Time Travel Omnibus, page 1057
Figwort frowned. Could it be that Nimrod was becoming dependent on the thought helmets, like a hermit crab in its shell? Surely not. And yet, jumping forward another five years, Figwort was not unsurprised to find that almost the entire flock had been lost. “There was a flood,” the woman told him, hardly batting an eyelid when the professor winked into existence by her side. “I was in town and Nimrod let the sheep loose to feed by the river, even though it had been raining. The waters came and washed them away. It was stupid.”
This berating was inwardly directed—the woman had soaked up all the blame, like an eggplant—and yet, could it be that self-indictment here concealed a more sinister truth? Who really was at fault for the loss of the sheep? Was the Pithwort Thought Helmet stupefying young Nimrod to the point where he was incapable of generating his own ideas? The boy had perfect understanding, yes, but had that robbed him of his independence? Was he merely an extension of his mother, or worse—just a badly-drawn copy? Figwort’s eyebrows huddled together, his lips twisting in distaste at the bitter thought.
“He’s always asking me what to do,” the woman admitted, gazing over to where Nimrod stood scraping with a flat stone at the hooves of a prostrate goat. “It’s what he’s used to, I suppose. But when I’m not here he seems lost, uncertain. He understands what I tell him but I have to anticipate everything—every little thing—or else . . .” She shrugged. “But that’s as may be. He’s my boy. I love him.”
Five years after that, Professor Figwort entered the house and found it empty.
“Madam?” He looked around, puzzled. “Young Nimrod?”
He ducked back outside and cast his squinted eye over the dry, hot land. In the distance, the mountains appeared cracked. The sun hung heavy above him, pulling on the sky like a golden millstone. Figwort hooked a bony finger under the skullcap and scratched his head. Something was not right.
“Hello?” he called, his voice timorous. “It’s me—er, the good shepherd.”
Figwort sweated and searched and eventually found Nimrod over by the Euphrates, sitting under a date palm beside what appeared to be the same goat as had observed the professor’s splashdown some sixteen years previously. The boy had his arm draped around the animal’s neck. Both wore skullcaps.
“Nimrod!” Figwort exclaimed. “What’s going on? Where’s your mother?”
The teenager’s eyes were glazed and he stared unseeingly at the river. From deep within his throat he grunted something that rippled through the Pithwort Thought Helmet as, ‘She’s dead’.
“Dead?” Professor Figwort’s mouth trod water. Phileas the guppy. “What—But—How?”
‘Wolves.’ Nimrod’s speech was a grating, open-mouthed wail. ‘I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know.’ He looked up. For a moment his eyes focussed and he made a pitiful wail of inquiry. ‘What should I have done? What should I have done, father?’
The goat bleated. ‘It happened here.’
Professor Figwort emerged blinking into the Mesopotamian winter of six months’ previous. It was cold and wet and he lurched face-first into the date palm.
A torrential downpour having covered the plain, nothing could be seen of Babylon or the distant mountains. The vainglorious sun now sulked behind murky grey clouds. Even the goat had left its post, opting for greener, drier pastures elsewhere.
A wolf growled and Figwort reeled away from the date palm, only to slip and fall over. Spitting mud, he scrabbled like a turtle in the quagmire.
“Help!” The woman’s scream came from close by. Her panic and desperation needed no translation. “Nimrod! Help me!”
Figwort looked around and caught a flash of her limping painfully towards the river. Of Nimrod there was no sign, but several dark shadows closed in pursuit, low to the ground and smelling heavily of dank fur. Figwort struggled to stand.
“Nimrod!” the woman sobbed. She couldn’t tell him what to do this time. Her plea was a sentiment without guidance. She was hurt. She needed him to help her. He had to think of something.
But Nimrod had spent his life immersed in Figwort’s thought helmet. He understood perfectly, but thinking was the one thing he’d never learnt to do.
