Z-Sting Page 8

  How careless can you get? How many times on a single space junket can you be so careless? He felt a rare bristling thrill at the nape of his neck: it spread down his spine and dissipated, leaving his legs weak. He hung indecisive beneath the uptime belly of the cylinder.

  Too late!

  . . . Except, of course, that there is no such thing as too late in uptime where recurrence is eternal.

  Croyd took time to breathe. Then he uptimed progressively until the hatch reopened in reverse time and the suited figure backed out and crab-scuttled away into space. Putting himself on a time diagonal, he held the figure frozen in space while he moved leisurely thither. He climbed onto its insentient back, wrapped arms and legs around it, and let go of time.

  His human steed jetted him violently to the cylinder and into the hatch, the cover slammed silently shut behind them, the inner cover opened, he was pulled through, the inner cover closed behind them, and he was in the large living-working space of the cylinder, still clinging to the back of its captain. Convulsively he thrust himself away and stood clear, unconscious of his suit-papoosed nakedness, while the captain unscrewed and discarded her helmet, revealing a handsome-sober broad-cheekboned fair young Nordic face.

  Before him, Marta Evans, already (in this forty-four-year oldtime) Chairman of Mare Stellarum and celibate forty-two-year-old matriarch of the Evans commercial empire, completed her unsuiting and stood like a Valkyrie in bare feet and a diaphanous thigh-length shift, muscle-tone of youth, skin tone of youth, asexually female, as beautiful as a snow goddess and stared directly at him, and considered him.

  Croyd, like appled Adam, became stunningly aware of his own nakedness. And she sighed and came toward him, lips parted a little. That she was his great-granddaughter, what did that matter? What had it mattered to Enki in the garden . . .

  Just before she touched him, he cursed and leaped nimbly aside: her practically infinite mass passed lethally through the place where he had been, and went on to the kitchen panel where she dialed herself a hot toddy.

  He muttered: Who but a Croyd Thoth or a Homo sapiens could goof so many lethal times in one sortie and live to kick himself?

  He tackled then the cord knots in earnest, and dressed, and suited, and helmeted, and breathed. Then once again he climbed upon the uptime-rigid back of Marta who did not know he was there, who indeed knew nothing since her mind no longer dwelt in this far-uptime body-trance; and he clung to her and let his mind-reach explore the traces of her conscience in the traces of her brain.

  Five minutes later, he had confirmed his suspicion that in her relative youth in 2431, Marta had still been an honest idealist.

  Well: now he was on the threshold of uptime Nereid, as yet uninhabited—and nearly on the tiny planetoid. Tiny; and yet its total surface provided as much space for a top-level governmental capital as a good-sized Erth megalopolis. And if he should get in, the uptime indications were clear: in her youth, in the youngness of her middle age, she had been decent and sharp, she had cracked the whip.

  What might renewal of her youth now do for her? It was a hell of a gamble . . .

  Anyhow, hanging off Nereid in space here, the uptime-exploratory part of his mission was terminated. He would have enjoyed taking uptime time to follow the progress of this courageous woman who had insisted on doing her own solitary stake-out of Nereid as a potential galaxy headquarters for Mare Stellarum, and who had gone on to drive it through and built it up and make it invincible. Perhaps eventually he would do this, if it should stay high enough among his priorities. But uptiming takes actual time, and there was time-tagged work to be done.

  Therefore, instead, Croyd uptimed to the hours-earlier moment when Marta had suited up for the sortie from which he had caught her coming in. And as soon as she had her helmet on, he climbed aboard her again and let her take him out through the airlock. But once in space, he kicked free; and while she descended onto barren Nereid, he shot out into space a fairly safe hundred kilometers off Nereid and downtimed to 18 May 2475—three days prior to actuality.

  At that moment, in Senevendia, Keri Andhra was being informed by her father of a dismal immediate imminence. Croyd was multi-crossing that date, not knowing its significance.

