Time Travel Omnibus, page 1049
Paitin managed a shout. “Snap! Snap your fingers NOW!”
Paitin didn’t hear her do it. A small explosion formed itself out of the air in front of Tarrington’s chest and hit him like a speeding car. Paitin saw his feet fly out in front of him before he was blown, doubled, through the window.
The curtains fluttered. The familiar ozone smell filled the room, and the broken window let in the wail of a hundred mournful sirens sounding the end of a civilization and the smoke of a thousand fires.
Eventually Paitin got up. He lurched to Sandra and released her from the web snare. She fell to the floor and scuttled away from him like a crab.
Paitin had to waste precious minutes speaking soothingly to her through a locked closet door. His love for her made him patient despite his desperation, and she eventually agreed to open the door wide enough to receive the objects he handed through: the minicorder, a pair of seashells, and a sealed envelope. The silence that followed seemed to stretch to eternity and back. Paitin’s heart became hollow and ready to collapse from the combination of her nearness and her distrust. He heard rumpling paper in the closet.
He’d shone a naked-ray through the envelope after she’d given it to him a month ago at his suggestion. It contained a piece of her very own stationary paper and a message penned by her own perfect little hand. It said:
Dear Sandra,
You are going to be frightened and confused when you read this, but listen to one piece of advice from your closest friend: Trust Him.
Sandra
Of course she couldn’t trust him completely. Not right away. But she would. Over the last three months, she had come to love him at least half of the time.
When she opened the closet door it was like a birth. Sandra emerged on wobbly legs with her damp hair matted to her forehead. He delivered her, holding her beneath the armpits so she wouldn’t fall, then let her collapse against him. Her body was stiff and unyielding, but that would change.
Paitin watched her. Tarrington had called her an animal, but that was ignorant. Modern civics taught that conditionals were inconsequential, but also that they gave their consent to the Invasion with their treatment of each other. They would have believed in the Invasion. Sandra’s misty civilization had already rejected liberalism. The upshot: Paitin’s lover was a human being capable of understanding him.
So who was the pervert?
He smiled and gave Sandra the minicorder again when she asked for it, holding the little screen in the palm of her hand. She watched scenes of the two of them laughing, walking along the beach (here she brought the shells out of her pocket, feeling their weight), dressing after lovemaking. She stared at her own stolen image. The emotions in her face were impossible for Paitin to sort out, but he thought he saw some grounds for hope, some allowance that it was all true, that he loved her and she’d loved him.
While she stared at herself, he stared at her. Sandra. The spectrum of Sandra, the could have, would have, politically incorrect should have, conditional perfect tense Sandra, even the metaphysical might have but did not Sandra. He never bothered to wonder which she was.
At one point she became deeply quiet and seemed to come to a hard decision. She became stiff and heavy as wood against him. Then a giant explosion brought dishes off of shelves and plaster from the walls. Sandra jumped and he seized her protectively in his arms, and she did not push him away.
He told her they had to leave, to get away from the area where Tarrington had called for the extract.
His arm was around her shoulders as they left by the front door. She still wasn’t steady on her feet. But that was normal.
Many of the buildings were burned and gutted in the aftermath of the world’s most spectacular party. To Paitin they seemed flat, truly unreal, as he’d been accustomed to think of them. He still experienced a certain visceral reaction to the red blood of the conditional perfects themselves, which made them a little more real. But Sandra . . . she’d glowed from the first.
He helped her pick her way over a spill of rubble in the street. He stood in front of her when a nude figure darted between two buildings and dove behind a garbage can. As they walked slowly and steadily, others broke cover like timid forest animals. Some of them had escaped captivity or been set loose and wore incongruous bits of costume: jester hats or bits of shackles; they had flaps torn out of the backs of their pants; some bore lash marks. The dead lay in strange contortions, embedded in four inches of cracked asphalt, eyebrows still glazed with the frost of the high clouds through which they’d fallen.
Paitin knelt to scoop his prize over his shoulder as she collapsed with a moan. It was for the best: he could hear the heavy buzzing drone of a splatterbot far down the street. He could even faintly see it. It worked away in the crisp morning, tall as a house with a swiveling torso, picking up victims and smashing them together, flinging them through the air, dashing their innards out against the blackened walls of the buildings. Where they tried to flee it stomped on them or kicked them, and the hovers followed languidly above, their passengers staring down tired and glazed from the night’s revelries. Sandra groaned.
Paitin patted her rump affectionately. “It’s alright,” he said. “Not you. Never you.”
She sagged, but Paitin felt confident she would rebound. She would never have to be a splatterbot victim or a gladiator or a sex show. He would keep her safe. Paitin clicked a button in his tooth, and a few minutes later Drew came swooping down with a hoverload full of clanking liquor bottles and stretched underwear. He came in low so that a naked man chained to the fender by his ankle would bang into the sides of buildings.
Drew stopped. He spoke without looking at Paitin as if he were ashamed. “We’re going to see the catapult, chum. Are you coming or not.”
Paitin pictured all the dumb shocked faces of the naked people in some makeshift corral, waiting to be flung over the hills. He found he didn’t need to see it.
