The Prometheus Project Part 21

Novak's face took on a look of tight control, like a mask with festering bitterness oozing out from around the edges. "So they said that, did they?" she asked, very quietly. She looked around. The Delkasu were all gone. We five humans were alone amid the echoing immensity. All at once, her expression cleared. "Well, I don't suppose it can do any harm now, can it?"

One of her men fidgeted. "We've got to get out of here. Tosava'throvor said-"

"You take your orders from me, not him! And we've got a few minutes." She turned back to us, and her first words were completely unexpected. "Have you two ever read Orwell's 1984?"We both nodded, wondering what the relevance could possibly be."He said that whoever controls the present controls the past . . . and whoever controls the past controls the future. Of course, what he was talking about was the way the Communist regimes of our world

falsify history and thus control the perception of the past. The Project's sociological forecasters tell us that he was too pessimistic, and that those Communist regimes are soon going to be living on borrowed time-and not for very long. But in a way he could never have imagined, he was absolutely right. The way to change the future-the dead-end future the human race is looking at-is to change the past. Not the memory of the past, but the past itself."

"What are you talking about?" I demanded, exasperated.

"We're in the position we're in because the human race was just a little late-"

"Yeah, right, we've heard this from you before," I interrupted. "But so what? Nothing can be done about

it now.""Yes, it can."We stared at her, wondering if she'd lost whatever marbles she possessed.Novak stared back, then shook her head. "So it really is true, isn't it? The Medjavar haven't told you they have time travel."

Looking back, I have no recollection of how long the silence lasted. I do recall what finally broke it: a whoop of derisive laughter from me."Time travel!" I finally gasped. "So that's what this is all about? Time travel?" I couldn't continue, for another uncontrollable spasm of laughter took me.

"Renata," said Chloe, in the carefully reasonable tone one takes when dealing with a borderline nutcase, "time travel is fantasy. The whole concept is a logical absurdity. It would allow for paradoxes like-"

"I haven't got time to argue the point, Chloe. So I'll just suggest that you ask yourself this question:

would a Tonkuztra family take the trouble to steal a fantasy? And if they did, would the Medjavar go to great lengths to get it back?"

I discovered I'd stopped laughing."I found out about it back in early '63," Novak resumed, talking with the rapidity of someone who's spent years holding a story inside for want of an audience. "It was indirect. I learned of it through one of the legitimate Delkasu commercial contacts that Section Five was dealing with. Her organization-'corporation' as we'd call it-was one of those to which the Tosava had put out feelers. They weren't interested. But they'd been given a list of other potential buyers they were authorized to approach. It's the way the Tonkuztra families do business. Anyway, I was the Project's only point of contact with these people. I was the only one who knew of it. I kept it that way, secretly recruiting a few trustworthy people. In the meantime, I used my contact to get in touch with the Tosava gevroth, through the usual Tonkuztra channels."

"And the rest, as they say, is history," I concluded. "All right. Let's a.s.sume there's some truth to all this. Now that you've finally got what you paid for-paid by selling out everyone who's ever trusted you-what do you intend to do with it?"

"Isn't it obvious? I'm going to do what the Ekhemasu were too cowardly to do, even though they held the means in their decadent hands. I'm going to change reality itself!"

Neither Chloe nor I possessed the power of speech.

"I'm going to go back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution," Novak went on, ignoring us. "I considered earlier periods, like the Renaissance or even Cla.s.sical Greece. But going that far back isn't really practical. And dealing with those societies would involve a whole new set of problems; I'd have to

introduce a whole new mind-set, in addition to leapfrogging too many technological revolutions. But in early-nineteenth-century England they even had the concept of the computer, thanks to Babbage. I'm going to take back the whole compendium of galactic knowledge that Mr. Inconnu brought, and which the Project has been gradually doling out. I'm going to have to be even more gradual . . . but I'll be starting a lot earlier. And even more importantly, I'll bring the knowledge that the Delkasu are coming, and that the human race must prepare.

"By that time the little vermin arrive in the mid twentieth century, Earth will be ready for them. There'll be no degrading subterfuges, no truckling to alien slime! We'll meet them as equals. No, more than that!

With the kind of momentum I'm going to impart to Earth's technological progression, we'll eventually surpa.s.s them and take our rightful place as the dominant race of the universe!"

By this time, Novak's voice had taken on the fiery intensity of a prophet. From the rapt look her two underlings wore as she poured forth her crazy dream, I could see that for them she was precisely that.

She'd known just the kind of people to recruit. Unfortunately, they weren't looking rapt enough for me to try anything. These guys might be true believers, but they were also pros.

"Renata," said Chloe, still superhumanly calm and patient, "if you succeed, what happens to our reality, in which none of this has happened? Does it vanish? And if so, where will you have come from? That's what I meant about paradoxes."

"There's a difference of opinion on that." With disconcerting abruptness, Novak was back down from Mount Sinai and talking matter-of-factly. "Maybe our timeline will vanish. But if so, there is an excellent probability that those of us who travel backwards in time and cause the change will be unaffected-we'll exist in a sort of overarching 'super-reality.' Another possibility is that the present reality will continue to exist, working out its own tragic destiny, while a parallel reality will come into being at the point at which I change history. That way, there'll at least be one universe in which events turn out right."

I could only stare at her. I started to speak, but then realized the pointlessness of anything I could say.

I also realized that I had nothing to lose.

"You're mad as a hatter," I said wearily. "And talking to you is a waste of air. Just do what you're going

to do and get it over with."

"Mad? Then don't take my word for any of this. Ask your Ekhemasu friends, when they wake up."

