Dinosaur Beach

42

The over-intellect of which I was a fraction confronted me. Fresh as I was from a corporeal state, to me its thought impulses seemed to take the form of a great voice booming in a vast audience hall.

“The experiment was a success,” it stated. “The dross has been cleansed from the timestream. Man stands at the close of his First Era. All else is wiped away. Now his future is in his own hands.”

I heard and understood. The job was finished. I-he had won.

There was nothing more that needed to be said—no more data to exchange—and no reason to mourn the doomed achievements of man’s many eras.

We had shifted the main entropic current into a past into which time travel had never been developed, in which the basic laws of nature made it forever impossible. The World State of the Third Era, the Nexxial Brain, the Star Empire of the Fifth, the cosmic sculpture of the Sixth—all were gone, shunted into sidetracks, as Neanderthal and the Thunder Lizard had been before them. Only Old Era man remained as a viable stem: Iron Age Man of the Twentieth Century.

“How do we know?” I asked. “How can we be sure our efforts aren’t as useless as all the ones that went before?”

“We differ from our predecessors in that we alone have been willing to contemplate our own dissolution as an inevitable concomitant of our success.”

“Because we’re a machine,” I said. “But the Kargs were machines, too.”

“They were too close to their creator, too human. They dreamed of living on to enjoy the life with which man had endowed them. But you-I are the Ultimate Machine: the product of megamillennia of mechanical evolution, not subject to human feelings.”

I had a sudden desire to chat: to talk over the strategy of the chase, from the first hunch that had made me abandon my primary target, the blackclad Enforcer, and concentrate on the Karg, to the final duel with the super-Karg, with the helpless Mellia as the pawn who had conned the machineman into overplaying his hand.

But all that was over and done with: past history. Not even that, since Nexx Central, the Kargs, Dinosaur Beach had all been wiped out of existence. Conversational postmortems were for humans who needed congratulation and reassurance.

I said, “Chief, you were quite a guy. It was a privilege to work with you.”

I sensed something which, if it had come from a living mind, would have been faint amusement.

“You served the plan many times, in many personae,” he said. “I sense that you have partaken of the nature of early man to a degree beyond what I conceived as the capacity of a machine.”

“It’s a strange, limited existence,” I said. “With only a tiny fraction of the full scope of awareness. But while I was there, it seemed complete in a way that we, with all our knowledge, could never know.”

There was a time of silence. Then he spoke his last words to me: “As a loyal agent, you deserve a reward. Perhaps it will be the sweeter for its meaninglessness.”

A sudden sense of expansion—attenuation—a shattering—

Then nothingness.