Collected Short Fiction, page 824
He blinked at her and went on.
“One second I was lying in the mud at the bottom of that gully. Gasping for air that burned my lungs. The ground under me roared and shuddered like something alive. Red-hot rocks hailed down around us. Something hit me. The pain—”
He winced and scowled at the plaque.
“Maybe Shafique can explain what saved me. I woke up lying in bed, somewhere with white curtains around me.” He shook his head. “The fire and thunder and pain were gone. The quiet hit me like another shock. I guess I was sedated. I remember a doctor, a busy little man in a white jacket. He pulled the sheet back to inspect me through big round goldframed glasses and put a cold stethoscope to my chest. He spoke to me and called the nurse in a language I didn’t know.
“The nurses—”
He shut his dark-rimmed eyes and sat rigid for another minute.
“Not human at all. They gave me dreadful dreams till I got well enough to like them. They were naked and hairless, with silvery scales for skin and limbs that looked boneless as snakes. Their heads were tapered like a dolphin’s, with white-toothed jaws at the top. They breathed though slits in their necks.
“Their eyes—”
He stopped to squint at me.
“Long green eyes, set on the sides of the heads like a chicken’s, looking in opposite directions. They had the chicken’s way of moving their heads in quick little jerks, I guess to get an effect of stereo vision. All of them were male. The sex organs are internal, but the penis makes a ridge under a neat little triangle of amber-colored scales.”
He stopped again. “If you believe me—”
I begged him to go on.
“I know it sounds insane.” He seemed somehow apologetic. “I used to wonder if I was dead, revived in some unlikely hereafter. Not that it mattered, not till my head began to clear. When I found the first crumb of sanity, it was the doctor. He looked oddly young, almost like a child. His pinkskinned body seemed too small for his hairless head. It moved in a quick and graceful way, like a bird’s. Or maybe like the nurses. I used to wonder—” He stopped to shake his head.
“The doctor.” He squinted at a Norman Rockwell print my wife has over the kitchen stove, a country doctor examining a doll for a little girl. He caught himself and went on. “Odd enough, but certainly more human than the nurses. For a long time I felt too weak and sick to wonder or even care where I was. When I got the wits to ask, he knew no English. I think what he spoke was a blend of Russian and Chinese.
“The head nurse became our translator. Big Jim Fish. That’s what I came to call him when we could talk. He was taller than the others, with copper-colored scales on his tapered head. His featureless face could pucker into what I learned to see as a smile. He used to take my pulse and temperature and palpate my body with his odd three-fingered hand. He was smart as anybody, reading the green symbols shining on the little stand by my bed and tapping the keys of something like a computer with his triple thumbs. He liked to joke about how different I was.
“When he turned me in bed, I found a wall of something like glass. A big window on a world I didn’t understand. A brick-red landscape scattered with broken rocks. Not a blade of green anywhere. A small dim sun shone out of a dusty yellow sky.
“At night I could see stars. I found the Milky Way and Orion and the Big Dipper, but there was an Evening Star that looked brighter than Venus or Jupiter ever did. The gravity was stranger than the sky, everything a lot lighter. When I dropped anything, I had time enough to grab it. I was able to stand before I had any strength at all, but my balance was off. Fish had to help me learn to walk.
“Beyond the window, a score of creatures like him were at work, carrying baskets of rock and dust out of a deep pit. They wore transparent suits and glassy bubbles over their heads. Some of them were screening the rubble, sorting something out. Once I saw a human skull.
“I learned what little I could. Fish and the nurses had a language of their own, with crackling consonants and vowels that sounded like little dogs yelping. Fish laughed when I tried to imitate him. A sound like a big cat purring. His vocal organs were a poor fit for English, but he knew the doctor’s language.
“He let me teach him a little English, enough to let him tell me we were on Mars, at the site where the refugees from Earth had settled. A grim environment, but they survived there until they developed the star drive that took them on to Fish’s planet, which they called New Hope. It’s light-years away.
