XIII.
Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on highThe ancient limbs, and the giant is loose;Elder Edda
Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on highThe ancient limbs, and the giant is loose;Elder Edda
Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on highThe ancient limbs, and the giant is loose;
Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on high
The ancient limbs, and the giant is loose;
Elder Edda
Elder Edda
In the black, cramping tunnel Thorn could only swing his knife in a narrow arc, and the snarl of the attacking dog was concentrated into a grating roar that hurt his eardrums. Nevertheless, knife took effect before fangs, and with an angry whimper the dog backed away—there was no room to turn.
From the receding scuffle of its claws Thorn could tell that it had retreated almost to the beginning of the tunnel. He relaxed from the crouch that had put his back against the rocky roof, sprawled in a position calculated to rest elbows and knees, and considered his situation.
Of course, as he could see now, it had been an inexcusable blunder to enter the tunnel without first building a fire to insure his being able to get back to a place from which he could use his slingshot. But coming down the ravine he hadn't seen a sign of the devils, and there was no denying it had been necessary to revisit the cave to see if Thorn III had any extra food, weapons, or clothing stored there. The need for food was imperative, and yesterday he and Darkington had completely failed in their hunting.
He wondered if Darkington would attempt a rescue. Hardly, since it would be late afternoon before the gnarled little man returned from his own hunting circuit. With night coming on, it was unlikely that he would risk his life venturing down into the ravine for the sake of a man whom he believed to be half-crazy. For Thorn had tried to tell him altogether too much about alternate worlds in which Civilization had not perished. Darkington had dismissed all this as "the dreams," and Thorn had shut up, but not until he realized he was forfeiting all Darkington's confidence in him as a hard-bitten and realistic neo-savage.
Besides, Darkington was a little crazy himself. Long years of solitary living had developed fixed habit patterns. His hunger for comradeship had become largely a subjective fantasy, and the unexpected appearance of an actual comrade seemed to make him uncomfortable and uneasy rather than anything else, since it demanded readaptation. A man marooned in a wilderness and trying to get back to civilization is one thing. But a man who knows that civilization is dead and that before him stretch only dark savage eons in which other creatures will have the center of the stage, is quite a different animal.
Something was digging into Thorn's side. Twisting his left hand back at an uncomfortable angle—his right still held the knife or cutter—he worked the pouch from under him and took out the offending article. It was the puzzling sphere that had stayed with him during all his passages between the worlds. Irritably he tossed it away. He had wasted enough time trying to figure out the significance or purpose of the thing. It was as useless as ... as that graveyard of skylons up there.
He heard it bound up the tunnel, roll back a way, come to rest.
Evidently his captors heard it too, for there came a sharp mewing and growling, which did not break off sharply, but sank into a confused palaver of similar sounds, strongly suggestive of some kind of speech. Once or twice he thought he recognized human words, oddly telescoped and slurred to fit feline and canine palates. It was not pleasant to be cramped up in a tunnel and wondering what cats and dogs were saying about you in a half-borrowed, quasi-intelligent jargon.
And then, very softly, Thorn thought he heard someone calling his name.
His almost immediate reaction was a sardonic grimace at the vast number of unlikely sounds a miserable man will twist into a resemblance of his name. But gradually the fancied sound began to exert a subtle pull on his thoughts, dragging them away toward speculations which his present predicament did not justify.
But who is to say what thoughts a trapped and doomed man shall think? As Thorn told himself with some calmness, this was probably his last stretch of reflective thinking. Of course, when death came sufficiently close, the fear of it might enable him to escape into another body. But that was by no means certain or even probable. He reflected that every exchange he had made had been into a worse world. And now, presumably, he was at the bottom, and like energy that has reached the nadir of its cycle of degradation, unable to rise except with outside help.
Besides, he did not like the idea of dooming any other Thorn to this predicament, although he was afraid he would do it if given the chance.
Again he dreamily fancied he heard his name called.
He wondered what was happening to those other Thorns, in their hodgepodged destinies. Thorn III in World II—had he died in the instant of his arrival there, or had the Servants noted the personality-change in time and perhaps spared him? Thorn II in World I. Thorn I in World III. It was like some crazy game—some game devised by a mad, cruel god.
