“No,” Corson said.
“To eliminate war,” Floria went on, “Those of Aergistal make use of people who have waged it. They know what it’s like. Sometimes they come to hate it enough to want to abolish it—really to want that, no matter what the cost. Those who do not immediately arrive at this conclusion spend a certain while at Aergistal. Eventually they understand. In the long run they all understand.”
“Even someone like Veran?” Corson said sceptically.
“Even someone like Veran. Right now he’s canceling a flare-up in the Lyra region.”
“But he’s dead,” Corson said.
“No one dies,” Floria countered. “A life is like a page in a book. There’s another next to it. Not after it—next to it.”
Corson rose and took a few steps toward the sea. He halted at the edge of the surf.
“It’s a great story. Who’s to tell me if it’s true?”
“Nobody. You’ll find that out by snatches. Maybe what you’ll find out will be a little different. No one has the monopoly of truth.” Without turning, Corson said—forcefully, almost violently—“I came back to learn the mastery of time, and how to commune with Those of Aergistal. And—”
“You’ll learn. Everything you’re capable of learning. We need people like you. There are so many outbreaks of war to be put out, like so many fires.”
“But I hoped to find peace,” Corson said. “And—and I came back for Antonella.”
Floria drew close and set her hands on his shoulders. “I beg you—” she began. He cut her short.
“I love her! Or… or I used to love her. She has vanished too, hasn’t she?”
“She never existed. She had been dead for a long time. We took her from the mausoleum world, from that warlord’s collection, and equipped her with an artificial personality, just as you did with Veran’s recruits. It was essential, Corson. Without her you would not have acted as you did. But a real human being could not have entered Aergistal.”
“Without being a war criminal,” Corson said.
“She was no more than a machine.”
“You mean she was bait.”
“I’m desperately sorry. I will do whatever you wish. I will love you, George Corson, if that is what you want.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” he muttered, recalling what Cid had told him: he must not hold against them what they had been forced to do. Cid had been expunged. He had known what was in store for him, yet he had pitied Corson…
“No one dies,” Corson said. “Perhaps I’ll find her again in another existence.”
“Perhaps,” Floria sighed.
Corson took a step into the sea. “So nothing is left to me—neither friendship nor love. My universe disappeared six thousand years ago. I’ve been cheated.”
“You are still free to choose. You can wipe it all away, return to square one. But remember! Aboard the Archimedes you were about to die.”
“Free to choose?” Corson echoed disbelievingly.
He heard her move away; when he turned he saw she was delving in the sand at the spot where it still bore the imprint of her body. When she came back she held an opalescent phial the size of a pigeon’s egg.
‘There is one more thing you must do in order to become completely one of us. Wild pegasones are no more capable of time travel than a caveman of advanced mathematics. At best they can move a few seconds back or forth. This phial contains an accelerator which multiplies their embryonic power billions of times over. You must administer it yourself at the proper moment. The dose has been carefully calculated. Its introduction into the past will cause no appreciable timequakes from your point of view. So far as your date of emergence is concerned, the margin for error is narrow, but we have taken that into account. A pegasone carries a certain volume of space along when it jumps through time. Now you know all that’s necessary. The decision is up to you, George Corson.”
He heard and understood. One last thing to be done. The keystone to be set on the arch. His own hand to be outstretched to himself across a gulf of six thousand years.
“Thank you,” he said. “But I don’t yet know what I’ll do.”
He took the phial and headed for his pegasone.
Chapter 38
Corson jumped more than six thousand years into the past, groped around to get his bearings, made a spatial correction… and the pegasone locked into the present. The planet spun around him for a moment until he managed to stabilize himself. He was in a very elongated orbit, the sort which a warship would adopt if it wanted to brush past the planet, spending minimal time close to its surface but needing to discharge something under the best possible conditions and out of the eye of the sun.
He waited, musing. The universe was spread out before him, yet he saw practically nothing of it. It was like a well, infinitely deep and infinitely wide, whereas all that any human—or alien—eye could perceive was the narrow borehole of its own awareness. Tangled together, but never uniting, all those pipelike strands led to the skin of the universe, toward its ultimate surface, where they all at last united at Aergistal. Each point in the universe, so Cid had claimed, possessed its own ecological universe. So must any given observer, any given maker of decisions.
Everyone tries to read his own destiny on the walls of the well. Everyone, if he can, seeks to alter the design of his life. Unaware, we burrow away and distort the shafts our neighbors are sinking…
But not at Aergistal. Not on the surface of the cosmos. For Those of Aergistal there was no distinction between the ecological universe and the plenum. They could not neglect anything. They could not be unaware of anybody.
Below Corson, Urian scanners were searching the sky. They voiced the fears of another segment of this complicated history. But at this distance the combined masses of pegasone and rider were too small to unleash a reaction from the gun batteries.
Corson hesitated. He could make off, in which case he would most likely be killed in the explosion of the ship. He might perhaps reach the ground in company with the Monster; then, sooner or later, he would fall into the clutches of the Urians. Few prisoners had returned from Uria and none in good shape. He could let Lieutenant George Corson, part-time soldier, specialist in Monsters and ignorant of almost everything about them, continue to the term of his natural destiny. Then he, the other Corson, the time traveler, would be obliterated. Was it worth dooming the other Corson to all those trials which would culminate in the frustration of continuous check and the gall of loneliness? He wondered what the other Corson would decide at the conclusion of his journeyings. Then he recalled that he was that Corson.
Well—was it worth it?
That night of terror in the forest beside the wailing Monster. Floria Van Nelle. She must have known he was going to attack her. Or could she really sense nothing beyond that fringe of a few seconds where the future loomed into certainty? Dyoto, the city he knew to be doomed, and his comical wanderings among its vertical streets. Antonella, who seemed to have sprung from nowhere and in fact had done so. Veran. His captivity. The house of the dead at the end of the blue road. Aergistal, that caldron of war where death itself was no more than a respite. And this web of intrigue, this mad to-and-froing of fanatics and warmakers in which time tore itself apart.
If he did nothing, if he went away… The Monster would reach its destination. It had proved how tough it was. It would bear its offspring. In due time Earth would win the war. She would dress her wounds. She would control, by cunning or by force of arms, the nascent Confederation. There would be rebellions, and further wars.