Time Travel Omnibus, page 1038
All of which was interesting, at least to me, but utterly useless.
As was everything else I’d thought about since the whole world had gone time-travel nuts. I mean, what could I possibly do that could have an effect, either good or bad? True, I could travel through time and space and do anything I wanted, but so could everyone else, and if you tried the one thing that might help—getting rid of time machines altogether—there’d be a thousand other travelers determined to stop me. Like the Hitler episode only way bigger.
But then, one day, my phone jangled loudly even though I was certain I’d turned it off long ago.
When I fumbled it out of my pocket and put it to my ear, an early-model Hawking Voice said, “Check your other pocket.”
Frowning, I looked around.
“Your other pocket,” the Hawking voice repeated, “not your surroundings. You don’t have a lot of time.”
I let myself shiver for a moment. “To do what?” I asked.
“To check your pocket and look at what you find there.”
I almost said, “But there’s nothing there,” but realized I would be lying. There was something there.
Now.
I could feel it moving.
“See?” the Hawking voice said.
Pointlessly, I braced myself and reached into the indicated pocket. And came out with a foldable sheet of digital paper. It must have been down to its standard one-inch square storage mode when I’d first realized it was there. The motion I’d felt had been its efforts to unfold itself.
Now, freed from its pocket prison, it snapped open like a spring-loaded umbrella. There were no words on the paper, no instructions on what to do next, only a single, constantly morphing image made up of several shades of red so similar to each other that the entire sheet seemed to be in deep shadow.
A shadow I instinctively knew I did not want to penetrate.
Except, I realized, I had penetrated it, not once but many times.
I could remember it vividly, positively. Just as I could also remember with absolute certainty that I had not ever seen it. None of which should have been surprising since Time had been converted into multilevel Swiss cheese.
“Now, now, Eldred,” said the Hawking Voice. “You’re resisting.”
I froze, realizing where I must be: In a massive Time Knot, trying to referee the countless pseudomemories that were assaulting my mind more harshly than ever before.
“Just relax,” the Hawking Voice said, “Let the Knot sort itself out. This is what it was made for.”
A Time Knot? Made on purpose? I shook my head, or at least I tried. Truth be told, I had no idea if my head was moving or not.
Or if it even existed outside my own imagination anymore.
“Don’t concern yourself with trivia, Eldred,” the Hawking voice said, beginning to sound more natural. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Just relax and go with the flow.”
Easy for him to say. His head didn’t feel like someone had drilled a hole in his skull and was tamping the pseudomemories into it at a fearsome rate.
Then I began to remember things—which is very different from being on the receiving end of a painful torrent of images and sounds and thoughts—none of which had anything whatsoever to do with me. Except for this one little snippet: The current scenario was ending, it said, and the results were being compiled.
In my head.
Except I didn’t remember having one.
I closed and opened my unseen eyes a few times and was relieved to discover that they really did exist.
And not just two. There were billions of them, each reading and storing a separate stream of data. In the head that, milliseconds ago, hadn’t even existed.
The head that was the Matiolin building.
“Good going, Eldred. You feel better now?”
I nodded, ignoring the sparks that were still stabbing randomly at what passed for my synapses these days.
And I did feel better. The roar of the data stream was still there, but all it gave me was a mild headache.
And even that would soon be over.
As soon as the data transfer was complete, I could begin the analysis. This time the process should be far quicker than last time. For one thing, the Scenario’s complexity index had been lowered by a factor of two, but it still encompassed thousands of years and countless more timelines of all lengths.
Abruptly I switched to the search functions which, as usual, I hadn’t known I had until I realized I needed them. The detailed analysis could wait. The cursory analysis the search function could provide would give me all the information I really wanted right now: Had this scenario, like all those that had come before, succumbed to the Styrofoam Syndrome?
“I take it you’re ready to go, Eldred?” The Hawking Voice sounded almost human now.
As expected, it didn’t take long to skim the timelines and snag the pertinent data. The only surprise was the disappearance of New Coke. Instead of digging in their heels, this last scenario’s decision makers had given in to plummeting sales and consumer complaints and decided it was pointless to continue to resist. After all, they made the same profits no matter which label they used.
Unfortunately, the same good sense was not applied to the one problem that had helped to shoot down every scenario so far: the Styrofoam Syndrome.
In all other respects, the scenarios were typical. Similar amounts of violence and altruism, of cruelty and kindness. Similar streaks of insanity and brilliance, often in the same individual or group.
But sooner or later, the Styrofoam Syndrome always strikes. People in those scenarios begin defying common sense in any activity having to do with tomatoes, and we daren’t release them into the general, forward-moving population for fear that this remarkable behavior would spread to other areas.
And it’s always the same. At some point, one or more of the growers invariably seem to forget that the primary function of a tomato is to taste good, and they start making them prettier to attract customers’ attention and begin making them firmer so they’re easier to ship. They are of course violating one of their primary rules: that any successful operation must be one in which form follows function, not the other way around. I mean, what good is a tomato that can be shipped across the country without a single unsightly blemish but tastes like Styrofoam?