Even as Professor Figwort found his feet and went stumbling to the rescue, the woman lost hers and dropped to the ground, her final communication one of abject helplessness. “Nimrod!” she shrieked, the wolves pouncing, jaws tearing at her throat. “Nim—”
And then she was silent, her thoughts left hanging in time, never completed. Figwort skidded wildly and fell into the river.
History flowed.
Not much changed over the next 5,000 years. The sun cast its rays and the planet spun, each period of enlightenment followed by an inevitable regression to darkness. Dawn. Dusk. Hope. Fear. Civilisation remained very much in the cradle.
As the universe blinked and ziggurats gave way to launch pads, Professor Figwort shot urgently forward in time—a midwife in shaky control of a Morris Minor; both hands on the wheel but thoroughly unsure as to the correct address.
In the end, he overshot his personal present by a couple of months and screeched to a stop just outside of Ankara, where the Turkish Prime Minister was hosting the most delicate of diplomatic talks between Syria and Israel. Rolling his sleeves up, Figwort burst into the conference room.
The Turkish Prime Minister was a dapper little man, clean-shaven except for the wispy outline of a moustache. He wore a neat suit, offset for this momentous occasion by a striped tie in alternating swathes of red, blue and white. It was bold, bordering on flamboyant. The Prime Minister shot to his feet and exclaimed, in precise if heavily accented English, “Who is this joker?”
Figwort dropped two thought helmets onto the conference table and slid one towards each end. “These, gentlemen, are the devices that will answer all your prayers.”
The Israeli Prime Minister, whose twinkling eyes had seen much of the world and whose beard was no stranger to an internet keyboard, reached for the crown of thorns. “I recognise you,” he declared, in Hebrew. “You’re the one who wrote about molecular sexuality.” He placed the Pithwort Thought Helmet over his head and frowned. “Hang on. Aren’t you supposed to be dead? There was something on the news.”
The Syrian President, meanwhile, was turning the other thought helmet over in his hands and staring at it with distrust. His heavily browed eyes reflected the politician’s dilemma—a ceaseless balancing of risk and gain. He levelled a penetrating stare at the Turkish Prime Minister—who was sputtering left then right like a malfunctioning funfair clown choked on Ping-Pong balls—then placed the Pithwort Thought Helmet over his own close-cropped hair. “Now,” he said, in Arabic, “what is the purpose of this umamah?” His thought helmet gave ‘umamah’ the taste of ‘head bandage for the mentally ill’.
Professor Figwort beamed. “The Pithwort Thought Helmet allows us to taste the pure essence of thought. It affords us communication such as mankind has never seen. Total honesty, gentlemen. No longer need you fear duplicity or dissembling. No longer shall paranoia run the circle of the round table. You may now conduct your talks with 100 per cent opacity.”
The Turkish Prime Minister sank slowly back onto his chair. “Oh dear,” he murmured.
Like rabbits who had evolved to drive cars, the Syrian President and the Israeli Prime Minister locked eyes and couldn’t look away, trapped in the glare of each other’s headlights. For half a minute or so they sat motionless, their thoughts speeding towards each other through the ominous pall that hung over the room. Both men wanted to remove the thought helmets. Both men wanted to withdraw. But neither could be the first to step down. Professor Figwort looked from one to the other and waved his hand through the intervening airspace. “Hello?”
Eventually, the air became so thick that the Israeli Prime Minister was forced to clear his throat. He then declared, “I have only one question: in light of recent diplomatic exchanges with North Korea, what is Syria’s position with regard the State of Israel?” In essence: ‘You’ve gone nuclear. Now what?’
The Syrian President licked at dry lips. “The Syrian Arab Republic wishes nothing more than for a lasting resolution to the conflict between our two countries . . .”—‘No peace. No recognition. No negotiation.’—“. . . I therefore call on you to break from your country’s policy of nuclear ambiguity. Does Israel have nuclear weapons?”
The Israeli Prime Minister bristled from the beard up. “Israel has long stated that we will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” In essence: ‘We have them. America doesn’t want us to use them, but we have them.’