“Just pitch her up here,” said Nick with a grin, “no reason she can’t come.” He began reaching for Sandra’s belt.
Paitin pulled Tarrington’s police-issue Twirp out of his belt and held it over his head. Nick disappeared behind his door.
Drew shook his head. “Just chirp again in an hour, pucker. You can have that again next weekend.”
“Fly away, Drew.”
Drew did. The ankle-chained man smacked against every chimney on the horizon, twisting on the length of chain.
Paitin chose a direction and started to hike across the rubble. Soon he would set Sandra on her feet and tell her to walk with him. At the thought of them walking side by side, hand in hand, Paitin knew he wanted to stay and protect her, forever.
He would stay.
If not this time, then certainly next time.
CORRESPONDENCE
Ruthanna Emrys
Behind the slatted blinds, lightning flashed. I caught my breath, resisting the urge to open the lab window, and glanced at my subject to be sure he hadn’t noticed. No, he tapped away at his response keys, completely oblivious to the storm. If I’d gone into physics, I could be outside right now. But a psychologist can’t simply look up from her particle accelerator and take a walk.
Morning had been bad enough—the first perfect spring day after a tepid but persistent winter. Now as evening drew on, the thunder began. Good storms were rare on Long Island. Even with the lab sealed, the prickle of ionized air made me want to run outside and dance around the courtyard. A subject held up his hand for the next questionnaire in the series; I sighed and fished it out of the pile. The other two bent over their desks, pecking at their keyboards. Three lousy data points, my reward for resisting temptation.
I’d run out of patience with my stack of research articles early in the day, so I spent most of the session rereading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. It’s a short book, and I came back from the silent beach of Earth’s last days to the sound of thunder and voices outside, the slash of rain . . . and my self-imposed imprisonment in the lab. I had time to daydream while I gazed into the rich, velvet light of the storm.
I spent far too much time reading Victorian science fiction, more of it the further I got into my dissertation. The old futures and outmoded theories drew me in. Airships and crystal cities, ether theory and phrenology, mapped the mind-life of a lost age. It was an age deeply flawed and never as civilized as it thought itself, but sometimes I wished I wasn’t too modern to believe in what it wanted to be.
What drew me most was the idea of the scientist as an adventurer. When I went to the library to add to my stack of literature, I’d sometimes take a side trip to the mezzanine, where the oldest journals were archived. The pages were delicate and a little yellowed; the leather bindings soft but sturdy. A biology paper might begin with a description of savannahs and native bearers: more travel diary than dry description. My data might have been more valid, but my methods section seemed lacking.
“It was in this frame of mind,” I scribbled in the margin of a paper on attentional capacity, “that I began to conceive of how I might partake in the wonders open to mad scientists while avoiding their tendency toward academic ridicule.” I nodded, pleased with the turn of phrase, too ornate for the modern ear. I wanted grand adventure, but tenure as a backup. Impossible, of course. I scribbled more—bullet points, diagrams, thoughts connected to one another by little arrows. I usually fleshed out my ideas this way. I didn’t plan on showing these notes to my advisor, though. In fact, I was going to have to white them out next time I had to Xerox the paper for a student. What the hell, it wasn’t like I was getting anything else accomplished.
The storm passed too quickly. As soon as my last subject left, I tore open the window and breathed deeply of the now dry wind. I ran downstairs to the courtyard, letting the past and future fall away in favor of the moment. It would be easy enough to let my fantasy slip away.
I thought of the Time Traveler racing to touch his machine, seeking reassurance that his memories were real and that he wasn’t crazy. I went back upstairs.
Humans produce ideas easily and prodigiously. Stuck on the World’s Longest Parking Lot, or daydreaming in front of my data analysis, I have thought of song lyrics, utopian social reforms, and plans for toilets that don’t overflow. By the time I have a spare moment, the thought is lost. The people who mark the world are those who, just once, manage to grasp an idea and follow it.
It probably said something about me that the idea I grasped and followed, if it worked, would change no life but my own, and in fact ensure that I would never do anything else of importance. The exact form of the idea also probably said something about me. In spite of my yearnings, I had never lived an adventurous life. I had never taken the most carefully controlled tour of England, let alone led my faithful retainers into the wilds of some unexplored land. The written word had been my only transport to the exotic. So when I personally sought to create a time machine, naturally I chose words for my vehicle.
I rarely found friends in the psychology department; people who knew the same things I did bored me. At need, I could call on a mathematician, a programmer, two physicists, a medical researcher, and way too many English majors. I didn’t know any temporal mechanics, but if I wanted to see the future I would have to find one. For what I needed now, I went to the mathematician. I wasn’t looking for Patrick’s expertise in fractal theory. I picked him because he was also an historical reenactor. He would know what materials were the most durable. He would also know someone who knew someone who could acquire and work whatever material I chose, and no one involved would think that I needed to be locked up.
“Stone.”
“Stone? Not some exotic metal?” I asked.
“It was good enough for Gilgamesh,” Patrick said. “What are you going to do about language?”
