He stood up. "My argument is simple: As I told our dear, savage friends here earlier, an heirpotential to the Indeterminate Throne is too valuable to risk on uncertain adventures. Before I was allowed to enlist as a mercenary, my elder self had to return from the experience to testify I would survive it unscathed. I did. Therefore, I will."
He sat.
There was a moment’s silence. "That’s all you have to say?" Dun Jal asked.
"It is enough."
"Well." Dun Jal cleared his throat and stood. "Then it is my turn. The Empire of the Aftermen is inherently unstable at all points. Perhaps it was a natural phenomenon–once. Perhaps the Aftermen arose from the workings of ordinary evolutionary processes, and could at one time claim that therefore they had a natural place in this continuum. That changed when they began to expand their Empire into their own past. In order to enable their back-conquests, they had to send agents to all prior periods in time to influence and corrupt, to change the flow of history into something terrible and terrifying, from which they might arise. And so they did.
"Massacres, death-camps, genocide, World Wars ..." (There were other terms that did not translate, concepts more horrible than Ellie had words for.) "You don’t really think those were the work of human beings, do you? We’re much too sensible a race for that sort of thing–when we’re left to our own devices. No, all the worst of our miseries are instigated by the Aftermen. We are far from perfect, and the best example of this is the cruel handling of the War in the final years of the Optimized Rationality of True Men, where our leaders have become almost as terrible as the Aftermen themselves–because it is from their very ranks that the Aftermen shall arise. But what might we have been?
"Without the interference of the Aftermen might we not have become something truly admirable?
Might we not have become not the Last Men, but the First truly worthy of the name?" He sat down.
Lightly, sardonically, Sev applauded. "Next?"
The Tarbleck-null placed both hands heavily on the table, and, leaning forward, pushed himself up.
"Does the tiger explain himself to the sheep?" he asked. "Does he need to explain? The sheep understand well enough that Death has come to walk among them, to eat those it will and spare the rest only because he is not yet hungry. So too do men understand that they have met their master.
I do not enslave men because it is right or proper, but because I can. The proof of which is that I have!
"Strength needs no justification. It exists or it does not. I exist. Who here can say that I am not your superior? Who here can deny that Death has come to walk among you? Natural selection chose the fittest among men to become a new race. Evolution has set my foot upon your necks, and I will not take it off."
To universal silence, he sat down. The very slightest of glances he threw Ellie’s way, as if to challenge her to refute him. Nor could she! Her thoughts were all confusion, her tongue all in a knot. She knew he was wrong–she was sure of it!–and yet she could not put her arguments together.
She simply couldn’t think clearly and quickly enough.
Nadine laughed lightly.
"Poor superman!" she said. "Evolution isn’t linear, like that chart that has a fish crawling out of the water at one end and a man in a business suit at the other. All species are constantly trying to evolve in all directions at once–a little taller, a little shorter, a little faster, a little slower. When that distinction proves advantageous, it tends to be passed along. The Aftermen aren’t any smarter than Men are–less so, in some ways. Less flexible, less innovative . .
. look what a stagnant world they’ve created! What they are is more forceful."
"Forceful?" Ellie said, startled. "Is that all?"
"That’s enough. Think of all the trouble caused by men like Hitler, Mussolini, Caligula, Pol Pot, Archers-Wang 43... . All they had was the force of their personality, the ability to get others to do what they wanted. Well, the Aftermen are the descendants of exactly such people, only with the force of will squared and cubed. That afternoon when the Tarbleck-null ordered you to sit in the window? It was the easiest thing in the world to one of them. As easy as breathing.
"That’s why the Rationality can’t win. Oh, they could win, if they were willing to root out that streak of persuasive coercion within themselves. But they’re fighting a war, and in times of war one uses whatever weapons one has. The ability to tell millions of soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the common good is simply too useful to be thrown away. But all the time they’re fighting the external enemy, the Aftermen are evolving within their own numbers."
"You admit it," the Tarbleck said.
"Oh, be still! You’re a foolish little creature, and you have no idea what you’re up against. Have you ever asked the Aftermen from the leading edge of your Empire why you’re expanding backward into the past rather than forward into the future? Obviously because there are bigger and more dangerous things up ahead of you than you dare face. You’re afraid to go there–afraid that you might find me!" Nadine took something out of her pocket. "Now go away, all of you."
Flash.
Nothing changed. Everything changed.
Ellie was still sitting in the Algonquin with Nadine. But Sev, Dun Jal, and the Tarbleck-null were all gone. More significantly, the bar felt real in a way it hadn’t an instant before. She was back home, in her own now and her own when.
Ellie dug into her purse and came up with a crumpled pack of Lucky Strike Greens, teased one out, and lit it. She took a deep drag on the cigarette and then exhaled. "All right," she said, "who are you?"
The girl’s eyes sparkled with amusement. "Why, Ellie, dear, don’t you know? I’m you!"
So it was that Eleanor Voigt was recruited into the most exclusive organization in all Time–an organization that was comprised in hundreds of thousands of instances entirely and solely of herself. Over the course of millions of years, she grew and evolved, of course, so that her ultimate terrifying and glorious self was not even remotely human. But everything starts somewhere, and Ellie of necessity had to start small.
The Aftermen were one of the simpler enemies of the humane future she felt that Humanity deserved.
Nevertheless they had to be–gently and nonviolently, which made the task more difficult–opposed.
After fourteen months of training and the restoration of all her shed age, Ellie was returned to New York City on the morning she had first answered the odd help wanted ad in the Times. Her original self had been detoured away from the situation, to be recruited if necessary at a later time.
"Unusual in what way?" she asked. "I don’t understand. What am I looking for?"
"You’ll know it when you see it," the Tarbleck-null said.
He handed her the key.
She accepted it. There were tools hidden within her body whose powers dwarfed those of this primitive chrono-transfer device. But the encoded information the key contained would lay open the workings of the Aftermen Empire to her. Working right under their noses, she would be able to undo their schemes, diminish their power, and, ultimately, prevent them from ever coming into existence in the first place.
Ellie had only the vaguest idea how she was supposed to accomplish all this. But she was confident that she could figure it out, given time. And she had the time.
All the time in the world.