Escape to Chaos

Chapter Four The Might of Deralan

Deralan, on arrival at Simpar, had been clapped into one of the feeding pens for fattening. He listened to the rumors that brightened the eyes of the one who had been in the pen before his shipment had arrived. Rumors of freedom. Rumors of revolt. They heard violence in the city for many days and nights and at last they were released. The guards were slain and the walls broken down and the gates smashed and the great house where the trader and pen-owner had lived set afire.

Deralan trotted into the city with the rest of them and there he heard the word that he had suspected, that he had not wanted to believe.

“Andro!” they shouted. “Andro of Galvan!” It was rallying cry, battle cry, blood scream. “Andro!”

With sickness in his throat, Deralan dodged into the mouth of an alley and waited until the running steps had thudded into the distance. Dusk had changed slowly to night before he found a lone slave he could overpower.

“What of this Andro? Quick, while you live!”

“Please! He is said to be in the city. He has come back. His face is changed, but he has come back.”

“Where can I find him?”

“I don’t know. Believe me, I don’t know!”

Deralan made a quick and practiced gesture and then flung the body from him. He joined another wolf pack, snatched a torch, held it high, looked endlessly for a man with the huge strong body of Andro of Galvan.

He found a knife with a blade that suited him. He looted and burned and shouted with the others, but always he searched for Andro. He lost track of the hours. And at last he found a big man who stood with a fair-haired girl behind him and fought well, fought with the skill to be expected of any noble of the House of Galvan. He seemed about to be overpowered when the girl stepped to the side and something gleamed in her hand. The three who still faced the big man folded and dropped into absurdly small heaps on the paving stones.

As the big man turned, the torchlight touched his upper arm. Deralan sucked in his breath as he saw the pale rectangular patch. As they hurried on, Deralan looked at the three bodies. He swallowed hard. Something that swept across them, something the girl had used, had apparently completely removed whole sections of the men’s torsos. That was why the huddled bodies looked so small.

He flung the torch aside to gutter out and followed the man and the girl through the smoke drift of the streets, his fingers hard and tight on the haft of the knife.

Deralan followed them out of the city and across the dark plain. The three dark moons stretched three vague shadows of his crouched body as he followed them. As the ground grew more uneven, he shortened the distance between them. He reversed the knife in his grasp. It had a good balance. Andro’s back was broad. Deralan raised the knife. He poised it. He hurled it with all his strength. In the fractional part of a second before he released it, a great light bathed the entire plain in green-white brilliance. During the last six inches of the swing of his arm it seemed to Deralan that some great outside force had taken his arm and had given it a whip and power beyond anything any man should possess. The odd power snapped the bones of his arm and hurled him screaming into blackness.

Solin sat with his hand on the port control, completely frozen by an astonishment so vast that he could not move. Arla had asked to perform the actual execution. Solin had been glad to comply as he had no heart for it. He opened the port for her and when she had the hand weapon readied, he lighted the target area for her. Andro and Calna were in perfect range, a hundred yards away and fifty feet below them. In the instant of touching the lights he had seen the third figure in the act of hurling what seemed to be a knife at the pair leading him.

The unknown man had hurled the knife. There had been a keening whistle indicative of high velocity and a full-throated chunk. Arla had fallen dead with the knife blade in her brain, the guard of the haft flat against her forehead.

No person could throw a knife that way. Yet they had. He had seen it. The thrower lay crumpled on the ground with both Andro and Calna staring at him.

Solin dropped the ship to the ground beside the hidden tunnel entrance. He stepped over Arla’s body and out into the now restricted area of green-white light.

Transition rested in Era 3 beside the endless thunder of the space port.

The Socionetics Board had launched a full scale investigation of the circumstances surrounding the loss of Era 4, and the loss of the thirty-odd Field Teams who had been trapped there when the index of probability dropped below the point where Agent ship power could accomplish the return.

The Board was exercising its prerogative of interviewing the staff members, one at a time. The Board met in the huge central chamber with the luminescent mural depicting the eventual merger of twenty-six co-existent worlds. Though now, of course, there were only twenty-four and thus the mural was, in that sense, a rather wry joke.

After three weeks of review and deliberation, the Director was called in to hear the decision of the Board.