“The doctor’s name was Nikolay Chen. He’d come back from New Hope. Back out of the future. He and his crew were excavating the abandoned site and studying the bright new star that had been the Earth. He was trying to recover what he could of Earth’s history and culture.
“I had questions of my own that Fish tried to answer.
“ ‘Hyperslider,’ he called the space-time machine that had brought them back to Mars. ‘Slide around space dimensions. Time dimension also. Dr. Nikolay Chen dig Mars site. Study singularity. Collect artifacts. You early human specimen. Pick from hot lava flow.’
“When I asked about the singularity, he took me up to an instrument room high in the dome and showed me an image on the screen of an electronic telescope. A great flat disk, it burned red at the rim and bright blue toward the center. It seemed to be spinning like a top. Long jets of bright white fire blazed along the axis out of its heart.
“Planet once,’ Fish said. ‘Once you people home.’
“I stood there a long time held by its terrible splendor, remembering Linda, remembering Claudius Zindler and his nano-singularities, remembering John Monkhouse and his warnings, remembering the night on the mountain when I bombed Zindler’s laboratory, remembering how he said I’d set his growing black hole free to destroy everything.
“I shrank away at last, swept with a sick regret.
4.
“How long I was there on Mars I never knew. I had no clock or calendar. Fish wore no timepiece and seemed to need none. The old Earth was no longer there to count the days and years. Its blazing remnant moved on a cycle of its own, disappearing from the evening sky, returning before the Martian dawn, back again at dusk, a motion meaningless to me.
“For a long time, talking to Fish and Chen was the only reason I had to stay alive. Fish learned more English and I learned to understand his amphibian voice. Our first texts were stray relics of Earth, an old volume of the Britannica and a paperback copy of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee. He liked to talk, whistling and quacking his English. I asked about his people and their world.
“We amphibs.’ Proudly, he tilted his bright-scaled head. ‘Amphib planet good for amphibs. Not much good for you people.’
“Chen had rescued me to be a sort of native informant. I learned all I could from him. New Hope is no new Earth. Its two major continents are over the poles, with only immense ocean in between. Its year is nearly five of Old Earth’s. Its polar axis is tipped far out of the ecliptic plane, to let the overhead sun creep through its year from one pole to the other. That makes the seasons extreme. Two Earth-years of broiling summer, a big red sun always in the sky. The winters are ice ages of bitter, moonless darkness.
“We amphibs ocean people,’ Fish said. ‘Land no good for life.’
“Yet, for the refugees, New Hope had been better than Mars. They landed at the tip of a peninsula that runs toward the equator from the south continent. Chen showed me videos. Mostly snow and ocean, but jungle stuff grows rank in the summers along the continental fringes. The winters kill it back.
“The amphibians own the ocean, as Chen put it. The polar ice caps never thaw, but the colonists have settled fertile spots between the ice and the sea. A few stubborn souls defy the winters from tunnels under the ice, but most of them shuttle back and forth with the sun. Farmers with fields on both continents can grow crops all around the year. The two races made friends. The amphibs helped the colonists adapt. They now keep the males alive, those like Fish that fail to find a mate.
“Curious people. I wish I’d known them better.” He sat for a moment smiling reflectively at the Norman Rockwell print. “They live without the basics of our civilization. No fire or metals, no writing, no wheels or electricity. Yet they have a culture I admire.”
He sighed and turned thoughtfully back to us.
“ ‘No need fire,’ Fish said. ‘Songs enough for us.’
“I remember videos of a rough rock tower the amphib males had built. It stands on the point of a narrow headland at the mouth of a cliff-walled fjord. Sheer black cliffs fall to white surf far below. In springtime views, the fjord is choked with ice from melting glaciers but the native jungle is already a heavy green crown on the cliffs. In winter scenes, snows have covered the tower to the level of a balcony around the top.
“ ‘Song tower,’ Fish called it. ‘Songs for women.’
“I asked about the women.
