Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Patsy

Whatever it was that Pat was seeing, it was brief. Hardly more than a minute or two; and when she pulled the helmet off her head, her expression both astonished and bewildered, and handed it to Patrice, it was without a word. Not without a struggle, though. Martin was already grabbing for it, but Pat pushed him away. As was right and proper, Patsy told herself, even in that moment; at least now they were doing alphabetical order again. And was quick to take the helmet when Patrice, as startled and uncertain as Pat herself, handed it to her.

The most astonishing thing Pat had said was true. It was a Horch that faced her in the simulation space. It was not at all the same Horch that Colonel duValier had displayed, either. This one carried no vicious-looking weapons, wore no armor, seemed much less evil. But it was certainly a Horch, all the same; and how such a thing could manage to use the device of the Beloved Leaders she could not guess.

Nor had time to.

The Horch didn't speak. It gestured-with both its boneless arms and with its sinuous, long neck as well-toward a corner of the field of view, and immediately a picture appeared there. Patsy was looking at a street scene in what, she knew, had to be a city, though not any kind of city she had ever seen before. The street itself was not a mere strip of hard surface. It was a moving ribbon of what looked like liquid metal, on which what looked like great, multicolored dragonflies danced, and now and then launched themselves into the air to fly into doorways set into tall buildings, high in the air. The buildings were alabaster and goldenrod and fleshy pink, some of them (it seemed to Patsy) a dozen stories tall. All this was what she saw in the first eye-blink, and she had no time to study details. Almost at once the view pulled back, as though the camera were rising to the sky. Through the sky; accelerating, it flew higher and higher until it was out of the planet's atmosphere entirely, looking down on the whole planet, pale blue and tainted white, as from orbit.

Then a spacecraft came into view, coppery-red and glittering, and the point of view approached it, entered it as though the ship's hull were only mist, and showed the inside. A Beloved Leader swam languidly in zero gravity there, the very scarecrow of the original message from space. It waved a fragile arm at its viewscreen, and something-something, something huge and dark and craggy-came plunging from nowhere at the planet. It blazed an eye-searing meteor trail through the atmosphere, and when it struck the surface it exploded with the power of a billion nuclear bombs.

And that planet died before Patsy's eyes.

No time to think about that now, either; immediately she was looking at another street scene (different street, dense with fast-moving vehicles; different buildings; different beings, these looking like wraiths with heads like sunflowers), but the story was the same. Pull back into space, see a Beloved Leader negligently take aim on the world, observe that world destroyed. And instantly there was another. And another, and another-the pace speeding up, the planets all-different, the end always the same. And then-

And then the velocity slowed. A world appeared in the field of view that she recognized at once. It was the world Patsy had always known: their own Earth, northern hemisphere. Down toward the fringes that approached the equator she could see the hook of Italy, the wedge of India with Sri Lanka hanging like a teardrop from its tip, the narrow Red Sea. And when the view went inside the object in orbit this time it was not an alien spacecraft. It was an orbiter she recognized: their own Starlab! And there was no giant asteroid plunging toward the planet-not yet-but what was happening inside was even more frightening. There was no Beloved Leader present. What there was was Dopey, clinging to a wall while a pair of Docs worked over a human figure spread-eagled against a bulkhead. The Docs were doing something to the back of the man's head. Then they drew back. The human figure turned itself-it was Martin!- and silently pulled itself to a lineup, joining Dannerman, Jimmy Lin, Rosaleen and Patsy herself. The Docs herded the humans, who moved like zombies, into the Clipper, and it dropped away en route to the planet.

That was it. The picture went black.

They had all seen the same thing.

They had all had the same reaction. "So the Horch want us to believe that the Beloved Leaders are mass murderers," Dannerman said meditatively. "Which, of course, is what the Beloved Leaders want us to believe about the Horch."

"So where does that leave us?" Jimmy Lin demanded. No one answered, but of course the answer was obvious, Patsy thought. They were left right where they had been all along: in their cell.

"But, if the Horch are telling the truth, Dopey also sent copies of us back to Earth," Rosaleen said. "Why would he do that, do you suppose?"

"We will damn well ask him that," Martin said, his face grim.

"If we see him again," Dannerman said.

That alarmed Patsy. "Why? Do you think he's going to abandon us?"

"I think he may not have much to say about it," Dannerman told her. "If things are as bad as he says- Now what does the thing want?" he added, as the helmet snarled at them again.

Martin was the nearest; he picked it up. "There's only one way to find out," he said.

Pat was outraged. "You're doing it again! It's my turn first!"

Martin looked at her contemptuously and, without replying, jammed the helmet down on his own head.

"Damn the man," Pat snapped in Patsy's general direction. Patsy didn't answer. All these things that were happening were coming a lot too fast for her comfort-yes, and a hell of a lot too weird, too. She couldn't sort them out. Beloved Leaders killing planets: all right, she was perfectly willing to believe that that was what the Beloved Leaders did. It wasn't good news, but at least it was comprehensible; they were being warned. But what was the meaning of sending copies of themselves to Earth! That was scary.

Then everybody fell silent as Martin Delasquez slowly lifted the helmet off his head. He stared at them blankly until Jimmy Lin snapped, "Well?"

"Yes," Delasquez said, organizing his thoughts. Then he took a deep breath and delivered his report. "What I was seeing-it was, I think, the VIP dining area at Kourou."