The decision was very simple and very direct. It was given to him in the form of an order. Improper controls and criminal laxness have lost us two complete spheres of eventual cultural expansion. There will no longer be a continuing effort to accelerate the extrapolated cultural pattern of all backward eras simultaneously. All Field Teams will be concentrated on one era. All existing equipment will be immediately altered to make only that era, plus the basic three, available to Agent ships. Era 20 is closest to unity status. All effort is to be concentrated there. If, by any chance, Era 20 should be lost to us, all Field Team activities will be cancelled. No further acceleration of cultures will be attempted. All equipment except one master ship will be altered so as to permit only slip between basic eras. Periodic surveys with the master ship will be made. When each peripheral culture has attained proper probability status, then unity will be undertaken, but it will achieve that status in its own way and in its own time.

“And if unity is achieved with Era 20 without trouble?” the Director asked in a low voice.

“Then all effort will be concentrated on the next era closest to a possible unity status.”

The Director was permitted to leave. He gave the orders he was required to give. He gave an additional one of his own. He called all remaining Field Teams in for complete indoctrination on Era 20, for retraining, for re-analysis.

Thirty-three Field Teams trapped in Era 4. Count Andro and Calna, and subtract Arla. Sixty-seven persons. So few. So very few.

The golden pyramidal ships sat in a closed circle in such a way that the shields combined to form a cone of silence. The cone rose black and tall near the palaces of Rael.

In the streets they said, in hushed tones, “The Great Ones speak again together.”

Andro had matured in the past months. Authority was stamped on his face, and dignity was imprinted on each movement.

“It is time to speak,” he said after a long silence. “I do not pretend to know how you are trapped here. It has been explained to me. I have been told that my activities caused this era to diverge from some pattern or other. You say that this era has become less probable, in relation to your basic eras. Be that as it may. The damage was done. You were trapped. Through the urging of Solin and Calna, you consented to help me impose my will on what is left of Empire. That has been done. There is no more resistance. We are the object of superstitious awe on every inhabited planet of Empire. Now you must feel that your task is ended. I say to you that it is not ended. With your consent, I wish to make you my agents, give each of you an area to govern until such time as self-government is possible. You have been told the things in which I believe. You do not need specific orders. It is not easy to be considered a god, as I now am. If you do your assigned tasks properly, there will come a time when I am no longer considered to be a god. That time will come long after all of us have died. I am urging this course because it seems to me that in this way this era can be gently guided back toward a point where eventually your own people will once again be able to make contact.”

The trapped Agents showed no great enthusiasm.

Calna took Andro’s place and spoke. “I urge you to accept. Through the incident of Arla’s death, we have a piece of knowledge that they do not have back at Transition. We know now that while we were attempting to build backward eras up to the point where unity could be achieved, a stronger force was seeking to make all frames divergent. We do not know what that stronger force is. In my own case, I know I was guided when I set this entire pattern in motion. I suspected it then. I know it now. One thing is puzzling. Why was Deralan made the agent of saving Andro and myself from certain death? Divergence had already been achieved. Why was it done in such a way that we would learn of this outside force which interferes with the achievement of unity for our co-existent eras? There is one possible answer. We were saved so that we could be the focal point of this successful effort of the past few months. We were advised of outside interference so that we should be able to content ourselves with these new limitations.”

Solin spoke. “Content ourselves? How is that meant?”

“Through knowledge that we are part of a master plan guided by some race, some civilization whose abilities make ours look like the efforts of children,” Calna replied

“What sort of master plan is it which keeps the basic eras from achieving unity with all sister probability frames? That seems like progress in the wrong direction,” another Agent said with a note of anger.

“I say,” said Solin, “that now that we have given Andro the assistance he asked, we should concentrate on using what skills and talents we have to devise a power source ample enough to enable us to slip back to our own era.”

There was a mutter of agreement. Andro turned to Calna and shrugged.

He said to all of them, “I see that Solin’s suggestion is your wish. So be it.” He looked at Calna. “You will work with them?”

“I made my choice quite a long time ago,” she said. Together they went back to the palaces where new laws were being written for a galactic race.

