The Overlords of War

Chapter 28

This time, they were creeping along the corridors of the cosmos. Through the perceptions of the pegasone Corson could actually see time. The beast’s tendrils were coiled around his wrists and stroking his temples. Now and then he felt a pang of nausea. Veran, who was hanging on the other side of the pegasone and controlling it, had insisted that Corson must learn to stare time in the face. He hoped that Corson would be able to guide him not only through the maze of the underground city but also through the labyrinth of Ngal R’nda’s life.

They were stealing among the crevasses of reality, in a present that was always new. A creature with very acute senses might have noticed a shadow move, possibly blurred colors, or—with a lot of luck—a vast and dreadful phantom. Before it had blinked, brushed away a nonexistent grain of dust, they would have melted into air or through a wall. And if the light were bright enough to show details, it would have revealed no more than a flat transparent outline. The pegasone never remained synchronized with the present for more than a fraction of a second, just long enough to let Veran and Corson get their bearings. For them walls, pillars, furniture, were a mere mist. Living creatures and anything that moved remained invisible. It was the other side of the coin. One can scarcely spy without the risk of being seen, nor hide without becoming blind.

“It’s a pity you didn’t get to know this base properly,” Veran had said.

“I asked for a week or two,” Corson had protested.

A shrug. “Some risks I take, others I don’t. I’m not going to hang around for a week while you and these birds rig traps for me.”

“What if someone spots us?”

“Hard to say. Maybe nothing. Maybe a timequake. Ngal R’nda may realize what’s going on and no longer trust you when you meet him again. Or he might decide to forestall you and launch his attack right away. We’d better not be seen. We mustn’t introduce random factors and change history in ways that might affect us. We’ll go alone. No escort. No heavy weapons. To use a gun in a past that one derives from is suicidal. I hope you realize that.”

“So it’s impossible to set traps in the past.”

Veran had smiled broadly, displaying the spiked bar which had replaced his teeth.

“I’ll be satisfied to introduce a tiny modification, a sub-threshold change which won’t be noticed but which I can exploit at the proper moment. You’re a valuable man, you know, Corson. You’ve shown me Ngal R’nda’s weak point.”

“And I have to come along?”

“Think I’m fool enough to leave you behind? Besides, you know the place we’re going to.”

“But the Urians will notice that I’m not here. There won’t be anything for them to listen to.” He touched the black shell around the transmitter he wore, which altered whatever was said automatically into material fitter for Urian consumption.

“We might chance removing it, but that would probably make it emit a warning signal. No, we’ll gamble on a short silence. We’ll only be away from the present for a few seconds. How old do you think this bird is?”

“I don’t know,” Corson answered after a brief hesitation. “Old for his species. And Urians live longer than humans—at least they did in my day. He must be about two hundred. Maybe two hundred and fifty if there’s been a major advance in geriatrics.”

“We’ll take the plunge,” Veran had said, satisfied. “There’s no risk of their picking up messages from your gewgaw before they’ve even put it around your neck, anyhow.”

And now here they were haunting the alleys of time. They had slipped into the underground city, passing through kilometers of rock which seemed like so much fog, and intruded into its galleries like ghosts.

In Corson’s ear Veran whispered, “How do I recognize him?”

“By his blue tunic,” Corson said. “But I imagine he only spends part of his time down here.”

“That doesn’t matter. When the pegasone latches on to him it will follow his spoor back to the moment of his birth. Or should I say hatching?”

A fleeting blue shadow… and there he was. They had never subsequently lost track of him, or at least only for such brief intervals that Corson had difficulty in believing they covered the months or even years which Ngal R’nda spent on the surface, playing his role of a distinguished and peace-loving Urian. They were tracking back on his life like salmon following a river to its source. The shadow changed color. Ngal R’nda was young and the tunic of the princes had not yet been set on his shoulders. Maybe he was not even thinking of his plan for conquest? But Corson doubted that.

More blue shadows had emerged with the passage of time: other Princes hatched from a blue shell who likewise and for a long while had plotted vengeance. Ngal R’nda had told the truth. He was indeed the last. The approach of his end had spurred him to action. Before him, generations of Princes had been content to dream.

