Time Travel Omnibus, page 1113
“Can we get closer?” someone asked.
“I wouldn’t advise it,” Wilson said.
The binoculars made the rounds. Gwyneth studied the triceratops. The great bellows of its lungs heaved irregularly. Dirt caked the exposed wound. Insects buzzed around the glistening bulge of viscera. She could smell the thing from here, a stench of rot and shit and death. It moaned when it saw them, that long rusty sound, like a nail being wrenched from ancient wood. Wilson drew them into a blind of towering angiosperms, admonishing them to silence.
“Soon now,” he said, and they hunkered down to wait.
The fronds of the angiosperms waved above them in the midday heat. Then, like God himself flipping a switch, the air went abruptly still. Gwyneth lifted her head, listening. It was more than the lack of birds. The tiny mammals in the treetops had fallen silent; the insects that moments ago had whickered in the air around them disappeared. The forest held its breath. Something big—something dangerous—was on the move. She could sense it: a charged stillness in the air, a tension in the blood.
Something snorted beyond the trees that screened the mouth of the ravine.
Gwyneth could see it in her mind, lifting its vast head to taste of the unmoving air.
Her heart quickened.
Twenty-five years, and Wilson had seen fourteen of them. Fourteen of them. And fucking Peter back at the hotel.
A callused hand touched her elbow.
“This is a time for courage, Mrs. Braunmiller. Not stupidity.”
Indeed not, she thought. She could feel his breath tickle erect the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, and for a moment she was aware of nothing else, not the desperate gasping of the felled triceratops, not the expedition group arrayed in the greenery around her, not even the vast creature that shifted its weight beyond the curtain of trees—
Wilson touched her elbow again.
“There you go,” he breathed, and then she saw the thing: monstrous, the beast of the apocalypse itself, like some foregone doom from the age of Revelation. It did not emerge from the trees, it simply appeared among them, ghost-like and huge and utterly silent, bigger even than the creature that had run in her dreams, invisible one moment, visible the next, like a long lens pulling focus.
And silent. So silent.
Someone moaned in terror—this wasn’t what they’d bargained for, not at all—and the monster swung its vast head toward the grove of angiosperms. Another moan—Wilson hissed, “Shut up, you fool!”—and the tyrannosaur moved, shedding the camouflage of the trees like water, one step, then two, its great taloned feet tearing at the dark soil, its tiny, ridiculous arms—evolution’s prank—folded at its breast. One slow step, then another, and a third. And did the earth shake beneath its feet? Surely not, yet Gwyneth felt it all the same, felt the earth rumble as the monster lunged toward them, gathering speed, fast, oh fast, and sweet Jesus who could have imagined the thing, death rampant and alive and more beautiful than she could have dreamed; she marveled at its sunshot hide, golden streaked and green, its bullet head weaving hollow-cheeked upon its cobra neck, its nostrils flaring, its eyes ravening and aflame.
It closed fast, forty yards, thirty, twenty-five. Someone broke and ran, she didn’t see who, and then the monster—this impossible beast from an era out of time—at last gave vent to the fury that burned in its furnace heart. It roared, its jaws unhinging to reveal a shark’s hoard of yellow teeth the size of railroad spikes. A gust of carrion stench blasted over Gwyneth. Her yoke seized her and she found herself careening once again toward the gravity well of the future, trying to hang on for a moment longer just to stare in wonder at the thing—
Her stomach twisted—
And then a rusty-hinge screech of agony reminded the tyrannosaur that other prey—bigger prey, and easy—was to be had. It wheeled to face the triceratops, its tail lashing, and loped the length of the ravine, its feet hammering tracks six inches into the soil. The triceratops somehow staggered to its feet, the bloody rent in its side disgorged fresh loops of tangled viscera.
And then the beast was upon it.
The triceratops lowered its head to meet the titan. Tearing at the soil with legs sheathed in swelling ropes of muscle, the tyrannosaur wheeled around the swinging horns. The wounded triceratops was too slow. One of the T-Rex’s taloned feet ripped open its hindquarters. The next moment—Gwyneth looking on, choked with terror and some other strong emotion, she couldn’t quite say what—the tyrannosaur closed its massive jaws just behind the triceratops’s frill.
The killing blow.
The triceratops went down, feet spasming as the tyrannosaur tore lose a giant chunk of flesh and swallowed. It lifted its monstrous head to the sky and bellowed in triumph.
After that it was awful.
The party that night—there were parties every night—hummed with excitement.
Three of the excursion groups had caught sight of the T-Rex, but only one of them, Wilson’s, had seen the kill. You lucky bastard, his colleagues said, shaking their heads, but Gwyneth knew that it was more than luck, that it was skill and knowledge; she recalled the swift precision of his lean hands applying the pressure bandage, she recalled his words in her ear: This is the time for courage, not stupidity.
She was done with stupidity, Gwyneth thought. She felt that she had opened a new angle of vision upon the world; she understood now that pain was sometimes necessary, that it ruined some things to speak of them too much, that truth could equal beauty. Her fellow guests seemed faintly diminished, their conversation—
—snapped its neck like a pretzel stick—
—magnificent creature—
—empty of any genuine comprehension of what they had seen.
Maybe the change—if there was a change—showed in her face, for as they sat down to dinner Angela said, “You look flushed, darling. Maybe this afternoon was too much for you.”