Deralan knew at last that the madness was leaving him. It began to leave when he was willing to admit to himself that he had been mad. Something had swept across his brain, twisting it, convulsing it. At last he recognized his environment, knew with a sense of shock that he was in a cell deep under the main palace, a cell that he had filled and emptied many times in what now seemed like a previous incarnation.

Co-mingled with his weariness and lethargy was a new, odd sense of mental power, as though the twisting force had also liberated areas of his brain that had previously been dormant. Throughout the uncounted days of torment he had heard a constant shrill chorus of thin voices, as though he lay in the midst of a vast throng of children at play. Now he could bring back the voices at will, merely by reaching to hear them.

When food, was brought, one of the shrill voices separated itself from the others and became so distinct that he could understand scattered phrases, “—should be executed — Andro will decide — so many things changed — the Great Ones—”

And slowly Deralan came to know that he was listening to the thoughts of those near him. For a long time he listened. With practice he grew more acute, more certain of this new power. Once, when food was brought on an earthen dish, he willed the movement of opening the fingers of his right hand, not opening them, but willing the movement to open them with all his strength. The guard stared stupidly down at the smashed dish and scattered food. He massaged his fingers for a few moments.

With this start, Deralan began to practice with great care, making sure that what he was doing remain undiscovered. He found he could trip those who walked by the cell. At times he wondered if it was merely madness, but there was the evidence of his eyes and ears to be considered.

When he was certain of himself he caused a guard to leave the cell door unlocked. Deralan walked out. It was simplicity itself to cause every other guard to look the other way. He walked through as though invisible. He climbed the flights of stairs up to ground level and went out through all the gates into the streets of the city. He found a man of his own general build and guided the man into a narrow place between two buildings and caused the man to strip and don the prison garments. The man obeyed with an utterly blank expression, with no sign of confusion or fear.

Suddenly Deralan realized how pointless this attempt at escape was. This inexplicable gift which had been thrust upon him at the moment of hurling the knife was too powerful to be used for such a petty affair as escape. He turned soberly and walked back toward the main palace.

He found Andro and the fair-haired girl of the dark plain in the apartments that had once belonged to Shain. He sent the guards striding woodenly down the corridor and entered through the arched doorway.

Andro stared at him, his eyes widening. “Deralan!” he gasped.

“Where is Shain?”

“Shain is dead by his own hand. Larrent and Masec are in exile.”

“You are Emperor?”

“The last one, Deralan. How did you get by the guards?”

“How do you plan to dispose of me?”

“By trial. You’ll receive justice.”

He stood and listened to their thoughts, first sorting out Andro’s, then the woman’s. Andro was merely puzzled, not afraid. The woman intrigued him. Two voices seemed to come from her. One from here and now. Another background voice that spoke of far places and wondrous things and skills beyond imagining, of others like her who were nearby. He related it immediately to the thoughts of the guards who had spoken of the Great Ones. He changed his plan immediately. He had intended to kill them both, setting them against each other to kill. But these two were not the real opposition.

“Take me to your people,” he said aloud to the woman. She reached for a glittering object which hung from her wide belt. He remembered the three who died so quickly and strangely on Simpar. He made her fling the glittering object into a corner. Her eyes widened with fear and then assumed the familiar blankness. She came with him as he willed her to walk. Andro gave a hoarse cry of alarm and Deralan forced him back into a far corner, left him standing there.

The woman guided him to a place just outside the city where a ring of golden pyramidal objects stood around a building that was new, oddly constructed, covered with hoods and twisted screens of wire.

The woman took him into the building where there were scores of people at work. They stared at him oddly. These were the enemy.

In the center of the floor was the cube on which they worked. Cables as big around as a man’s thigh writhed away from the cube. A shining metal column rose upward from the cube through the roof high overhead.

Deralan looked at the cube and he was puzzled. He had a feeling of wrongness. He stared at it and saw wrongness, and an obscure clumsiness, and a childish ineffectuality. He walked closer to it and in his mind saw the image of the way it should be. The people were forgotten. Only the power cube was important. He brushed by those who tried to bar the way and reached into the cube where tiny tubes glowed and relays chattered. Slowly at first, and then with increasing dexterity he began to take down circuits. As they tried to pull him away, he turned with impatience and smote them back with a careless easy power of the mind which sent them sprawling. Soon he noted that they were helping him, and he heard his own voice giving instructions that sounded meaningless and yet had a sound of rightness as opposed to the wrongness he was eliminating.

