Barrington Bayley - Collision with Chronos

The Oblique Entity had answered in a throbbing voice. “There is considerable drama in this situation on Earth,” it had said. “I am reluctant to interfere with that drama.”

For periods during their discourse the room in which Ascar sat had wavered and vanished, and he’d found himself drifting like a dust-mote through vast ratcheting machine-spaces, or through dark emptinesses in which swam flimmering, half-seen shapes. This was not, he decided eventually, an attempt to frighten him or a show of anger on the Entity’s part. It was simply that its thought processes occasionally distracted its attention from the job of transmitting sensory data to the receiver in Retort City, and Ascar was left picking up random images. Each time the Entity spoke, however, he was promptly deposited back in his simulated room.

Then, finally, the voice had changed. Ascar had heard the girl’s voice again, coming through the speaker with a tinkly laugh.

“Enterprise such as yours deserves a reward,” she’d said. “This is what I will do.”

And the Entity had shown him, not in words, but in a graphic, simple demonstration that had jolted right into his consciousness. It showed him time being split up into rivulets and streaming in all directions to bring deserts to life. And it showed him the main torrent from which those rivulets were taken, rushing headlong to where it would meet with an equal power and be convulsed into a horrendous vortex that would destroy it.

When Ascar explained this to Shiu the old man nodded, reflecting at length.

“Ingenious,” he said. “And logical. The Oblique Entity clearly has a sense of justice.”

“I don’t understand,” Sobrie Oblomot complained. “I don’t understand any of it.”

Shiu glanced at him and then wrapped his arms in his sleeves. “It would be difficult for a layman,” he admitted in his slow, musing voice. “Attend to the following description. Time moves forward, always in one direction. But there is more than just one direction in the real universe. Six dimensions can be defined, not just the three that the Absolute Present produces. So outside the stream of time that travels from the past into the future, there is yet more non-time, like a landscape through which the river of time flows. What this means in practical terms is that there are alternate Earths existing in the fifth dimension, side by side with the Earth you know. These Earths are uninhabited: they have no life, and no time. The river of time could be turned aside so as to flow into one of these alternate Earths, instead of directly onward. There would be no collision; an ideal solution to your problem.”

“And that, I take it, is not to be?” Sobrie asked, wrestling with these abstract ideas.

“Regretfully, no. The Entity is leaving the main stream of Earth’s time untouched. It agrees only to split off rivulets from the main flow, sending each into a different Earth – there are a vast number to choose from, all more or less the same. The people involved in these rivulets will find themselves constituting a small island of life in an otherwise desert planet. But eventually that life will spread to cover the whole globe. In each case a new world will be born.” He nodded to himself, an unselfconscious picture of sagacity. “It is, perhaps, a wiser solution than we would have chosen.”

“Each surviving dev reservation will be given a world of its own,” Ascar explained to Sobrie. “The Oblique Entity is giving every human subspecies its own future, free of interference from any other. A contingent of Titan civilisation, even, is being given its own Earth to rule – an Earth where there will be no alien interventionists, no future-Earth aliens to destroy Titan ambitions. And the same holds for the future-Earth race: they also have various factions and nations, some of which will be saved.”

“And for the rest – annihilation?”

“Yes – almost.” A gleam, as of a vision, came into Ascar’s eyes. “The Armageddon, the great war through time, must take place, as must the collision in time. But even there, there will be survivors. Even now the Titans are drawing up blueprints for protective bunkers, buffered with intense artificial time fields to try to ward off the force of the collision. Some of these bunkers – a few – will probably survive, provided their equipment is rugged enough. So there will be a handful of Titans left alive after it’s all over, to try to rebuild something on an Earth that will be unimaginably devastated.”

“This splitting up of time – when is it going to happen?”

“It already has happened,” Ascar said. “It had happened before the Titans found me in Shiu’s observatory.”

Sobrie wondered if his friends in the Amhrak reservation had noticed their changed circumstances yet. It was good, he thought to himself, to know that Amhrak civilisation would continue.

Titan-Major Brourne flung the array of vidcoms off the table with one sweep of his arm. Nobody was reporting in now.

Brourne was alone in his office; he’d already sent his adjutant outside to help man the barricade. The time had come, he saw, for the last stand.

He strode from the office. As far as he knew his HQ was the only post not yet overrun, and an attack was expected any second.

A long gallery-like concourse stretched ahead of the building he’d chosen for his headquarters. It gave an excellent defensive position: a long avenue, bare of cover, up which an enemy must pass. But that would avail little, he knew, against the tricks of these Chinks.

He’d barely reached the steel barricade set up across this avenue, and was giving a few words of encouragement to his men, when the attack started.

The Chinks were everywhere simultaneously. Several appeared on his side of the barricade and some of his men set to fighting them furiously at close quarters, while others were firing stolidly down the avenue. Once again Brourne observed the dreadful effects of Hoka, but fortunately the Chinks here were outnumbered. Then he directed his eyes down the avenue. There they were: blue-uniformed, broad-helmeted, flitting in and out of existence and advancing down the concourse like shadowy ghosts. He was facing an enemy one could only see half the time.

Suddenly Major Brourne gave a violent, almost joyous roar. He leaped forward to a gun emplacement, pushed the gunner aside, and lifted the heavy machine gun off its tripod. Normally two men were needed to carry it, but Brourne clambered over the barricade, the cartridge belt trailing behind him, and fired a long burst from the hip.

“No use squatting here, men!” he bellowed. “Come on out and get ’em!”

He went lumbering down the concourse, firing intermittently from the big, clumsy weapon, into the crowd of flitting Chinks. This was the way to go, he told himself. To die like a man, fighting to the last breath against a subhuman horde.

He was still firing when a hand touched the back of his neck and he died.

The blue-garbed soldiers thronged the plaza before the balcony where Su-Mueng, Sobrie and Prime Minister Hwen Wu, with members of his cabinet, stood. Su-Mueng licked his lips nervously.

It had been his own idea: he would parade the cabinet of the Leisure Retort before his victorious soldiers. The venerable officials would lose face, would seem human and vulnerable. The workers would see for themselves the men who’d denied them their rights.

Hwen Wu, however, had been unexpectedly in favour of the confrontation. Indeed, he’d seemed not to understand Su-Mueng’s intent, but had thanked him graciously for organising the proceeding. He should have been more forthright with Hwen Wu, Su-Mueng thought.

Because, in rolling, sonorous tones, the Prime Minister was praising the workers of the Production Retort for their timely intervention.