There were innumerable small changes. And the difference between these and normal Chronotic mutations was that the inhabitants of the empire were aware of them.
Prince Vro Ixian had at last achieved his heart’s desire. Following leads found in the Traumatics’ temple in Umbul, the detective Perlo Rolce had traced the body of Princess Veaa to a rundown house in the outskirts of the city. Prince Vro, arming himself and taking only Rolce with him, entered the house and found it uninhabited.
Methodically he went through the dwelling room by room. In the second floor back he discovered a chamber draped in white silk. An open coffin of pinewood lay on a dais, and in the coffin, as beautiful as a pale rose, was the embalmed corpse of the young princess.
‘My dearest, my beloved Veaa!’ Vro swept towards the coffin.
And in that moment the tidal wave of potential time overcame the material world and swept everything away. The world came back in what, to the actors in it, could have been only an instant. But Vro was aware of the hiatus and understood what it implied.
In the coffin Princess Veaa opened her eyes, moved her head, and slowly sat up.
Vro gave a wild cry. ‘Veaa!’ he shrieked.
‘Vro!’ Her shriek was no less mortified.
The two stared at each other in utter horror.
In the court chamber everything was more or less as before. Inpriss Sorce clung tightly to Aton.
‘Will it happen again?’ Aton asked.
‘The wave has but receded for a moment. The turbulence is still building up. When it returns there will be no reprieve. All will dissolve… permanently.’
The Imperator clicked and hummed. Suddenly there was a muted whine, and a part of its matted surface opened. Aton saw a tiny room within, illuminated, its walls padded.
‘Get inside, quickly,’ the Imperator ordered.
The command’s urgent tone brooked no inquiry. Hastily Aton and Inpriss crowded into the small space. The door closed up behind them.
The rolling geodesics of the substratum, summoned up from the deeps, had hit a resonance that nothing could withstand. As the mighty preponderance of Chronotic potentiality smashed against the empire for the second time, the edifice that had been built up with such care was not temporarily annulled merely, but torn apart, and the materiality of the fragments dissipated beyond recovery. The screen of orthogonal time was, itself, ripped to shreds.
Seconds before this happened the Imperator had phased into the strat. Aton, reading the move on a small instrument panel with which the tiny cabin was provided, was only mildly surprised to learn that the machine-emperor possessed this ability. He heard the strained drone of the modest drive unit as it battled against the dangerous turbulences.
Where was the Imperator taking them?
So it had happened. The one thing uniquely feared by achronal archivists had finally come to pass.
Phased permanently into the strat, the Achronal Archives were the one department of Chronopolis’s administration to survive. The archivists now saw the fullest justification of their cult of isolationism. The emotionally shattered men and women prowled around the vaults, touching one another for comfort, caressing the humming casings that contained the computer store of all that had taken place in the vanished Chronotic Empire.
All around them lay nothing but the strat. There was no orthogonal time. The time-storm, of unprecedented proportions, had eliminated it, and potentiality reigned supreme. There was no actuality, except for this one little isolated bubble.
The in-turned atmosphere of the sepulchral establishment, always noticeable, now intensified by the minute. Chief Archivist Illus Ton Mayar knew that in short order it would develop into group insanity. But he did not think that any of them would live to see that happen. Very soon the archives would melt into the strat like sugar in water. Their existential support – the whole material background from which they had sprung – had been taken away. They persisted now only by virtue of strat time, which did not match one-for-one with orthogonal time.
Mayar was sitting alone in his private room when there was a hammering on the door and an excited shout from one of the senior archivists.
‘There’s something approaching through the strat.’
Mayar hurried to investigate. He arrived at the loading bay just in time to see the imposing bulk of the Imperator materialise there.
All present fell to their knees. A door in the side of the Imperator clicked open and a man and a woman, the man dressed as a captain of the Time Service, stepped out.
Mayar watched the apparition with astonishment. ‘God be praised!’ he managed to say. But he still did not dare to hope.
The man and the woman stepped towards him, but before he could speak again the Imperator had once more vanished.
And in the Invincible Armada, swaying its way through the disturbed and roiling strat, there also dawned the realisation of the empire’s destruction.
Prince Philipium, Grand Admiral of the Armada, enthroned in the majestic bridge in the titanic flagship God’s Imposer, froze as though paralysed. His face was almost green with shock.
There could be no mistake. From all parts of the huge armada the message was the same. The instruments revealed that the concept of order and religion which everyone on board was sworn to serve was irrevocably gone.
To the commanders surrounding Prince Philipium the news brought varied emotions. Sick anger, sinking fear, stony grimness, defiant hatred.
‘We are ghosts!’ uttered Prince Philipium in a voice hollow with grief. ‘What can we do? The empire is vanquished!’
‘Ghosts we may be, but we shall still live for a while,’ growled Commander Haight. He tried to calculate how long it would be before the armada faded away and lost all vestige of materiality, now that it had no existential support. It could be hours or days.
‘One thing is still left to us,’ he urged. ‘Revenge! Let us ensure that of the Hegemony, too, nothing remains!’
Exultant shouts greeted his words. Prince Philipium, his eyes staring but devoid of life, gave the orders.
The ghost armada moved forward only to find that its quest was needless. The Hegemony had gone down along with the empire. The ships that it had put into the strat, however, persisted like those of the armada itself. The two forces locked on to each other and began to battle. There was no question of phasing into ortho to fire their weapons – there was no orthogonal time any longer – and the strat torpedoes were too ineffective to satisfy their blood lust. Instead the ships sought to destroy each other by collision. The conflict raged on, fed by despair and hatred.
Aton found he could strike little cheer from the Chief Archivist and his assistants. They seemed unable to recognise that the existence they knew had, in fact, vanished and that they would shortly die. In what Aton found a morbid manner they preferred to go about their duties and spent as much time as possible lovingly going over recorded scenes of bygone days and endless lists of names, places, and events.
Neither was he able to answer any of their questions. But two hours later those scanning the surrounding strat reported that an object was again approaching.
For the second time the Imperator materialised into the loading bay.
‘Aton, my servant!’ it boomed.
Aton stood before it stiffly. ‘I am here, Imperator.’ Then he added, ‘Where have you been?’
‘Into the far future. My mind is clear now.’
The Imperator seemed larger, more powerful, more majestic than it ever had before. ‘The time for your greatest service to the empire has arrived, Captain Aton.’