  Holding the time stratum, giving every mass a wide berth, letting uptime flow by at a high multiple of time’s actuality rate (to minimize the amount of actuality that he was using up), he moved in on elaborately superstructured Nereid, now long established as Mare Stellarum headquarters, potently bidding also to become Interplanetary Union headquarters, out here where Neptune’s leisurely solar orbit apposited that headquarters successively each one hundred sixty-five years to every star system in the universe. And now he clung to one craft or another and one human or another until he had got himself into the private solarium of old, old Marta Evans.

  There he observed her comings and goings, sampling them over a period of several days in the course of a quarter-hour, until he was sure of two pertinent facts: (1) old Marta had settled into fixed habits, and her solarium schedule was among them; (2) one secretary, a middle-aged man named Berber, handled practically all of her appointments and served her confidentially.

  Croyd was now ready for the semifinal step. Downtiming to just behind the surface tension of the actuality bubble on 21 May 2475, he sat beside the motionless Chairman of Mare Stellarum on her solarium chaise longue (her bulk left his thin buttocks precarious perch) and relaxed for several minutes, breathing slowly and deeply, until he felt sure that he was ready for a maximum uptime-period without air.

  He then unsuited; and he carefully laid out the suit on the floor beside the chaise longue on the side where Secretary Berber could see it when he would enter. Berber would not see it, of course, because the suit would remain anchored in this instant of uptime, never to emerge into actuality; but the whimsy pleased Croyd, who had to put the suit somewhere.

  Actuality is, in some theoretical philosophies and perhaps commonly in naive supposition, an instantaneous instant, a tempoplane without duration dividing past from future.

  In fact, as Croyd knew from experience, actuality has appreciable duration. It is the period during which an event becomes so definite that its outcome is practically certain; and it terminates when the event has become unambiguously definite. Uptime begins at this point; and in uptime the event, already definite, begins progress toward eternal unchangeability as the mass of its trace grows acceleratively more ponderous—and its magnitude deceleratively smaller.

  Croyd had now the difficult task of performing subtle alterations upon uptime. What he had to do could not be done in present actuality, for someone would spot him doing it; nor could it be done in hard uptime, for then it would be too late to make any changes whatsoever.

  He had therefore to operate on the tenuous margin between actuality and uptime—the indefinite microfractional second after events had become definite but before their mass could freeze that way. His presence and his operations then might cause some vague disease in the minds of the people upon whose brains he was operating; but the foggy botheration would be neither noticed nor remembered.

  Marta was here, reclining on the chaise longue. He positioned himself behind her head. His mind reach, more slender than the filament that one uses to dissect a virus, capillaried into her brain. Long practice in his own brain during years of inwardly conscious paralysis taught him how to find, systematically, the rank of cells in her memory banks which correlated communications with time references. There he inscribed latent pseudo-memories, easily recallable, of three recent communications from an unknown erthling named Croyd.

  The process required eighteen minutes, longer than he had anticipated because Marta’s brain was powerful and resisted interference. His unbreathing vitality was flagging, he had no time to lose. Progressively he uptimed until Berber was present; he then latched on to Berber’s back and accelerated both of them downtime to the hinterland of actuality, at an instant when Berber happened to be at his desk in Mart
a’s antechamber reviewing commitments for the remainder of her day. In Berber’s brain Croyd engraved pseudo-memory of the same three dated communications.

  Judging by his acute physical discomfort, at least thirty-one minutes!

  Springing away from Berber, Croyd adopted a relaxed stance before the secretary’s desk and let himself drift down into actuality.

  When the aide saw him, Croyd was breathing heavily.

  Rehab Action Four

  CONFRONTATION WITH ESTABLISHMENT GRANDEUR

  Nereid, 21 May

  Aggression Is mammalian-genetic, and Man is a toolmaker, and his most glamorous tools are weapons. If a weapon-tool exists, he will improve it; if an improved weapon-tool exists, he will use it. As long as any sort of weapon at all is permitted to exist, no solemn interconstellational resolution will prevent a catastrophic development at the hands of some Faust-fool.

