Collision with Chronos

“But that makes it like a god!” Sobrie exclaimed disbelievingly.

“Yes, like a god,” Ascar repeated, his lips curling slightly. That was exactly what he’d said at the time, and the Entity’s reply still sounded in his ears: I am as insignificant as you. The Supreme does not notice me, just as it does not notice you.

“Is he speaking the truth?” Sobrie asked Shiu anxiously. “Is that really what you’ve been doing in your observatory?”

Shiu’s tone was cold and superior. “That was indeed our project. I’d suspected long ago that the Oblique Entity has powers unknown to us.”

“Deus ex machina,” Sobrie muttered.

“Yes,” said Ascar tonelessly, “a real deus ex machina. However, the Oblique Entity insists it’s basically a spectator, a noninterventionist. When I asked it to use its powers on our behalf, it refused.”

A heavy silence fell on the room, and Su-Mueng stirred.

“My regrets for your planet,” he said stiffly. “However, if you’ll excuse me, Retort City will continue to exist and I have business to deal with.”

“That wasn’t the end of the matter, sir,” Ascar said quickly to Shiu when the younger man had left the room, “I argued with it further.”

His mind fled back to his recent experience, still fresh in his memory. At first his world-weary cynicism had come to the fore. He’d shrugged his shoulders and mentally written Earth off.

But then he’d found that he was unable to give up so easily. Something in him had pushed him on, made him press his case to this being beside which he felt like an ant. He didn’t plead, exactly – no, plead wouldn’t be the right word – but he’d come close to it.

The Oblique Entity had answered in a throbbing voice. “There is considerable drama in this situation on Earth,” it had said. “I am reluctant to interfere with that drama.”

For periods during their discourse the room in which Ascar sat had wavered and vanished, and he’d found himself drifting like a dust-mote through vast ratcheting machine-spaces, or through dark emptinesses in which swam flimmering, half-seen shapes. This was not, he decided eventually, an attempt to frighten him or a show of anger on the Entity’s part. It was simply that its thought processes occasionally distracted its attention from the job of transmitting sensory data to the receiver in Retort City, and Ascar was left picking up random images. Each time the Entity spoke, however, he was promptly deposited back in his simulated room.

Then, finally, the voice had changed. Ascar had heard the girl’s voice again, coming through the speaker with a tinkly laugh.

“Enterprise such as yours deserves a reward,” she’d said. “This is what I will do.”

And the Entity had shown him, not in words, but in a graphic, simple demonstration that had jolted right into his consciousness. It showed him time being split up into rivulets and streaming in all directions to bring deserts to life. And it showed him the main torrent from which those rivulets were taken, rushing headlong to where it would meet with an equal power and be convulsed into a horrendous vortex that would destroy it.

When Ascar explained this to Shiu the old man nodded, reflecting at length.

“Ingenious,” he said. “And logical. The Oblique Entity clearly has a sense of justice.”

“I don’t understand,” Sobrie Oblomot complained. “I don’t understand any of it.”

Shiu glanced at him and then wrapped his arms in his sleeves. “It would be difficult for a layman,” he admitted in his slow, musing voice. “Attend to the following description. Time moves forward, always in one direction. But there is more than just one direction in the real universe. Six dimensions can be defined, not just the three that the Absolute Present produces. So outside the stream of time that travels from the past into the future, there is yet more non-time, like a landscape through which the river of time flows. What this means in practical terms is that there are alternate Earths existing in the fifth dimension, side by side with the Earth you know. These Earths are uninhabited: they have no life, and no time. The river of time could be turned aside so as to flow into one of these alternate Earths, instead of directly onward. There would be no collision; an ideal solution to your problem.”

“And that, I take it, is not to be?” Sobrie asked, wrestling with these abstract ideas.