Collision with Chronos

9

Leard Ascar had been obsessed, from an early age, with only one question.

The question of time.

He could remember the day – it had been his tenth birthday – when the full force of the enigma had first struck him. The dilemma, the paradox, the impossible, irreconcilable paradox. The transient present, moving from a past that vanishes into a future that appears from nowhere. And even more perplexingly, what he later came to know as the Regression Problem: how can time “pass” without having “time” to pass in?

These enigmas drove out all his other interests. He read everything he could understand on the subject, and then studied physics and mathematics so as to understand what was left. He was precocious, ahead of his class in all the subjects he took. He never made any friends, but could have had a brilliant career in almost any branch of physics, had he not preferred to devote himself to unsuccessful, self-financed researches into the nature of time. Among more conventional minds he gained a reputation as a crank, an oddball, and his experiments had regularly ground to a halt for lack of any further money.

Then he had come into contact with the scientific establishments of the Titanium Legions and they, to give them their due, had made it possible for him to continue his work. Following the victories over the deviant subspecies there had been a splurge of boastful expansionism in the sciences, a feeling that True Man could achieve anything. Not only Ascar but real cranks, near-psychotics with the most extraordinary and fanciful theories, had been allotted funds to bring their ideas to fruition. And so he had made some small progress, until that incredible day when the real nature of the captured alien vehicle had become evident.

That day had been a climax in Ascar’s life. A second climax came on the day he was introduced to Shiu Kung-Chien, the foremost expert on time in a city that had mastered nearly all its secrets.

That he had been trained to regard individuals of Shiu Kung-Chien’s race as subhuman did not bother him. He would gladly have sat at the feet of a chimpanzee if it could have taught him what he wanted to know.

He sat across from the master physicist, beside whom, on a lacquered table, was a pot of the steaming green tea the man never seemed to stop drinking. Around them was Shiu Kung-Chien’s observatory which, so he understood, explored both space and time: on one side a curving, transparent wall giving a view of empty, sable space, on the other a neat array of apparatus whose functions Ascar could not divine.

Shiu Kung-Chien himself Ascar would not have picked out among his compatriots – but then these Chinks all looked alike to Ascar. His dress and appearance were modest: a simple, unadorned silk gown tied at the waist with a sash, the long, silky beard worn by many of his generation. But his fingernails, Ascar noted, were unusually long, and painted. It seemed that Shiu did almost no physical work himself; all the equipment he used, though designed by him, was constructed elsewhere, and thereafter was set up and attended by the robot mechanisms that now busied and hummed at the other end of the observatory.

“Yes, that’s quite interesting,” Shiu Kung-Chien said. He had been listening politely while Ascar tried to give him a rundown on his own ideas and what had led up to them. They’d been forced to resort to verbal descriptions – Ascar’s own equations, as it turned out, were adjudged near-useless by Shiu, and those he offered instead were incomprehensible to Ascar. Seemingly the type of mathematics he used had no equivalent in Ascar’s experience, and even the acupuncture assisted language course was of no help.

Ascar folded his arms and sighed fretfully, rocking back and forth slightly on his chair. “Up until recently my mind was clear on the subject. I thought I’d got to the bottom of the age-old mystery. But since I discovered another ‘now’ – another system of time moving in the opposite direction – I’ve been in confusion and don’t know what to think. The picture I’d built up is really only credible if the Absolute Present is unique.” He shot Shiu a hard glance. “You tell me: is the universe coming to an end?”

Shiu’s seamed face showed amusement and he chuckled as if at some joke. “No, not at all. Not the universe. Just organic life on Earth. To be more precise, time is shortly due to stop on Earth.”

He waved a hand and a cybernetic servitor rolled forward with a fresh pot of tea. “You know, you haven’t quite disposed of the Regression Problem, although you appear to think you have.”

