CHRYSALIS Page 8

  “Rather tedious.”

  “No doubt. But we do not allow tedium to enter here. I cannot promise your stay will be exciting, but I can promise it will be instructive, perhaps even rewarding. Much depends upon your curiosity.”

  “Rewarding perhaps, instructive certainly,” Simon said easily, standing again and turning slowly, looking about the room with languid unconcern. “As to my curiosity, I’ll admit to being mildly curious as to how you managed to build what has every appearance of being a medieval church several hundred feet underwater.”

  “Ah!” Kosh smiled happily. “You like it? I’m quite proud of it, it’s quite a technical achievement. You’re standing on the very tiles of what was once the chapel of a ruined and long abandoned medieval Scottish fortress, a fortress called Linngard, no doubt so-called because it sat in the middle of a lake, guarding the border with quarrelsome England. Not much was left of it, it was essentially a pile of rubble, but I was able to salvage the chapel and most of the main hall, and had them transported here and reconstructed. The main hall serves as a State dining room, and quite admirably so. As to the chapel, I use it as my principal study, for contemplation. I find the atmosphere conducive to quiet thought.”

  “I should think it would give you the creeps.”

  “Not at all,” Kosh said shortly. “Come, I wish to show you something.”

  He led Simon through a door and into a large, modernly furnished room, well lit, deep pile carpeting underfoot, with comfortable looking sofas and a large stone fireplace at one end. This wasn’t what one noticed about the room, however, for one entire wall was glass. Behind the glass was the lake, lit with underwater lamps, so that guests could enjoy the sight of fish, mouths agape, eyes wide, swimming lazily in the man-made light.

  “Those are pike,” Kosh said, “though we see many shad and salmon as well, not to mention the swarms of panfish of every description. We feed them, of course. It’s amazing how quickly they become accustomed to a source of food.”

  “Everybody's looking for a handout. But tell me, Kosh, why go to all this trouble? Why build your hideout underwater? What's the point?”

  “This is where Dorothea wants to be. I believe she likes the seclusion.”

  “Dorothea?”

  “Medusa.”

  “Ah. We’ve heard the stories. I gather she’s the source of your power?”

  “Some, but by no means all,” Kosh smiled. “In any event, I please her when it’s in my interest to do so. At the moment it pleases her to live on the bottom of a lake, and so I built Linngard on the bottom of Lake Champlain, over two hundred feet deep at this point. You will recall, I’m sure, that Lake Champlain was the scene of an important naval battle, the Battle of Valcour Island, where General Benedict Arnold gave the British all they could handle.”

  “Your kind of guy.”

  “I detect a note of hostility,” Kosh said, feigning sadness. “To be expected. Expected, and overcome.”

  “Now look, Kosh,” Simon said sternly. “Let's cut the crap. I'm your prisoner. What do you want?”

  “I want to make you an offer you will not wish to refuse,” Kosh said quietly. “I want to make you my son.”

  In the silence following this remarkable statement, Simon stared at the fish wall, collecting his thoughts. He had assumed Kosh had brought him here for sport, to gloat, to glory in the capture of Tal Avenger. He expected to be paraded through the streets in a cage, held up to ridicule, shown to the world as an example of what happens to those who oppose the Director. He didn’t expect to be killed out of hand, for that could have been accomplished easily enough in the grave of Gaeton Thon. He did expect to be killed after he’d served his purpose, which meant he had no reason not to treat these people with the contempt they deserved.

  “A startling proposal,” Kosh laughed. “I was just as startled when it was first proposed. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw the merit in it.”

  “Proposed by whom?”

  “Why, by Dorothea. She’s admittedly a bit absent-minded at times, but occasionally, in her more lucid moments, she has a brilliant and original thought. Ah, here’s breakfast!”

  A white coated waiter wheeled a cart across the deep carpeting, followed by a whole squadron of white coated waiters bearing a table, two chairs, flowers, candelabra, silver and napery. The table was set up next to the fish wall and places set with an economy of effort that would’ve done credit to an Air Force crew setting up a missile battery.

