Nadine’s laughter was cut off by a squawk from the visi-plate. The woman who had lectured them earlier appeared, looking stern. "Launch in twenty-three seconds," she said. "For the Rationality!"
"For the Rationality!" Ellie responded fervently and in unison with Nadine. Inside, however, she was thinking, How did I get into this? and then, ruefully, Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.
"Eleven seconds ... seven seconds ... three seconds ... one second."
Nadine launched.
Without time and space, there can be neither sequence nor pattern. The battle between the Aftermen dreadnoughts and the time-torpedoes of the Rationality, for all its shifts and feints and evasions, could be reduced to a single blip of instantaneous action and then rendered into a single binary datum: win/lose.
The Rationality lost.
The time-dreadnoughts of the Aftermen crept another year into the past.
But somewhere in the very heart of that not-terribly-important battle, two torpedoes, one of which was piloted by Nadine, converged upon the hot-spot of guiding consciousness that empowered and drove the flagship of the Aftermen time-armada. Two button-pushers set off their explosives. Two shock-waves bowed outward, met, meshed, and merged with the expanding shock-wave of the countermeasure launched by the dreadnought’s tutelary awareness.
Something terribly complicated happened.
Ellie found herself sitting at a table in the bar of the Algonquin Hotel, back in New York City.
Nadine was sitting opposite her. To either side of them were the clever albino and the man with the tattooed face and the filed teeth.
The albino smiled widely. "Ah, the primitives! Of all who could have survived–myself excepted, of course–you are the most welcome."
His tattooed companion frowned. "Please show some more tact, Sev. However they may appear to us, these folk are not primitives to themselves."
"You are right as always, Dun Jal. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Seventh-Clone of House Orpen, Lord Extratemporal of the Centuries 3197 through 3992 Inclusive, Backup Heir Potential to the Indeterminate Throne. Sev, for short."
"Dun Jal. Mercenary. From the early days of the Rationality. Before it grew decadent."
"Eleanor Voigt, Nadine Shepard. I’m from 1936, and she’s from 2004. Where–if that’s the right word–are we?"
"Neither where nor when, delightful aboriginal. We have obviously been thrown into hypertime, that no-longer-theoretical state informing and supporting the more mundane seven dimensions of time with which you are doubtless familiar. Had we minds capable of perceiving it directly without going mad, who knows what we should see? As it is," he waved a hand, "all this is to me as my One- Father’s clonatorium, in which so many of I spent our minority."
"I see a workshop," Dun Jal said.
"I see–" Nadine began.
Dun Jal turned pale. "A Tarbleck-null!" He bolted to his feet, hand instinctively going for a sidearm which, in their current state, did not exist.
"Mr. Tarblecko!" Ellie gasped. It was the first time she had thought of him since her imprinted technical training in the time-fortress of the Rationality, and speaking his name brought up floods of related information: That there were seven classes of Aftermen, or Tarblecks as they called themselves. That the least of them, the Tarbleck-sixes, were brutal and domineering overlords. That the greatest of them, the Tarbleck-nulls, commanded the obedience of millions.
That the maximum power a Tarbleck-null could call upon at an instant’s notice was four quads per second per second. That the physical expression of that power was so great that, had she known, Ellie would never have gone through that closet door in the first place.
Sev gestured toward an empty chair. "Yes, I thought it was about time for you to show up."
The sinister grey Afterman drew up the chair and sat down to their table. "The small one knows why I am here," he said. "The others do not. It is degrading to explain myself to such as you, so he shall have to."
"I am so privileged as to have studied the more obscure workings of time, yes." The little man put his fingertips together and smiled a fey, foxy smile over their tips. "So I know that physical force is useless here. Only argument can prevail. Thus ... trial by persuasion it is. I shall go first."
He stood up. "My argument is simple: As I told our dear, savage friends here earlier, an heirpotential to the Indeterminate Throne is too valuable to risk on uncertain adventures. Before I was allowed to enlist as a mercenary, my elder self had to return from the experience to testify I would survive it unscathed. I did. Therefore, I will."