Ascar frowned. “Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. The Regression Problem points out the apparent impossibility of passing time. It’s defined thus: take three consecutive events, A, B and C. One of these events is occurring ‘now’ and the other two are in the past or the future. Let’s say that B is ‘now’, so that A is in the past and C is in the future. But there must have been a time when A was ‘now’ and B and C were in the future, and likewise there will be a time when C is ‘now’ and the other two are in the past. So we can draw up a table of three configurations of these three events, giving nine distinct terms in all. But we can’t stop there: if we did there’d be three simultaneous ‘nows’, and there can only ever be one ‘now’. So we must select one of these configurations and assign our own ‘now’ to it – this gives us a second-order ‘now’ related not to a single event but to a dynamic configuration of all three events: the one containing the real location of ‘now’. But we can’t stop there, either. Each one of the three configurations can in turn claim a second-order ‘now’, by virtue of the fact that the ‘now’ is moving. So we have to draw up a new table where the first table is repeated three times, the A-B-C groups number nine, and the single events themselves are permutated to twenty-seven, all this being encompassed by ‘third-order time’. The process can be repeated to the fourth-order, fifth-order, and ad infinitum time.”

Shiu waved his hands at Ascar, suddenly impatient with the exposition. “I’m fully conversant with all the arguments,” he said. “But what made you think you’d resolved the paradox?”

“Well,” said Ascar slowly, “when we actually travelled into the past and into the future and discovered there was no ‘now’ there, I simply assumed that the whole argument was fallacious. The facts showed that there was no regress.”

“But did you not bother to ask yourself why the regress did not occur?” said Shiu acidly. “No; you merely rushed in like a schoolboy and forgot about the matter.”

Ascar was silent for long moments.

“All right,” he said, “where did I go wrong?”

“Your basic mistake was in presuming time to be a general feature of the universe,” Shiu told him, bringing out his words carefully and emphatically. “You imagined the Absolute Present as a three-dimensional intersection of the whole of existence, traversing it everywhere simultaneously, much like a pickup head traversing a magnetic tape and bringing the images it contains to life. Agreed?”

“Yes,” said Ascar, “that’s a pretty good description.”

“But don’t you see that if you adopt that picture then the Regression Problem remains?”

“No,” Ascar answered slowly, “because the time intersection passes each instant only once –”

He stopped suddenly.

“Yes, you’re right,” he resumed heavily. “I can see it now. There’d have to be an infinite number of identical universes, one for each instant in our own universe, varying only in that the Absolute Present – the time intersection – was in a different part of its sweep. Every instant, past, present or future, would at this moment have to be filled by an Absolute Present somewhere among those universes.”

“And beyond that,” Shiu continued for him, “would have to exist a further set of universes numbering infinity raised to the power infinity, to take care of the next stage in the regression. Already we’re into transfinity.”

Ascar nodded hurriedly. “All right, I accept that. I also accept that the facts have shown my model to be wrong. So what’s the truth?”

“The truth,” said Shiu, “is that the universe at large has no time. It’s not ‘now’ everywhere simultaneously. The universe is basically, fundamentally static, dead, indifferent. It has no past, no future, no ‘now’.”

He refilled his teacup, allowing Ascar to interrupt with: “But there is time.”

Shiu nodded patiently. “Localised, accidental phenomena without overall significance. Processes of time can begin over small areas, usually associated with a planet, though not always. They consist of flows or waves of energy travelling from one point to another: small, travelling waves of ‘now’. Philosophically it’s explained thus: the universe issued from the Supreme as an interplay between the forces of yin and yang to form a perfect, dealocked harmonic balance. Occasionally these forces get a little out of balance with one another here and there, and this causes time energy to flow until the balance is redressed. As such a wave proceeds it organises matter into living forms in the process we know as evolution.”

“So time is a biological phenomenon, not a universal one?”

“Rather, biology is a consequence of time. Biological systems aren’t the only phenomena it can produce. There are – many variations. But life and consciousness can arise in the moving present moment and be carried along with it.

“You can see now why time travel is comparatively easy,” Shiu went on. “We merely have to detach a fragment of the travelling ‘now-wave’ and move it about the real static world of non-time. It comes away quite easily, because it’s local energy, not part of a cosmic schema.”

“Yes, and we’ve found that you need a living presence to make a time machine work,” Ascar agreed. “That would follow, too.”

“Only because your machinery is primitive. In Retort City we can dispatch inanimate objects through time as well.”