  “Please,” Kosh said graciously, gesturing Simon to a chair. The two men sat and the waiters served the ice-cold melon.

  Simon glanced idly at the fish wall, and the distorted and indistinct reflection of Kosh leaped out at him, sending his brain rummaging through his memory banks. He was startled to discover the memories were those of the Simon Pure lying on the floor of Jimmy Shallcross's bedroom. From this angle, the distorted and indistinct reflection was tantalizingly familiar. In a moment or two his brain found the right file cabinet and produced a picture that matched in too many particulars to be coincidental. Now that he’d made the connection, he saw the underlying similarities; he knew why the picture of Kosh in Gaeton Thon's interrogation room had seemed familiar. Dr. Sariot Kosh was his analyst, Dr. Edward Posner.

  “Excellent melon,” Kosh said. “I trust it suits you?”

  “Never had better,” Simon said. Things were coming together, beginning to make sense. Marykate as Marianna, the long dead young Jimmy Shallcross, himself as himself, and now Dr. Posner as Dr. Kosh. Yes, he thought, staring at a large, voracious looking fish that had chosen that moment to swim idly by, it’s beginning to make sense. I’m on the floor of Ada Shallcross's back bedroom, passed out for some unknown reason, and I’m having a dream. He wondered who else he knew was here.

  “A penny for your thoughts, Mr. Pure,” Kosh said, looking at him oddly.

  “Oh,” Simon shrugged, “I was merely thinking that not all dreams turn out well.”

  “Indeed they do not,” Kosh said slowly, after a moment's pause. “Though an odd statement in the present circumstance.”

  Kosh was right, it was odd, for now that he saw the similarities, he also became aware of the dissimilarities. He saw no difference in himself, for such, he told himself, is the nature of dreams, but now that he looked closely he saw that Kosh and Posner were not identical. Indeed, looked at critically, Kosh didn’t look at all like Posner, not if you took each feature separately and compared them. But somehow, when you looked at Kosh, you were inevitably reminded of Posner. Now that he thought about it, Marianna wasn’t quite Marykate, either, though closer to each other than Kosh was to Posner. As for Jimmy Shallcross, how could he tell? He had never met him, had seen, only briefly, a posed photograph on a dresser.

  The waiter was pouring coffee, and Simon realized he was being addressed. He said, “Yes please,” and the waiter added hot milk. Another waiter placed a plate in front of him, and Kosh said, “Grouse eggs, lightly scrambled with heavy cream and sherry. I’ve no doubt you’ll find them delightful.”

  He did find them delightful, notwithstanding his recent breakfast, and said so, with such conviction that Kosh beamed as hugely as if he’d made them himself. Kosh seemed in high good humor, and Simon thought it best to be agreeable, to go along, keeping Kosh on course, in control, setting the agenda, a thought that brought him back to the present. His senses fine-tuned by danger, Simon found himself able to pierce through the outer layers of his personal reality and see it for what it was. He saw it clearly now, as he looked at the reflection of Kosh in the fish wall, a reflection that he now recognized as being very real. He knew he was not looking at Dr. Posner, at least not the Dr. Posner he knew. He knew, sitting here, looking at the fish, listening to Dr. Kosh prattle on about the difficulty of retaining first class chefs, that this was not a dream, or if it was, that it was as real as if it weren’t. He remembered something he used to believe as a child, that if you fell from a great height in a dream you would
die if you hit bottom. He hadn’t believed that childhood mythology for a long time, but he knew, with the clarity of sudden and unbidden insight, that it was true. He was in a dream, and he was falling, and if he hit bottom he would die.

  “Excellent, excellent,” Kosh said. “More coffee?”

  They finished up, sipping their coffee, Kosh chitchatting amiably, until a messenger entered the room, whispered in Kosh's ear, and withdrew as silently as he had come.

  “Good news,” Kosh smiled. “Your lady has arrived.”

