Shadows Out of Time

“The Colour out of the Shadow” HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Pmurt glided along a coolly lit hallway in one of the huge structures the Grand Race had erected in a place it deemed salubrious. Two other members of his kind — ten-foot cones with crinkly integuments — moved in front of him, while two more followed behind. Most unusually in that vanished time and place, all four of his escorts carried weapons in the claws mounted on extensible arms that served them as organs of manipulation.

That he knew a measure of pride at having earned such companions perhaps spoke to the reason he had done so. The pair in front of him halted at a doorway shaped for their kind. One of them, whose name was Relleum, gestured within, saying, “Your fate will be meted out here.”

“I know.” Pmurt affected an indifference he did not altogether feel. Such proceedings as this one involving him were rare in the annals of the Great Race. But rare did not signify unknown, and the necessary steps to follow had been set down long before; they waited only to be dusted off and put into use.

Relleum and his comrade slid aside to let Pmurt precede them into the…courtroom is not exactly what it was, but that will have to do. Three more cones waited behind a table suitable to their height. Weapons at the ready — they could agonize or kill, depending on the need — Relleum and the other three guards followed the prisoner inside (approximations again, but good enough to give the gist).

The central judge, an individual whose especially rugose hide showed great age, was called Sirica. Pointing a claw at Pmurt, she said, “You understand what you have done and why it has condemned you.”

“I do,” Pmurt said, not without pride.

As if he had not spoken, Sirica continued, “What may be a puzzlement to you as it is to us is why you did what you did. We know you have a habit of haunting the basalt towers and the trap doors of the Old Ones.” The judges shuddered at the unwholesomeness of such activities. Those places roused almost superstitious dread in most of the Great Race. Not in Pmurt. He reveled in doing what others would not or perhaps could not.

He had had to invent the notion of fraud ex nihilo, for instance. The Great Race commonly told the truth, and took for granted that everything it heard would likewise be true. His crimes going unsuspected — indeed, all but unimagined — he got away with them for a very long time. He had begun to believe he would get away with them forever. In that, however, he proved mistaken, as his presence here showed.

Sirica said, “From your resources, we have made what recompense we could to those you misled. Now we come down to punishing you for your wrongdoing. Imprisonment here would be pointless. One of us is as tranquil anywhere as anywhere else. One of us not addicted to the lure of forbidden places, I should say.”

Pmurt did not reply. He had hoped they would simply incarcerate him. He had mental resources aplenty to wait out any term of confinement.

“Instead, we shall send your spirit hundreds of millions of years into the future,” Sirica told him. “You will serve your term of exile trapped in the degenerate body and tiny brain of a mere human being. You deserve no better.”

Involuntarily, Pmurt’s claws opened and closed in dismay. He had not dreamt they would do anything so horrid to him. He had met human spirits swapped for other members of the Great Race who explored that far-future time with scholarly interest. Humans impressed him less than any other of Earth’s future intelligent races. Sirica and her fellow judges likely knew that. They were harder and crueler than Pmurt had guessed they would be.

“I wish to appeal,” Pmurt said.

“There is no appeal,” Sirica said flatly. “Relleum, carry out the sentence.”

“I gladly obey,” Relleum answered, and aimed his weapon at Pmurt. Only it was no weapon, not in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a temporal transposer. Pmurt recognized it too late even to begin to flinch as the transposer’s tip glowed green.

He woke in darkness, and lying down. For one of his former shape, that would have been disastrous if not impossible. He took stock of his new body. It told him this peculiar posture was pleasant enough. It also told him he had been asleep, and should sleep again. Far more than the Great Race, humans were slaves to their animal natures.

Another human creature lay on the sleeping furniture — the bed — beside him. Some cue (scent, perhaps) told him it was a female. He stayed where he was, uncertain of customs. Before very long, light slid in through the window curtains. The female sat up and glanced over to him. He thought she was hideous, but his body let him know she was attractive for one of her kind.

When she saw his eyes were open, she nodded to him and said, “Good morning, Donald.”

“Good morning,” he echoed. He was relieved to recognize the sounds of English. He had learned the language from the writings of the creature that called itself Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee and from conversation with one or two other temporal exiles. What he learned, of course, he did not forget.

“Good you are up,” the female said. “We go to Arkham soon for the hotel opening, remember?”

