Time Travel Omnibus, page 1104
He could make out the top of the escarpment, at least he could see that it did have a top, an edge indicating that it had stopped its vertical climb, but he could tell little more than that. As his eyes traveled further down he was able to focus on more detail, and taking a few steps back gave him a better perspective.
There were numerous more or less clearly defined strata, each in movement seemingly independent of the others, sometimes in an opposite flow from those adjacent, and sometimes the same but at a different speed. Like a multilayered roulette wheel, he thought, which seemed appropriate.
Trapped in most of these layers were visible figures—some of them blurred, but some of them so clear and vivid that when they were looking in his direction, as if from a wide window in the side of a building, he attempted to gain their attention by waving. None responded in any definitive way, although here and there the possibility that they might have seen him certainly seemed to be there.
The vast majority of these figures appeared to be ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities—fixing or eating dinner, housecleaning, working in offices, factories, on farms—but occasionally he’d see something indicating that an unusual event was occurring or had recently occurred. A man lying on his back, people gathered around, some attending to the fallen figure but most bearing witness. A couple being chased by a crowd. A woman in obvious anguish, screaming in a foreign language. A blurred figure in freefall from a tall building.
The settings for these dramas, suspenseful or otherwise, were most often sketchily drawn: some vague furniture, the outlines of a building, or not indicated at all. The figures sometimes acted their parts on a backdrop of floating abstractions. In a few cases, however, it was like looking out his front door—at random locations a tree branch or a roof eave actually penetrated the outer plane of the escarpment and hung there like a three-dimensional projection in the contemporary air.
It was like a gigantic three-dimensional time-line/cruise ship passing through the eastern Colorado plains, each level representing a different era. It was like a giant fault in time, shifting the temporal balance of the world in an attempt to rectify past mistakes. But there was no compelling reason to believe any of these theories. It was an enormous, fracturing mystery traveling through the world.
And just as suddenly as it had appeared, becoming so dramatically there it sucked up all the available reality of its environment, it was gone, reduced to a series of windy, dust-filled eddies that dissipated within a few seconds. Will shakily examined himself with eyes and hands. Would he lose his mind the way his Jeff had?
MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER
Ken Liu
Ten:
Dad greeted me at the door, nervous. “Amy, look who’s here?”
He stepped aside.
She looked exactly the way she did in the pictures hung everywhere in our house: black hair, brown eyes, smooth, pale skin. Yet she also felt like a stranger.
I put down my book bag, unsure what to do. She walked over, leaned down, and hugged me, first loosely, then very tight. She smelled like a hospital.
Dad had told me that the doctors had no cure for her sickness. She had only two years left to live.
“You’re so big.” Her breath felt warm and tickly on my neck, and suddenly, I hugged my mother back.
Mom brought me presents: a dress that was too small, a set of books that were too old, a model of the rocket ship she rode in.
“I was on a very long trip,” she said. “The ship went so fast that time slowed down inside. It felt like only three months.”
Dad had already explained it all to me: this was how she would cheat time, stretch out her two years so that she could watch me grow up. But I didn’t stop her. I liked listening to her voice.
“I didn’t know what you would like.” She was embarrassed by the gifts that surrounded me, gifts that were meant for another child, the daughter of her mind.
What I really wanted was a guitar. But Dad thought I was too young.
If I had been older, I might have told her that it was all right, that I loved her gifts. But I was not yet so good at lying.
I asked her how long she would stay with us.
Instead of answering, she said, “Let’s stay up all night, and we’ll do everything Dad says you can’t do.”
We went out and she bought me a guitar. I finally fell asleep at seven in the morning in her lap. It was a fantastic night.
When I woke up she was gone.
Seventeen:
“Why the fuck are you here?” I slammed the door in my mother’s face.
“Amy!” Dad opened the door again. Seeing him next to my mother, still twenty-five, still exactly the same woman from the pictures, I suddenly realized how old he had grown.
He was the one who held me when I was scared out of my wits by the blood I found in my panties. He was the one who, red-faced, mumbled to the store clerk to beg her to fit me for a bra. He was the one who stood there and held me while I screamed at him.
She has no right to dip back into my life once every seven years, like some fairy godmother.
Later, she knocked on my bedroom door. I stayed in bed and said nothing. She came in anyway. She had crossed light years to get here, and a plywood door wasn’t going to stop her. I liked that she pushed her way in to see me and I also hated it. It was confusing.
“That’s an elegant dress,” she said. My prom dress was hanging from the back of the door. It was elegant and cost me half my savings, but I had torn it near the waist.
After a while, I turned around and sat up. She was in my chair, sewing. She had cut a guitar-shaped piece from her own silver dress and patched it over the tear in mine. It was perfect.
“My mother died when I was a little girl,” she said. “I never got to know her. So I decided that I would do something different when I . . . found out.”
It was strange to hug her. She could have been my older sister.
Thirty-eight:
Mom and I sat together in the park. Baby Debbie was asleep in the stroller, and Adam was with the other boys by the jungle gym, screaming with joy.