“Different,” he said. ‘Bigger than men. Breathe seawater. Homes on sea floor. Men breathe air. Live only on land. Men sing for women.’ His scales rippled in what I had learned was a rueful shrug. ‘Some women come to singer. No woman for me.’
“Chen showed me videos taken from the tower. White water breaking over rocks out beyond the beach. Farther out, creatures like dolphins leaping out of the waves and swimming toward land.
“Mating season, he said. In the fall of the long year. The males sing from that tower or any high rock they can find. The females answer when they please. The lucky males swim out to meet the females. They couple. The females carry them away to sea. Most never get back. The winters used to kill the few that did, before the colonists arrived.
“Fish told me his own story. He grew up there at the mouth of the fiord, living through the summer on fruit he found in the jungle and shellfish he learned to dig. Fall came. He listened and climbed the tower to answer when he heard a woman singing. Her voice was beautiful. They exchanged their names, sounds I never learned to utter. He sang me the nuptial song he had made of her name, and said it bound them together forever.
“Happy day.’ He smiled, bright white teeth shining across the crown of his sleek-scaled head. ‘Swam out to tall rock. Climbed rock. Sang again. Listened again. Woman sang again. Promise of joy and place in odes of ocean. Dived off rock. Swam toward woman, but waves too tall. Sweep me back to rocks.’
“His sleek head sagged, the smile erased.
“ ‘Sang again. Dived again. Waves too tall again for poor Jim Fish.’
“Chen told me how the females ride back on the high tides when the ice breaks up in the spring. They he on the beaches long enough to give birth, and go out again on the next tide. The young females are able to swim with them. The young males are left like Fish to grow up on shore in the summer and sing for a lover when the season turns.”
In a vaguely troubled way, he glanced at the clock and the Rockwell print, frowned again at the stained-glass plaque as if something about it troubled him. It’s a blood-red rose my wife’s mother made the summer before we married. Neat enough, but nothing remarkable.
“In spite of all that,” he went on abruptly, “I think Fish was homesick. He learned to operate the video machine and ran his favorite scenes again and again. A huge red sun rising out of a stormy ocean. Winter ice breaking up in the fiord. The first green of spring in the hills beyond the tower.
“Soon go home.’ We were looking at a scene of females playing in the waves out beyond the breakers. ‘New song to sing. Song of land adventure and exciting singularity.’ His body flexed to a graceful shrug. ‘Young daughters prefer sons of recent season, but elder mothers do return.’
“With a sudden display of affection, Fish wrapped a slick-scaled arm around me.
“ ‘Sorry you not come with us.’
5.
“That was a painful jolt. I’d known the expedition would be returning and hoped for a new life on New Hope. When I tried to ask why they meant to leave me, Chen put me off. His own time here on Mars was running out. He was busy with the dig. Most of the recovered artifacts were waiting to be examined and catalogued. His study of the singularity was not complete. He said we had no language for the math of hypertime.
“I watched his preparations to close down the dig. The amphibians filled up the pit and dismantled the digging machine. Chen sorted and crated his collected artifacts. He automated his telescopes and spectrometers to store their data on the accretion disk and the plasma plumes.
“Yet at last he did ask me to dine with him in his office, high in the dome. Beyond the big window, the remnant of Earth shone low in the twilight, tinged pink from a dust storm. Only a star, it was still bright enough to cast shadows. Fish served the meal, the main course the big yellow fruit of a New Hope sea plant. He sat with us to translate.
“Hopefully, I asked Chen to take me with him back to New Hope.
“Impossible.’
“Soberly, he pushed his plate away and leaned across the table to explain. Fish had become pretty fluent by then, but his first translations baffled me. I asked more questions till I thought I understood. Here’s the way I got it, if I can make it clear.
“It’s all a matter of perception.”
The stranger frowned and rubbed his jaw, trying to find words for what he thought he understood.
“You felt that you were making a free choice when you saw me naked on the sidewalk and decided to bring me in. I am deeply grateful to you, but as Chen saw the universe, you had no choice at all. We’re all victims of a basic paradox. Quantum laws do seem to shape the universe, yet Chen saw quantum uncertainty as illusion. He said we should learn to see the whole, from a point outside space and time. Seen that way, it’s simply there, changeless and complete.