“I do remember,” Pmurt said: his first lie in this new body. That animal part of him declared it needed nourishment. “Food first, though. Breakfast.” Finding the right word pleased him absurdly.

The female — another term was woman—spoke into a small implement of hydrocarbon-based plastic. “They will bring it, and the paper.” She got out of bed and went into another room. After hydraulic noises, she returned.

A moment later, Donald — he couldn’t very well call himself Pmurt any more — realized he had certain hydraulic needs of his own. He went into that room himself. As the woman had, he closed the door. His body put one foot in front of the other on automatic pilot, as it were. He knew he would soon get the hang of walking, but for now it seemed a strange and insecure way to move.

He almost had what would have been an unfortunate accident before he figured out how to untangle himself from the false skins in which humans wrapped themselves. The flush lever told him which device to use to ease himself. The woman had used it, so he did as well.

He looked at himself in the mirror. Yes, he was hideous, too. He would just have to get used to it. This was what he had until such time as the judges decided he’d been punished enough. And if this was what he had, he needed to make the most of it.

Breakfast arrived on two trays while he was tending to things. Cooked ova, strips of grilled smoked meat, shredded and fried tubers, a cup with some strong-smelling hot liquid in it…He glanced at the woman to see how she used the metal implements by the plate, then imitated her. His body let him know the food was good of its kind.

Also on his tray lay the New York Post. The date told him he was here almost a hundred years after Peaslee’s spirit had been taken into the past. And his picture, in garments quite different from those now enveloping him, was on the front page. HOTEL MAGNATE TO OPEN NEW ONE BY ARKHAM RESERVOIR! the headline shouted.

Seeing the name of Arkham, as opposed to hearing it, reminded him the Peaslee creature had taught at a university there. Miskatonic, Pmurt remembered. He wondered if the university was still operating. Humans and their institutions seemed ephemeral to him.

He read further. There might be protesters by the hotel. The reservoir was alleged to be polluted—“accursed” was the odd word one of the protesters used — although the authorities insisted it was safe for drinking and all other purposes.

If the authorities said something was so, so it was bound to be. Thus Pmurt, with his long experience of the Great Race’s civilization, firmly believed. Some of the things he’d heard from human spirits cast back in time made him wonder how true it was for mankind, but he did not wonder long. Authorities were authorities for good reason. So his long experience as a ten-foot rugose cone assured him.

After he and the female finished eating, she said, “We should get dressed. Can’t go in our pajamas, after all.”

“No?” Pmurt said. The woman made a noise that indicated amusement among these creatures. “No,” Pmurt repeated, more firmly this time.

The closet showed him more clothes than he knew what to do with, in the most literal sense of the words. He found an outfit not too different from the one the newspaper showed. That seemed to be public garb. Even after he figured out buttons and zippers, it was none too comfortable. Tying his cravat and shoes were special trials. He had not needed to worry about such things in his proper body.

The woman’s clothes seemed much simpler than his. He wondered why the sexes had such contrasting wrappings. That was a question for another time, though. Someone knocked on the living area’s outer door: plainly a call for attention. Pmurt tried to pull the doorknob before realizing it turned, but no one saw the mistake. He got the door open.

A man in the hallway said, “Sir, the limo is ready to take you and the missus to the airport for the flight to Arkham.”

The Peaslee creature had written of motorized conveyances. This one was quieter, smoother riding, and altogether more luxurious than those writings would have led Pmurt to expect. Humans must have made respectable progress in the mechanical arts across the intervening century.

Air travel, in Peaslee’s time, had barely begun. Now it seemed altogether routine. The flight was nearly as smooth as the ground transport had been. Another quiet, comfortable limo awaited Pmurt and the female in Arkham. It whisked them them to a large, gaudy hotel by the side of a lake — no, as Pmurt recalled from the Post story, it was a reservoir. If he looked to the south, he could see the dam.

Humans paraded near the hotel, chanting and carrying signs. Others, by their uniform clothing likely order-keepers, prevented them from coming too close. A subordinate male whose expression Pmurt instinctively recognized as worried told him, “Sir, you promised you’d meet with their spokesperson.”

“Well, if I promised, I’d better do it,” Pmurt said. “Bring whoever it is to me, why don’t you?”

That spokesperson was a female, older and less attractive than the one that seemed to belong to Pmurt. “I am Louise Pierce, professor of environmental science at Miskatonic University,” she said. “My great-great grandfather, Ammi Pierce, barely survived the alien infestation now buried below the surface of the reservoir here.”