“Yes… I see.…”

Ascar strained to grasp in entirety the vision Shiu Kung-Chien was presenting to him. “So let’s put this together,” he said with difficulty. “The universe consists of a static four-dimensional matrix –”

“Not four-dimensional,” Shiu corrected. “Your whole theories about dimensions are erroneous: there are no dimensions. But if you want to use them as a descriptive tool, that’s all right. In that case a six-dimensional matrix would suffice to describe all the possible directions that exist. Time-waves, when they arise, can take any one of these directions – from our point of view, forward, backward, sideways, up, down, inside-out – directions impossible to envisage. But the wave-front always abstracts, as it proceeds, a three-dimensional environment to anyone who is inside it. And it always creates, for an observer trapped in it, a past and a future.”

“And the Regression Problem,” Ascar reminded him. “What happens to that?”

“There is no Regression Problem. The problem only arises when time is thought of as an absolute factor in the universe. But it’s an incidental factor only, a triviality. The universe as a whole doesn’t notice, is indifferent to, time, as well as to all the phenomena such as living creatures which it produces. Therefore there’s no contradiction about before and after, past and future, or the moving moment. There is, as far as the universe is concerned, no change; non-time swallows it all up without a whisper.”

Considerately, Shiu gave Ascar time to mull this over. The Earth physicist placed his chin on his hand, gazing at the floor.

“And so this is what’s happened to Earth?” he said finally. “Another time-system has taken root on it, creating another process of evolution… but travelling in the reverse direction to ours. And they’re going to collide.”

“Correct,” affirmed Shiu in a neutral voice.

“I still have difficulty with this. With the idea of time travelling in reverse, but producing the same effects as our own time. I’ve been used to regarding physical laws, such as chemical reactions and the laws of thermodynamics, as working only one way. The laws of entropy, for instance… that would seem to give time a definite direction irrespective.…”

“That’s because you’re accustomed to looking upon time as an absolute function. To take the law of entropy – the law that disorder increases with time – the time-wave itself produces this effect. There are two contrasting modes in every time-wave: first, the tendency toward increasing disorder, and second, the tendency toward increasing integration, which results in biological systems. These tendencies are due to the yin and yang forces which are present in the time-wave, but battling against one another instead of harmonising. Yin brings the tendency toward integration, and yang brings the tendency toward disorder. When they cease to war with one another, time dies away.”

“But that’s not how it’s going to be on Earth?”

“No. Your civilisation is most unfortunate, as also is the civilisation which is going to collide with yours. It will be a violent, catastrophic conflict between irreconcilable powers – the weirdest, most fantastic event, perhaps, that can happen in this universe.”

“What will happen?”

“Almost certainly the end result will be that time will cease. The two wave-fronts will cancel one another out in a sort of time explosion.”

“What I really meant was,” Ascar said, avoiding Shiu’s eye, “what will it be like for the people on location – caught on the spot when the wave-fronts came within range of one another?”

“You want to know what it will be like?” Shiu said. “To a certain extent, I can show you.”

He rose and walked toward the other side of the laboratory, making for a transparent sphere about eight feet in diameter. “Retort City once suffered a similar incident.”

Ascar sprang to his feet and joined him. “And you survived?” he exclaimed.

“It wasn’t quite as disastrous as it will be with you,” Shiu told him mildly. “For one thing, the angle of approach was small – the entity we encountered was moving obliquely to us through time, not in head-on collision as will be the case with you. For another, we gained an advantage from our situation here in interstellar space. We were forewarned and were able to move ourselves, so that there was no actual physical contact. Nevertheless the wave-fronts did interfere with one another, and the effects were extremely unpleasant. It’s the closest we’ve come to annihilation.”

He halted before the transparent sphere. “At the time some all-sense tapes were made of the event. Do you have all-sense recording on Earth?”

Dumbly Ascar shook his head.

“As its name implies, it gives a record covering all the senses – all the external senses, and besides that the internal senses as well, such as body feeling, and so on. Where the senses are, the mind is; therefore you won’t be able to distinguish the experience from the real thing.”

He turned to his guest. “I’ll play you one of these sense-tapes if you like. I warn you it will be somewhat disturbing.”

“Yes, yes,” Ascar said eagerly. “I want to know what happens.”

