Vestiges of Time (19 page)

in KHL-000, and that they would certainly be doing something about it soon, terribly soon.

Even as he prepared to speak again he could feel something moving in the world outside the apartment, a force swelling, expanding, probing toward him, carefully at first, hesitant, then more certain of itself.

“Now you must work out some simple ruse to distract the guards outside the doors of the apartment,” he told them quickly. “Sally, you can help in this. Draw them into the room. Get their attention. Then perhaps Eric can do something. And remember, they have no women of their own.” He thought briefly of the Magers, as Mathers had called them, riot Kriths in disguise as he had once believed, but something else, almost men, but not quite men, something more, or perhaps something less, maybe a hybrid of man and Krith, certainly not the product of any known evolutionary process. But then neither were the Kriths. “And remember, they have no women of their own,” he had said; “they’re drawn to human women, pome of them.” Sally made a motion as if to speak, but then did not, suddenly aware of a second
presence,
a new and terrible force gathering around the Shadowy Man.

He felt it too, a touch, lightly at first, no more than a brushing, then a first contact, a quick and ruthless examination. A pause. A flickering of fire across an endless sky. A swelling of anger and hatred. A rushing toward him. A further swelling. Then the lash of a whip of great psionic force across his consciousness.

He almost lost control of the air for a moment, then made it speak for him.: “They
kn
ow!”

The lash came again, and with it the swelling of pain, psychic pain of an intensity such as he had never before known or imagined. Then a momentary pause. He looked within himself to see what defenses he had, what weapons with which to strike back.

And with it all was a momentary sense of resonance

with the Eric Mathers who was still on the bed with Sally. A brief sharing of pain and awareness.

Mathers gasped aloud in that common pain.

“Eric!” Sally cried.

A momentary respite, the raising of a mental shield. The Tromas withdrew for instants, preparing to strike again, and harder.

“You’re me,” Mathers said.

The Shadowy Man made the air speak again: “In a sense. You might be me. You might become me, given time.”

Mathers was there with him for instants more: Mathers looking forward in time, backward through the Shadowy Man’s own memories. Fear!

Then he pushed Mathers away, out of him, knowing that Mathers could never withstand what he could feel sweeping toward him across space from the palace of the Tromas.

Lightning flashed in the bedroom, leaping from some point near the ceiling toward the focus of his consciousness. And with it the blow of a psionic ax, the cutting, ripping, tearing through
him
of a sharpened blade of mental force. He erected his shields, strengthened them, struggled to hold himself together until the swift and terrible pressure subsided.

Blazing with a halo of light and invisible radiation, the Shadowy Man made the air say: “I will fight them as long as I can, but I don’t know how long that will be. I’m a long way from home. . . .” Another blow was coming. Lightning crackled through the room. “Hurry!” the air cried.

Mathers pulled himself from the bed, drew Sally after him, and, both of them naked, they stumbled from the bedroom as forces swept through it, blasting, shattering, rending.

“Come on,” Mathers called, his voice dwindling as the blow came toward the Shadowy Man, sweeping toward
him
_;
then across him, battering again at his

shield, being partly held this time, only portions of the psionic attack bursting through to shatter, to shake him, to rip through him and fill
him
with pain.

He forced the shields up once more, swung them forward to deflect streams of psionic flame, sought again for weapons, found them, curled balls of coruscating energy within himself, outside the universe, and sucked them into space/time to hurl them at the Tromas.

With the shields before him he advanced, feet, miles, light-years; the terms are meaningless. He advanced toward the Tromas.

The Krithian females drew together their own strength, united again, raised their own shields, and moved forward to meet him.

Through space and time he hurled the particles/ waves/balls/stars/novas/quasars of psionic force toward the advancing Tromas . . . who caught them and hurled them back at him, splashing across his shields, sending him reeling backward, ripping again through his consciousness.

The Shadowy Man, stunned by the sudden reversal, retreated. The nucleus of his energy floated, drifted, moved relative to spatial frameworks.

Into the Hying room of the suite came the form of the Shadowy Man, his smoky, ghostly form now clothed in flickering lightning and halos of incandescence; sheets of auroral flame surrounded him, flickering in neon colors across the spectrum from the edges of infrared to the margins of ultraviolet. The air around him was becoming ionized; carpeting and woodwork smoldered as he brushed across them, moving ever more slowly and ponderously, struggling to halt his retreat, to turn back toward his enemies, to again try to find weapons to use against them.

Other weapons he did find, and hurled the strength of them outward, but with ease the Tromas seemed to catch them and throw them back against his shields.

They were powerful, unimaginably powerful, these females of the Krithian race. How had he ever thought he could equal them in combat?

But he could not yield, not yet. For a while he must hold. He must give Mathers and Sally time to escape, for if they did not escape, there would never be a Shadowy Man. The universe looped and looped within itself. What was it Mathers had once said? “The universe is a can of worms, and each worm is bending back upon itself to eat its own tail. . . .”

For a moment there was respite again. For an instant the Tromas did not hurl wave after wave of psionic energy against him. He gasped within himself, drew himself together, welded back together the shattered margins of his consciousness, tried to find additional means of strengthening his shields, for now he knew that all he could hope to do was hold, for just a bit longer, hold and give Mathers and Sally time. He could not defeat the Tromas. He could barely even strike back at them.

And then there it was, sweeping across space and time again, a tsunami of psionic force, greater than all the others before, a cresting wave of hatred, anger, and destruction; burning, shattering mental forces rushing toward him. The Tromas had gathered all their power in one great field and threw it with all their strength at the conflux of forces that was the Shadowy Man.