Remembering the Post story again, Pmurt replied, “That’s a bunch of superstitious hooey.” He didn’t know just what hooey meant, but liked the sound of it.

Professor Pierce shook her head. “It’s not. Something from another world visited what was the Gardner farm in the 1880s, and bad things happened afterwards. Contemporary accounts are quite clear about that. The reservoir may have diluted the problem over the past eighty or ninety years, but hasn’t dissolved it. Despite filtration, Arkham has high rates of insanity and birth defects. And the water in the reservoir is the likeliest cause. Believe me, I drink only bottled water from out of state. Sensible people here do.”

“My people say it’s safe,” Pmurt declared. “The state says it’s safe. I’m not afraid of it. I’d drink it straight out of the reservoir.” Yes, he trusted duly constituted authority.

Professor Pierce looked alarmed. “I wouldn’t do that. I really wouldn’t, not for anything. Even after a long lifetime and enormous dilution, it can’t possibly be safe. If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.”

“Everything will be fine. You watch and you’ll see. All these stories about the water, they’re nothing but”—Pmurt paused, casting about for a phrase, and found one in a Post story that had nothing to do with the human whose body he now inhabited—“nothing but fake news, that’s what they are.”

He called for his aide. “What do you need, sir?” the male asked, appearing as if out of nowhere.

“Bring me a big glass of water from the edge of the lake,” Pmurt said. “A big one, you hear?”

“Are you…sure that’s a good idea, sir?” the aide asked.

“Do what I pay you to do,” Pmurt replied. In every suitably complex society of which he knew, that was a potent argument. So it proved here. The aide fidgeted for a moment, but then went off to do what he was paid to do.

“Really, you don’t need to show off like this, not with unfiltered water from that…that unholy reservoir,” Professor Pierce said.

Pmurt laughed. What the Peaslee creature had written of the holy and the unholy struck him as particularly ridiculous. The aide came back with a large tumbler. He carried it carefully so the water wouldn’t slosh…or touch him. Pmurt took it from him. “Looks like water.” He sniffed. “Smells like water.” He raised it to his lips. “Tastes like water, too.” So it did; it was cool and refreshing. He drained the tumbler, then handed it back, empty, to the aide. He smiled what he somehow knew to be a mocking smile at the scholar from Miskatonic University. “You see? I didn’t blow up or anything. Fake news, like I told you.”

“‘The Ides of March are come.’ ‘Ay, Caesar, but not gone,’” Professor Pierce said.

“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” Pmurt demanded angrily. The Peaslee human had never quoted Shakespeare or written about the end of the Roman Republic. Neither had any of the other human spirits Pmurt had encountered. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he added.

“On your head be it,” the aging female human being said.

Pmurt was not used to having a head, even if sensory and manipulative organs had been concentrated near the apex of the conical body he’d formerly inhabited. “Are you going to complain any more?” he asked. “This hotel is legal. We’ve won all the court fights. You know we have. You’re just here to complain.” He wouldn’t have known any of that himself without the New York Post. Newspapers were a useful human invention.

Louise Pierce said, “I’d thought you might be politer and more sensible in person. Too much to hope for, obviously. Well, good luck with this place. I think you may need it, you and the out-of-staters who come to stay here. No one from within fifty miles of Arkham will want anything to do with your hotel. I promise you that.”

“Oh, yeah? What about the people who work here? They’re locals. We’re making jobs, is what we’re doing.” One more time, Pmurt relied on the Post’s coverage.

“If you see one of them drink from the tap or eat food that’s been made with reservoir water, I’ll be astonished,” Professor Pierce told him. She walked away without giving him a chance to reply. Among the Great Race, that would have been rude. Pmurt had no doubt it was among these human creatures, too.

As if to confirm as much, his aide said, “Sorry you had to go through that, sir.”

“Ah, never mind. She’s a sour, ugly old maid.” Pmurt inferred that Professor Pierce was unmated from her surname’s being the same as that of her ancestor. He had noticed that human females took males’ surnames on mating. Females were generally smaller and weaker than males; the name change had to be an acknowledgment of dependency.

“There may be more protesters at the opening ceremony this afternoon,” the aide said. “The police have promised that they won’t let them get close enough to annoy you.”

