21

CARNIVORE came clumping in an hour before sunset. Nicodemus had cut steaks and was squatting, broiling them, He motioned at a huge chunk of meat he had laid upon a bed of leaves pulled off a nearby tree.

“That’s for you,” he said. “1 picked a choicest cut.”

“Nourishment,” said Carnivore, “is a thing I stand in need of. I thank you from my gut.” He picked up the chunk of meat in both his hands and hunkered down in front of the woodpile on 53

which the other two were seated. He lifted it to his face and bit vigorously into it. Blood spouted on his whiskers.

Chomping vigorously, he looked up at his two companions.

“I do not bother you, I hope,” he said, “with my unseemly eating. I hunger greatly. Perhaps I should have waited.”

“Not at all,” said Elayne. “Go ahead and eat. Ours will be ready in a little time.” She gazed in sick fascination at his bloody chops, the blood running down his tentacles.

“You like good red meat?” he asked.

“I’ll get used to it,” she said.

“You don’t really have to,” said Horton. “Nicodemus could find you something else.” She shook her head. “When you travel world to world, you find many customs that are strange to you. Some that may even be a shock to your prejudice. But, in my way of life, there can be no prejudice. Your mind must stay open and receptive—you must force it to stay open.”

“And this is what you’re doing by eating meat with us?”

“Well, it was to start with and I suppose it is still a little. But without half trying, I think I could develop a fondness for the flesh.” She said to Nicodemus, “Could you make sure that mine is on the well-done side?”

“I already have,” said Nicodemus. “I started yours well ahead of Carter’s.”

“I have been told many times by my old friend Shakespeare,” said Carnivore, “that I am an unmitigated slob, with no manners worth the mentioning, and dripping, filthy habits. I am, to tell you truth, devastated at such evaluation, but I am too long in the tooth to change my way of life, and I would, on no account, become a mincing dandy. If I be a slob, I shall enjoy being one, for slobbishness is a comfortable situation in which to find oneself.”

“You’re a slob, all right,” said Horton, “but if it makes you happy, pay us no attention.”

“Thankful I am for your graciousness,” said Carnivore, “and happy I do not have to change.

Change is hard for me to do.” He said to Nicodemus, “You have the tunnel nearly done?”

“Not only is it not nearly done,” said Nicodemus, “but now I’m fairly sure it will not be done.”

“You mean fix it you cannot?”

“That’s exactly what I mean unless someone comes up with a bright idea.”

“Oh, well,” said Carnivore, “while hope forever springs inside the gut, I am not surprised. I walked for long today with myself communing, and I told myself too much I should not expect. I say to myself that life has not been hard on me and many happinesses I’ve had, and that in view of this, I should not gag at some wrong events. And I sought within my mind alternatives. It seemed to me that magic might be a way to try. You say to me, Carter Horton, that you do not trust nor understand the magic. You and Shakespeare are the same. He make heavy fun of magic. He say it no damn good. Perhaps our newest compatriot may not think so strongly.” He looked appealingly at Elayne.

She asked, “Have you tried your magic?”

“That I have,” he told her, “but against Shakespeare’s scornful hooting. The hooting, I tell myself, take the edge off it, reduce it down to nothing.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Elayne, “but I’m sure it would do no good.” Carnivore nodded sagely, “Then I say to myself, if magic fails, if the robot fails, if all else fails, what am I to do? Remain upon this planet? Surely not, I say. Surely these new friends of mine will find a place for me when off this world they fly into deeper space.”

“Now you’re leaning on us,” Nicodemus said. “Go ahead and bawl. Roll on the ground and kick your heels and scream. It won’t do you any good. We can’t put you in cold-sleep and. . .”

“At least,” said Carnivore, “I am with friends. Until I die, I am with friends and away from here. I take little space. I huddle in one corner. I eat very little. I am not in the way. I will keep my mouth shut.”

“That will be the day,” said Nicodemus.

“It’s up to Ship,” said Horton. “I will talk with Ship about it. But I can hold out no hope.”

“You comprehend,” said Carnivore, “that I am a warrior. There is but one way for a warrior to 54

die, in the bloodiness of fighting. That is how I want to die. But that may not be the way of it with me. To fate, I bow my head. What I do not want is die here, with no one to see me die, to think poor Carnivore, he is gone, to crawl out my last days in the loathesome nothingness of this place passed by in time. . .”

“That’s it,” said Elayne, suddenly. “Time. That is what I should have thought of right at first.” Horton looked at her in astonishment. “Time? What are you talking about? What has time to do with it?”

“The cube,” she said. “The cube we found in the city. With the creature in it. That cube is frozen time.”

“Frozen time!” said Nicodemus. “Time can’t be frozen. You freeze people and food and other things. Time you do not freeze.”

“Arrested time,” she said. “There are stories—legends— that it can be done. Time flows. It moves. Stop its flow and movement. No past, no future, just the present. An everlasting present. A present existing from the past and embedded in the future that now has become the present.”

“You sound like the Shakespeare,” grumbled Carnivore. “Always spouting foolishness. Always yak, yak, yak. Saying things with no sense in them. Just to hear his talk.”

“No, it’s not that at all,” insisted Elayne. “I tell you the truth. There are stories on many planets that time can be manipulated, that there are ways to do it. No one can say who does it. . .”

“Perhaps the tunnel people.”

“There never is a name. Just that it can be done.”

“But why here? Why with the creature frozen into time?”

“Perhaps to wait,” she said. “Perhaps so it will be here when the need for it arises. Perhaps the ones who put the creature into time could not know when that need would come. . .”

“So it’s waited through the centuries,” said Horton, “with millennia still to wait. . .”

“But don’t you see,” she said. “Centuries or millennia, it would be all the same. Frozen as it is, it has no time experience. It exists and continues to exist within that frozen microsecond . . .“ The god-hour struck.