“Here inside it, we never see it all. Our perceptions are only a moving moment, carried by quantum waves along the time lines that trace the history of every particle from its origin to its end. Chen told me to imagine the conscious mind as a lantern we carry from birth to death through the dark tunnel of time.
“ ‘Look at the alternative,’ he said.
“Any real quantum uncertainty would have to create new possibilities. Branches in the lines of time. Every time an electron changes orbit you’d have a new chain of possible cause and effect. A new universe. You’d have an infinite multiplication of worlds that would bloat the cosmos into an absurdity forbidden by the fundamentals of physics.
“Mass and energy have to be conserved.
“When I stuck to the notion of free will, Chen brought up Godel’s old proof that every system of thought leads to paradoxes it can’t resolve. All motion, he said, is mere illusion. So is our sense of the present moment, our sense of passing time, our belief in our own freedom of action. Life and mind themselves are illusion.
“I said that defied common sense.
“He shrugged. Quantum physics, he said, has always defied common sense. He recalled old Einstein, a man of good common sense who refused to believe that God plays dice with the universe. He never accepted the principle of quantum uncertainty, yet it’s proved every time an atom splits.
“Still a skeptic, I asked Chen how his laws of time had let him come back from New Hope. Travel in time, he said, was just one more illusion. When he turned his life back to the past, he was simply lighting his way along a time track as old as the universe itself.
“That lava flow must have cut my fines of time on Earth,’ I told him. ‘I was dying. How were you able to meddle with that?’
“ ‘No meddling.’ Chen shrugged. The lava flow had broken your lifeline. Set you free of time. That left us pick you up and bring you here.’
“He’d used a device he called a chronoscope to search the history of Earth. Its sub-quantum forces let him trace the lines of time and see past events. Or he could amplify the force to stretch them and let him reach or change the past. The fines spring back, however, when the force is removed. The static universe restores itself. The future is as rigid as the past, freedom of the will always sheer illusion.
“He was rising to leave the table. I stopped him with more questions.
“How far back in time could he go? Back to Claudius Zindler’s childhood? Couldn’t Zindler’s fife be set on a different track? Couldn’t the escape of his baby black hole be prevented? Couldn’t the Earth be saved?’
“He listened to me, and frowned at that red star setting in the west.
“I thought of that. In fact I came back to do it.’ He shook his hairless head and turned slowly back to me. ‘But I’ve been here too long and seen too much of the ancient Earth. I’ve watched a million generations five and love and die, making it what it was. Something wonderful! Perhaps unique in the universe.
“ ‘But their heirs—’
“His face set hard and he spoke with a savage force.
“ ‘Earth was sick and dying before Zindler ever saw it. Swarming with ape-men in suits driven by the morals of the jungle, but loose to play their crazy games with high technologies they never even tried to understand. They were plundering the planet. Wasting their great legacy. Fighting senseless wars, killing one another for nothing.
“ ‘Earth wasn’t worth saving!’
“Chen stalked toward the door and turned suddenly back.
“But I think humanity may be.’ His tone had softened. ‘The colonists here on Mars and then on New Hope faced hard new conditions for survival. Severe environments, that forced them into a major leap in racial evolution. As few as we are, I think we on New Hope have a better chance than Old Earth ever did.’
“Next morning I woke alone. Listening for amphibian chatter, I heard total silence. The halls were empty when I walked them. Chen gone from his office, the crates of artifacts gone from the storeroom inside the air lock. I thought I’d been left alone on Mars, the only human being this side of the stars.”
6.
My wife was trained in medical records. We’d met when she came to keep our records at the clinic. She still works part time there. We left the stranger in the house, with the morning paper and a sandwich in the fridge for his lunch. He was asleep in his room when we got back. My wife called to wake him for dinner. He stumbled out squinting around him as if still uncertain where he was. I was heating the grill for lamb chops. She set a place for him, but he said he didn’t feel like eating.