And yet what was the whole universe, so far as it had been revealed to him, but a mad, cruel pageantry? The Dawn myth was right—there were serpents gnawing at every root of the cosmic ash Yggdrasil. In three days he had seen three worlds, and none of them were good. World III, wrecked by subtronic power, cold battlefield for a hopeless last stand. World II, warped by paternalistic tyranny, smoldering with hate and boredom. World I, a utopia in appearance, but lacking real stamina or inward worth, not better than the others—only luckier.
Three botched worlds.
He started. It was as if, with that last thought, something altogether outside his mind had attached itself to his mind in the most intimate way imaginable. He had the queerest feeling that his thoughts had gained power, that they were no longer locked-in and helpless except for their ability to control a puny lever-assembly of bones and contractile tissue, that they could reach out of his mind like tentacles and move things, that they had direct control of a vastly more competent engine.
A faint sound up the tunnel recalled his altered mind to his present predicament. It might have been a tiny scrape of claws on rock. It was not repeated. He gripped his knife. Perhaps one of the beasts was attempting a surprise attack. If only there were some light—
A yellowish flame, the color of the woodfire he had been visualizing, flared up without warning a few feet ahead, casting shafts of ruddy glare and shadow along the irregular tunnel. It lit up the muzzles of a gaunt gray dog and a scarred black cat that had been creeping toward him, side by side. For an instant surprise froze them. Then the dog backed off frantically, with a yelp of panic. The cat snarled menacingly and stared wildly at the flame, as if desperately trying to figure out itsmodus operandi.
But, with Thorn's thought, the flame advanced and the cat gave ground before it. At first it only backed, continuing to snarl and stare. Then it turned tail, and answering in a great screech the questioning mews and growls that had been coming down the tunnel, fled as if from death.
The flame continued to advance, changing color when Thorn thought of daylight. And as Thorn edged and squirmed along, it seemed to him that somehow his way was made easier.
The tunnel heightened, widened. He emerged in the outer chamber in time to hear a receding rattle of gravel.
The flame, white now, had come to rest in the middle of the rocky floor. Even as he stooped, it rose to meet him, winking out—and there rested lightly on his palm the gray sphere, cool and unsmirched, that he had tossed away a few minutes before.
But it was no longer a detached, external object. It was part of him, responsive to his every mood and thought, linked to his mind by tracts that were invisible but as real as the nerves connecting mind with muscle and sense organ. It was not a machine, telepathically controlled. It was a second body.
Relief, stark wonder, and exulting awareness of power made him weak. For a moment everything swam and darkened, but only for a moment—he seemed to suck limitless vitality from the thing.
He felt a surge of creativeness, so intense as to be painful, like a flame in the brain. He could do anything he wanted to, go anywhere he wanted to, make anything he wanted to, create life, change the world, destroy it if he so willed—
And then—fear. Fear that, since the thing obeyed his thoughts, it would also obey his foolish, ignorant, or destructive ones. People can't control their thoughts for very long. Even sane individuals often think of murder, of catastrophes, of suicide—
Suddenly the sphere had become a gray globe of menace.
And then—after all, he couldn't doanything. Besides any other limitations the thing might have, it was certainly limited by his thoughts. It couldn't do things he didn't really understand—like building a subtronic engine—
Or—
For the first time since he had emerged from the tunnel, he tried to think collectedly, with more than the surface of his mind.
He found that the depths of his mind were strangely altered. His subconscious was no longer an opaque and impenetrable screen. He could see through it, as through a shadowy corridor, sink into it, hear the thoughts on the other side, the thoughts of the other Thorns.
One of them, he realized, was instructing him, laying a duty upon him.
The message dealt with such matters as to make the imagination shiver. It seemed to engulf his personality, his consciousness.
His last glimpse of World III was a gray one of dark, snow-streaked pines wavering in a rocky frame. Then that had clouded over, vanished, and he was in a limitless blackness where none of the senses worked and where only thought—itself become a sense—had power.
It was an utterly alien darkness without real up or down, or this way or that, or any normal spatial properties. It seemed that every point was adjacent to every other point, and so infinity was everywhere, and all paths led everywhere, and only thought could impose order or differentiate. And the darkness was not that of lightlessness, but of thought itself—fluttering with ghostly visions, aflash with insight.