“I never got to meet Scott,” she said, apologetic. “You weren’t dating last time I visited, during grad school.”
He was a good man, I almost said. We just grew apart. It would have been easy. I had been lying for so long to everyone, including myself.
But I was tired of lying. “He was an ass. It just took me years to admit it.”
“Love makes us do strange things,” she said.
Mom was only twenty-six. When I was her age, I had been full of hope too. Could she really understand my life?
She asked me how Dad had died. I told her that he went peacefully, even though it wasn’t true. There were more lines on my face than on hers, and I felt that I needed to protect her.
“Let’s not speak any more of sad things,” she said. And I was angry with her for being able to smile and I was also glad that she was there with me. It was confusing.
So we spoke about the baby, and watched Adam play until it was dark.
Eighty:
“Adam?” I ask. It’s hard for me to turn the wheelchair, and everything seems so dim in my eyes. It can’t be Adam. He’s been really busy with his new baby. Maybe it’s Debbie. But Debbie never visits.
“It’s me,” she says, and squats down before me. I squint: she looks the same as always.
But not exactly the same. The smell of medicine is stronger than ever, and I can feel her hands are shaking.
“How long have you been traveling,” I ask, “since you started?”
“Two years and counting,” she says. “I’m not leaving again.”
I’m sad to hear this, and yet I’m also happy. It’s confusing.
“Was it worth it?”
“I got to see less of you than most mothers do, but also more.”
She pulls up a chair next to me, and I lean my head on her shoulder. I fall asleep, feeling very young and knowing that she’ll be there when I wake up.
The End
THE CARPET BEDS OF SUTRO PARK
Kage Baker
I had been watching her for years.
Her mother used to bring her, when she was a child. Thin irritable woman dragging her offspring by the hand. “Kristy Ann! For God’s sake, come on!” The mother would stop to light a cigarette or chat with a neighbor encountered on the paths, and the little girl would sidle away to stare at the old well house, or pet the stone lions.
Later she came alone, a tall adolescent with a sketchpad under her arm. She’d spend hours wandering under the big cypress trees, or leaning on the battlements where the statues used to be, staring out to sea. Her sweater was thin. She’d shiver in the fog.
I remember when the statues used to be there. Spring and Winter and Prometheus and all the rest of them, and Sutro’s house that rose behind them on the parapet. I sat here then and I could see his observatory tower lifting above the trees. Turning my head I could see the spire of the Flower Conservatory. All gone now. Doesn’t matter. I recorded them. As I record everything. My memory goes back a long way . . .
I remember my parents fighting. He wanted to go off to the gold fields. She screamed at him to go, then. He left, swearing. I think she must have died not long after. I remember being a little older and playing among the deserted ships, where they sat abandoned on the waterfront by crews who had gone hunting for gold. Sometimes people fed me. A lady noticed that I was alone and invited me to come live with her.
She took me into her house and there were strange things in it, things that shouldn’t have been there in 1851: boxes that spoke and flameless lamps. She told me she was from the future. Her job was saving things from Time. She said she was immortal, and asked me if I’d like to be immortal too. I said I guessed I would.
I was taken to a hospital and they did a lot of surgery on me to make me like them. Had it worked, I’d have been an immortal genius.
The immortal part worked but the Cognitive Enhancement Procedure was a disaster. I woke up and couldn’t talk to anyone, was frightened to death of people talking to me, because I could see all possible outcomes to any conversation and couldn’t process any of them and it was too much, too much. I had to avoid looking into their eyes. I focused on anything else to calm myself: books, music, pictures.
My new guardians were very disappointed. They put me through years of therapy, without results. They spoke over my head.
What the fuck do we do with him now? He can’t function as an operative.
Should we put him in storage?
No; the Company spent too much money on him.
Gentlemen, please; Ezra’s intelligent, he can hear you, you know, he understands—
You could always send him out as a camera. Let him wander around recording the city. There’ll be a lot of demand for historic images after 2125.
He could do that! My therapist sounded eager. Give him a structured schedule, exact routes to take, a case officer willing to work with his limitations—
So I was put to work. I crossed and recrossed the city with open eyes, watching everything. I was a bee collecting the pollen of my time, bringing it back to be stored away as future honey. The sounds and images went straight from my sensory receptors to a receiver at Company HQ. I had a room in the basement at the Company HQ, to which I came back every night. I had Gleason, my case officer. I had my routes. I had my rules.
I must never allow myself to look like a street vagrant. I must wash myself and wear clean clothing daily. I must never draw attention to myself in any way.
If approached by a mortal, I was to Avoid.
If I could not avoid, Evaluate: was the mortal a policeman?
If so I was to Present him with my card. In the early days the card said I was a deaf mute, and any questions should be directed to my keeper, Dr. Gleason, residing on Kearney Street. In later years the card said I was a mentally disabled person under the care of the Gleason Sanatorium on Chestnut Street.
The one I carry now says I have an autiform disorder and directs the concerned reader to the Gleason Outpatient Clinic on Geary.