He sat.
There was a moment’s silence. "That’s all you have to say?" Dun Jal asked.
"It is enough."
"Well." Dun Jal cleared his throat and stood. "Then it is my turn. The Empire of the Aftermen is inherently unstable at all points. Perhaps it was a natural phenomenon–once. Perhaps the Aftermen arose from the workings of ordinary evolutionary processes, and could at one time claim that therefore they had a natural place in this continuum. That changed when they began to expand their Empire into their own past. In order to enable their back-conquests, they had to send agents to all prior periods in time to influence and corrupt, to change the flow of history into something terrible and terrifying, from which they might arise. And so they did.
"Massacres, death-camps, genocide, World Wars ..." (There were other terms that did not translate, concepts more horrible than Ellie had words for.) "You don’t really think those were the work of human beings, do you? We’re much too sensible a race for that sort of thing–when we’re left to our own devices. No, all the worst of our miseries are instigated by the Aftermen. We are far from perfect, and the best example of this is the cruel handling of the War in the final years of the Optimized Rationality of True Men, where our leaders have become almost as terrible as the Aftermen themselves–because it is from their very ranks that the Aftermen shall arise. But what might we have been?
"Without the interference of the Aftermen might we not have become something truly admirable?
Might we not have become not the Last Men, but the First truly worthy of the name?" He sat down.
Lightly, sardonically, Sev applauded. "Next?"
The Tarbleck-null placed both hands heavily on the table, and, leaning forward, pushed himself up.
"Does the tiger explain himself to the sheep?" he asked. "Does he need to explain? The sheep understand well enough that Death has come to walk among them, to eat those it will and spare the rest only because he is not yet hungry. So too do men understand that they have met their master.
I do not enslave men because it is right or proper, but because I can. The proof of which is that I have!
"Strength needs no justification. It exists or it does not. I exist. Who here can say that I am not your superior? Who here can deny that Death has come to walk among you? Natural selection chose the fittest among men to become a new race. Evolution has set my foot upon your necks, and I will not take it off."
To universal silence, he sat down. The very slightest of glances he threw Ellie’s way, as if to challenge her to refute him. Nor could she! Her thoughts were all confusion, her tongue all in a knot. She knew he was wrong–she was sure of it!–and yet she could not put her arguments together.
She simply couldn’t think clearly and quickly enough.
Nadine laughed lightly.
"Poor superman!" she said. "Evolution isn’t linear, like that chart that has a fish crawling out of the water at one end and a man in a business suit at the other. All species are constantly trying to evolve in all directions at once–a little taller, a little shorter, a little faster, a little slower. When that distinction proves advantageous, it tends to be passed along. The Aftermen aren’t any smarter than Men are–less so, in some ways. Less flexible, less innovative . .
. look what a stagnant world they’ve created! What they are is more forceful."
"Forceful?" Ellie said, startled. "Is that all?"
"That’s enough. Think of all the trouble caused by men like Hitler, Mussolini, Caligula, Pol Pot, Archers-Wang 43... . All they had was the force of their personality, the ability to get others to do what they wanted. Well, the Aftermen are the descendants of exactly such people, only with the force of will squared and cubed. That afternoon when the Tarbleck-null ordered you to sit in the window? It was the easiest thing in the world to one of them. As easy as breathing.
"That’s why the Rationality can’t win. Oh, they could win, if they were willing to root out that streak of persuasive coercion within themselves. But they’re fighting a war, and in times of war one uses whatever weapons one has. The ability to tell millions of soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the common good is simply too useful to be thrown away. But all the time they’re fighting the external enemy, the Aftermen are evolving within their own numbers."
"You admit it," the Tarbleck said.
"Oh, be still! You’re a foolish little creature, and you have no idea what you’re up against. Have you ever asked the Aftermen from the leading edge of your Empire why you’re expanding backward into the past rather than forward into the future? Obviously because there are bigger and more dangerous things up ahead of you than you dare face. You’re afraid to go there–afraid that you might find me!" Nadine took something out of her pocket. "Now go away, all of you."
Flash.