He scraped sand over what he had vomited, swallowed painfully, wiped the corners of his mouth.
“I’m better now,” he told Antonella, who was still staring at him in dismay. “It’s nothing. A—a fit.”
She had offered no help, or even sympathy. She had not made a move.
Too young, maybe, he thought. Brought up in the silken safety of a world unaware of disease and pain. Hardly more than a pretty flower. Experience will change her. Then I shall be able to love her. By the gods, l’ll take Aergistal to pieces stone by stone to find her again! They can’t keep her there. She has never soiled her hands with any crime.
And that justified Corson’s presence here. Antonella could not do what he had done, nor what remained for him to do. Neither Selma, nor Cid, nor anyone from their period could do it. They were not hardened as he was. They belonged to another world and fought on a different front. Unluckily for them, it was not free from danger. And it was the role of people like Corson to minimize their peril.
What we are, he said to himself, we’re the road sweepers of history, the sewermen. We paddle in shit so that the way will be clean for the feet of our descendants.
“Are you going for a swim?” the girl asked.
He nodded, not having recovered enough to speak. The sea would make him feel clean again. The entire ocean might not be too much.
Chapter 35
Cid was back when Corson came out of the water. He found an excuse to get rid of Antonella and described his plan. The general outline fitted together, but certain details remained unclear: the collar, for instance, which he still did not know how to take off. Maybe he would find out at Aergistal. or during a journey into the future. But for the moment it represented only a minor inconvenience.
Arranging the escape would be quite easy. Veran himself had given Corson a whole range of weapons after he had been fitted with the collar; assuming he had no more to fear from that quarter, he concluded that every available man was indispensable in time of war.
One of the weapons created the light-inhibiting field. By modifying it Corson thought he could increase its range at the cost of exhausting its power pack in a few minutes. Its corollary was an ultrasound projector which enabled you to find your way about in the dark; he also had one of those. The ration bag he would leave on the mausoleum planet formed part of the equipment of his pegasone. There remained the two suits he would give to Antonella and the other Corson, but he expected to pick those up without much difficulty during the confusion caused by his arrival.
Contrary to his expectations, Cid did not react when he came to the most delicate aspect of his plan: the reanimation of the undead girls. The man was either incapable of emotion or very strong-willed. Corson thought the former more likely.
“I have some knowledge of reanimation techniques and synthetic personality implantation,” Corson said. “It was being tested on casualties during the Earth-Uria war. But I’ll need equipment and perhaps technical assistance.”
“I suspect you will find all you need on the mausoleum world,” Cid answered. “These sadistic collectors of yours will certainly have prepared for all eventualities. And if you need advice, get in touch with Aergistal.”
“How? By shouting at the top of my voice? Do they always keep an eye on me?”
Cid smiled faintly. “Probably. But that’s not the way. Didn’t you know you can reach them through the pegasone? You’ve been to Aergistal. The route is indelibly imprinted on your nervous system. Besides, it’s not so much a route as a way of seeing things. Aergistal occupies the surface of the universe, which implies that it’s everywhere. The surface of a hypervolume is a volume with one dimension less. That’s not exact, because the number of dimensions in this universe is probably irrational and may even be transfinite, but for practical purposes it’s all you need to know.”
“But what do I have to do?” Corson asked in perplexity.
“I don’t know pegasones as well as you do, and I’ve never been to Aergistal, but I assume it will suffice to establish your usual empathy relation with it and then call your journey back to mind. The pegasone will instinctively make any necessary corrections. Don’t forget it can reach quite deep into your subconscious.”
Cid stroked his chin. “You see,” he went on, “it all began with pegasones, on this planet at any rate. In the old days they were unknown on Uria. Into this probability line, or another adjacent”—with a sad smile—“you introduced the first pegasone. Urian scientists studied its offspring. They managed to work out how they jumped through time. Then they contrived to endow humans with the same talent, at first on a very small scale. I told you, it’s less a question of a talent than a way of looking at things. The human nervous system has no special powers, but it does have the ability to acquire them, which is perhaps even better. A few centuries ago, at the beginning of our period of responsibility, the humans on Uria were only capable of cogging a few seconds of their future. For some reason the Old Race, the avians, had even more trouble.”
“A good thing too,” Corson grunted, remembering Ngal R’nda. “But the people I met on my arrival had the power, and the study of pegasones must have happened later.”
Cid smiled again, this time with genuine amusement. “How many people did you actually meet?”
Corson searched his memory. “Only two—Floria Van Nelle, and Antonella.”
“They came from your future,” explained Cid. “Later on the most advanced or the most gifted entered communion with Aergistal. Everything has become much easier. At least, in a manner of speaking.”
He straightened and filled his lungs.
“Now we have begun to move through time without pegasones or machines. We do still need a little device, a memory-jogger, as it were. But soon we’ll be able to do without that, too.”
“Soon?”
“Tomorrow, or in a hundred years. It makes no difference. Time counts little for those who have mastered it.”
“Many will die between now and then.”
“You’ve already died once, haven’t you, Corson? And that isn’t preventing you from carrying out your mission.”
Corson remained silent awhile, concentrating on his plan. What Cid had told him disposed of two problems: how to get the pegasone to take Antonella and the other Corson to Aergistal, and how to locate the mausoleum world. Because he had been there once, he would know how to get back. Obviously it was impossible for a man to keep track of the billions and billions of celestial bodies in this corner of the universe, let alone follow their relative motions over long periods of time. But he could always retrace a route he had taken once, just as it is not necessary to have read every book in order to know how to read a few.
“We could have given you a certain amount of training,” Cid remarked, burrowing in the sand. “But it would have taken a very long time. And this probability line is rather fragile. It’s better for you to use the pegasone. As for us, we are forcing ourselves to give them up.”
He unearthed an engraved silver-gilt container.
“You must be hungry,” he said.
Corson spent three ten-days on the beach. It was a sort of furlough. But he devoted most of the time to perfecting his plans. From memory he drew on the sand a detailed map of Veran’s encampment. He would have little time to lead the fugitives to the pegasone park and there must be no question of tripping on a tent peg or losing his way in the maze of alleys. He also worked out the principal attributes of the artificial personalities he wanted to give to the reanimated girls. He still did not know how to get them from the mausoleum world to Uria, but there would be time to figure that out when he had dealt with the earlier stages of the scheme.