The Overlords of War

Chapter 37

On the beach a woman alone: blond, naked, lying face downward. She was either asleep or in communion. There were no footsteps on the sand except hers. Corson sat down nearby and waited for her to awaken. He had plenty of time. Ahead of him stretched a fragment of the eternity on which was founded Aergistal.

He relaxed. He had reached the end of his road. He could afford to stare at the sea and run sand between his fingers. Later, he too would learn to master time. He had already had a certain amount of practical experience.

The woman roused. She stretched, rolled over, rubbed her eyes. Corson recognized her.

“Floria Van Nelle,” he said.

She nodded and smiled, faintly and almost sadly.

“Where are they?” he demanded, and when she appeared not to understand, went on: “Cid, Selma, and Ana! I must make my report to the Council of Uria.”

“There has been a time slip,” Floria said softly. “Thanks to you, not a very grave one. But in this line of probability they do not exist.”

“They’re dead?”

“They have never existed.”

“I’ve lost my way,” Corson said. “I’m in the wrong place—the wrong time—maybe the wrong universe!”

“You have erased them. They inhabited a parenthesis of history. Your intervention has abolished them.”

Corson felt himself turn pale. He clenched his fists. “They were my friends, and I’ve killed them!”

Floria shook her head. “No. They belonged to another possibility and you have brought about this better one. They knew what would become of them if you succeeded, and they hoped you would succeed.” Corson sighed. He had had friends and they had vanished, shadows now even fainter than those claimed by death. They had left nothing behind, not a footprint, not a scratch on a stone, not even a name in this universe which to them was forever closed. They had not been born. They were no more than a memory in Corson’s mind and abstract entries in the ghostly records of Aergistal.

What I touch I wipe away. I am the eraser of the gods.

He recalled Touray, a good comrade, doubtless tossed back into the crazy chaos of unending battle. He thought of Ngal R’nda, last Prince of Uria, torn to bits by his own devoted followers, and Veran, the cunning mercenary, struck down by his own companions. He thought, with terror, of Antonella. He wanted to ask a question, but words would not come.

“On the other creode I did not exist,” Floria said. “And I was assigned to welcome you when you arrived on Uria. Did you think I turned up by chance? Here I exist, thanks to you. Don’t say you’re sorry.”

Bitterly Corson said, “So we are ripples on the surface of reality, to be reshaped or dispersed by a puff of wind according to the whim of the gods. I’ve been a toy for Those of Aergistal, the puppeteers who are making over history.”

‘They are not gods, even if they are somewhat more than we are. They do not act merely from caprice.”

“I know,” Corson rasped. “They work for the best. They are eliminating war. They’re rearranging history so that it will climax with them. I heard all that at Aergistal. To eliminate war, comprehend war, preserve war… There they cower like rats at the end of time, scared of the Outside.”

“That’s only half the story,” Floria said patiently. “They are ourselves.”

“They’re our descendants. They mock us from their billion-year vantage point.”

“They are ourselves, Corson,” Floria repeated. “We are Those of Aergistal. But we don’t know that we are. We have to discover and grasp that truth. They are the sum of everything that’s possible, for their kind, for ours, for all others, even for species you cannot dream of and that could not dream of you. They are all the fragments of the universe and all the perceptions of the universe. We are not the ancestors of the gods, nor are they our descendants, but we are one part of them, cut off from our origins or rather from our completion. Each of us is one of their possibilities, a detail, a creode, aspiring in our muddled way to achieve union with them, yet struggling blindly in the dark to assert our separate existence. Something has happened somewhere in space and time which I myself don’t understand, though I know it was neither at the beginning nor the end of time. There is no ‘before’ or ‘after.’ To them, and already to a tiny extent to us, time is a dimension along which events coexist like objects laid side by side. We are one moment of the long path that leads to Aergistal, toward the union of all possible consciousness, and Those of Aergistal are each and every one of the beings who have ever taken and will ever take that path.”

“Gods with schizophrenia,” Corson grunted.