  —Nike Pan, Plato and the Stars (2343)

  Marta Evans, Chairman of Mare Stellarum, de facto ruler of Erthworld and potential de facto ruler of the germinating Interplanetary Union, smoothed back the thin white hair that she scorned to tint or thicken or bewig (they never had found a reliable way to regrow it in an oldster) and let her hands pass on back to clasp her thick recumbent neck, elevating her flabbily substantial breasts and her muscular pelvis (all decently covered), offering her otherwise bare body to the reflected pallor of Neptune filtered through the solarium dome and then gently amplified by crystal refractors until this pallor became subdued Florida-type sunlight. Baggy eyes closed, she refrained from listening to the audio newsken that skinny secretary Berber, fully clothed, was playing for her. Instead, with Neptune’s glow warming her eyeballs through eyelid skin, she yielded up her brain to semi-hallucinations of strong young men who she had never known.

  Marta was eighty-six. Science had retarded her senescence; it had not defeated her senescence.

  The newsken ceased. Berber said: “Word comes from outside that a Mr. Croyd is here to see you.”

  The almost hairless brows of Marta furrowed, the eyes stayed closed. “I seem to remember the name. But I don’t know why.”

  “He has written three times for a private appointment The last letter came to your personal attention.”

  Marta’s eyes came open. “How the hell did he get out here? Who authorized transport?”

  “I’d have to check. Shall I—”

  “Forget it.” Marta touched a button that sprang the chair back and the Marta-back erect. “If he could get here, he deserves to come in—with precautions. What does he want?”

  “A job, Madame.”

  "As what?”

  “He specified, responsible and interplanetary. No more.”

  "In, then,” she ordered, seeing briefly to the pectoral and pelvic coverage.

  Berber signed. A door opened. Croyd hobbled in.

  Seeing his age, old Marta dismissed modesty and dreaming.

  Croyd came all the way in and stood beside her chair. Had he had a hat, it would have been in hand only by reason of courtesy. He was about as erect as a man his age could be.

  Marta, quietly: "We are light hours from Erth and light years from Alpha Centauri. How did you get here?”

  “I flew.” His voice did not quaver old; Marta got an odd displaced sense of youth.

  She demanded: “From where? In what? On whose authority?”

  “From Erth; in a ship; on my authority.”

  She had drawn up a leg, she was leaning toward him. “I take it you’re a rich old bastard. What did you want to see me for?”

  “I wrote three times. The last time, your secretary replied that I would be welcome if I could get here. I got here.”

  Marta let her leg sag and breathed out air. “The reply you received was supposed to be the ultimate brush-off. Just our luck that you had to be rich enough to hire a space ferry and bribe your way through our defenses. Get your business done and go away.”

  Croyd glanced at Berber. “This is confidential—and unpleasant. Is he a confidant? And are we bugged?”

  “Talk!” Marta bit.

  His hands were in his long pants pockets. “It is three to one that within a month, COMCORD or the Penultimate Trigger or the Z-sting itself will go neurotic and hit Erth with a Z-strike somewhere. But the guardian of Erth, Mare Stellarum, is so riddled with intercompetitive bureaucracy that its chairman has lost control of her own ministries. Consequently, this total incredibility: nobody in Mare Stellarum, including its chairman, knows where the Penultimate Trigger or the Z-sting itself are located! Now you know what I know that I shouldn’t. Do you still want me to go away?”

  She frowned at him. Her lips had not perceptibly paled, possibly because they were rouged.

  He added: “I wouldn’t advise killing me, either, because of what I can do for you.”

  “What can you do for me, Mr. Croyd?”

  Compressing lips, he stared at Berber.

  “Go away, Berber,” said Marta lazily, “and cut the bug.”

  That was how Croyd knew he had touched her.

  Berber was gone. “Sit down,” Marta commanded.

  Croyd sat on a nearby armchair.

  “Drink?”

  “Zac and branch.” Out here on Nereid, he wondered whether she would use dehydrated water.