Once that point is reached, it’s all over. The Syndrome is self-sustaining. As sales drop, fewer and fewer tomatoes are grown in the ground, and even fewer are grown in the kind of ground that produces good flavor, largely because by then no one believes the type of ground makes a difference. With growers interested only in shipability and experts blathering about appearance, real tomatoes are gone. Within another century, no one would recognize the taste of a real tomato, and they’ve gone from being the most delicious of vegetables to being a fading part of folklore.
Sadly, I made a few last minute changes to the waiting scenario and activated the Reset.
As the new scenario enveloped me, I could hear the Hawking Voice sigh.
“Good luck, Eldred,” it said. “Try to get it right this time.”
GRANDFATHER PARADOX
Ian Stewart
A question of time.
I didn’t turn round.
I knew what was coming. It happened once a year, on his birthday. His choice: moral blackmail, perhaps? I sensed the misty shimmer forming in the corner of the room behind me, the impossible twists in directions that didn’t exist, the machinery and its increasingly haggard passenger solidifying from thin air.
On the sideboard was a faded monochrome picture: a confident young man and his beautiful new bride. Without turning, I spoke to the original.
“The answer’s still no, Hubert.”
“I’m not asking a lot,” he pleaded.
“Only murder,” I said, fingering the gun in my pocket. We went through the usual exchange. “If you don’t kill me, you didn’t get born.”
“I was born.”
“That’s because my causal loop is incomplete,” Hubert said angrily. “You’ve seen the analysis. You know what won’t happen if you let me live.” I had, and I did, and it made no more sense now than it had when The Beatles were recording Sergeant Pepper.
According to family tradition, Grandad had wanted to be an inventor, failed, and ended up running a pub. Actually, one invention had worked. I knew it was true. When a time machine materializes before your eyes, you believe.
Physicists and philosophers always say that time travel into the future is straightforward. It’s travelling into the past that creates the paradoxes. Grandad discovered that it’s not that simple.
The time machine had been Hubert’s only success, an ingenious application of Hamilton’s quaternions. He flight-tested it with a short hop into his own future, finding that he and his new bride Rosie were deliriously happy and a baby was on the way. Reassured and proud, he pushed the lever to return to the instant of his departure . . .
Nothing happened.
The machinery checked out, so he reworked the theory . . . and discovered a sign error. His machine could travel only into the future. By so doing, he had created a paradox. If he never got back . . . who had married Rosie?
He started skipping ahead a few weeks at a time, in a frantic search for inspiration. He haunted public libraries, boning up on physics and philosophy. As the years flicked by, he came to realize that he could never go back.
He watched his son’s christening, then his marriage. He was waiting outside the hospital when I was born. He developed a ‘chronoclastic calculus’ of space-time in an attempt to rationalize his fragmented life. Sitting in the back of the chapel at my father’s funeral, he suddenly understood what had to be done.
Time travel violates several conservation laws, but the Universe can borrow energy, momentum or matter—provided it repays the debt when the time machine returns to its starting point. Hubert’s dual existence broke no laws. So far. But it would if he could create a paradox so blatant that it could not be resolved by repaying what had been borrowed. This was why he kept begging me to kill him.
According to Grandad’s calculus, the basis of the Universe is not energy or information, but logic. If I killed him in my timeline he would never have invented his machine—so I wouldn’t be able to kill him. With its logical basis wrecked, the Universe would resolve the paradox by excising the time machine, and snap back to a consistent history in which Hubert married Rosie, with all of its consequences.
“You must help me!” he pleaded. His body trembled, his eyes were wild. His life now consisted of closely spaced episodes in which he begged me for death. It was a horrible way to live, and we were both becoming desperate.
Destroying the time machine wouldn’t help. Neither would suicide. Chronoclastic calculus allowed logic to be suspended inside the time machines causal loop, until the loop closed. The agent of his destruction had to be outside the loop, and it had to be a logical consequence of his hypothetical return to his past. That meant my dad, me or my kids . . . My kids!
This had to stop.
Grandad climbed reluctantly into his machine, hesitated, and pulled the start lever. As the machine began to fade, I took the gun from my pocket and shot him. I couldn’t risk aiming at the controls: I would have only one chance, and he was a bigger target.
I’d finally realized that his calculus was as defective as his machine. Yes, my timeline contained a grandfather who lived a happy life with his beloved Rosie—but it also contained a grandfather who materialized in a time machine. Hubert’s time-travelling causal loop was logically entangled with mine; if the Universe excised him, it would also excise me and my kids. So I trapped Grandad’s corpse in a frozen instant where no time passes and logic is suspended.
That faded photograph tells me I am no murderer. It lies. Oh, how it lies!
My grandfather wanted me to kill him, and when no other choice remained . . . I did.
And that’s the only reason why either of us was ever alive.
TIME, AGAIN
Tim Maly
1
Before we met, you showed me your diary.