Shiu nodded, his expression withdrawn and unreadable, and directed Ascar to enter the sphere by a narrow hatchway which closed up behind him. Once Ascar could no longer see him he smiled faintly to himself. He was unexpectedly pleased with the Terran visitor; despite his barbarian origin he was proving to be an apt pupil.

From within, the walls of the sphere were opaque. There was a dim light, by which Ascar saw a chair fixed to the floor. He sat on it, and as he did so the light went out, leaving him in pitch-darkness.

For a few moments nothing happened. Then light sprang into being again. But he was no longer in the glass sphere. He was sitting in a similar chair in a typically light, airy room in Retort City. The air carried a mingle of faint scents, and from somewhere came strains of the jangly, hesitating music that was popular here.

He stared at the room’s fittings for a while before he began to see that there was something odd about his surroundings. The proportions of the room were wrong, and seemed to become more wrong by the second. The angles of the walls, floor and ceiling… they didn’t add up, he realised; they were an impossible combination, as if space itself were altering its geometry.

The music, in the middle of a complicated progression, became stuck on one chord which elongated and prolonged itself, wailing and wavering, unable to escape its imprisonment in one moment of time.

Ascar watched with bulging eyes as a slim vase left the shelf on which it stood and moved through the air on an intricate orbit. This in itself was not so amazing; but the vase itself was deforming, going through a variegated procession of shapes. Finally Ascar found that he was looking at the vase transformed into a four-dimensional object – something akin to a klein bottle, impossible in three-dimensional space, with no inside, no outside, but comprising a continuous series of curved surfaces all running into one another.

He felt stunned to think that not only could he visualise such a figure but he was actually seeing it.

Everything else in the room began to deform in the same way. Alarmed, Ascar tried to rise from his chair – but couldn’t. Dimly, he tried to remind himself that he was being subjected to a recording, not an actual event; presumably the sense-tapes inhibited the power of movement in some way. Soon he stopped even trying, for the deformations, quite horribly, were acting on him, too.

Ascar let out a long, howling scream. Pain — Pain — Pain.

Then the room collapsed and was replaced by something indefinable. Ascar became aware of his nervous system as a skein, or network, floating like a rambling cloud, without tangible form, drifting through a multidimensional maze. Nothing was recognisable any more, and neither was there any proper sense of time. But his nerves, perhaps because the intruding time field had compromised their chemical functioning, were signalling pain: agonising, sharp, irresistible.

And into his consciousness was intruding something that, it seemed, was imminently going to end that consciousness. Thump, thump, thump, it went, like a living heart, or like a hammer that had his soul on the anvil.

Around him, his surroundings seemed to crystallise into some sort of form for a few moments. He saw more than the room in which he’d been seated: he saw a whole section of Retort City, deformed into bizarre non-Euclidean geometries so that its walls were no longer impediments to vision. Trapped in that nightmare were thousands of people, themselves transformed beyond semblance of humanity, like flies in a sticky jungle of spider-web: protruding through walls, floors and ceilings, combined with pieces of furniture, broken up into fragments of bodies still connected by long threads that were drawn-out nerves.

Then the city was on the move again, folding, distorting, sliding together like some shapeless, living monster from the ocean’s ooze.

Shiu Kung-Chien, watching a monitor of the tapes on a small screen set into the sphere’s pedestal, chose that moment to cut the playback, before there was any risk of Ascar suffering psychosomatic damage.

He switched on the sphere’s internal light and opened the hatch. Leard Ascar staggered forth, his face haggard and his breath coming in gasps.

“I think that will do,” Shiu said mildly. “It gets worse, but we don’t want to make a psychiatric case out of you.”

“It gets worse?”

“Yes. What you experienced were the effects of the initial approach of an alien time field. By the time it was all over our population had actually been decimated. We might not have got off so lightly, had the Oblique Intelligence itself, being also able to manipulate time, not taken steps to alter its direction.”

Ascar hung onto the edge of the hatch. “And this is what it’s going to be like in Earth?” he wanted to know.

“Oh, on your planet it will be incomparably worse than anything that happened here. Ours was merely a glancing blow, scarcely more than a close passage. What it will be like for you is scarcely conceivable.”

“Holy Mother Earth!” whispered Ascar hoarsely.