Collision with Chronos

Heshke drew his gun again, confused but thinking that he, too, should help fight the enemy. As it was he was given no time to fire. The two unhurt devs dropped to one knee and took careful aim with objects they held in their hands, too small for him to be able to see properly. He felt a momentary buzzing in his brain, before he lost consciousness.

Awareness returned suddenly and clearly, like a light being switched on. Nevertheless Heshke knew that there had been a lapse of time.

The strange surroundings took a few moments to become familiar with. He lay, half reclined, on a sort of chair-couch, in a room that was long and narrow, decorated at either end with burnished gold filigree. He was alone except for a yellow-faced dev who stood by an instrument with a flat grey screen, and who gave Heshke a distant, rather cold smile.

“You—all—right—now?” he asked in a weird, impossible accent, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully.

Heshke nodded.

“Good. Solly—stun.”

Heshke studied the offbeat face that belonged to his slim, youthful captor. These devs reminded him of something. … They were not representative of any modern subspecies, but he believed he had seen something like them in photographs of subspecies long exterminated. What had they been called? Shings? Chanks? It had been only a small grouping, in any case. It was perplexing to find them operating a time traveller – or spaceship? – now.

“Where are my two friends?” he demanded.

The other listened politely but did not seem to follow him. Apparently his grasp of the language was limited.

Nothing bound him to the chair-couch; he stood up and approached the dev threateningly. “What have you done with my friends?” he said, his voice rising to a shout.

The dev staved him off with a gesture; an elegant, flowing gesture.

“You–have–nothing–fear,” he said, smiling broadly. He pointed to a table on which stood various articles: a pitcher, a cup, plates of food. Then he sauntered away from Heshke, opened a door Heshke had not noticed before, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Heshke went to the table and sat down at the chair provided, inspecting the fare with great interest. From the pitcher – in passing he noticed its almost glowing glaze, its light, almost fragrant yellow colour, its fine shape – he poured a lemon-coloured liquid into the wide-brimmed cup and drank greedily. It was delicious; heavenly, unsurpassable lemonade. He drank again, and only then did he pause to examine the excellent craftsmanship involved in the cup. It was of a feather-light, bone-like material, but so thin and delicate that it was translucent. It had no decoration; its whole form was so perfect that it needed none.

He realised that he had fallen into the hands of a people who knew how to gratify the senses.

Next, being ravenously hungry, he attacked the food. It was a mixture of spiced meat, vegetables, and a near-tasteless mass of white grains he couldn’t identify. At first he was disappointed to find the meal only lukewarm – he liked his food hot – but the flavours were pleasing and he gulped it swiftly down.

Afterward, his stomach satisfied, he felt much better. He could not altogether quell his alarm at having fallen into the hands of devs – but after all, this was such a totally mysterious situation.

And he was alive – and, hopefully, would remain so. Things were much better than they had been a short while ago.

He sat brooding, exploring the room with his eyes. Its shape was pleasing, he realised. A ratio of – four to one? Hardly the proportions he would have chosen, but somehow it worked; it was aesthetic. These people, dev or not, were artists.

He remembered Blare Oblomot, and felt a sudden pang for that rebel’s protestations regarding the deviants. Poor Blare.

He became aware of a murmur of energy, barely audible through the floor. The room suddenly seemed to shift, to tilt. Then it became steady again.

Of course. He was in some kind of vehicle.

He paced the room, which was lined with horizontal slats of a honey-brown material, and stopped before the instrument the dev had been standing beside when he awoke. It was mounted on a pedestal, like a washbasin. As he came near, its flat grey screen glowed with neutral light; words appeared.

YOU ARE EN ROUTE TO INTERSTELLAR SPACE. The characters were neat, but functionally inelegant. There followed a diagram consisting of dots, some heavily, some lightly scored, superimposed by a series of concentric circles. An arrow left the centre and stabbed slowly out, jerking several times toward empty space.

Heshke guessed it to be a star map, but he was no astronomer and it meant nothing to him.