  23

  “All right,” Juan Marie said. He settled himself comfortably in his chair as another of Thorstenssen's seemingly endless supply of graduate assistants brought in the tea.

  “All part of the learning process,” Thorstenssen smiled, noting Juan Marie's raised eyebrow. “Not all graduate assistants go on to become Professors, and it’s well they master the fine art of carrying a tray without spilling the tea, in the event they must someday earn an honest living. Besides, I had to do similar menial tasks when I was a g.a., so it’s simply a matter of being my turn.”

  “I had no idea academe was so caste ridden,” Juan Marie said. “But you were telling me the history of time viewing.”

  “I was, and I shall be brief, though encompassing. In truth, the essential flavor of the search for time travel may be told in a moment, though the beauty, and the drama, is in the details. A science cannot often be said to have begun at a specified date, but I believe the science of time viewing can be so described. In the year 2067, three hundred and forty three years ago, a Frenchman named Claude LeFleur published a paper which proved, mathematically, the existence of the tachyon.”

  “If I recall my university days,” Juan Marie interrupted, “tachyons are faster than light particles, predicted by Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity.”

  “Correct,” Thorstenssen said. “Special Relativity stated that anything that was faster than light could go backward in time. The difficulty was that anything faster than light was not, from a practical standpoint, a part of our universe. Even if there were such a thing as a tachyon, how would anyone detect it, or, if able to detect it, to use it? Nonetheless, LeFleur's work set off a scramble to find the tachyon. Fifteen years passed before it was found, and the search for application began. By this time, many papers had been written, describing how a stream of tachyons might be sent into the past, to return with physical data, temperature, humidity, air composition, and so forth. The scramble to be first was breathtaking. This was Nobel Prize stuff! A team of Frenchmen won the race, appropriately enough, since Claude LeFleur had started the whole thing, a team headed by a genius named Paul Descharpentier. You see,” Thorstenssen said, pouring himself another cup of tea, “the problem was not the tachyon but the event horizon.”

  “You have not as yet lost me,” Juan Marie smiled, “as you no doubt expected you would. Are you speaking of black holes?”

  “Precisely. And I would expect, amigo, that far from losing you, the science editor of a popular magazine would, in fact, know one or two elementary facts about science. To continue, LeFleur's mathematics showed that inside a black hole the tachyon would be like any other particle, that is to say, it would travel at the speed of light, not faster than the speed of light, in which case the tachyon would be in our universe. The problem, needless to say, was getting inside a black hole.”

  “And Descharpentier found a way?”

  “He did. The search for the tachyon spurred a search for black holes as well, and by the time Descharpentier had worked out the problem of the event horizon, university laboratories around the world were routinely producing black holes. Small black holes, of course. As you know, or possibly only as I imagine you know, a black hole occurs in nature when a star collapses in upon itself, and if the mass is sufficiently large, gravitational forces become so strong that the process of compression cannot be stopped. The star will be squeezed until the volume is zero and the density is infinite. The point of infinite mass density is called a singularity. So you now have a black hole, with a singularity at its center. Unfortunately, you cannot see a singularity, or anything else inside a black hole, including a tachyon, because you cannot see beyond the event horizon.”

  “Which brings us once again to Descharpentier.”

  “Yes. The event horizon is the place where the gravity created by the singularity becomes so strong that anything that crosses the event horizon is trapped in the black hole, unable to get back out. The event horizon is also the place where time comes to a stop, at least to the observer on the outside of the black hole.”

  “Ah,” Juan Marie smiled. “How very elegant. So Descharpentier's contribution was to find a way into the black hole, past the event horizon?”

  “Yes. And back out again. And in the year 2122, fifty-five years after LeFleur's paper, the French sent a stream of tachyons into the past.”

  “And as I recall,” Juan Marie said, “they thought they were sending the tachyons into their own past, our own past, but they were not.”

  “That’s correct. The French conducted a series of tachyon experiments, resulting in a very serious misunderstanding of the results. All indications were that the tachyons had disturbed the past somehow, thereby changing the time track, resulting in a blockage at year 1276 BC. Every attempt to go into the distant past was met with rebuff. We could travel no further back in time than 1276 BC.”

