I did not expect... this.
I turn away from the thing that is the doorway, the jumble of metal parts that seems to have angles and perspectives that the eye cannot follow... and I look out at the Suliban facility.
An expanse of featureless black floor; above it, some four metres over my head, a matching expanse of featureless black ceiling... and if there are walls, they are lost in the distance and I cannot see them. But all around me are... rings. Hollow cylinders, some two metres across, and rising as high as my waist, and in each one is a column of softly glowing coloured light, and in each column some - artifact - hangs unsupported in mid-air.
"It is... not like any Suliban base I have seen," I say.
"It is unique," says Thyvesh quietly. "Even now, I do not know if we made this place, or merely discovered it." He gestures behind me. "Same thing is true of the doorway. Did we make it? It is eternal, outside normal time - maybe we found it, when our temporal fumblings matched its configuration -"
"You mean that it was made by some earlier civilization?"
"Perhaps. Or perhaps - it is outside time, it has always been there - perhaps no one made it. Perhaps it just... is."
A disquieting thought. "But the... devices? The things in the -"
"Oh, yes, in the force cells. Yes, they are all ours." His face, in the coloured lights, looks drawn, haggard. "All of them."
"How many? How big is this place?"
"Large enough. There is a wall, but you could never reach it - the space-time of the lesion distorts at that point. Yes. Large enough." He makes a vague gesture with his left arm. "Replicators, sanitary units, sleeping couches, all are over there, in the white section. It was laid out in sections, once. We gave up keeping them in order, though, after a while."
"Sections?" I ask.
Thyvesh stops. He looks down, at the blank black floor, and does not speak for some seconds. When he does, his voice is as I have never heard it before: hard, flat, controlled. "The devices are colour coded according to utility. White is for conventional weapons - energy beams, explosives and the like. Yellow is information weaponry - two shades; the bright golden yellow is for computer viruses, the lighter one for memetic warfare targeted at sentient minds. Everything from basic propaganda to lethal earworms and basilisk images. Do not study the data carts in a yellow cell too closely, unless you are familiar with the safety procedures. Even so, we lost people."
"Lost people? Thyvesh, who was here? How many of you?"
He ignores the question. "Cyan is for subspace weapons, isolytic devices. Purple is for temporal devices, mostly weaponry, some utility. Green is genetic augmentations and biological warfare."
It is a matter-of-fact recitation, and it is enough to chill the blood. There are dozens, even hundreds, of these columns of light.
"How long were you here? How many of you - how did you make all of - of this?"
He stops still. When he speaks, his voice is soft, and sounds as though it comes from far away. "After the Temporal Cold War effort collapsed, shortly before the founding of the Federation, a dozen of us withdrew... here. Time flows... differently, here. By the time of the current interference, in the twenty-third century, I was the only one left. There were many factors at work. I need not age, you see - my body rejects entropy at the cellular level, if I wish it. And I did wish it... I was so certain, at the time, that I had to persevere. That I could use these things, here, to rewrite time, to change history, in my favour." He shakes his head. "A fundamental mistake."
"You were the last one? What happened to the others?" Though I am not sure that I want to know the answer to that question.
"Industrial accidents. On a philosophical level, sometimes. We tried many different augmentation procedures, and epigenetics is a complex matter. Chaotic, in fact. The smallest change can have immense consequences, usually fatal ones. This is... one part of the problem. The humans are right to reject efforts to improve their genome. Such efforts never go to plan - possibly, they cannot go to plan. Evolution is another chaotic process, it is impossible to anticipate its requirements.... There were other things. Follow me." He turns and strides off, between the columns of light, moving quickly and purposefully. I follow him.
He stops after twenty metres or so, and points to a purple-glowing column. The device floating in it looks like something to be worn, a metal vambrace, gleaming in silver, with a ring of controls surrounding a single large, ominous, red button.
"There is one item," he said, "that led to an... existential accident."
"What is it?" I ask.
"An immediate temporal reduplicator. Suppose you are faced with a decision, with a choice between two or more courses of action... the reduplicator allows you to proceed down all the branching timelines ramifying from that decision, and you can pick the one with the best outcome. You need never make a mistake again."
"I... think I see," I say. Then I shake my head. "No, no, I do not. By definition, surely, that device cannot go wrong... can it?"
"Think. What would happen to you if you used that device?"
"I... would always be successful?" I frown. "Though... if I never made a mistake... would I ever learn anything?"
Thyvesh nods. "You do understand. Wear that device, use it for long enough, and you become a mindless thing, a creature that understands only one concept, press the red button and you get it right. Sibrei... she developed it, she used it... and she came to understand the flaw."
"What happened to her?"
"She used the device. She decided that her fundamental error, the one initial mistake she had to correct... was being born as the sort of person who might use such a device. So she corrected that mistake. I... I remember her. Because that is the way my brain works. But to the rest of the universe, she is gone, she never existed."
"But surely -" My head is spinning. I put a hand to my forehead. "There must be things here that are safe. Things whose - scientific principles - could usefully be studied -"
"No!" Thyvesh's eyes are burning. "The conventional weapons - most of them are already familiar to your era's scientists, there is nothing to be gained from studying those. The same is true for the information weapons, even the wetware hacks - you refrain from those, but it is a matter of morality, not from ignorance of the principles. Even the subspace devices, they are not beyond the reach of your science. As for the temporal weapons -" His voice trembles, and his whole body with it. "They cannot be used for good purposes. They must never be used at all. Nobody, nobody knows this... better than I."
"Very well." I do not know if he is right; I only know that I must depend on him, for the present. "Turning to practicalities - are we safe, here?"
"In among all these weapons of existential destruction? Yes, safe enough." He laughs. "The time flow here is monodirectional and inviolate. The other me cannot enter here while I am present. For the time being, we are safe enough." He shakes his head. "But the time will come when we must leave."
"Well, of course we cannot remain here indefinitely -"
"We do not. We did not. The confrontation is coming. And for the first time in - centuries, perhaps -" He closes his eyes tightly. "The confrontation is coming - and I cannot see what happens after that."
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