The Far Shore of Time

Two bizarre machines were hovering over a small chest, made out of the same primrose chinaware as the walls. They weren’t the spidery Horch fighting machines I’d seen before. What they looked like, more than anything else, was a pair of squat, crystalline Christmas trees. They had spiky glass branches coming off a central trunk, and twigs off the branches, and needles off the twigs-yes, and littler needles coming off the needles, too. For all I knew there were still littler needles than those as well, but I didn’t see them. Each of the machines was topped off by a sort of glassy globe, where the angel should have been on a proper Christmas tree, and these were faceted and glittery, like the rotating mirror spheres people rent to cast little spangles of light around a dance floor. One of the things was a pale green, the other a rosy pink. It seemed to me-that was hope speaking, not wisdom-that they looked pretty fragile. Whatever they were up to, I thought, I would have something to say about, because one swift kick would shatter a quorum of their glassy needles.

I was quite wrong about that, of course.

They evidently took notice of the fact that I was awake. The green one did something queer with some of its needles. Clusters of them rearranged themselves, fusing into colorless, faintly glowing lenses pointing in my direction, while the other extended a branch toward something I couldn’t see inside the porcelain box.

I must have made a sudden move, because there was a quick, new pang from my head. I reached up to touch the part that hurt and made an unpleasant discovery. Something that didn’t belong there was just behind my ear. It was ribbed and hard-surfaced, and faintly warm to the touch, like my own flesh. It seemed to be embedded in my skin. It hadn’t been there before, and I didn’t like it.

That was when the littler one-its needles were like slivers of shell-pink glass-rolled up close to my face, waving its nearest sprig of needles under my nose.

Then it really surprised me. It spoke to me. It said, “You will be asked questions. Answer them quickly and accurately.”

That put a different face on things.

I know it sounds peculiar, but when the machine said that to me it actually made me feel a bit better. Interrogation was something I understood, having done plenty of it myself. I spoke right up. I said, “My name is James Daniel Dannerman. I am a citizen of the United States of America and a senior agent of the American National Bureau of Investigation. I have been a captive of the Beloved Leaders, who are your enemies as well as my own-“

The Christmas tree unhurriedly stuffed a fist of needles into my mouth to shut me up, and the needles weren’t fragile at all. They were curiously warm. They didn’t hurt, but it was like being gagged with a mouthful of steel wool. It said, “You have not been asked those questions. Answer only the questions you have been asked.”

I’m not sure what I tried to say in response. With that glassy bird’s nest stuffed in my mouth it only came out as “wumf,” but it made the thing remove the needles from my mouth and speak again.

“You will now supply information,” the machine said, “concerning the conspecific persons you identify as ‘Scuzzhawks.’ Did their poor personal hygiene and use of psychoactive materials adversely affect their mortality and reproduction rates?”

CHAPTER THREE

Of all the things I could have expected to be interrogated about by a Horch machine, that one was about at the bottom of the list.

I did know all about the Scuzzhawks, of course. They were an ultralight plane gang that roamed the American Southwest, scandalizing law-abiding citizens. The Scuzz were more or less based in Orange County, California, but they rallied anywhere from Bakersfield to Tijuana. They didn’t bathe much. They didn’t wear much, either-there was a limit to how much load their frail little craft could lift, and they reserved most of their carrying capacity for beer and shotgun shells. They painted the wings of their ultralights with obscene slogans; they relieved themselves wherever they felt a need, which was frequently-even while they were airborne, and often enough over the clean, well-kept patios of respectable homeowners. The Scuzzhawks were not nice people. They earned their fuel and food and beer and dope by drug-dealing and petty crime, and sometimes crimes that were not so petty; and early in my career with the Bureau I had been assigned to infiltrate them. That mission hadn’t been my choice. When it was over I felt lucky to get out of it alive and generally disease-free.

Why this pink-glassy Christmas tree was asking about them, I could not guess, but the reason didn’t matter. The important thing was that it did want to know about them.