  “It must have been maddening.”

  “Worse than maddening, it was intolerable. The Tachyon Anomaly Chronos Heuristic organization, otherwise known as TACH, was set up in Chicago to undo the mischief caused by the tachyon experiments. By this time the programmable portal had been invented, and it was now possible to send objects through the event horizon. Someone discovered you could send one programmable portal through another, creating sending and receiving terminals, and soon people were traveling in time, or at least they thought they were. TACH conceived the idea of sending someone back to 1276 BC, in an effort to undo the damage. They didn’t succeed, because they didn’t understand the problem. The time track into their past was not blocked, could not be blocked, because there was no time track. So-called time travel through the event horizon was not really going back into time, at least not back into their time!”

  “Wait, it’s coming back to me,” Juan Marie laughed. “Those tedious physics classes at university! They weren’t going back in time at all, they were traveling to another universe, a parallel universe, whose moment in time was different from their own.”

  “Well put,” Thorstenssen said, “and after being buried in your unconscious all these years. Time is not a single arrow, traveling through space. Time is a series of arrows, an infinite number of arrows, each arrow representing one of an infinite number of universes. We’re traveling on one of those arrows, just one of an infinite number of universes, all existing in the same physical space, inhabiting the same physical universe, sharing the same sun and stars. The line of arrows is not marching line abreast, amigo. Think of them as two dimensional, a sheet of paper with infinite height and infinite length, waving and undulating. A straight line, a rhumb line, drawn from any point, would show some of the arrows ahead of the imaginary rhumb line, some on the rhumb line, and some behind the rhumb line. In short, amigo, one cannot travel into one's own past, because one doesn't have a past, not a physical past. One has memory, but the past is gone, not to be revisited.”

  “Sobering,” Juan Marie said.

  “Sobering indeed. Time is a point, my friend, moving forward into the void, with nothing either behind or in front of the point. What was thought to be travel into one's own past was in actuality travel between the point of one arrowhead and the point of another arrowhead, which is to say, between one present moment to another present moment. When one travels between these points in time, one arrives in another universe, a parallel universe, whose present moment may be ahead of your present moment, in which case you’ve traveled into the future, relative to your own pr
esent moment, or to a universe whose present moment is behind your present moment, in which case you’ve traveled into the past, or at least what seems to be the past. But you’ve done neither. You’ve merely traveled horizontally, not vertically, and you’ve not arrived in either the past or the future, but merely in a different present moment. After this was understood, a great effort was made to map the universe, to search for alternate universes, much as the astronomers map the skies, searching for stars.”

  “Brilliantly put,” Juan Marie said. “Even I understand it. But what does this mean regarding those figures on your screens? That is, after all, the question of the moment, present or otherwise.”

  “The effect of this discovery,” Thorstenssen continued, ignoring the question, “was to bring to an end all free lance time travel. The portals were brought under government control, and a worldwide agreement was very quickly hammered out. For almost eighty-four years now, since 2326, no one has stepped into a portal without government approval. The University has two portals, but even I cannot use them without permission. In fact, it has taken two years of bureaucratic frustration to get approval to send one of them to 14LQ638. I tell you, my friend, there are times I vow I’ll simply go ahead and use my portals as I see fit, without so much as a by your leave!”

  “Breathtaking! But of course, you intend to answer the question.”

  “Of course. The figure on the screen, that of the young man, is no doubt the occupant of the bedroom we see.”

  “I understand the portal was sent to Cleveland last Friday. Is it known where the portal arrived?”

  “Yes. Our telemetry indicates it arrived in Universe 14LQ638, in the city of Cleveland, in their year 2008, but not at the lakeside. For reasons as yet unknown to us, the portal arrived in a bedroom in a house not far from the lake.”

  “Do you know if the young man is dead or unconscious, and is it possible the arrival of the portal is responsible for the state of the young man?”