“That is very reassuring . . .”—‘America, who found reason after the event to sanction Operation Orchard’—“I foresee peace blossoming.” In essence: ‘We, too, can strike pre-emptively.’
“So be it.” The Israeli Prime Minister removed his thought helmet and stood up.
“Be it so.” The Syrian President did likewise.
Then both men left the room—stiff of gait and gaunt of face; dead men walking. The Turkish Prime Minister glared at Professor Figwort and raised one finger to his temple. “Good men trust that each will put his prejudices aside and do what is necessary. It is their words that represent their intentions, not their personal thoughts or opinions.” He shook his head and looked at his watch. “Good men should never know each other’s thoughts.”
Figwort was speechless. How could this happen? How could perfect communication precipitate what would be the most destructive conflict in human history? The Dead Sea War, they’d call it—mankind’s lowest point—and he, Figwort, would be responsible.
Billions dead. The world decimated. Everything as he knew it, history.
But how? Could the solution he had found be worse than the problem? Miscommunication. Perfect communication. Perhaps they were, after all, just two sides of the same burnt piece of toast. At that uncertain moment in time, with history starting to smoke, suddenly, clearly, it seemed so.
Professor Figwort picked up his thought helmets and returned home, tears welling behind his wide, haunted eyes.
Slowly, the universe blinked.
Professor Figwort made just one more trip back through time, to farewell Prunella Bonsoir and to retrieve the gun he’d put aside and lost those sixty years ago. The undergraduate Miss Bonsoir didn’t recognise Phileas Figwort as an old man. She was puzzled by his sad, silent smile. But the gun was there, cocked and ready. Figwort picked it up and returned to the present.
For the best part of a lifetime, Professor Figwort had held that gun to his head. His was the finger on the trigger—bone upon metal with but a layer of skin to separate them, stretched thin by the wretched pull of obsession. Figwort’s were the hopes and expectations that cavorted throughout time and history, heedless of consequence, dragging the professor this way and that as he strove to free himself from the pitfalls of existence. Professor Figwort had pointed the gun; unwittingly, perhaps, but no less damningly. For now, as Life’s clock ticked over and the cuckoo sprang out, Figwort finally came to terms with the greatest of his discoveries:
“Time contraceives,” he murmured, the storm having passed and delivered a new day unto the world. “When we try to alter what is, causality intervenes and inevitably we must face that which could be.” Light shone into the empty room and Professor Figwort blinked sadly. “Miscommunication pulls me one way. Perfect communication pulls me the other. So who am I to decide? Each person must strive to find the answer, otherwise it is meaningless.” He shook his head. “Even though I have it. It’s right here.” He regarded his trembling hands. “After all these years, I could change the world.”
But only for the worse.
And so it was that Professor Figwort came to an understanding, free at last from time’s passing and the tinkerer’s damn. Outside in the jungle, all was peaceful. The universe sang while sleepy orangutans dozed in the morning sun. Closing his eyes, Figwort crooked one finger and beckoned the future.
RED LETTER DAY
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
A little knowledge . . .
Graduation rehearsal—middle of the afternoon on the final Monday of the final week of school. The graduating seniors at Barack Obama High School gather in the gymnasium, get the wrapped packages with their robes (ordered long ago), their mortarboards, and their blue and white tassels. The tassels attract the most attention—everyone wants to know which side of the mortarboard to wear it on, and which side to move it to.
The future hovers, less than a week away, filled with possibilities.
Possibilities about to be limited, because it’s also Red Letter Day.
I stand on the platform, near the steps, not too far from the exit. I’m wearing my best business casual skirt today and a blouse that I no longer care about. I learned to wear something I didn’t like years ago; too many kids will cry on me by the end of the day, covering the blouse with slobber and makeup and aftershave.
My heart pounds. I’m a slender woman, although I’m told I’m formidable. Coaches need to be formidable. And while I still coach the basketball teams, I no longer teach gym classes because the folks in charge decided I’d be a better counselor than gym teacher. They made that decision on my first Red Letter Day at BOHS, more than twenty years ago.