“One second I was lying in the mud at the bottom of that gully. Gasping for air that burned my lungs. The ground under me roared and shuddered like something alive. Red-hot rocks hailed down around us. Something hit me. The pain—”
He winced and scowled at the plaque.
“Maybe Shafique can explain what saved me. I woke up lying in bed, somewhere with white curtains around me.” He shook his head. “The fire and thunder and pain were gone. The quiet hit me like another shock. I guess I was sedated. I remember a doctor, a busy little man in a white jacket. He pulled the sheet back to inspect me through big round goldframed glasses and put a cold stethoscope to my chest. He spoke to me and called the nurse in a language I didn’t know.
“The nurses—”
He shut his dark-rimmed eyes and sat rigid for another minute.
“Not human at all. They gave me dreadful dreams till I got well enough to like them. They were naked and hairless, with silvery scales for skin and limbs that looked boneless as snakes. Their heads were tapered like a dolphin’s, with white-toothed jaws at the top. They breathed though slits in their necks.
“Their eyes—”
He stopped to squint at me.
“Long green eyes, set on the sides of the heads like a chicken’s, looking in opposite directions. They had the chicken’s way of moving their heads in quick little jerks, I guess to get an effect of stereo vision. All of them were male. The sex organs are internal, but the penis makes a ridge under a neat little triangle of amber-colored scales.”
He stopped again. “If you believe me—”
I begged him to go on.
“I know it sounds insane.” He seemed somehow apologetic. “I used to wonder if I was dead, revived in some unlikely hereafter. Not that it mattered, not till my head began to clear. When I found the first crumb of sanity, it was the doctor. He looked oddly young, almost like a child. His pinkskinned body seemed too small for his hairless head. It moved in a quick and graceful way, like a bird’s. Or maybe like the nurses. I used to wonder—” He stopped to shake his head.
“The doctor.” He squinted at a Norman Rockwell print my wife has over the kitchen stove, a country doctor examining a doll for a little girl. He caught himself and went on. “Odd enough, but certainly more human than the nurses. For a long time I felt too weak and sick to wonder or even care where I was. When I got the wits to ask, he knew no English. I think what he spoke was a blend of Russian and Chinese.
“The head nurse became our translator. Big Jim Fish. That’s what I came to call him when we could talk. He was taller than the others, with copper-colored scales on his tapered head. His featureless face could pucker into what I learned to see as a smile. He used to take my pulse and temperature and palpate my body with his odd three-fingered hand. He was smart as anybody, reading the green symbols shining on the little stand by my bed and tapping the keys of something like a computer with his triple thumbs. He liked to joke about how different I was.
“When he turned me in bed, I found a wall of something like glass. A big window on a world I didn’t understand. A brick-red landscape scattered with broken rocks. Not a blade of green anywhere. A small dim sun shone out of a dusty yellow sky.
“At night I could see stars. I found the Milky Way and Orion and the Big Dipper, but there was an Evening Star that looked brighter than Venus or Jupiter ever did. The gravity was stranger than the sky, everything a lot lighter. When I dropped anything, I had time enough to grab it. I was able to stand before I had any strength at all, but my balance was off. Fish had to help me learn to walk.
“Beyond the window, a score of creatures like him were at work, carrying baskets of rock and dust out of a deep pit. They wore transparent suits and glassy bubbles over their heads. Some of them were screening the rubble, sorting something out. Once I saw a human skull.
“I learned what little I could. Fish and the nurses had a language of their own, with crackling consonants and vowels that sounded like little dogs yelping. Fish laughed when I tried to imitate him. A sound like a big cat purring. His vocal organs were a poor fit for English, but he knew the doctor’s language.
“He let me teach him a little English, enough to let him tell me we were on Mars, at the site where the refugees from Earth had settled. A grim environment, but they survived there until they developed the star drive that took them on to Fish’s planet, which they called New Hope. It’s light-years away.