Ngal R’nda vanished for a long moment.

“This is where he was bom, is it?” Veran asked worriedly.

“I haven’t the least idea,” Corson said, annoyed by the mercenary’s tone. “But I presume so. Ngal R’nda is too important to have been hatched far from the sanctuary of his race.”

On the instant the shadow of Ngal R’nda reappeared. Corson could not recognize him any more, but he was learning to decipher the responses of the pegasone.

“So what is this trap of yours?” he had asked.

“You’ll see.” And that was all Veran would say.

They were heading for the moment when the last Prince of Uria hatched out. Did Veran plan to inject him at birth, Corson wondered, with a genetic sensitizer which would only do its work years later, when it was exposed to the proper stimulus? Or implant a bug in his body, no larger than a single cell, which would spy on him all his life, so deeply buried that no surgical operation was likely to distab it? No, such tricks were too unsubtle. They might cause too violent a disturbance in the web of time.

The pegasone slowed, came to a stop. Corson felt as though every bit of his body wanted to take off in a different direction. He swallowed hard. The nausea faded slowly.

“He has not yet been born,” Veran said.

Employing the senses of the pegasone, Corson perceived a large elliptical room, much like that in which he had witnessed the Presentation of the Egg, but oddly changed. Only a few tendrils of the beast protruded from the wall; it and its riders were hidden in the depths of the stone.

There was little light. A few bright niches gleamed in the polished wall, and in each rested an egg. Right at the back of the room, in a somewhat larger niche, lay a purple one. Corson corrected himself. No, even if it looked purple to the pegasone, it would look blue to a man or a Urian.

That must be the egg of Ngal R’nda. So the niches were incubators. And no one would come into the room until hatching time.

“We’ll have to wait,” Veran said. “We’ve come a bit too far.”

There was a faint noise, like a thousand miners attacking a distant vein of ore. Corson realized what it was: the young Urians rousing and breaking their shells. The time displacement and the peculiar senses of the pegasone combined to alter and exaggerate the sound.

The pegasone sidled toward the blue egg. Corson was getting better at interpreting the beast’s perceptions. He could almost share its all-around vision. Thanks to that he saw Veran move, pointing some sort of device toward the egg.

He said sharply, “Don’t smash it!”

“Idiot!” Veran answered. “I’m only measuring it.”

The insult betrayed the tension he was feeling. In this crucial moment of Ngal R’nda’s life the least shock could introduce a major change in history. Beads of sweat ran from Corson’s forehead and down his nose. Veran was playing with fire. What would happen if they made a mistake? Would they simply vanish from the continuum? Or would they pop up in another area of time?

The blue egg was being shaken by blows from within. Now it opened. At its top an irregular piece of shell broke away. Liquid oozed out. The bit of shell slid to the floor. A membrane tore. The top of the young Urian’s head appeared. It looked enormous, as big as the egg. Then the shell split apart. The chick opened its beak. It was about to utter its first cheep—no doubt the signal awaited by nurses outside.

The shell burst completely. To Corson’s surprise he realized that in fact the chick’s head was no larger than an average man’s fist. But of course Ngal R’nda’s nervous system had a long period of growth ahead; even more than humans, Urians were born immature.

The pegasone emerged from the wall and locked on to the present. Veran threw aside his harness and produced a plastic bag into which he threw the debris of the eggshell, then remounted the pegasone. Without even fastening his straps he ordered the beast into the wall and out of phase with present time.

“First stage over,” he said between his teeth.

In the elliptical room the chicks were uttering their first cries. A door opened.

“They’ll notice that the shell has gone!” Corson said.

“You haven’t caught on yet,” Veran grunted. “I’m going to give them another. If I’m to believe what you told me, they only keep blue shells and throw the rest away.”

They leaped to the surface. In a lonely spot—a ravine full of boulders—Veran synched the pegasone again. Corson, feeling giddy, slid to the ground.

“Mind your feet,” Veran said. “We’re still in our objective past. You can never tell whether breaking a twig may not trigger a major timequake.”

He opened the bag and carefully inspected the bits of the blue egg.

