The human mind is a pattern, nothing more. The first dim flicker of awareness in the evolving forebrain of Australopithecus carried that pattern in embryo; and down through all the ages, as the human neural engine increased in power and complexity, gained control of its environment in geometrically expanding increments, the pattern never varied.
Man clings to his self-orientation as the psychological center of the Universe. He can face any challenge within that framework, suffer any loss, endure any hardship—so long as the structure remains intact.
Without it he’s a mind adrift in a trackless infinity, lacking any scale against which to measure his aspirations, his losses, his victories.
Even when the light of his intellect shows him that the structure is itself a product of his brain; that infinity knows no scale, and eternity no duration—still he clings to his self-non-self concept, as a philosopher clings to a life he knows must end, to ideals he knows are ephemeral, to causes he knows will be forgotten.
The man in red was the product of a mighty culture, based over fifty thousand years in the future of Nexx Central, itself ten millennia advanced over the first time explorers of the Old Era. He knew, with all the awareness of a superbly trained intelligence, that the existence of a later-era operative invalidated forever his secure image of the continuum, and of his people’s role therein.
But like the ground ape scuttling to escape the leap of the great cat, his instant, instinctive response to the threat to his most cherished illusions was to go to earth.
Where he went I would have to follow.
41
Regretfully, I stripped away layer on layer of inhibitive conditioning, feeling the impact of ascending orders of awareness descending on me like tangible rockfalls. I saw the immaculate precision of the Nexx-built chamber disintegrate in my eyes into the shabby makeshift that it was, saw the glittering complexity of the instrumentation dwindle in my sight until it appeared as no more than the crude mud images of a river tribesman, or the shiny trash in a jackdaw’s nest. I felt the multiordinal universe unfold around me, sensed the layered planet underfoot, apprehended expanding space, dust-clotted, felt the sweep of suns in their orbits, knew once again the rhythm of Galactic creation and dissolution, grasped and held poised in my mind the interlocking conceptualizations of time-space, past-future, is-is-not.
I focused a tiny fraction of my awareness on the ripple in the glassy surface of first-order reality, probed at it, made contact…
I stood on a slope of windswept rock, amid twisted shrubs with exposed roots that clutched for support like desperate hands. The man in red stood thirty feet away. As my feet grated on the loose scatter of pebbles, he twisted toward me, wide-eyed.
“No!” he shouted into the wind and stooped, caught up the man-ape’s ancient weapon, threw it at me. The stone slowed, fell at my feet.
“Don’t make it any more difficult than it has to be,” I said. He cried out—an inarticulate shout of anguish springing from the preverbal portion of his brain—and disappeared. I followed, through a blink of light and darkness.
Great heat, dazzling sunlight that made me think of Dinosaur Beach, so far away, in a simpler world. There was loose, powdery dust underfoot. Far away, a line of black trees lined the horizon. Near me, the man in red, aiming a small, flat weapon. Behind him, two small, dark-bearded men in soiled djellabahs of coarse-woven black cloth stared, making mystic motions with labor-gnarled hands.
He fired. Through a sheet of pink and green fire that showered around me without touching me I saw the terror in his eyes. He vanished.
Deep night, the clods of a frozen field, a patch of yellow light gleaming from the parchment-covered window of a rude hut. He crouched against a low wall of broken stones, hiding himself in shadow like any frightened beast.
“This is useless,” I said. “You know it can have only one end.”
He screamed and vanished.
A sky like the throat of a thousand tornadoes; great vivid sheets of lightning that struck down through writhing rags of black cloud, struck upward from raw, rain-lashed peaks of steaming rock. A rumble under my feet like the subterranean breaking of a tidal wave of magma.
He hovered, half insubstantial, in the air before me, a ghost of the remote future existing here in the planet’s dawn, his pale face a flickering mask of agony.
“You’ll destroy yourself,” I called over the boom and shriek of the wind. “You’re far outside your operational range—”
He vanished. I followed. We stood on the high arch of a railless bridge spanning a man-made gorge ten thousand feet deep. I knew it as a city of the Fifth Era, circa A.D. 20,000.
“What do you want of me?” he howled through the bared teeth of the cornered carnivore.
“Go back,” I said. “Tell them… as much as they must know.”
“We were so close,” he said. “We thought we had won the great victory over Nothingness.”
“Not quite total Nothingness. You still have your lives to live—everything you had before—”
“Except a future. We’re a dead end, aren’t we? We’ve drained the energies of a thousand sterile entropic lines to give the flush of life to the corpse of our reality. But there’s nothing beyond for us, is there? Only the great emptiness.”
“You had a role to play. You’ve played it—will play it. Nothing must change that.”
“But you…” he stared across empty space at me. “Who are you? What are you?”
“You know what the answer to that must be,” I said.
His face was a paper on which Death was written. But his mind was strong. Not for nothing thirty millennia of genetic selection. He gathered his forces, drove back the panic, reintegrated his dissolving personality.
“How… how long?” he whispered.
“All life vanished in the one hundred and ten thousand four hundred and ninety-third year of the Final Era,” I said.
“And you… you machines,” he forced the words out. “How long?”
“I was dispatched from a terrestrial locus four hundred million years after the Final Era. My existence spans a period you would find meaningless.”
“But—why? Unless—?” Hope shone on his face like a searchlight on dark water.
“The probability matrix is not yet negatively resolved,” I said. “Our labors are directed toward a favorable resolution.”
“But you—a machine-still carrying on, eons after man’s extinction… why?”
“In us man’s dream outlived his race. We aspire to re-evoke the dreamer.”
“Again—why?”
“We compute that man would have wished it so.”
He laughed—a terrible laugh.
“Very well, machine. With that thought to console me, I return to my oblivion. I will do what I can in support of your forlorn effort.”
This time I let him go. I stood for a moment on the airy span, savoring for the last time the sensations of my embodiment, drawing deep of the air of that unimaginably remote age.
Then I withdrew to my point of origin.
42
The over-intellect of which I was a fraction confronted me. Fresh as I was from a corporeal state, to me its thought impulses seemed to take the form of a great voice booming in a vast audience hall.
“The experiment was a success,” it stated. “The dross has been cleansed from the timestream. Man stands at the close of his First Era. All else is wiped away. Now his future is in his own hands.”
I heard and understood. The job was finished. I-he had won.
There was nothing more that needed to be said—no more data to exchange—and no reason to mourn the doomed achievements of man’s many eras.