produces the fantasy and the delusions you name future and past and present.
“There is neither future nor past nor present!”
Those last words were spoken with a solemnity that left Carter without the ability to doubt. He believed, yet he could not, even in the multitude of his personalities, conceive that which had been set before him.
“Then if not Time, since there be no Time, what is it that causes change?” he finally said, baffled at the paradox.
“There is no change. All that was and all that is to be, have a simultaneous existence. Change is an illusion that has begotten yet another illusion.
“There would be no time in your world were it not for that which you call change.”
As the voice paused, Carter pondered, and saw that he could accept that last statement intellectually, as well as merely at the solemn affirmation of the Space Presence. Obviously, if nothing ever changed, then there would be no earthly sense of time. Time was marked in its flight by the course of stars, by the motion of the hands of a clock; and if neither these nor any other thing changed then surely there would be no time.
“But they do change!” he protested. “And therefore there must be time. My hair is gray, and my skin is wrinkled — I have changed. And my soul is weary with the recollection of that which was once, but no longer is. I am eaten with the grief that came of friendships which died before the body of him who was a friend, and I exult, betimes, at the memory of those whose spiritual presence has survived the change in their bodies. There is change, and it has marked me, and every man! Is all that, then, illusion?” demanded Carter, as a mighty despair corroded him.
“There is no change,” pronounced the voice with a solemn majesty that made Carter believe, though he could not understand. “Look, you, Carter, and see that your universe is but the projection of a higher-dimensioned cosmos.
“And consider, in your own limited terms, the form you call a cone. Your geometers cut it with a plane. The section is a circle. They cut it with a plane that passes at a different angle, and the section is an ellipse. And again, it is a parabola whose branches sweep out through the uttermost limits of your space. And yet, it is the same cone, and there has been no change. You have but cut it at a different angle. And all, if you will, simultaneously. You have at the end no more, no less than at the beginning; and thus the ellipses, and parabolae, and hyperbolae, are illusions you call change, forgetting that their parent form is an unalterable spatial figure.
“Your world is but a section of super-space,” repeated the Space Presence, as the enlightenment sank into Carter. “And time and change are but the illusions caused in that phantom existence of yours by the shifting angle of the plane which cuts the world of reality.”
“Then there is change!” cried Carter triumphantly, as he saw that he had at last forced the Space Presence into a contradiction. “The angle of cutting changes!”
Then before the more than godlike, indulgent smile of the Presence, Carter felt very small and childish, and his triumph even more inane, as he heard the answer.
“If you must still in human fashion split hairs, Randolph Carter,” said the voice, “we will grant your point, and not remind you that that angle and that plane are of this world rather than yours. And it is strange,” continued the voice, “that a member of a race credulous enough to believe that a God ordered the slaughter of his other self, as an object lesson in gentleness, could quibble about an angle of section!”
The monstrous multi-dimensional space quivered with a laughter such as Carter had in his earthly imaginings attributed to the mirth of young gods as they romped childishly about, discarding worlds whereof they had tired. Yet there was a brooding note of solemnity behind that more than divine mirth which made the jest older than time itself, and mordant with grimness tinged with… regret, Carter finally realized. Regret at his monumental stupidity.
Then Carter began to perceive, dimly and terrifyingly, the background of the riddle of that loss of individuality which had at first shaken him with horror. His intuition integrated the truth fragments which the Space Presence had poured upon him. And yet he could not quite see the summation.
“There was once an I,” he finally said, “and even that has been destroyed by this negation of time and change. And if there be neither past nor future, then what of all those Carters before me, all of whom I sense that I am, and yet am not….”
As he proposed the question, his voice trailed to a thin nothingness; for while he sensed, he could not yet express that which staggered and bewildered him. He dared not face the certainty, as it now seemed to him, that there had never been a Carter who fought before the walls of Ascalon, a Carter who had dabbled in black magic in the days of Queen Elizabeth, a Carter who had strangely vanished near the snake den, and one whose forbidden studies had brought him perilously close to the scaffold. These had been his heritage and the bulwark of his ego; and even they had been destroyed by this merciless Presence who had spared neither God, nor Time, nor Change.
“All those Carters,” replied the voice to his question, “are one Carter in this ultra-spatian domain; and this multivariated Carter is eternal as we are. And those you deemed the ancestors whose heritage of soul you have are but cross sections in three directional space of that one of our Companions who is all Carters in one. And you — you are but a projection. A different plane of section, so to speak, is responsible for your manifestation, than was the cause of that ancestor who vanished so strangely.
“And he vanished when his ruling plane turned edgewise simultaneously to the three directions of your senses.
“Listen again, Randolph Carter of Arkham: you who have been so terrifyingly bewildered at the destruction of your ego, you are but one of the sections, even as any one ellipse is but one of an infinity of sections of a cone.”
Carter pondered in the mighty silence that followed that statement; and bit by bit, its implications became explicit. And he knew that if he had understood aright, he would in his very body be able to do that which theretofore he had done but in dreams.
He sought to test his understanding by putting it into words.
“Then if my section-plane be shifted in its angle, can I become any of those Carters who have ever existed? That Carter, for instance, who was imprisoned eleven years in the fortress of Alamut, on the Caspian Sea, in the hands of that one who falsely claimed to be the Keeper of the Keys? That Geoffrey Carter, who at last escaped from his cell, and with his bare hands strangled that false master, and took from him the silver key which even now I hold in my hands?”
“That, or any other Carter,” pronounced the Presence. “They are all — but that you know, now. And if that is your choice, you shall have it, here and now….”
Then came a whirring, and drumming, that swelled to a terrific thundering. Once again Carter felt himself the focal point of an intense concentration of energy that smote and hammered and seared unbearably, until he could not say whether it was unbelievably intense heat or the all-congealing cold of the abyss. Bands and rays of color utterly alien to any spectrum of this world played and wove and interlaced before him; and he was conscious of an awful velocity of motion….
He caught one fleeting glimpse of one who sat alone on a hexagonal throne of basalt.
Then he realized that he was sitting among crumbled ruins of a fortress that had once crowned this mountain that commanded the southernmost end of the sombre Caspian Sea.
Geoffrey Carter, strangely, retained some few vestigial memories of that Randolph Carter who would appear some 550 years later. And it was not utterly outrageous to him, this thought of remembering someone who would not exist until five centuries after the Lord Timur had torn the castle of Alamut to pieces, stone by stone, and put to the sword each of its garrison of outlaws.
Carter smiled thinly at human fallibility. He knew now why that castle of Alamut was in ruins. He realized, too late, the error that Randolph Carter had made — or, would make? — in having demanded a shift of the Carter-plane without a corresponding shift of the earth- plane, so that Geoffrey-Randolph Carter might seek this time to do what he had once failed of doing: riding in the train of that brooding, sombre Timur who had terribly destroyed Alamut, and liberated him.
Geoffrey Carter remembered enough of Randolph Carter to make his anomalous position not entirely unbearable. He had all the memories that Randolph Carter was to have, five centuries hence; and what was most outlandish of the paradox was that he, Geoffrey Carter, was alive, in a world five hundred years older than it should be. He sat down on a massive block of masonry, and pondered. At last he rose, and set out on foot, and empty-