“The doctor’s name was Nikolay Chen. He’d come back from New Hope. Back out of the future. He and his crew were excavating the abandoned site and studying the bright new star that had been the Earth. He was trying to recover what he could of Earth’s history and culture.
“I had questions of my own that Fish tried to answer.
“ ‘Hyperslider,’ he called the space-time machine that had brought them back to Mars. ‘Slide around space dimensions. Time dimension also. Dr. Nikolay Chen dig Mars site. Study singularity. Collect artifacts. You early human specimen. Pick from hot lava flow.’
“When I asked about the singularity, he took me up to an instrument room high in the dome and showed me an image on the screen of an electronic telescope. A great flat disk, it burned red at the rim and bright blue toward the center. It seemed to be spinning like a top. Long jets of bright white fire blazed along the axis out of its heart.
“Planet once,’ Fish said. ‘Once you people home.’
“I stood there a long time held by its terrible splendor, remembering Linda, remembering Claudius Zindler and his nano-singularities, remembering John Monkhouse and his warnings, remembering the night on the mountain when I bombed Zindler’s laboratory, remembering how he said I’d set his growing black hole free to destroy everything.
“I shrank away at last, swept with a sick regret.
4.
“How long I was there on Mars I never knew. I had no clock or calendar. Fish wore no timepiece and seemed to need none. The old Earth was no longer there to count the days and years. Its blazing remnant moved on a cycle of its own, disappearing from the evening sky, returning before the Martian dawn, back again at dusk, a motion meaningless to me.
“For a long time, talking to Fish and Chen was the only reason I had to stay alive. Fish learned more English and I learned to understand his amphibian voice. Our first texts were stray relics of Earth, an old volume of the Britannica and a paperback copy of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee. He liked to talk, whistling and quacking his English. I asked about his people and their world.
“We amphibs.’ Proudly, he tilted his bright-scaled head. ‘Amphib planet good for amphibs. Not much good for you people.’
“Chen had rescued me to be a sort of native informant. I learned all I could from him. New Hope is no new Earth. Its two major continents are over the poles, with only immense ocean in between. Its year is nearly five of Old Earth’s. Its polar axis is tipped far out of the ecliptic plane, to let the overhead sun creep through its year from one pole to the other. That makes the seasons extreme. Two Earth-years of broiling summer, a big red sun always in the sky. The winters are ice ages of bitter, moonless darkness.
“We amphibs ocean people,’ Fish said. ‘Land no good for life.’
“Yet, for the refugees, New Hope had been better than Mars. They landed at the tip of a peninsula that runs toward the equator from the south continent. Chen showed me videos. Mostly snow and ocean, but jungle stuff grows rank in the summers along the continental fringes. The winters kill it back.
“The amphibians own the ocean, as Chen put it. The polar ice caps never thaw, but the colonists have settled fertile spots between the ice and the sea. A few stubborn souls defy the winters from tunnels under the ice, but most of them shuttle back and forth with the sun. Farmers with fields on both continents can grow crops all around the year. The two races made friends. The amphibs helped the colonists adapt. They now keep the males alive, those like Fish that fail to find a mate.
“Curious people. I wish I’d known them better.” He sat for a moment smiling reflectively at the Norman Rockwell print. “They live without the basics of our civilization. No fire or metals, no writing, no wheels or electricity. Yet they have a culture I admire.”
He sighed and turned thoughtfully back to us.
“ ‘No need fire,’ Fish said. ‘Songs enough for us.’
“I remember videos of a rough rock tower the amphib males had built. It stands on the point of a narrow headland at the mouth of a cliff-walled fjord. Sheer black cliffs fall to white surf far below. In springtime views, the fjord is choked with ice from melting glaciers but the native jungle is already a heavy green crown on the cliffs. In winter scenes, snows have covered the tower to the level of a balcony around the top.
“ ‘Song tower,’ Fish called it. ‘Songs for women.’
“I asked about the women.
“Different,” he said. ‘Bigger than men. Breathe seawater. Homes on sea floor. Men breathe air. Live only on land. Men sing for women.’ His scales rippled in what I had learned was a rueful shrug. ‘Some women come to singer. No woman for me.’