“Yes, if that helps you to understand them. Sometimes I tell myself that they must have set out to explore the full range of what is possible, and got lost on the way and became us, and that’s the reason for war, this splitting and cracking and crumpling of history which they are so carefully smoothing out. The fact that it has been broken prevents them, despite their great power, from instantly and completely setting the universe to rights. For what they are, we are also. War is part of them. And we must grope about to rediscover the long, the very long road that leads to them, that’s to say to ourselves. They were bom of war, Corson, from this dreadful tumult that shakes our lives, and they will only exist if they abolish it. Here and there they repair a fault, reknot the mesh. We do it, sometimes with their help. You have done it. Do you regret that?”

“No,” Corson said.

“To eliminate war,” Floria went on, “Those of Aergistal make use of people who have waged it. They know what it’s like. Sometimes they come to hate it enough to want to abolish it—really to want that, no matter what the cost. Those who do not immediately arrive at this conclusion spend a certain while at Aergistal. Eventually they understand. In the long run they all understand.”

“Even someone like Veran?” Corson said sceptically.

“Even someone like Veran. Right now he’s canceling a flare-up in the Lyra region.”

“But he’s dead,” Corson said.

“No one dies,” Floria countered. “A life is like a page in a book. There’s another next to it. Not after it—next to it.”

Corson rose and took a few steps toward the sea. He halted at the edge of the surf.

“It’s a great story. Who’s to tell me if it’s true?”

“Nobody. You’ll find that out by snatches. Maybe what you’ll find out will be a little different. No one has the monopoly of truth.” Without turning, Corson said—forcefully, almost violently—“I came back to learn the mastery of time, and how to commune with Those of Aergistal. And—”

“You’ll learn. Everything you’re capable of learning. We need people like you. There are so many outbreaks of war to be put out, like so many fires.”

“But I hoped to find peace,” Corson said. “And—and I came back for Antonella.”

Floria drew close and set her hands on his shoulders. “I beg you—” she began. He cut her short.

“I love her! Or… or I used to love her. She has vanished too, hasn’t she?”

“She never existed. She had been dead for a long time. We took her from the mausoleum world, from that warlord’s collection, and equipped her with an artificial personality, just as you did with Veran’s recruits. It was essential, Corson. Without her you would not have acted as you did. But a real human being could not have entered Aergistal.”

“Without being a war criminal,” Corson said.

“She was no more than a machine.”

“You mean she was bait.”

“I’m desperately sorry. I will do whatever you wish. I will love you, George Corson, if that is what you want.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he muttered, recalling what Cid had told him: he must not hold against them what they had been forced to do. Cid had been expunged. He had known what was in store for him, yet he had pitied Corson…

“No one dies,” Corson said. “Perhaps I’ll find her again in another existence.”

“Perhaps,” Floria sighed.

Corson took a step into the sea. “So nothing is left to me—neither friendship nor love. My universe disappeared six thousand years ago. I’ve been cheated.”

“You are still free to choose. You can wipe it all away, return to square one. But remember! Aboard the Archimedes you were about to die.”

“Free to choose?” Corson echoed disbelievingly.

He heard her move away; when he turned he saw she was delving in the sand at the spot where it still bore the imprint of her body. When she came back she held an opalescent phial the size of a pigeon’s egg.

‘There is one more thing you must do in order to become completely one of us. Wild pegasones are no more capable of time travel than a caveman of advanced mathematics. At best they can move a few seconds back or forth. This phial contains an accelerator which multiplies their embryonic power billions of times over. You must administer it yourself at the proper moment. The dose has been carefully calculated. Its introduction into the past will cause no appreciable timequakes from your point of view. So far as your date of emergence is concerned, the margin for error is narrow, but we have taken that into account. A pegasone carries a certain volume of space along when it jumps through time. Now you know all that’s necessary. The decision is up to you, George Corson.”

He heard and understood. One last thing to be done. The keystone to be set on the arch. His own hand to be outstretched to himself across a gulf of six thousand years.

“Thank you,” he said. “But I don’t yet know what I’ll do.”

He took the phial and headed for his pegasone.