Eschaton 3 - THE FAR SHORE OF TIME

CHAPTER TWENTY

Those scenes in the helmet had put the fear of God into me- well, fear of the Others, anyway. They were definitely taking over my planet. Every last person I cared about-even Pat, even my other self!-was threatened with becoming a zombie servant of the Others, just like the Docs.

It was about the worst news I had ever had to face. I didn't see how I would be able to sleep with that haunting me. I was wrong about that, though. I dropped off as soon as Pirraghiz left the room, and I didn't even dream.

Maybe that was my own way of turning away, like Pirraghiz, from what was too hard to face. It didn't last. The minute I woke up, there it was. I didn't have any choice. I had to face it.

I stumbled across the dimly lit room to the balcony, my mind full of what I had seen. When I threw the accordion slides open it was bright daylight outside, and three or four Horch were getting into their tricycles to go to work in the fields. I stared at them without seeing them, thinking hard. What I wanted to do more than anything else was to escape from this place, back to Earth, to face whatever was still happening there.

What I had to do first, though, was something different. One additional warm body wouldn't be much help to the human race. To be of any use at all, I had to bring something useful back with me. What's more, I had to do it now… always assuming, that was to say, that what I had seen was what was still happening, and not ancient history.

When Pirraghiz heard me moving around she came in, bringing food. As soon as she was in the room she glanced at the drapes, shook that big head reprovingly and began to fuss with them without waiting to hear anything I might have to say. She scolded, "You mustn't cover the lights during the day, Dannerman. They have to charge up with sunlight so that you can use them after dark."

I wasn't in a mood to be instructed about housekeeping. I said to her back, "How long have I been here?"

She left off fussing with the drapes and turned around, peering at me. "What?"

"I want to know," I insisted. "Those scenes in the helmet, they come from all different times-some winter, some not. I can't tell anything from them, and I need to know how much time has passed."

"Do you mean since the Horch liberated this planet? Let me see." She stroked the mossy beard on her chin, counting to herself. "About four sixty-fours of days, I think. A little more."

I did the arithmetic in my head. Allowing for the fact that this planet's days were shorter than Earth's, it came out to about six months. A long time, and a lot could have happened. But it wasn't ancient history.

"All right," I said. "Now I want to know everything there is to know about the Horch and the Belov-I mean, the Others. Let's get started."

Pirraghiz was obliging, but she was puzzled, too, and she had a lot of questions. What exactly was it that I wanted to know? When all my answers kept adding up to that same single word-"everything"-she sighed. "I must have advice on this," she told me. "Wait for me. Eat. I will be back very soon."

She was, too. I was sipping from a ceramic bowl the last of something that tasted salty and faintly sour when she appeared at the door. She looked pleased. "Much of what you want to learn may be in the Repository of the Nest," she announced. "The Greatmother has given permission to take you there-as soon," she said, tidily beginning to pick up die dishes from my breakfast, "as I put these in my room."

I didn't want to wait for that, or for anything, but Pirraghiz was firm. Her room was about the same size as mine-pretty small, for a Doc-and she had fitted it with enough belongings to make me think she planned to stay for a while. Among the tiny potted flowers and the bric-a-brac I saw one of those great, cubical cookers Dopey had used. I thought of how much heat those things could produce, and wondered if Beert knew she had it in his fire-free nest. Pirraghiz caught my stare and asked, "Is something wrong?"

I didn't want to get into a discussion, so I lied. "I was wondering why the Horch have so many empty rooms like this," I said.

"Why," she said, closing the door and leading me down the steps, "the reason is simple. When the Horch liberated this planet, all of the captive Horch who wished it were returned home- well, taken to Horch planets, anyway; it has been so long since they were brought here that none of them really has a home anywhere else anymore."

That much I knew, more or less, but I kept her talking. "But not Djabeertapritch and these others."

She gave me one of those massive arms-and-shoulders shrugs. "The ones who stayed in this nest do not always agree with all the things about the cousin Horch."

That got my interest. If Beert and the "cousins" disagreed, there might be a place to drive a useful wedge between them. "What kind of things?"

But Pirraghiz was not willing to be drawn out on that. "You must ask Djabeertapritch himself," she said. "Now here is the Repository of the Nest."

The Repository of the Nest was a library, and it looked like one. It was a suite of three or four rooms, all lined with ceiling-high shelves. In two rooms an assortment of wooden boxes were shelved, most of them looking ancient and worn. In the third some of the wooden boxes had been replaced with bright yellow cubes made of the Horch ceramic. In that room a young Horch female was working at a high table, a spread of documents in front of her. She gave us an unwelcoming glance, but Pirraghiz paid no attention. Pirraghiz knew what she was looking for. She went at once to a great, double-fronted chest of drawers that sat in the middle of the room, and began pulling out an assortment of those silvery spools I had seen in her own room, back in the compound. As she picked each one out she scanned the legend on its label before putting it back, frowning.

I took one of the rejects from her hand to look it over. She didn't resist. She only whispered, "Be careful with it." But it wasn't helpful. Its label bore a string of curlicues and jagged lines-identifying its contents, I supposed.

But the writing meant nothing to me. The gadget behind my ear had its limitations. The Horch had given me their spoken language, but hadn't bothered to make me literate.

