PART ONE
CHAPTER I
“Through mastery of the temporal,” Scop would have said, “capturing one by one the frozen moments in which our history itself pivoted. Kennedy dead, the kings asssassinated. Here at the moment of impact we can see the gong of civilization struck.”
“What you have done is illegal. Witness may be allowed under certain circumstance but photographs never,” the Master would have said, leaning forward, scuttling the photographs, hiding them in his robes. “You have broken all of the codes; you are asked to submit at once, no delay, to questioning,” he says. “You will explain why this was done and how you have circumvented the codes.”
“It is of no matter. I have duplicates.” Suddenly Scop leans forward, seizes the Temporal Master by the ribbons of his own clothing and pulls the old man closer to him, a faint, fine quiver like that of the machine goes through his hands, a faint, dense sweetish odor penetrates Scop’s nostrils, he becomes aware as if for the first time of the acute mortality and vulnerability of the Master and this dismays him because he has not up until now really concerned himself with that problem, being more involved—let us face it—with the reordering of all existence. “We live in a time stream based upon astonishment and disaster, created by a series of accidents, based upon pain and brutality which sends us lurching inch by inch in pain toward a future we cannot divine,” he says rather floridly, makes florid gestures with his hands upon the Master’s robe, with equal floridity although perhaps some self-awareness wipes his forehead. “Look at these pictures and you will see the proof inviolable. Don’t turn away!” he shrieks to the Master whose old eyes indeed do turn inward and who begins to breathe steamily through his mouth exhaling fumes of cabbage, onion, incense and the other mysterious materials which Scop imagines the Masters to eat, “You’ve got to face it, you’ve got to face the truth, our world is based on murder,” and indeed as he shakes and shakes the old man (becoming more aware of his vulnerability on the instant and by that knowledge also understanding his own power in a world he never made) he can feel the insight driven into him, some spike into the consciousness of the diseased but necessarily gallant old man whose eyes flutter open with that knowledge and the Master says, “Why I do see this, I see it indeed! You’re perfectly right: how can an evolution predicated upon the murder of saints lead to anything but barbarism?” and he begins to laugh. Scop laughs also, the two of them laugh hopelessly in the dim clamp of the enclosure while joy fills Scop’s heart for he knows that he has made his case to the Master and that all will be changed. The lines will be changed, the dead will walk again, the enormously complicated task of switching over will begin and within his lifetime if not within the next decade Scop will see a world of truth and justice in which the lives of the saints, perpetuated to their natural end, gave impetus to the era of benevolence which follows. “Thank you,” the old man says, “thank you for helping me to see this. How unreasonable we were to have thought that this could go on, Scop.”Scop , he says again, murmuring it, the ritual of naming and places his hand on Scop’s head now, the translucent fingers shaking and Scop feels vague warmth, light, distension . . . he feels joined through the ritual of the naming in some indefinable fashion which will weld him and the Master together for all time, may lead for all he knows, to his own initiation as Master some day . . . but as this moment flows over him, as he revels in the understanding that he has, almost single-handedly brought the era of barbarism to a close the photographs wink and dazzle before him, they seem to blend and flow together in the murky light and then there are cries, cries all around him, the sounds of the trespassers coming into the hall to seize him with enormous hands and as they drag him away Scop realizes—or then again he tries to avert the realization—that none of this has truly happened and that what he has taken to be resolution is nothing more than a construction, he never got through to the Master, the Master never listened to him, the Master refused to agree . . . and they tear him from there, he protesting, screaming for his evidentiary photographs but they take him far to a safe place and there he is wrapped layer between layer of stasis while they decide, oh how he hopes that they will decide soon! what they will do with or to him.