I’m the only adult in this school who truly understands how horrible Red Letter Day can be. I think it’s cruel that Red Letter Day happens at all, but I think the cruelty gets compounded by the fact that it’s held in school.
Red Letter Day should be a holiday, so that kids are at home with their parents when the letters arrive.
Or don’t arrive, as the case may be.
And the problem is that we can’t even properly prepare for Red Letter Day. We can’t read the letters ahead of time: privacy laws prevent it.
So do the strict time-travel rules. One contact—only one—through an emissary, who arrives shortly before rehearsal, stashes the envelopes in the practice binders, and then disappears again. The emissary carries actual letters from the future. The letters themselves are the old-fashioned paper kind, the kind people wrote 150 years ago, but write rarely now. Only the real letters, handwritten, on special paper get through. Real letters, so that the signatures can be verified, the paper guaranteed, the envelopes certified.
Apparently, even in the future, no one wants to make a mistake.
The binders have names written across them so the letter doesn’t go to the wrong person. And the letters are supposed to be deliberately vague.
I don’t deal with the kids who get letters. Others are here for that, some professional bullshitters—at least in my opinion. For a small fee, they’ll examine the writing, the signature, and try to clear up the letter’s deliberate vagueness, make a guess at the socio-economic status of the writer, the writer’s health, or mood.
I think that part of Red Letter Day makes it all a scam. But the schools go along with it, because the counselors (read: me) are busy with the kids who get no letter at all.
And we can’t predict whose letter won’t arrive. We don’t know until the kid stops mid-stride, opens the binder, and looks up with complete and utter shock.
Either there’s a red envelope inside or there’s nothing.
And we don’t even have time to check which binder is which.
***
I had my Red Letter Day thirty-two years ago, in the chapel of Sister Mary of Mercy High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Sister Mary of Mercy was a small co-ed Catholic High School, closed now, but very influential in its day. The best private school in Ohio, according to some polls—controversial only because of its conservative politics and its willingness to indoctrinate its students.
I never noticed the indoctrination. I played basketball so well that I already had three full-ride scholarship offers from UCLA, UNLV, and Ohio State (home of the Buckeyes!). A pro scout promised I’d be a fifth round draft choice if only I went pro straight out of high school, but I wanted an education.
“You can get an education later,” he told me. “Any good school will let you in after you’ve made your money and had your fame.”
But I was brainy. I had studied athletes who went to the Bigs straight out of high school. Often they got injured, lost their contracts and their money, and never played again. Usually they had to take some crap job to pay for their college education—if, indeed, they went to college at all, which most of them never did.
Those who survived lost most of their earnings to managers, agents, and other hangers on. I knew what I didn’t know. I knew I was an ignorant kid with some great ball-handling ability. I knew that I was trusting and naïve and undereducated. And I knew that life extended well beyond thirty-five, when even the most gifted female athletes lost some of their edge.
I thought a lot about my future. I wondered about life past thirty-five. My future self, I knew, would write me a letter fifteen years after thirty-five. My future self, I believed, would tell me which path to follow, what decision to make.
I thought it all boiled down to college or the pros.
I had no idea there would be—there could be—anything else.
You see, anyone who wants to—anyone who feels so inclined—can write one single letter to their former self. The letter gets delivered just before high school graduation, when most teenagers are (theoretically) adults, but still under the protection of a school.
The recommendations on writing are that the letter should be inspiring. Or it should warn that former self away from a single person, a single event, or a one single choice.
Just one.
The statistics say that most folks don’t warn. They like their lives as lived. The folks motivated to write the letters wouldn’t change much, if anything.
It’s only those who’ve made a tragic mistake—one drunken night that led to a catastrophic accident, one bad decision that cost a best friend a life, one horrible sexual encounter that led to a lifetime of heartache—who write the explicit letter.