“Chen showed me videos taken from the tower. White water breaking over rocks out beyond the beach. Farther out, creatures like dolphins leaping out of the waves and swimming toward land.
“Mating season, he said. In the fall of the long year. The males sing from that tower or any high rock they can find. The females answer when they please. The lucky males swim out to meet the females. They couple. The females carry them away to sea. Most never get back. The winters used to kill the few that did, before the colonists arrived.
“Fish told me his own story. He grew up there at the mouth of the fiord, living through the summer on fruit he found in the jungle and shellfish he learned to dig. Fall came. He listened and climbed the tower to answer when he heard a woman singing. Her voice was beautiful. They exchanged their names, sounds I never learned to utter. He sang me the nuptial song he had made of her name, and said it bound them together forever.
“Happy day.’ He smiled, bright white teeth shining across the crown of his sleek-scaled head. ‘Swam out to tall rock. Climbed rock. Sang again. Listened again. Woman sang again. Promise of joy and place in odes of ocean. Dived off rock. Swam toward woman, but waves too tall. Sweep me back to rocks.’
“His sleek head sagged, the smile erased.
“ ‘Sang again. Dived again. Waves too tall again for poor Jim Fish.’
“Chen told me how the females ride back on the high tides when the ice breaks up in the spring. They he on the beaches long enough to give birth, and go out again on the next tide. The young females are able to swim with them. The young males are left like Fish to grow up on shore in the summer and sing for a lover when the season turns.”
In a vaguely troubled way, he glanced at the clock and the Rockwell print, frowned again at the stained-glass plaque as if something about it troubled him. It’s a blood-red rose my wife’s mother made the summer before we married. Neat enough, but nothing remarkable.
“In spite of all that,” he went on abruptly, “I think Fish was homesick. He learned to operate the video machine and ran his favorite scenes again and again. A huge red sun rising out of a stormy ocean. Winter ice breaking up in the fiord. The first green of spring in the hills beyond the tower.
“Soon go home.’ We were looking at a scene of females playing in the waves out beyond the breakers. ‘New song to sing. Song of land adventure and exciting singularity.’ His body flexed to a graceful shrug. ‘Young daughters prefer sons of recent season, but elder mothers do return.’
“With a sudden display of affection, Fish wrapped a slick-scaled arm around me.
“ ‘Sorry you not come with us.’
5.
“That was a painful jolt. I’d known the expedition would be returning and hoped for a new life on New Hope. When I tried to ask why they meant to leave me, Chen put me off. His own time here on Mars was running out. He was busy with the dig. Most of the recovered artifacts were waiting to be examined and catalogued. His study of the singularity was not complete. He said we had no language for the math of hypertime.
“I watched his preparations to close down the dig. The amphibians filled up the pit and dismantled the digging machine. Chen sorted and crated his collected artifacts. He automated his telescopes and spectrometers to store their data on the accretion disk and the plasma plumes.
“Yet at last he did ask me to dine with him in his office, high in the dome. Beyond the big window, the remnant of Earth shone low in the twilight, tinged pink from a dust storm. Only a star, it was still bright enough to cast shadows. Fish served the meal, the main course the big yellow fruit of a New Hope sea plant. He sat with us to translate.
“Hopefully, I asked Chen to take me with him back to New Hope.
“Impossible.’
“Soberly, he pushed his plate away and leaned across the table to explain. Fish had become pretty fluent by then, but his first translations baffled me. I asked more questions till I thought I understood. Here’s the way I got it, if I can make it clear.
“It’s all a matter of perception.”
The stranger frowned and rubbed his jaw, trying to find words for what he thought he understood.
“You felt that you were making a free choice when you saw me naked on the sidewalk and decided to bring me in. I am deeply grateful to you, but as Chen saw the universe, you had no choice at all. We’re all victims of a basic paradox. Quantum laws do seem to shape the universe, yet Chen saw quantum uncertainty as illusion. He said we should learn to see the whole, from a point outside space and time. Seen that way, it’s simply there, changeless and complete.
