mystery, and a promise, and a fragment of History. To Corson the lieutenant they had been only abstract lights, the glints on the teeth of terror. To the new Corson it was more as though each lighted a rung of a scaling ladder by which he could climb over the ramparts of time.

He could leave the lieutenant to eke out the short span of life remaining to him, wipe away all bitterness, accomplish the most perfect suicide of all eternity. But that other Corson in the black hull of the Archimedes had had no desire to die.

Can I divide myself from him? Corson wondered. And it came to his mind that Floria had spoken only half the truth. Yes, perhaps warfare was the result of shattering that union of all possibilities experienced by Those of Aergistal. But why Those, in the plural? Was there not some point at which Those of Aergistal would be revealed as all possible variants of a One? And might not that One have grown bored, and chosen to scatter Himself knowingly into oblivion, becoming each man and all men, each being and all beings? Rock and worm, star and wave, space and time . . .

Am I dreaming? Corson wondered. Or am I remembering?

He would never know if the other Corson were to die. Along with his life, he would lose the memory of having lived.

Beyond life, there was hyperlife. Like the pages of a book, in Floria’s image. A hypercube, a tesseract, contains an infinite number of cubes yet its volume is finite in four dimensions. “Our lives are not infinite, but they are boundless,” so the being at Aergistal had said. “You will learn to control time. You will become like us.”

So there were at least three levels of existence: the level of potential, that of Cid and Selma and Ana, where one was no more than an entry in the phantom records at Aergistal; the level of linear life, like that of the other Corson, where one was held prisoner by time from birth to death; and finally the level of hyperlife, which might symbolically be mapped along a dimension perpendicular to the time axis, where one was liberated from time.

What he was reminded of was the notion of excitation states of elementary particles, as defined in primitive physics. Maybe the pioneering scientists of early human history had sensed a great truth. A particle—atom, nucleon, meson, quark—once excited, rose to a higher energy level. It would become something else without ceasing to be itself. It could spontaneously revert to its initial state by giving off in its turn particles of a lesser order, such as a photon, an electron, a neutrino, a muon, or the like.

Now Corson was standing on the threshold of hyperlife. He could fall back to the level of linear existence by emitting the counterpart of a neutrino, his existence of the past several weeks, which would become potential and cease to have significant consequences. It would not vanish completely, but it would have negligible reality, massless and chargeless like a neutrino. Someone in a laboratory at Aergistal would observe the equivalent of a shower of sparks. A spectral cloud chamber would record the discontinuance of a hyperlife.

Not every page of the book could be so drowned in bitterness . . .

Corson reached his decision.

The blackened hull of the Archimedes was occulting a cluster of stars above him. He desynched the pegasone, approached, penetrated the screens and armor of the ship. Unafraid of being noticed, he made for the magazine; temporal dephasing would make him effectively imperceptible to any observer on board.

He felt his pegasone hesitate, reluctant to come close to its wild cousin. Calming it, he slipped the phial into the grip of one of its tendrils. He saw himself from behind, his outline distorted by the temporal dephasing and the pegasone’s peculiar senses. The tendril coiled around the phial probed through the force screen enclosing the Monster. When the phial was above the creature’s maw, he locked his pegasone into the present for a billionth of a second. A flash, a sharp crack. The force screen had chopped off the tendril and the injured beast had shied through time and space.

A leap of a few kilometers, a few seconds.

Away in space Corson waited, staring at the tiny, almost invisible hull of the ship. A very old memory came back to him. Just before the catastrophe he had seen a flash, unbearably brilliant but so brief he had doubted its reality. He had had no time to puzzle about it then.

A new flash was superimposed on that infinitesimal trace. The Archimedes had blown up. And the gun batteries on Uria had remained silent. The orbit her captain had selected had fulfilled its purpose; her approach had gone unnoticed.

A generator breakdown, he said to himself.

More likely, though, was that he himself had unleashed the catastrophe. The accelerator had vastly multiplied the powers of the Monster. It had not made use of them at once to flee through time. It had turned against its cage, and the generators could not stand the load.

Shattered, the hull of the Archimedes plunged toward the jungles of Uria. It seemed to Corson that something separated from it. An illusion. He did not yet have the power to see across time. But that would come.

He thought of his old comrades, dead now. There was nothing he could do for them. The die was cast once for all.

A long while later the hull reached the atmosphere and burst into flame. The ground batteries finally opened up. Space became full of spy missiles. Corson forced himself to believe that the ship would have been destroyed in any case. Another illusion.

The ship burned out under the heedless stars.

Somewhere on Uria, six thousand years away, another Corson was struggling to stay alive. He did not yet know he would be called on to cancel out a war under the chill gaze of the eons, that at Aergistal he would hear the voice of the true gods, and that he would perhaps enter into hyperlife.

“Why me?” Corson asked himself as once again he took the path toward the future.

Me—me—me . . . said echo-Corsons spread out along his lifeline, and all around on the lifelines of alternative Corsons. He felt his mind fill with a murmuring sound such as might give birth to words, the undercurrent of their common consciousness. It seemed he was on the brink of communion with them, these countless Corsons of the ramifying future. He could believe that he was going to know what they lived through, see with their eyes, think their thoughts. But he remained as yet on the threshold of that perfect union, for time had not finished its work, nor had experience, and those Corsons were only just beginning to have the shadow of a chance of existence.