  She dialed two highballs and half-reached one to him, making him come and get it She asserted: "We are private, except that this same dial has activated a tape. This tape will continue to record as long as it hears my voice at least once in thirty seconds. After my voice stops, if I do not deactivate this tape—a thing which only I can do—in thirty seconds it will sound an alarm. So if you choose to kill me, do it an instant after I have said something, and then you will have nearly thirty seconds to escape.”

  “Very good.” He nodded, back in his seat. “Relatively speaking, the allowance is generous. I shall talk in short bursts; pray come in promptly when I pause. Anyhow, I do not choose to kill you. I choose to rejuvenate you.”

  Marta stared at him. She began to laugh.

  He remarked: “I trust your laughter counts as your voice.”

  She nodded, laughing. Placidly he waited until she quieted. He then inquired: “Amused at me, or at yourself?”

  Marta went stoney-browed. "Amused obviously at the notion of a fossil like yourself proposing to rejuvenate anybody. Stop talking nonsense and get to your business. You have won this audience with an illegal entry, two wild charges, and one insane prediction about COMCORD. What are your proofs?”

  “First, the question of your control over your bureaucracy. I could break your heart with instances, but let me give you just one. Are you familiar with the frigate Mazurka of Rab, and with her mission?”

  "You tell me.”

  “Her announced mission was dual—to plant an experimental hypertelecom station on Moon, and to sample Erth’s megalopolitan tempopatterns. Were you personally aware of this?”

  “Presumably it came to me in my daily summary from External Security.”

  “Whether or not this happened, should not External Security have notified Internal Security?”

  She was gazing at him. “And?”

  “And should you not have been advised immediately by both security ministries—and particularly by your omniscient aide Dr. Ziska—of any and all departures from flight plan?”

  “Well?”

  “Then were you advised that a dozen hours ago the Mazurka was cruising off Nereid—and that this cruise had been approved by Moonbase?”

  Marta’s bare feet slapped the floor as she snapped to erect sitting position sidewise on the chaise longue.

  “Check it with Ziska,” he advised, and sipped.

  Marta pressed a button and snapped into the intercoms “Berber—get Ziska on the phone, soonest.” Disconnecting, she gazed at Croyd with something faintly resembling alarm. “I am not so naive,” she observed, “as to suppose that you will tell me how you know all this. While we are waiting for Ziska, suppose you mov
e to the COMCORD question.”

  Leading from probability-inference in a context of factual ignorance, Croyd prodded: “You are already worried about COMCORD. That was what got me this audience.”

  “It gets you no more, unless you give more. What do you have on COMCORD?”

  “Dr. Ziska is your Minister of Internal Security. You are waiting for his call because I put the finger on a failure of this part of your creaking bureaucracy. If there is anything wrong with COMCORD, this is also a failure of his part of your bureaucracy. When Dr. Ziska calls, ask him about COMCORD.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You are hedging, and I think you’ve played out your bluff. What would you do if I were to call for help?”

  “There’s an easy way to find out. Keep quiet for thirty seconds—no, twenty-five now.”

  Pursing lips, she waited, watching him. Sipping, he watched her.

  At the end of the thirtieth second of her silence, raucous hooting resounded in the solarium. Croyd raised eyebrows and disappeared, zac and all. Marta was on her feet, ogling the point of evanishment, as the army poured In.

  “I'm over here,” called Croyd from behind the soldiers. They spun and parted to reveal him standing by the door where they had entered. He hobbled forward, not looking at them. Coming up to Marta, he told her: “That’s what I’d do.”

  She burst out:’’What do you want of me?”

  “At the moment, more zac—”

  Berber came in on the intercom. “I have Dr. Ziska waiting.”

  Two squads of soldiers continued to stand there, arms at the ready, “Well done,” Marta told their lieutenant. “It was only a sneak inspection. Take them away, sir.” He saluted, and they left.

  She told Croyd, her tone a shade less premptory: “You’ll have to wait a bit for your second zac. Please move over there where you are beyond the range of the visicom.”

  Moving, he queried: “Are you sure you want his present?”