After fifty hours of ceaseless labor the work was done. The blue cube was like nothing any of the exiled Agents had ever seen before. It utilized only a fractional part of the power they had hooked up to lead into it. It had ceased to be a cube and had become a geometric form which dizzied them as they looked at it. It had nine sides, yet only ten edges. The effect was mildly hypnotic, and the attempt to relate visual evidence to known geometric forms gave it the look of being in constant flux.

Deralan had collapsed the moment the work was finished. They had taken him to a couch. His eyes were wide and he babbled endlessly and sucked at his fingers.

The cables led to one of the Agent ships which had been brought as close as possible to the main entrance to the building.

Calna looked at them all in anger. “Are we to be superstitious children? Are we to be afraid of this? He was used before, by ‘them’. Now he has been used again. Once he had fulfilled his purpose, he was discarded.”

“What will it do?” Solin asked.

“I say it will do just what it was intended to do. Take us back to our own era,” she said.

Hesitation faded. Two Agents stepped into the ship and port folded shut behind them. The others watched, expecting the mistiness which would indicate that the ship had slipped properly. Instead the ship was just... gone. The heavy cables fell to the ground and the air, rushing into the place where the ship had been, made a sound like the cracking of a great whip.

One by one they departed. Solin was last. He left alone in the ship which he had shared with Arla. There was one golden ship left. And Calna. Andro had come. He watched her thoughtfully.

“You may go,” he said.

“I shall stay here, Andro. I belong now.”

She went back to the palace with him.

The long days went by. Often she went to a high window from which she could see the building in which the cube throbbed and shifted. Many times she walked to that place and watched the cube and touched her fingers lightly to the side of the small golden ship.

Andro sensed her discontent. He was busy with the new structure of government which he was building carefully. There was little that they could share.

She remembered other days, and other times, and realized more strongly each day how savage and primitive an era this was.

In a place that was no-place and in a time that was no-time, the thought record halted and waited. It waited, not in the sense of elapsing time, hut in the sense of an endless interruption. Impatience was not known to the intelligence directing the record. Other endless computations continued. But the directing intelligence, which did exist in a finite, though variable, space time, felt a subtle irritation.

This particular phase of this particular problem had been completed. The basic questions had been answered. An unseen hand had reached into the remote past, had twisted probabilities to the ultimate degree of distortion. In its simplest sense, false worlds had been created. The historical derivations had been weighed. Cause-effects had been measured in all temporal directions.

And now the ultimate step in the problem was held in stasis, merely because of the almost unpredictable whim of a female who, being a structural portion of an experiment in improbability, was herself improbable...

He came to her as she stood at the high window, and he said, “You must return. I know that. Come back, if it can be done, and if you have the desire. I can keep you a prisoner no longer.”

“Not a prisoner, Andro.”

“You must go back.”

“I will return if I can. But you’re right.”

They went to the golden ship where the cables were already attached, waiting.

She turned as she entered the port, and lifted her hand slowly. Her eyes were misted. She turned quickly to the controls. The port folded shut.

And thus, with the whip crack of her departure, the universe itself, Andro’s time and place and cities and suns and planets and wars and history — snapped out as though a quick finger had touched the light switch, leaving a room in darkness. The webs of probability had been pulled tight, twisted. And now the pressure was released. The record had been kept. The experiment was over.

Probability is like a plastic which is formed with a molecular “memory.” It can be distorted, but once released, it will revert.

The reversion will be a function of time, rather than space. Tangential worlds can be artificially created. So long as the artificial pressure is maintained, they will seem to “exist.” But with the release of that pressure...

The Agent Ship had plunged into the crust of Zeran in Era 4, powerless to save the sole remaining ship, the flagship of Andro’s fleet. The crippled flagship swung lower, out of control. Solin, at the controls of the Agent ship, picked up the crippled ship in his screens and swung up through the planet crust in order to be within close range in case anything might be done. He halted the Agent ship twenty feet below ground level just as the crippled ship landed with a tremendous jarring crash.