I wasn't one of the Bureau's language wonks. Outside of English, the only one I knew well was German. But being unable to read any language I could speak at all was new to me, and depressing. I left Pirraghiz and wandered over to where the young female was at work. She had one of the antique wooden boxes open, carefully transferring its contents to a ceramic one. On the floor next to her was a kind of balloon, almost a meter across, with its valve gently hissing. She elevated her head warningly as I came close.

"Do not breathe moisture on the records," she ordered. "These are very old and very delicate."

I moved back a step, turning my head sharply away from her as though about to be inspected for a hernia. Mollified, she explained what she was doing. The documents were the total records of the captive Horch colony, from their earliest beginnings.

Her job was to transfer them from their original containers to the new ones given by the Horch cousins. When she finished the box she would seal it and then purge the air out of it with an inert gas from the balloon at her feet. She was obviously proud of the responsibility the Greatmother had given her. She even pulled a few sheets out of their boxes for me to see. The earliest ones were very old, scratched on tough leaves; later the sheets were paper, somehow or other made by the colonists. But when the librarian read me a few lines, there was nothing there worth trying to remember; after their capture, the colonists had had a tough time, and their hardships were what they wrote about. Interesting. Even touching. But useless.

And so, it seemed, were the book spools Pirraghiz was sorting through. "I am sorry, Dannerman," she told me. "I do not think there is much here that will tell you what you want to know. These are gifts of the cousins to this nest, and they are all music and drama and such things."

"Nothing about the Others? Or technology?" "No, Dannerman. Djabeertapritch may have some of that sort, but they are not in the Repository of the Nest." She hesitated. "There is one story which is very old and famous. It is about Horch who lived long ago, if you would like to see it? Yes? Very well, but let us do it in my room, so we will not disturb this female in her work."

So I viewed the thing, all the way through. It lasted for a couple of hours. In the first ten minutes I realized there was nothing useful here, but I stayed with it anyway-remember, I got my doctorate in drama and, in spite of everything, I was hooked.

The story took place in a Horch city, time not specified, and the plot was easy enough to follow. It was a kind of a love story. A female Horch and a male Horch wanted to mate, but since they were from the same gens, though not blood relatives, they couldn't. The various threads of the plot struck me as pretty universal; it was Romeo and Juliet combined with Oedipus Rex and a few snatches of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. The male was a space pilot, the female some kind of a farmer. That didn't mean she dug seedlings into the mud with her toes. None of these Horch, however ancient in time, had to do much purely physical work. For that sort of thing they had machines. Those were pretty primitive compared to the latest Christmas-tree models, but they were good enough to free the Horch for more intellectual pursuits. Some of the characters in the play were artists, some philosophers, some teachers, some, as far as I could tell, engineers.

I can't say I followed every detail of the story. There were a lot of references that went right past me, but there are plenty of those in Shakespeare, too. The basic story was clear enough… except that I kept thinking what a pity it was that I hadn't had this experience while I was in graduate school. What a hell of a doctoral dissertation I could have written-maybe even one that somebody might actually have wanted to read.

Pirraghiz had gone about her own business while I was watching the bowl. She timed her return perfectly, coming back in just as the story finished, and she wasn't alone. The male named Mrrranthoghrow was with her. After the two of them had greeted me, she looked at me apologetically. "Was any of that what you wanted to know?"

I came alive. "Not exactly. I was more interested in your field, technology, weapons, that sort of thing."

"Not weapons," he protested. "I have no experience with weapons. That is what the warriors and the Horch fighting machines are for."

"All right then." I pointed to the viewing bowl. "What makes that thing run?"

He scratched his beard. "Do you mean where the power comes from? There is a small unit in the base, which provides that. It is called a-" I heard the word he said, but it meant nothing to me.

"Something like a battery?" I guessed. I used the English word, because I didn't have one in Horch, but when I explained, "A device in which power from another source is stored, and released as needed," he shook his great head.

"I have never seen the (incomprehensible) charged up, Dannerman. I know nothing of such matters; I am a mechanic, trained in that alone. The power in each machine comes from-" he searched for a term I might understand, and came up with- "an accumulator, but what it accumulates, and what it accumulates it from, I do not know. Perhaps Djabeertapritch can tell you, if he wants to, but the Others had no reason to instruct me in such matters. When I disassembled and rebuilt the transit machine for the Horch, I knew what components needed to be connected in certain fashions, but I do not understand how it works."

Suddenly there was a rush of hot blood to my brain. I stared at him. "You worked on the transit machine?"

"With others, yes."

"And it is in working order?"

"Certainly. The cousin Horch use it all the time-for making copies, such as yourself, and also for tracing channels to other installations of the Others."

I swallowed, my throat tight. "Strictly as a theoretical question," I said-I didn't want to scare him off too soon-"would it be possible for me to use that machine to, say, transmit me back to my planet?"

He looked startled, and so did Pirraghiz. "Oh, Dannerman," she said sorrowfully, understanding at once what I was getting at.

So did Mrrranthoghrow. His voice was sympathetic as he said, "I am sorry, Dannerman. It is impossible."

I wasn't giving up, although my pulse was racing. "Why impossible? The Horch wouldn't have to know! You could just smuggle me in-"

He was shaking that great, moon-faced head. "I could not do that without their consent, Dannerman," he said gently. "But that is not the reason. It simply cannot be done. Nothing can be transmitted to any locus unless there is a receiver there, and die receiver in your Starlab has been destroyed."