Andro sat a few feet from the woman and waited for her to regain consciousness. He tried to guess what had happened. He still wore the leather and metal battle skirt, but his cape was gone. He remembered tearing it off as it had started to flame, throwing it aside as he picked up the dying girl and carried her through the great smashed place in the hull of his ship. The battle skirt showed signs of having been scorched. The thongs that bound his sandals were blackened, crisped and the hair had been burned from his calves and ankles. The holster at his right side was empty.
The woman’s face was toward him as she opened her eyes. Her eyes were a clear grey and they saw nothing. They focused on him and he did not like the look of intelligence that came into them. In face and body he found her pleasing, but the eyes alarmed him. They spoke too clearly of knowledge beyond his own — knowledge that made him feel like a child. He saw her test the strength of the strip that hound her wrists, then sit up awkwardly, throw her head back to swing a heavy strand of her hair away from her face. She smiled at him as a conspirator would smile.
“Who are you?” he asked heavily.
She moved her underjaw from side to side and grimaced. “You are strong, Andro.”
“Who are you?”
“Your friend. Your very good friend. My name is Calna.”
“Calna,” he said, tasting the word carefully. “I was dying. Now I am whole again. I was trapped, and now I am free. If you did that, it is evidence that you are a friend. But your purposes in doing that may make you enemy rather than friend.”
She glanced down at her belt. “Untie me, Andro. The bonds are too tight.”
He untied her. She stood up, flexing her hands, rubbing her wrists. The top of her shining head was on a level with his eyes. She smiled at him and there was something in the smile he didn’t like.
She said, “I’m helpless now because you took the things from my belt?”
“Of course.”
She put her hands on him and he tried to strike her again. He cried out in sudden agony as her fingers found pressure points. She did not cease smiling. She touched his elbows in what could have almost been a caress and both arms hung slack and useless. Her hand swept across the side of his throat and he fell heavily. He tried to move and though his effort made the sweat stream from his face, he could not move.
She sat beside him and said softly, “It will go away in a few moments, Andro. And do not let your pride be hurt. Those are methods in which I was, carefully trained.” She stood up and glanced around. She went unerringly to the stone behind which he had hid the shining things. She picked them up and hooked them casually onto the belt.
Some of the weakness had left him. He sat up and glared at her. She laughed. “Don’t look so fierce, Andro. You see, I know you very well. I’ve known you for four long years. There were five escapes before this last one. Probably you thought they were good luck, or even good judgment. I was helping you, Andro. Six times you should have died, and I helped you. The seventh time occurred while you were unconscious and that was the worst time of all, the most dangerous.”
“Why did you help me?”
“I am not from your world, Andro.”
“I have guessed that.”
“My world was interested in your revolt against Shain. It was to our advantage to help you succeed- We helped in many ways, but not enough. I was following orders given to me. When it was seen that our help was not enough, I was ordered to let you die on Zeran. I disobeyed orders.”
“Why?”
Calna frowned. “I... I don’t really know. I knew that I was becoming emotionally interested in you, but that in itself should not have been strong enough to enable me to act counter to my training. It just became something I... I had to do, Andro. Now I am being hunted by my world.”
“As I am being hunted by mine?”
“No. Your world believes you are dead.”
He stood up as the last increment of his strength flooded back. He looked around.
“Is this your world or mine?”
“Neither.”
He stared at her. “What are we to do? How did we come here? I wish to go back to my own world. I left... many things unfinished.”
“You cannot go back. There is no way.”
Andro watched her for a moment. “Until that moment, I believe you told the truth. Now why do you start to lie?”
“Listen carefully and understand, if you can. I will say it as simply as I possibly can, Andro. We tried to help your world without making our presence known. If we did it too obviously, your world would grow out of our reach and we could no longer visit it. If you should go back now, the mere fact of your returning from the dead will put your world out of our reach. So I cannot permit that.”
He studied her. “That seems odd, Calna. You say you are being hunted by your world. Can they hunt for you here?”
“Of course.”
“Then why not return me to my world. You say it will place my world out of reach. Then wouldn’t that mean safety for you, in my world?”
“Yes, but it is against all my training, all I believe in, and...”
He saw her indecision and for the first time he felt that his strength equaled hers. He put his hands lightly on her shoulders, felt her tense under his touch. He looked into her grey eyes until her glance wavered, dropped. She came into his arms with a small cry in her throat that was like a confession of weakness, that was the sign of the transfer to him of the authority for whatever path they would take into the unknown future.
“We will go to my world,” he said. He felt her acquiescence. “And before we return,” he said, “you will teach me how to use the devices of your world. When I return I shall be stronger than Shain and Larrent and Masec, even with no followers.”
She stood a little apart from him then, her head lowered. “My people will be looking for us in your world. They will want to stop us, before the effects of your return have made sufficient change in your world to move it out of their reach.”
At a place which was the essence of no-place, and in a time which, in stasis, was no-time, there was a record of progress in the analysis of paradox, where directed thought maintained the record, where a billion eras moved the record one half-step nearer the point where at last all infinities would become finite. It could not be done on the basis of a controlled experiment, because there is a flow in that theory. The mere factor of control is an alien factor, a newness added to the other components. Without control, all things must be weighed and all factors considered. The measured counting of high value infinities can only be performed in no-time, and only no-place is vast enough to hold the records.
A child awakens and cries in the night. In its simplest sense the impact of that occurrence can be measured through a thousand generations, given all factors for weighing. What complicates it is that cause and effect are expressions of the same factor. It is more delicate to trace the child’s awakening backward for a thousand generations, but still finite and feasible — given enough time and enough space for the keeping of records. Where it becomes paradoxical is when worlds are bridged and all probabilities assume equal values, and in ten thousand co-existent fields of probability where the child awoke at the same instant, the same track can be plotted backward for a thousand generations and be identical for ninety-nine hundred and ninety-nine probabilities, only to diverge at the next to the last generation in the very last of the ten thousand coexistent webs in the matrix. So go back and make that last one similar, and the result will be an increment of divergence which results, most probably, in no child at all, and, less probably, in a night of unbroken rest for the child.