“They annoy me just by being here,” Pmurt snapped.

To his surprise, the aide smiled and even chuckled at that. “You sound like yourself, all right.”

“Who else am I gonna sound like?” Pmurt knew the answer to that, even if the subordinate male didn’t. He added, “Make sure I’ve got some more reservoir water for the ceremony. I want to drink it where they can see me pour it down.”

“Really? Um, really, sir?” The aide remembered, more slowly than he should have, that the man in whose body Pmurt dwelt deserved — more, demanded — his respect. But, respectfully, he persisted: “Sir, the locals are so up in arms about this, I really don’t think it’s a good idea. If anything happens to you, they’ll blame the water, and the publicity will be terrible. Worse than terrible, whatever that is.”

Worse than terrible is wearing this horrible body the way the body wears its clothes. But Pmurt could not tell the aide any of that. Instead, he said, “Everything is gonna be fine. The big brains say the water’s safe, that’s plenty good for me.”

He made his speech that afternoon. The bushes and trees in the distance looked odd to him; they were as different from the plants he was used to as this body was from the one that still lived in those ancient times. The order-keepers— police, that was the term — made sure the protesters stayed far enough away that their shouts and chants were barely audible.

“This is gonna be a great hotel!” he said, waving back at it. His human name surmounted the building in enormous golden letters of anodized aluminum. “It’s beautiful. The scenery is gorgeous. So is the reservoir, with all this fresh, clean water to enjoy.” He drank another glass of water from the artificial lake. It tasted like…water. What else would it taste like? Setting down the tumbler, he continued, “Important people will come and visit here. There’ll be good jobs for people from Arkham. Everything will be terrific. And those ingrates over there”—he pointed toward the far-off protesters—“they can go take a hike. You hear me? They can take a hike and never come back.”

The assembled dignitaries clapped their hands — a sign of approval among humans, as Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had noted. The males wore outfits similar to his own. The females had on clothes of the same order as those worn by the one who belonged to him, though theirs showed greater variety than the males’. His woman was among the most attractive, which he took to be a sign of the high status of the human in whose body he was exiled.

Some of the humans drank ethanol mixtures at the reception after his speech. He refrained, not wanting to poison himself even slightly. One of the men laughed and said, “Still on the wagon, are you? A little never hurt anybody.”

“You live your life. I’ll live mine,” Pmurt said. For some reason, the male seemed to find that funny.

After the reception, he and his woman (the proper term, he remembered, was wife) ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. The meal satisfied the animal senses of his human body, so he supposed it was good. A stream of humans kept interrupting his feeding by congratulating him. Among the Great Race, that would have been worse than rude, but the woman took it in stride, so he tried his best to do the same.

The went up to a room once they finished eating. He glanced through all the publications he found there. One praised him and his business acumen. Others described the scenic and cultural possibilities in the region around Arkham. He learned a good deal.

“You don’t usually read so much,” his wife remarked.

“Something to pass the time,” he said, as neutral a reply as he could find. She shrugged and turned on the television. He fell asleep while she was still watching it. He fell asleep, and the water from the reservoir, the water that diluted but did not obliterate the alien, extraterrestrial matter that had made a blasted heath of Nahum Gardner’s farm, swirled through his bloodstream and rose to his head, stranger and stronger than any merely earthly wine ever fermented. Had he been a merely human personality, it might not have hit him so hard, but he was what he was.

He dreamt…He dreamt of colours out of space, colours unimagined by either humans or the Great Race (and perhaps that foreign spelling of the word emphasized how alien, how unimaginable, those colours were). His dreams threatened to explode his mind, not from horror but from sheer grandiosity. No one, he was sure, had ever had dreams like his before. Of course, he knew nothing of Nahum Gardner and the eerie fate that had befallen him, his family, his livestock, and his crops. He knew nothing, and he’d fought shy of finding out.

When he woke, that sense of grandiose magnificence still filled him to overflowing. He didn’t remember just what he’d dreamt, only that it was important and he was important. He was so important, he shook his wife till her eyes opened.

“What is is?” she mumbled sleepily.

“Melania, listen! You gotta listen to me!” he said. “You know what I’m gonna do?” She shook her head, but he didn’t care. He was talking to himself more than to her anyway. He rushed on, filled with the sense of his own magnificence: “I’m gonna run for President, Melania! And you know what else? I’m gonna win!”