The Source

In Grenzel's room it was a repeat of the same story. His spine had been broken, looked bitten through to the marrow and spinal cord. His sharp features seemed even sharper in death, and his huge, bulging eyes an even deeper shade of grey.

What had those esper's eyes of his seen before he died, Khuv wondered? And then he stilled the bobbing of his Adam's apple and staggered out of the room, until he was no longer able to hear Luchov's throwing up into Grenzel's toilet ...

The Dweller's garden was a marvellous place.

It was a miniature valley, a gently hollowed 'pocket' at the rear of a saddle in the mid-western reach of the mountains. In extent the garden was something a little more than three acres in a row, with the length of its rear boundary against the final rise of the saddle, and its frontage where the saddle started to dip toward frowning cliffs. A low wall had been built there, to keep people from moving too close. In between there were small fields or allotments, greenhouses and a scattering of clearwater ponds. One of the ponds swarmed with rainbow trout, while some of the others bubbled with heat from thermal activity deep in the ground; hot springs, in fact.

Because of the abundance of water the place was lush with vegetation, but only a handful of species were unknown to Earth. The rest of the flowers, shrubs, trees in the garden would have been perfectly at home in any English garden. Harry Jnr's mother tended them, when she felt up to it. But usually his Travellers looked after the garden, as they looked after almost everything here.

Harry Jnr's bungalow house was centrally situated, built of white stone with a red tile roof, its front perched over the wide mouth of a well that occasionally gave off streamers of steam. He swam and bathed in the pool regularly. His Travellers (no longer true Travellers, in fact, for they were permanent dwellers here themselves now) inhabited similarly constructed stone houses at the sides of the saddle, where the level ground met rising cliffs. All such homes were centrally heated, with a system of plastic pipes carrying hot water from a deep, gurgling blowhole. They had glass windows, too, and other refinements utterly unheard of before Harry Jnr's time.

The Dweller (as all of his tenants insisted on calling him) had built greenhouses in which to grow an abundance of vegetable produce. Heated and watered from the springs, his crops were amazing. Also, he had found ways round the long, cold, dark sundowns. Plant species which would adapt already had, but others which wouldn't received artificial sunlight. The permanently ru

'You've done ... so much!' Harry Keogh told his son, where he walked with him along the edge of a plot shady with sweet corn grown tall. 'All of this is nothing short of... astonishing!'

Harry Jnr had heard much the same thing from Zek Foener, Jazz Simmons, every Traveller who ever made it here; it was a common reaction to things he'd come to take for granted. 'Not really,' he answered. 'Not set against what I'm capable of doing. Chiefly I wanted a place to live, for myself and for my mother. So it had to be made liveable. And what is it really but a strip of fertile soil some two hundred or more yards long by eighty wide, eh? As for the ru

'But the buildings,' Harry said, as he'd said it so often during the course of the past sunup. 'Oh, I know they're only bungalows, but they're so, well, beautiful! They're simple but delightful. The great span of their arches, the delicate buttresses, the cut of the roof timbers. They're not Greek, not anything I can put a finger on, just so pleasing. And all built by these... well, by these cave-dwellers of yours!'

The trogs are people, father,' Harry Jnr smiled. 'But the Wamphyri never gave them a chance to develop, that's all. They're no more primitive than your Australian bushmen, all considered. But on the other hand they're eager to learn. Show them a principle or a system and they catch on quick. Also, they're grateful. Their old gods didn't treat them too well, and I do. As for the architecture which so impresses you: well, that surprises me. Surely you realize that I'm not the designer? I got all this from a Berliner who died back in 1933. A Bauhaus student who never did make it when he was alive, but he's designed some beautiful stuff since then. I'm a Necroscope, like you, remember? All of the very simple, very efficient systems you see in use here were given to me by the dead of your own world! Don't you realize how far you could have gone, the things you could have done, if you hadn't spent the last eight years of your life tracking me?'

Harry shook his head, still a little dazed by what his son had shown him, by what he'd been told. 'See,' he finally said, perhaps a little desperately, 'that's another thing. Eight years, you said. Now, in my mind you're a boy, an eight-year-old boy. In fact I've prided myself in picturing you that way, in imagining what you'd be like. It would have been far easier to think of you as a baby, which is how I remember you. But I made myself see you as you'd be now - or as I thought you'd be. And... and just look how you are! I still can't get over it.' He shook his head again.

'I've explained that.'

'What, how you tricked me?' Harry didn't try to disguise the bitterness in his tone. 'How you not only crossed the divide between universes but displaced yourself in time, too? You went back in time! Long before you were born, and long before I lost you, while I was growing up you were growing up too - here! Just exactly how old are you, anyway?'

'I'm twenty-four, Harry.'

Harry nodded, sharply. 'Your mother's now fifteen years my senior! Not that she'd recognize me, anyway. And... and you have looked after her. That was always one of my biggest worries: that she be looked after. But through all of those years I didn't know! Couldn't you have let me know, just once?'

'And prolong the agony, Harry? So that you'd always be there, just one step behind us?'

Harry grimaced, turned away. 'I noticed you've skipped the "father" bit, too. You're a man, not the boy I expected. You wear that damned golden mask, so that I can't even see your face. You're ... a stranger! Yes, we're like strangers. Well, I suppose that's the way it had to be. I mean, we're hardly father and son, are we? Let's face it, I'm not all that much older than you, now am I?'

Harry Jnr sighed. 'I know I've hurt you. I knew it all the time you were chasing me.'

'But you kept ru

'I might have come back, but... oh, there were a lot of things. Mother wasn't improving; there were good places I could take her, where she'd be happy; many reasons for not coming back. One day you'll understand.'

Harry felt something of his son's sadness. Yes, there was a sadness in him. He nodded again, but not so sharply now. For long moments he wrestled with his emotions. In the end blood won. 'Anyway,' he relaxed, took a deep breath, somehow managed to grin, 'just how did you do it?'

Harry Jnr had felt the tension go out of his father, knew he'd been forgiven. He, too, relaxed. 'Time-travel, you mean? But you did it too, and long before me - relatively speaking.'

'I was immaterial - literally. I was incorporeal, al! aura. You're flesh and blood. Mobius reckons it can't be done. It would create too many irresolvable paradoxes.'

'He's right,' Harry Jnr nodded. 'In the purely physical sense - in any entirely physical universe - it can't be done.'

Are you telling me there are other sorts of universe?'

'You know of at least one.'

Harry felt he'd had this conversation before. 'The Mobius Continuum? But we've already agreed that - '