"Kourou? in South America?"

"The European launch center," Delasquez confirmed. "That's what it looked like, anyway-I did a six-month exchange mission there once. But what is astonishing-I was seeing it out of my own eyes."

Rosaleen was the first to react. "Your own eyes? But how do you know it was you?"

"It was. I saw my Academy ring on my hand-and I know my own hand. And there were all kinds of European Space Agency people there too-at other tables-I think I even saw Colonel duValier-but I wasn't with them. I was at a table by myself, except for one other man. He was in uniform, and he carried a sidearm, and he wasn't eating. Didn't even have a plate in front of him. He was just watching me. It was-" He hesitated, trying to think of the right word. "It was-It was very unpleasant."

"Let me have that," snarled Jimmy Lin, reaching for the helmet. Pat was ahead of him. She snatched the thing from Martin's slack grip.

"My turn!" she snapped, and put it on.

Martin was paying no attention. "I could taste the food," he said wonderingly. "I was eating an omelette, one of the kind with vegetables in it? And there was the shell of a papaya on the table-I could still taste it-and a brioche. Quite good coffee, too. And hot; it almost burned my tongue."

Rosaleen was listening intently. "You could taste and feel? So it wasn't just a television picture?"

"It was just as though I were there," Martin insisted. But by then Patsy wasn't listening anymore, because Pat had claimed her attention. She was making sounds of distress, and Patrice was standing anxiously beside her, begging to know what was wrong.

Then Pat moaned, gasped and pulled the helmet off as though it burned her. "It was all woogly!" she cried, suddenly white-faced and shaking. Patrice put her arm around her; if Patrice hadn't, Patsy would have, because she had never seen Pat look so shaken. "I guess I was on Earth, all right-partly, anyway. But I was in jail!"

And of course there were about a million questions about that, but Patsy didn't wait to hear the answers, didn't even wait to find out what Pat meant by being "partly" on Earth. She went right to the source. Snatched the helmet out of Pat's hand, pulled it over her head, snapped the goggles into place-

It was a good thing that Pat's complaints had prepared her, at least a little bit. Even so, the shock was almost paralyzing as she found out what Pat had meant by "woogly."

She wasn't seeing one scene. She was seeing two of them- no, not merely seeing; she was present in two different places. Feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling; all the senses were involved. And everything was doubled. In one scene she was seeing herself with the helmet over her head, saw Pat-right up close, as though she were holding her in her arms; no, she was holding Pat in her arms, because she could feel Pat's body shaking. And at the same time, in the other scene, she was looking at a bare room with bright lights, a small table with nothing on it, a straight-backed plastic chair, dun-painted walls without any pictures or ornamentation of any kind. She saw all this second scene from a recumbent position, because she was lying on a hard, narrow cot, curled up on her side with her open hand under her cheek, but wide awake. She was staring into space. And she could see the door to the room, all right, and, yes, Pat had been perfectly right.

There were steel bars on the door. She was definitely in some kind of a jail.

When Patrice took her turn-no argument about who was next this time, not even from Jimmy Lin; everyone wanted to know what the "woogliness" was all about-she reported seeing the same thing. Two separate scenes. Both wholly real, in every sensory way. The only difference was that in the scene that corresponded to their cell, she saw Patsy there instead of herself.

"Dopey said they were monitoring our copies," Rosaleen said meditatively.

"But like this? Seeing with our eyes?" Pat was still shaken. "It gave me a damn migraine! Only-" She hesitated, remembering. "Only what I saw was three different scenes, not two. Two of them were here, from different angles; it was the other one that looked like a jail."

"Damn well was a jail," Patrice said feelingly.

Rosaleen sighed. "Yes," she said, following out some private thought process of her own. "It must be so."

"What must be so?" Patsy demanded, and Rosaleen looked at her with compassion.

"It explains much," she said. "These copies of us that the Horch showed us, the ones the Beloved Leaders made and returned to Earth? They were fitted with some sort of transmitters to pass on everything they saw and felt-"

"How?" Jimmy Lin asked.

"Oh, Jimmy, what foolish questions you ask. How do I know how? With a magical incantation, perhaps, or perhaps they implanted a tiny broadcasting station in the left nostril-who knows what kind of technology is here?"

"Damn," Dannerman said feelingly. "I see what you mean, Rosaleen. That's how Dopey knew the name of my boss, Colonel Morrisey."

"Yes. And much more," Rosaleen said. She turned back to Patsy and Patrice. "And when, in kindness, Dopey provided us with you two, he first turned you into observing devices-"

"Hey!" both of them said at once.

"Yes. And so now, at least, we know just how Dopey was able to read all our little secret messages that we passed around with such care. You two read them for him. Whatever you saw he saw too."

In these last two days Patsy's life had been violated in more ways than she could count-the violation of the nudity taboo when she was first brought in, the endless privacy violations that came with everyone being huddled together in the one common pen for everything-for sleeping, for eating, even for going to the damn toilet.

But this latest violation was something new. Until now she had had the illusion that at least her private central self was intact. Now that illusion was destroyed. Some weird creature somewhere-not just Dopey; who knew what other bizarre beasts were eavesdropping as well?-somebody was seeing and feeling everything she did.

And beyond doubt was still doing it. It was, she told herself, an intolerable situation… except, of course, that she had no choice but to go right on tolerating it.