“Here inside it, we never see it all. Our perceptions are only a moving moment, carried by quantum waves along the time lines that trace the history of every particle from its origin to its end. Chen told me to imagine the conscious mind as a lantern we carry from birth to death through the dark tunnel of time.
“ ‘Look at the alternative,’ he said.
“Any real quantum uncertainty would have to create new possibilities. Branches in the lines of time. Every time an electron changes orbit you’d have a new chain of possible cause and effect. A new universe. You’d have an infinite multiplication of worlds that would bloat the cosmos into an absurdity forbidden by the fundamentals of physics.
“Mass and energy have to be conserved.
“When I stuck to the notion of free will, Chen brought up Godel’s old proof that every system of thought leads to paradoxes it can’t resolve. All motion, he said, is mere illusion. So is our sense of the present moment, our sense of passing time, our belief in our own freedom of action. Life and mind themselves are illusion.
“I said that defied common sense.
“He shrugged. Quantum physics, he said, has always defied common sense. He recalled old Einstein, a man of good common sense who refused to believe that God plays dice with the universe. He never accepted the principle of quantum uncertainty, yet it’s proved every time an atom splits.
“Still a skeptic, I asked Chen how his laws of time had let him come back from New Hope. Travel in time, he said, was just one more illusion. When he turned his life back to the past, he was simply lighting his way along a time track as old as the universe itself.
“That lava flow must have cut my fines of time on Earth,’ I told him. ‘I was dying. How were you able to meddle with that?’
“ ‘No meddling.’ Chen shrugged. The lava flow had broken your lifeline. Set you free of time. That left us pick you up and bring you here.’
“He’d used a device he called a chronoscope to search the history of Earth. Its sub-quantum forces let him trace the lines of time and see past events. Or he could amplify the force to stretch them and let him reach or change the past. The fines spring back, however, when the force is removed. The static universe restores itself. The future is as rigid as the past, freedom of the will always sheer illusion.
“He was rising to leave the table. I stopped him with more questions.
“How far back in time could he go? Back to Claudius Zindler’s childhood? Couldn’t Zindler’s fife be set on a different track? Couldn’t the escape of his baby black hole be prevented? Couldn’t the Earth be saved?’
“He listened to me, and frowned at that red star setting in the west.
“I thought of that. In fact I came back to do it.’ He shook his hairless head and turned slowly back to me. ‘But I’ve been here too long and seen too much of the ancient Earth. I’ve watched a million generations five and love and die, making it what it was. Something wonderful! Perhaps unique in the universe.
“ ‘But their heirs—’
“His face set hard and he spoke with a savage force.
“ ‘Earth was sick and dying before Zindler ever saw it. Swarming with ape-men in suits driven by the morals of the jungle, but loose to play their crazy games with high technologies they never even tried to understand. They were plundering the planet. Wasting their great legacy. Fighting senseless wars, killing one another for nothing.
“ ‘Earth wasn’t worth saving!’
“Chen stalked toward the door and turned suddenly back.
“But I think humanity may be.’ His tone had softened. ‘The colonists here on Mars and then on New Hope faced hard new conditions for survival. Severe environments, that forced them into a major leap in racial evolution. As few as we are, I think we on New Hope have a better chance than Old Earth ever did.’
“Next morning I woke alone. Listening for amphibian chatter, I heard total silence. The halls were empty when I walked them. Chen gone from his office, the crates of artifacts gone from the storeroom inside the air lock. I thought I’d been left alone on Mars, the only human being this side of the stars.”
6.
My wife was trained in medical records. We’d met when she came to keep our records at the clinic. She still works part time there. We left the stranger in the house, with the morning paper and a sandwich in the fridge for his lunch. He was asleep in his room when we got back. My wife called to wake him for dinner. He stumbled out squinting around him as if still uncertain where he was. I was heating the grill for lamb chops. She set a place for him, but he said he didn’t feel like eating.