Calna moved up behind him and watched the screen over Solin’s shoulder. A powerful man staggered out through the huge rent in the skin of the ship, dragging an unconscious dark-haired girl. They saw him glance up at the dark skies, his face twisted with fury and anger. He fumbled for a pulse in the girl’s throat, then stood silently, shoulders slumped, in stoic grief. Again he searched the blackness overhead, and ran into the city. His wounds had weakened him. He weaved as he ran, but he tugged a weapon from his holster.

“Can we save him once more?” Calna asked calmly.

“Not this time. They’ve seen him run into the city.”

“At least we could follow. Report the end of it.”

They took the portable screen from the rack, left the ship standing there, sliced through the depths of the city, following Andro in his blundering run. They saw him take refuge in a blind alley, shadowed by the eternal blue dusk. They saw him brace his shoulders against the wall, waiting for them to find him.

Calna and Solin waited directly below him.

Soon the dying man was spotted. He used the weapon well. His last shot was fired from within the boundary of death itself, the finger tightening in the last convulsion. Deralan came and cautiously inspected the body. He signaled to the others to take the body away.

Solin started back along the fresh tunnel, but Calna did not follow. He turned and stared at her. “What is it?”

“I... I don’t know. A very odd feeling. As though somehow we have made a mistake that we could not predict. We should have cut up through to him, saved him.”

“And turn a decent rebellion into a pseudo-religious revival?” Solin said.

“I know all that. It was just an odd feeling. But strong, Solin. Very strong.”

Sarrz, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Socionetics, turned in his chair so that he would not have to look at the face of the female Agent who had asked to speak with him after she and Solin had made a rather disappointing, but unavoidable, report on the demise of one Andro, rebel of Era 4.

“You say you are troubled.”

She chose her words carefully. “I wish to request EC, Deputy Director. I have had odd imaginings. Possibly the strain of the last few months in Era 4.”

“Do you care to tell me any of them?”

She shrugged. “They are all a bit ridiculous. It seemed that in some other existence we had saved Andro rather than permitting him to be killed. I know how unfortunate a mistake it would have been to save him again. Also, I found myself thinking that we had lost some of the eras by permitting too great a probability divergence from our basic eras. And during the last sleep I dreamed that we have a power source which can cause slip to any era, no matter how divergent.”

“Those are concrete examples. But what is your attitude toward them?”

“Awe, I would say. Foreboding. And a feeling of having led other existences.”

Sarrz said, “All of us have dreams. I dreamed of dying at this desk. I have dreamed of losing all the worlds.”

“And you feel fear?”

“Tension. Doubt. But those, I feel, are the result of our primitive heritage. It is in our blood and our bones to think of only one space and one time. Now we know that there are twenty-six available space-times contiguous to our own which we can reach, and an infinite number of others that we cannot yet reach. I would not worry too much, Agent Calna. We live in a day of oddness, of new philosophic evaluations, of invisible doors which have opened so that we can step through. The first wild dogs that joined savage man in his caves must have had uneasy dreams by the fires of night. And maybe, Agent Calna, we are no higher in our possible evolutionary scale than those dogs were in relation to the man they joined. Even now, at this moment, some inconceivable intelligence from our remote future may be tampering with our acts and the consequences of our acts. Such tampering would leave elusive traces in your mind, in my mind. Possibly every time we enter a strange room and have the feeling that we have been in that room before, it is because we actually have been in that room, in some fragmentary part of a vast experiment which was later abandoned. Our present actions, this very conversation, this room... it could all be part of an artificially induced environment merely in order to test your reaction and mine. In fact, you may not even exist in the ordinary sense of the word, but only as a manufactured entity thrown into my personal equation as some portion of a test for a solution.”

The girl smiled uncertainly. “This begins to sound like one of the conversations planned to disprove the existence of everything except the mind of the beholder.”

“I will approve EC if you insist.”

“I think I must insist.”

“You can report to EC at once, if you wish. I will reassign Solin, and give you a new partner when you return.”

The girl left. Sarrz sat in utter stillness for a long time. The girl’s request had crystallized some of his own weary doubts as to the rightness of the entire program on which they had embarked.

He sat and felt a sour yearning for the days gone by, the days when man could concern himself with only one environment — back in the functional simplicity of the third atomic era.