For the first sixty years I used to get sent out with an Augmented Equine Companion. I liked that. Norton was a big bay gelding, Edwin was a dapple gray and Andy was a palomino. They weren’t immortal—the Company never made animals immortal—but they had human intelligence, and nobody ever bothered me when I was perched up on an impressive-looking steed. I liked animals; they were aware of details and pattern changes in the same way I was. They took care of remembering my routes. They could transmit cues to me.
We’re approaching three females. Tip your hat.
Don’t dismount here. We’re going up to get footage of Nob Hill.
Hold on. I’m going to kick this dog.
Ezra, the fog’s coming in. We won’t be able to see Fort Point from here today. I’ll take you back to HQ.
I was riding Edwin the first time I saw Sutro Park. That was in 1885, when it had just been opened to the public. He took me up over the hills through the sand dunes, far out of the city, toward Cliff House. The park had been built on the bluff high above.
I recorded it all, brand new: the many statues and flower urns gleaming white, the green lawns carefully tended, the neat paths and gracious Palm Avenue straight and well-kept. There was a beautiful decorative gate then, arching above the main entrance where the stone lions sit. The Conservatory, with its inlaid tile floor, housed exotic plants. The fountains jetted. The little millionaire Sutro ambled through, looking like the Monopoly man in his high silk hat, nodding to visitors and pointing out especially nice sights with his walking stick.
He was proudest of the carpet beds, the elaborate living tapestries of flowers along Palm Avenue. It took a boarding-house full of gardeners to manicure them, keeping the patterns perfect. Parterres like brocade, swag and wreath designs, a lyre, floral Grecian urns. Clipped boxwood edging, blue-green aloes and silver sempervivum; red and pink petunias, marigolds, pansies, alyssum in violet and white, blue lobelia. The colors sang out so bright they almost hurt my eyes.
They were an unnatural miracle, as lovely as the far more unnatural and miraculous phenomenon responsible for them: that a rich man should open his private garden to the public.
The mortals didn’t appreciate it. They never do.
* * *
The years passed. The little millionaire built other gifts for San Francisco, his immense public baths and towering Cliff House. The little millionaire died and faded from memory, though not mine.
The Great Earthquake barely affected Sutro Park, isolated as it was beyond the sand dunes; a few statues toppled from their plinths, but the flowers still sang at the sky for a while. Sutro’s Cliff House went up in smoke. After automobiles came, horses vanished from the streets. I had to walk everywhere now by myself.
* * *
So I watched Kristy Ann and I don’t think she ever saw me once, over the years, though I was always on that same bench. But I watched the little girl discovering the remnant of the Conservatory’s tiled floor, watched her get down on her hands and knees and dig furtively, hoping to uncover more of the lost city before her mother could call her away.
I watched the older Kristy Ann bringing her boyfriends there, the tall one with red hair and then the black one with dreadlocks. There were furtive kisses in amongst the trees and, at least once, furtive sex. There were long afternoons while they grew bored watching her paint the cypress trees. At last she came alone, and there were no more boys after that.
She walked there every afternoon, after work I suppose. She must have lived nearby. Weekends she came with her paints and did endless impressions of the view from the empty battlements, or the statue of Diana that had survived, back among the trees. Once or twice I wandered past her to look at her canvases. I wouldn’t have said she had talent, but she had passion.
* * *
I didn’t like the twentieth century, but it finally went away. Everything went into my eyes: the Pan Pacific Exhibition, Dashiell Hammett lurching out of John’s Grill, the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. Soldiers and sailors. Sutro’s Baths destroyed. Mortals in bright rags, their bare feet dirty, carrying guitars. Workmen digging a pit to lay the foundations of the Transamerica Building and finding the old buried waterfront, the abandoned ships of my mortal childhood still down there in the mud. The Embarcadero Freeway rising, and falling; the Marina District burning, and coming back with fresh white paint.
My costume changed to fit the times. Now and again I caught a glimpse of myself, impartial observer, in a shop window reflection. I was hard to recognize, though I saw the same blank and eternally smooth face every time under the sideburns, or the mustache, or the glasses.
The new world was loud and hard. It didn’t matter. I had all the literature and music of past ages to give me human contact, if secondhand through Dickens or Austen. And I had kept copies of the times I’d liked, out of what I sent into the Company storage banks. I could close my eyes at night and replay the old city as I’d known it, in holo.
Everything time had taken away was still there, in my city. Sutro was still there, in his silk hat. I could walk the paths of his park beside him, as I’d never done in his time, and imagine a conversation, though of course I’d never spoken to him or anyone. I didn’t want to tell him about his house being torn down, or his park being “reduced” as the San Francisco Park Department put it, for easier maintenance, the Conservatory gone, the statues almost all gone, the carpet beds mown over.
* * *
Kristy Ann in her twenties became grim and intense, a thin girl who dressed carelessly. Sometimes she brought books of photographs to the park with her and stalked along the paths, holding up the old images to compare them with the bare modern reality. One day she came with a crowd of young mortals from her college class, and talked knowledgeably about the park. The term urban archaeology was used a number of times.