“Hope they know English. Either they’re smart enough to figure it out or there’s not much point. We’re not dealing with simple concepts like ‘Yes, we know what prime numbers are,’ or ‘Stay off the nuclear waste.’ I want to talk.”
The hard part was figuring out what to say. I needed something that would matter enough to the inventors of time travel that they would want to come visit me, right along with Jesus and Galileo and Heinlein. My temporal mechanic might work for a government or a corporation, might be a mad genius alone in a basement or part of some institution that I couldn’t imagine. Hell, he might be on a Fulbright. Knowing only that something drove him to want to touch history, and able to send only a single letter to get his attention, I needed to make him a friend.
“To the Time Traveler,” I began. I spoke first of the details of my time—not merely the events of the newspapers, but the way it felt to be living at my particular cusp of progress. I placed myself at the dawn of genetics, with all our uncertainty over what humanity itself could and should become. I placed us in the midst of ecological crisis, torn between fear of our own power and hope that our power could save ourselves and our world. I described the drought of the space age and the sheer density of information. I touched on the politics that would be labeled “history” only briefly, as they added to the experience of living in uncertainty.
I listed my qualifications for time travel. I read science fiction and could think sanely about change. I also knew the dangers of temporal paradox; I was willing to keep any necessary secret. I knew that they could only take me on if I was not historically important (and I was quite humble about the place in the scientific edifice of experiments where people try to remember what color sock they saw). I knew the difference between the laws of nature and the laws of my tribe.
Finally, I begged. “I yearn, as much as you do, to speak to other times and learn other ways of thought. Most of all, I need to know what happens next—at least that we survive.
“With hope, Dena Feinberg, scientist and forever a student.”
The carving cost more than I cared to think about, and I covered a good portion of it in barter. I didn’t relish the idea of helping Patrick cater pseudo-medieval feasts for the next three years, but if I was lucky I would fit those years in around years doing real medieval studies. He and the stonemason would both have waived fees entirely to know if my plan worked, but I knew that if I was willing to tell even one person, I could never be told myself.
I buried the stone for the archeologists and tried to forget about it. I had done what I could, and if it never worked, I had a life to live. More importantly, I had a dissertation to complete. I spent days in the lab with the windows closed, nights praying for miracles from my spreadsheets. The spreadsheets supported my thesis about the nature of memory for objects in rooms: I rejoiced and no one else gave a damn. The twenty-first century was less than a decade old, and I was steadily becoming more eager to leave it.
I took a weekend in the White Mountains, in a cheap cabin without luxuries like newspapers and television. The windows were stuck open, and I woke on Saturday caressed by mountain breezes. The only good thing about living on Long Island was how much I appreciated other places. If you had teleported me with my eyes closed, I would have known I was away from the city by the feel and smell of real air. I hiked Mount Lafayette, something I hadn’t done since before college. Just short of the main summit, the lesser peak overlooks a valley misted over with tall grass and goldenrod. It took six hours of steady hiking to get there from the base, and my peanut butter and jelly sandwich tasted like manna. At the summit I looked across the lower mountains, down the cliffs, until I had to close my eyes because they were full. I felt that I was in my right place, in my right time. Millennia had crumpled the mountains up from the earth like paper and would wear them away to plains; I had been lucky enough to see them like this.
Still, that night I dreamed of airships.
When I returned, two wars had started and several governments were threatening others with the creations of their own mad scientists. There was an editorial about the risks to human nature of immortality, and another about the economic benefits to undeveloped nations of low wages and bad health care. Even a block from the ocean, the air in my apartment felt stifling. It had been a warm winter, and it would be a hot summer. I taught social psychology from my advisor’s notes and learned how to cook venison. My dreams were full of silver cities, omniscient-but-benevolent computers, and gentle childlike people with British accents. In July, I received a package.
The package arrived by Western Union, in a miniature wooden chest with my name and address engraved on a brass plate. It was delivered by a teenager with acne, who made me feel old and glad of it.
“They’ve had this for over a century,” he told me. He looked like he’d rather be somewhere else.
“You’re full of it,” I told him. “People don’t say things like that.”
“My boss said to tell you. I’m just working there for the summer. I’m with you—I don’t believe it. I think he got it from a movie.”
“I saw that one,” I said, surprised that he was old enough to remember. “I don’t think it would work. Even Western Union would lose something after a hundred years.”
“Actually, my boss said there was supposed to be a key, and they did lose it, and not to tell you. Sign?”
I put the chest on the coffee table. It scared me. It reminded me of the little envelopes I got back when I applied to grad school. I never wanted to open them and find out that they weren’t what I wanted. If they were what I wanted, that was scary too. Sometimes the unknown was safer.
I went into the kitchen and tried to do the dishes. My hands shook: I chipped a plate and got water all over my shirt. I told myself I wouldn’t be any good until I let myself get disappointed. I would cry hysterically for about five minutes, take a shower and get on with worrying about post-doctoral positions.
The lock didn’t look too strong. I broke the latch with a hammer, and opened the chest. Inside was a single paper, worn at the edges and a little discolored.