And then, without surprise or any consciousness of alteration, he realized that he was no longer one Thorn, but three. A Thorn who had lived three lives—and whether memory pictured them as having been lived simultaneously or in sequence seemed to matter not at all. A Thorn who had learned patience and endurance and self-sufficiency from harsh World III, who had had ground into the bedrock of his mind the knowledge that man is an animal in competition with other animals, that all human aspirations are but small and vaunting and doomed things—but not necessarily worthless therefore—in a blind and unfeeling cosmos, and that even death and the extinguishing of all racial hopes are ills that can be smiled at while you struggle against them. A Thorn who had seen and experienced in World II the worst of man's cruelty to man, who had gained a terrible familiarity with human nature's weaknesses, its cowardly submissiveness to social pressure, its capacity for self-delusion, its selfishness, its horrible adaptability, who had plumbed to their seething, poisoning depths the emotions of hate and resentment and envy and fear, but who in part had risen superior to all this and learned humility, and sympathy, and sacrifice, and devotion to a cause. A Thorn who, in too-easy World I, had learned how to use the dangerous gift of freedom, how to fight human nature's tendency to go evil and foul itself when it is not being disciplined by hardship and adversity, how to endure happiness and success without souring, how to create goals and purposes in an environment that does not supply them ready-made.
All these experiences were now those of one mind. They did not contradict or clash with each other. Between them there was no friction or envy or guilt. Each contributed a fund of understanding, carrying equal weight in the making of future decisions. And yet there was no sense of three minds bargaining together or talking together or even thinking together. There was only one Thorn, who, except for that period of childhood before the split took place, had lived three lives.
This composite Thorn, sustained by the talisman, poised in the dimensionless dark beyond space and time, felt that his personality had suddenly been immeasurably enriched and deepened, that heretofore he had been going around two-thirds blind and only now begun to appreciate the many-sidedness of life and the real significance of all that he had experienced.
And without hesitation or inward argument, without any sense of responding to the urgings of Thorn II, since there was no longer a separate Thorn II, he remembered what the death-resisting Oktav had whispered to him in the Blue Lorraine, syllable by agonized syllable, and he recalled the duty laid upon him by the seer.
He thought of the first step—the finding of the Probability Engine—and felt the answering surge of the talisman, and submitted to its guidance.
There was a dizzying sense of almost instantaneous passage over an infinite distance—and also a sense that there had been no movement at all, but only a becoming aware of something right at hand. And then—
The darkness pulsed and throbbed with power, a power that it seemed must rack to pieces many-branched time and shake down the worlds like rotten fruit. The thought-choked void quivered with a terrifying creativity, as if this were the growing-point of all reality.
Thorn became aware of seven minds crowded around the source of the pulsations and throbbing and quivering. Homely human minds like his own, but lacking even his own mind's tripled insight, narrower and more paternalistic than even the minds of World II's Servants of the People. Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions of godhead. Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance—which their power protected.
Then he became aware of vast pictures flaring up in the void in swift succession—visions shared by the seven minds and absorbing them to such a degree that they were unconscious of his presence.
Like river-borne wreckage after an eon-long jam has broken, the torrent of visions flowed past.
World II loomed up. First the drab Servants Hall, where eleven old men nodded in dour satisfaction as they assured themselves, by report and transtime televisor, that the invasion was proceeding on schedule. Then the picture broadened, to show great streams of subtronically mechanized soldiers and weapons moving in toward the transtime bridgehead of the Opal Cross. Individual faces flashed by—wry-lipped, uninterested, obedient, afraid.
For a moment World I was glimpsed—the interior of the Opal Cross shown in section like an ant-hill, aswarm with black uniforms. Quickly, as if the seven masters hated to look at their pet world so misused, this gave way to a panoramic vision of World III, in which hundreds of miles were swept over without showing anything but fallen or fire-tortured skylons, seared and scrub-grown wasteland, and—cheek by jowl—glacier walls and smoke-belching volcanoes.