I must confess that I am still confused by this sequence of events, as, I imagine, you must be confused by my decision to leave your life so suddenly. I’ve gone over everything in my head time and time again and I can’t shake the feeling that, somehow, everything got mixed up. Though this may seem a flimsy reason to you, it is reason enough for me. I don’t understand, so I’m going to leave.
Before we met, you showed me your diary and then we were having sex on the wooden floor of your living room. I still remember the way the plants filtered the sunlight and the sound of the tea kettle building up steam. Then our son was at the foot of the bed, asking me where you’d gone.
“I don’t know,” I told him, “I expect she’ll be back soon.”
Today I went into your study and found that you’d converted it into a gallery. The first photo of every roll of film we’d ever had developed was there, somewhere. I found that I could date every one, even the ones that hadn’t happened yet. They seemed to go on forever, a jumbled mess of happy memories, each one partially obscured by blinding white light. I knocked over a jar full of tacks but when I went to pick them up I was overcome with vertigo and I had to leave.
We were making desperate love in your basement when you told me about spacetime. You said that the future is just as real as the past. You told me that just because you aren’t there yet doesn’t mean it isn’t real. You said it was like Baghdad still being real when you’re in London. You talked about personal time and light cones and folding space and I didn’t understand anything except the way that your breasts moved and the way your breath misted in the cold. Then we were on a roller coaster and you were screaming and you said, “This is what it’s going to be like all the time.” A balloon seller lost hold of his wares and they floated majestically into the sky. It was beautiful.
2
After you introduced yourself, we resumed our date and I asked you again why you’d chosen a drive-in. You told me that you had a special soft spot in your heart for B-movies. You said that there was something endearing about the earnestness of it all. You said that they called out to our imaginations in a way that big budget films can no longer achieve. You said that all science fiction—no matter how dismal—was optimistic in that it assumed that there would be a future at all. We were in a board room and you were explaining to the assembled group of investors about the Machine. They were smiling and nodding. They didn’t really understand but experts had told them that your idea showed promise and, after all, a war was on. The coffee tasted terrible and I kept fidgeting in my seat. You were radiant. No one thought to ask what would happen if the Machine broke.
Today, I watched an egg assemble itself on the kitchen floor. It made a strange popping noise as the last bit of eggshell attached itself. It flew into the air up and up and then came to rest on the counter. A helicopter roared overhead and our son came in and told me he was scared. I didn’t know what to tell him. The war has begun and no one can say how or when it will end.
I remember your reaction when you read this letter. I remember how the last line, where I say “we weren’t meant to live like this,” brought a tear to your eye and you turned to our son and tried to explain to him that I was gone. But how could you explain? What does ‘gone’ mean to a child his age? Then we were lying together under the stars and when the first fireworks went off, you leaned over and kissed me for the first time. You tasted like popcorn. I can’t blame you for choosing a new husband.
When you finally came back, you were younger. That was the hardest for both of us, I think. We didn’t share the same memories anymore. You held me and told me that it would be alright, that you had hardly changed but I think that we both know now that that wasn’t true at all. Time changed people. That’s how it worked.
3
Today, I went down to the basement and stared at the Machine. I can still remember the day you turn it on. You’ll stand in front of a crowd of reporters with our son and your new husband at your side and you’ll give your speech about the tyranny of time and death and the triumph of science and about setting us free. But inside, you’ll be thinking, “I wish he had been here to see this.” I know this because, before we met, you showed me your diary and you wrote about this day. How could you not? It was the most important day of your life. You saved us from the enemy and ended the war. You asked me to stop it. There’s nothing I can do. The future is just as real as the past. There is no before or after anymore. Because of you, there never was.
We weren’t meant to live like this.
THE GULF OF THE YEARS
George-Olivier Châteaureynaud
In the train, the passengers spoke in hushed voices about the hard times. A young woman with a yellow star sewn to her breast briefly lifted her gaze from the dressmaker’s pattern she was studying. The boy across from her pulled the latest issue of Signal from a worn satchel and unfolded it right in front of her face. She lowered her eyes.
Through the window, Manoir watched the few cars, quaint and yet almost new, on the road beside the tracks. He started at the sight of a military convoy. He checked his watch, then settled back. It was still early. The bombing wouldn’t start till later that morning. Far away, young men were waking in their barracks . . . or were they on their feet already, assembled in flight suits before a blackboard with their wing commander? Early rising schoolboys of fire and death. They were twenty, in fur-lined boots and leather helmets, blue wool and sheepskin. They drank tea and smoked gauloises blondes. Manoir’s best wishes went with them. And yet, in a few hours, one of them would kill his mother.
Manoir got off at S. He walked up the Avenue de la Gare, turned left at the town hall, and passed the post office, then the elementary school. He hesitated, but not over which way to go. As a child, he’d pretended he was blind in these streets. He’d try and make his way to school from home with his eyes closed. Sometimes he walked right into a lamppost, or someone’s legs. He cheated, of course: from time to time he opened his eyelids just a bit, long enough to see where he was. But one night he’d managed to make it only cheating three times.