He braced himself for the swelling tide of flame.

It came, splashed against his shields, tore against them and then through them, one after the other, ripping them away and plunging deeper and ever deeper, toward the remote core of his consciousness.

How do I relate it? How do I tell what it was like to be . . . smashed and battered by psionic blows of tremendous, godlike, unimaginable power, to be struck and struck again and to be almost overwhelmed by the waves of hate and anger from the female Kriths, to

feel your composite mind tom to shreds by psionic forces infinitely greater than your own, ancient and more wise in their use of power, to be beaten to your figurative knees and then, screaming in psionic pain, withdraw, fall upward through time, inward across the Lines, back into the subterranean laboratories where your own physical body and those of your replicates are contorted with pain.

How do I tell it? I don’t know.

But with that last assault the Shadowy Man could endure no more; he knew that his consciousness was being destroyed and in instants more he would no longer exist and his physical bodies would be nothing more than vegetables with bumed-out brains.

With an effort that took more strength than he knew he had, the Shadowy Man disengaged himself, not knowing at the time how he was able to accomplish even that. Mortally wounded, he felt himself, dying, himself and the physical bodies upon whose brains he was built. He fell upward, inward, screaming in the pain he could no longer tolerate, seeking the safety of the underground shelter so that he might die in some semblance of peace.

Downtime Again

But he did not die.

The wounds were not mortal. Painful and soul-shattering, yes, but not mortal. The blasts had hurt him, the Shadowy Man, but they had not moved far enough across time and space and paratime to touch the brains of which he was the composite mind.

He fell back to those cerebral cortexes, resonated among them, rested, wept, shuddered in remembered pain, and then, at last, for the first time in his existence, he slept.

When the consciousness of the Shadowy Man again had self-awareness, he knew that he would recover from the ordeal through which he had gone. He would recover and he would do more than that. There was a great deal that he could learn from the experience, a great deal that he could put into practice the next time he encountered the Tromas, for he was certain that he would again encounter them in combat, though exactly where, exactly when, he was yet to know.

He rested, studied, analyzed, gained knowledge and regained strength, and then, for a brief moment, cut himself away from the bodies of the replicates, now relaxing with the passing of the pain they too had felt, and entered complete third-level resonance with the superior of the replicates, the physical Eric Mathers of Here and Now.

The body was still drugged, was still without the ability to move itself, other than to rotate its eyes within their sockets and raise and lower its eyelids.

166

The Shadowy Man had anticipated this, and was not disturbed.

Through those eyes he again looked out into the recording room within the Underground of the BrathelLanza, saw once more the bloodstained body of the dead technician on the floor near the chair, and Mathers’ immobile figure, what he could see of it. With the eyes of that body he swept leftward and found once more the chronometer. The digits read 12:42:01. Just over thirty minutes of chronological time had elapsed since he had last looked at the chronometer, before he had begun his series of flights across space and time.

There was, he realized, a definite correlation between time as he experienced it and time as the still body of Eric Mathers experienced it, a correlation, but one of extremely high ratio. There was a linearity to time, he was certain, although time was not linear in the sense that he had once believed it to be. Nor, he suspected, would it be possible for him, the Shadowy Man, to occupy a point in space/time already occupied by himself. Why, he was uncertain, but he believed it to be so. He would have to hold these things in mind and work them into the concepts of the nature of time as he was gradually developing them.

Thirty minutes. Then MaLarba had been dead nearly seventy-two minutes. An hour and twelve minutes had passed since the raid on the Underground had taken place. That still gave him, ample time before the drugs began to wear off the body of Eric Mathers.

The drugs had begun to become a matter of concern to him. He was certain that, at least in part, his creation was based on the condition of this physical body, which had been his starting point. The drugs had altered the mind of Eric Mathers, had made that
min
d more capable of digging into itself, of bringing forth unconscious memories, had made it more sensitive and more receptive to union with the replicates. And the mnemonic recorder, he felt, was also a factor: the

electrodes were still attached to Eric Mathers, his so- called brain waves were still being detected by them, passed on to the amplifiers of the recorder, and in the fact of their amplification lay something of the secret of the creation of the Shadowy Man. Many factors had gone into his genesis.

Now he was uncertain of how the wearing off of the mnemonic drugs might affect the resonance patterns between the senior and the replicates. There would be some effect, of that he was certain. But how great? Was it possible that with the passing of the drugs, it would be impossible to maintain the total resonance between the 33-7 bodies? Might it be that he would disintegrate into merely a senior and a cluster of replicates, a single conscious
min
d, that of Eric Mathers, and the nearly unconscious minds of the replicates? Would, he was asking, the Shadowy Man cease to exist once the drugs no longer held their sway?

He was not certain. Despite the data that had swelled up out of the unconsciousness of Eric Mathers, there still was not enough information to answer that question. Perhaps there was not enough data anywhere. Who had ever researched this sort of thing? Such a condition had never before existed in all the universes, he believed, outside of the existence of the Tromas themselves, and he was uncertain how close an analogy he could draw between them and himself. Again, too little data.

But that time was centuries away as time was experienced by the Shadowy Man, and there was a universe of things he could do before that much time had gone by.

He set out to do them.

Once again he divorced himself from the physical bodies upon which he was built, existed as a resonance pattern between the senior and the replicates, and once more moved into a psionic void where none of the conventional human senses had any validity, although