But that was only the beginning. Fruits of earlier time-splits were shown. There was a world in which telepathic mutants fought with jealous nontelepaths, who had found a way of screening their thoughts. There was a world in which a scarlet-robed hierarchy administered a science-powered religion that held millions in Dawn Age servitude. A world in which a tiny clique of hypnotic telepaths broadcast thoughts which all men believed in and lived by, doubtfully, as if in a half-dream. A world where civilization, still atomic-powered, was split into tiny feudalistic domains, forever at war, and the memory of law and brotherhood and research kept alive only in a few poor and unarmored monasteries. A world similarly powered and even more divided, in which each family or friends-group was an economically self-sustaining microcosm, and civilization consisted only of the social intercourse and knowledge-exchange of these microcosms. A world where men lived in idle parasitism on the labor of submen they had artificially created—and another world in which the relationship was reversed and the submen lived on men.
A world where two great nations, absorbing all the rest, carried on an endless bitter war, unable to defeat or be defeated, forever spurred to new efforts by the fear that past sacrifices might have been in vain. A world that was absorbed in the conquest of space, and where the discontented turned their eyes upward toward the new frontier. A world in which a great new religion gripped men's thoughts, and strange ceremonies were performed on hilltops and in spacecraft and converts laughed at hate and misery and fear, and unbelievers wonderingly shook their heads. A world in which there were no cities and little obvious machinery, and simply clad men led unostentatious lives. A sparsely populated world of small cities, whose inhabitants had the grave smiling look of those who make a new start. A world that was only a second asteroid belt—a scattering of exploded rocky fragments ringing the sun.
"We've seen enough!"
Thorn sensed the trapped horror and the torturing sense of unadmitted guilt in Prim's thought.
The visions flickered out, giving way to the blackness of unactualized thought. On this blackness Prim's next thought showed fiercely, grimly, monstrously. It was obvious that the interval had restored his power-bolstered egotism.
"Our mistake is evident but capable of correction. Our thoughts—or the thoughts ofsomeof us—did not make it sufficiently clear to the Probability Engine that absolute destruction rather than a mere veiling or blacking out, was intended, with regard to the botched worlds. There is no question as to our next step. Sekond?"
"Destroy! All of them, except the main trunk," instantly pulsed the answering thought.
"Ters?"
"Destroy!"
"Kart?"
"The invading world first. But all the others too. Swiftly!"
"Kant?"
"It might be well first to.... No! Destroy!"
With a fresh surge of horror and revulsion, Thorn realized that these minds were absolutely incapable of the slightest approach to unbiased reasoning. They were so fanatically convinced of the correctness of all their past decisions as to the undesirability of the alternate worlds, that they were even completely blind to the apparent success of some of those worlds—or to the fact that the destruction of a lifeless asteroid belt was a meaningless gesture. They could only see the other worlds as horrible deviations from the cherished main trunk. Their reactions were as unweighed and hysterical as those of a murderer, who taking a last look around after an hour spent in obliterating possible clues, sees his victim feebly stir.
Thorn gathered his will power for what he knew he must do.
"Sikst?"
"Yes, destroy!"
"Septem?"
"Destroy!"
"Okt—"
But even as Prim remembered that there no longer was an Oktav and joined with the others in thinking destruction, even as the darkness began to rack and heave with a new violence, Thorn sent out the call.
"Whoever you may be, wherever you may be, Oh you who created it, here is the Divider of Time, here is the Probability Engine!"
His thought deafened him, like a great shout. He had not realized the degree to which the others had been thinking in the equivalent of muted whispers.
Instantly Prim and the rest were around him, choking his thoughts, strangling his mind, thinking his destruction along with that of the worlds.
The throbbing of the darkness became that of a great storm, in which even the Probability Engine seemed on the verge of breaking from its moorings. Like a many-branched lightning-flash, came a vision of time-streams lashed and shaken—Worlds I and II torn apart—the invasion bridge snapped—
But through it Thorn kept sending the call. And he seemed to feel the eight talismans and the central engine take it up and echo it.
His mind began to suffocate. His consciousness to darken.
All reality seemed to tremble on the edge between being and not-being.
Then without warning, the storm was over and there was only a great quiet and a great silence present, that might have come from the end of eternity and might have been here always.
Awe froze their thoughts. They were like boys scuffling in a cathedral who look up and see the priest.
What they faced gave no sign of its identity. But they knew.
Then it began to think. Great broad thoughts of which they could only comprehend an edge or corner. But what they did comprehend was simple and clear.