“No ordinary eggs, these,” he muttered. “More sort of articulated plates, like a man’s skull bones. Notice the suture lines? Snug as the edges of a static closure.”

He broke off a tiny fragment and placed it in a device he took from his belt, then set his eye to a viewer on it.

“The pigmentation goes right through,” he reported. “A real genetic curiosity. I wonder whether they overdid the inbreeding to try to bring it off… Never mind that, though. It won’t be hard to find a dye of the same shade but not so stable.”

“You’re going to dye the egg?”

Veran snorted. “My dear Corson, you are incurably stupid. I’m going to replace this shell with a newer model, and that one will be dyed. With a substance I know how to neutralize if I have to. All Ngal R’nda’s power is due to the color of his egg. That’s why he thinks it’s a good idea to show it off now and then. Very likely that’s also the reason why there’s nobody in the room when the chicks are hatching out. It means no one can pull a switch. That is, not without a pegasone handy. I don’t believe this swap will ever be noticed, nor that it will entrain a major timequake. To be absolutely certain I’m going to take the shell of an egg hatched at the same time and of the same size. The real difficulty lies in making the exchange in about one second flat, before someone has time to come in and see us.”

“Impossible,” Corson said.

“Oh, there are drugs that increase human reaction time by a factor of ten. I imagine you’ve heard about them. They’re sometimes used during space battles.”

“But they’re dangerous,” Corson said.

“I’m not asking you to take any.”

Veran made to replace the bits of shell in his bag; then he thought better of it.

“It would be safer still to bleach this and leave it in place of the substitute. You never know…”

He carried out some more tests, and finally dusted an aerosol over the fragments. They turned to the color of ivory in a few seconds.

“Back in your saddle,” he said with satisfaction.

Once again they dived into the river of time. It was not long before they located a room where dozens of empty shells were lying around. Veran synched the pegasone, inspected various fragments, and finally selected a whole shell of the proper size. It turned a perfect blue under the jet of the aerosol spray and took the bleached shell’s place in his bag. Then he produced a pill and swallowed it.

‘The accelerator will take effect in about three minutes. It’ll give me about ten seconds of superspeed, more than a minute and a half of subjective time. That’s as much as I need.”

He turned to Corson with a smile. “The beauty of this, you know, is that if anything happens to me you won’t know how to get away. I wonder what the Urians would think if they found two men in their incubation room, one dead and one alive. Not to mention a tame pegasone, when all they know about are the wild ones. Oh, you’d have to spin them a pretty yam.”

“We’d disappear at once,” Corson said. “There would be a major timequake. The whole history of this part of the galaxy would be affected.”

“It seems you learn quickly when it suits you,” Veran said good-humoredly. “Yes, the real trick is going to be getting back the instant after our departure. I have no wish to meet myself going the other way. And above all I don’t want to break the Law of Non-regressive Information.”

Corson didn’t react.

“In any case,” Veran went on, “the pegasone wouldn’t like it either. It’s going to be hard to get it to pass itself. It hates that.”

Nonetheless I seem to have done it, Corson thought. Or rather I shall do it. Like all natural laws, the Law of Non-regressive Information must be relative. Someone who understands it perfectly can work out how to break it. That means that one day I shall understand the machinery of time. I’ll get out of here. Peace will return and I’ll find Antonella again…

It all happened so swiftly that Corson retained only a blurred memory: Veran’s kaleidoscopic shadow moving so fast that it seemed to define a solid volume of space, the blue gleam of the broken shell, the cells full of cheeping baby Urians, the door opening with a creak, a sudden smell of chlorine even though he knew the air of the chamber could not enter his suit, a sideslip across time, Veran’s voice uttering words so quickly he could barely catch them, a caracole in space, nausea, the sense of being scattered to the corners of the cosmos…

“End of stage two!” cried Veran triumphantly.

The trap was primed. Two hundred, perhaps two hundred and fifty years would have to wear away before it would pitch Ngal R’nda, last Prince of Uria, the last warlord hatched from a blue egg, to meet his doom.

Time, Corson thought as rough hands freed him from his harness, is the most patient god of all.