"You mean you're not going to kill us?" Chloe blurted before Novak's words had fully registered on me.

"Of course not, Chloe! What do you think I am?" Before I could collapse in a fit of hysterical laughter

over that one, she continued. "No, I'm going to leave you here. Why shouldn't I? There's nothing you can do to stop me now."

One of the guards looked worried. "Shouldn't we . . . ?" He gestured in our direction with his paralysis beamer.

"No, there's no need. Besides," Novak added, to us, "it's a fairly unpleasant sensation. I don't know if they have insects, or the local equivalent, in this place, but if so you don't want to be lying around, completely immobile but fully conscious, while they crawl over you . . . and into you, through your nose and your mouth, if it was open at the instant the beam hit you. So just behave yourselves until after we leave. And do ask these Ekhemasu if what I've said is true. I think you'll find they haven't been altogether candid with you."

With that she departed, followed by the two guards, who kept their weapons trained on us as they exited.

We were left alone in the midst of the vast chamber, looking at each other and not trusting ourselves to speak.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

We didn't have a whole lot to do, waiting for the Ekhemasu to awaken. We couldn't even get breakfast, not knowing how to find our way back to our quarters and their stock of human-type rations. So we spent our time looking for Khorat, examining the features of every unconscious Ekhemasu we encountered.

We finally found him, after what were probably fewer hours than it seemed at the time. He was in a gallery-like s.p.a.ce that was evidently a kind of office suite, looking out through broad windows over the Sanctuary's terraced approach, beyond which the slow dawn of Khemava was breaking over the desert.

We rolled him over-remember, this was low gravity-and tried to arouse him, using every ploy our limited knowledge of his species' physiology suggested.

Our amateurish ministrations must have had some effect. He came around before his colleagues, despite

his advanced age.

"Have you contacted the authorities?" were his first words. They came out of our earpieces in the same imperturbable computer-generated voice as always, even though he was speaking in the rustling croak that was his equivalent of a whisper.

"No," said Chloe. "We didn't know how."

"Of course you didn't." With an alarmingly visible effort, Khorat heaved himself upright from where

he'd lain sprawled across his cushions. He tottered over to a console and began making connections and talking to various uniformed Delkasu.

"It is probably just as well you were not able to reach any law enforcement agencies," he observed after

cutting the last connection. "There will of course be questions, which I will need to deal with. This touches on extremely sensitive matters."

"Yeah, we know," I said shortly. I'm not a morning person, and hunger never improves my disposition.

The translator must have conveyed the hard flatness of my tone, for Khorat stopped what he was doing and turned the unreadable regard of his enormous eyes on us.

"We talked to Novak before she and her Tonkuztra allies left, Khorat," Chloe explained.

"And she told you . . . ?"

"Everything."

Something seemed to crumple up inside the old Ekhemar. He closed his eyes tightly as though in

physical pain, and from deep in his throat came a low sound that my earpiece did not translate.

"Khorat?" said Chloe, alarmed. "Are you all right?"

"Quite." Khorat seemed to take command of himself. "There is much to do. We must awaken as many of

my fellows as possible before the security forces arrive. We must also return the two of you to your

quarters, as your presence here is not generally known and would be awkward to explain."

"Yeah, sure," I nodded. "Not for the world would we cause trouble. But Khorat . . . after the cops are gone, we're going to have a long talk."

"A long, frank talk," Chloe amplified.I heard a rustling Ekhemasu sigh. "Very well. You have my word on it. But at present, there is need for haste."

We spent a boring time as Delkasu officials and their Ekhemasu flunkies swarmed over the Sanctuary. What Khorat had told us about their regard for native Ekhemasu religious sensibilities must have been true, for they stayed away from areas the Medjavar told them were off-limits-like the area where our quarters were located. It even made sense, I reflected. The Medjavar were the victims in this crime. What reason would they have to withhold information?

Finally, the investigators departed and Khorat conducted us to his office. It was a smaller version of the suite we'd found him in, s.p.a.cious to our eyes but probably the Ekhemasu equivalent of the stereotypical small, book-lined, pipe-smoke-smelling study of some equally stereotypical professor. Except that it was pretty much open to other similar offices; the Ekhemasu, descendants of herd animals, didn't altogether share our human ideas of privacy. But the three of us were alone.

"What did you end up telling them?" I asked Khorat, as Chloe and I settled gingerly onto the cushions that had to serve in the absence of human-adapted furniture. "I mean, about what this raid was aimed at?" "Nothing. We insisted we had no idea what could possibly motivate such an act. I could tell they were not satisfied. But they will still pursue their investigation vigorously. A crime involving violation of air traffic regulations is one which the imperial authorities take seriously, however vague its motive. And they will enjoy the full-if covert-cooperation of the Osak gevroth, who will be livid over a Tosava intrusion on a planet they consider part of their turf." (My respect for the translator software went up yet another notch.) "But it will all come to nothing, of course. They will know nothing of what is involved. Nor may they be told."

Chloe leaned forward in a way that was oddly beseeching. "Khorat, help me understand this. Novak told us that this is all about the secret of . . . well, of time travel." She gave a nervous little laugh, as though desperately inviting Khorat to share her amus.e.m.e.nt at something so ludicrous, and beseeching him to explain to us what Novak had really meant.

Instead, the great dark eyes remained expressionless. So did the voice in our earpieces, as he snuffed out Chloe's hope. "Yes. I see there is no point in denials. It is now time for you to learn the whole story. "It dates back to shortly after the Delkasu conquest. Actually, I must go even farther back than that, to our beginnings as a race and our fundamental orientation as a culture.