“Looks like you got a fever is what it looks like,” Frank opined, ordering the duckbill steak. (“Appropriate, eh?” he joked.)
Appropriate enough, Gwyneth supposed.
The truth was, she didn’t feel quite herself. Frank had been right: fever was the word for it. Fever—ever since she had seen that monster for herself, and felt the blast of its carrion breath. She had read about it, she had seen it on video, but not until this afternoon had she really known such things existed in the world. Fever. The fever called living, she thought, another fragment of old poetry rattling around inside her head like a piece of angry candy.
She only wished Peter had been with her.
“Where is Peter, anyway?” Frank said, as if he’d sensed the run of her thoughts.
“I think he is coming down with something,” she said. “Maybe we both are.”
“Up to the room with you, the minute you’re finished eating,” Angela said.
Frank grunted.
But it wasn’t up to the room that Angela dragged her when Frank had finished his steak and wandered off to hold court at the party. It was to the little bar overlooking the plain, where a fire-pit burned and a pair of lovers whispered in the shadows.
“Something warm,” she told the bartender, and afterwards, cupping Irish coffee as they stood by the fire pit, “Peter’s not sick and you know it.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been married twice, love. He’s sulking. Sulking this morning and sulking at dinner, making it worse for himself every moment because he can’t stay in that room forever, and he knows it. Stupid male pride. Whatever in the world has gone wrong with you two?”
“I don’t know,” Gwyneth said.
Down below, in the darkness beyond the tree-studded escarpment, something roared on the savannah. She wondered what it was—something big, no doubt—but nothing she could shape inside her head. And that was how it was with Peter, too, wasn’t it? Something big had happened to them somewhere along the way, but she couldn’t put her finger on when, or what.
She couldn’t find the shape of it inside her head.
“I don’t know.”
She swiped at tears with one hand.
“You must think I’m an idiot.”
“I think you’re confused. It’s okay to be confused.”
“But there’s nothing wrong. There shouldn’t be anything wrong. He’s a good man, he’s kind and he’s gentle and he’s handsome—anyone could see that he’s a good man.”
Angela wrapped an arm around Gwyneth’s shoulder and pulled her close.
“I know. I—”
“He said—” Gwyneth sobbed discreetly.
The lovers had departed.
The barman found something pressing to do at the far end of the bar.
“He said that what was wrong with us wasn’t in the Caymans or in Paris or in the Cretaceous. He said it was inside us.”
“He’s probably right about that.”
“I thought that I could save us by coming here. I really did. I risked everything on it, everything we had.” She sniffed and met the other woman’s gaze. “Somehow I thought that I could save us. I don’t know how.”
“Do you love him, Gwyneth?”
“I don’t know. We just drifted away from each other,” she said, and that image came to her once again: continental drift: landmasses on the move, so slow you didn’t even notice it until an ocean lay between you.
It would have been easier if one of them had cheated.
“Shhhh,” Angela said.
Gradually, the sobs subsided.
The barman brought them another coffee. The night had turned cool, and the moon had just started to slide over the massif to their back, laying down a patchwork of shadows on the ridge below them. Once again, Gwyneth felt that new knowledge take shape inside her: that some things could not be spoken, that truth could equal beauty, that pain was sometimes necessary, and real.
“Why on earth did you ever come here?” Angela said.
They caught up with Frank at the party, but soon after, he and Angela departed—another shot at Kronosaurs had been promised for the morning, and Angela had shamed him into going along this time. “We didn’t come here to play tennis,” she said. “Besides you’ll be wearing a lifesuit. It’s not like you can drown.”
Afterwards, Gwyneth floated ghost-like through the party, waiting for Peter. She had resolved to kiss him on the stairs when he came, but he did not come, and at last it was late. The moon had risen high into the alien sky. The fires had dwindled to coals. Even the hard-core drinkers were pouring themselves one by one into their rooms.
Somehow—afterward Gwyneth could never quite figure out precisely how it happened, how the decision came to her or if it had been a decision at all and not some foreordained conclusion—she found herself at the concierge’s desk. Inquiries were made. The concierge responded without lifting an eyebrow. Apparently such inquiries were not uncommon.
The corridor was in the basement of the hotel.
She knocked on the door.
Robert Wilson opened it.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“I’m sure.”
His hands were callused. They felt real against her flesh.
Later—it must have been three or after—Gwyneth slipped through the door of her room. Peter stirred in the depths of the eggshell bower.
“What time is it, Gwen?” he said in the darkness, as though he didn’t know, as though his voice wasn’t wide awake, and waiting.
“It’s late, Peter.”
He was silent for a long time. Gwyneth stood by the door until her eyes adjusted. She made her way across the shadowy room. She stood by the window, staring out into the Cretaceous night. It had grown darker, but the moon in its long descent still frosted the leaves outside the window. If she squinted, she could see—or imagined that she could see—something moving out there near the forest floor. A low-slung night grazer, maybe, or maybe just the wind-drift fronds of some ground-hugging fern.
“The party must have gone late.”
“I guess it did.”
“The T-Rex and everything. People must have been excited.”
“It’s all anyone could talk about.”
“I’m sorry I was ill. I wish I could have been there.”
She said nothing.
“What was it like?”
“The party or the T-Rex?”
He laughed in the gloom.
She had no words for it, no way to begin.
“There was something spiritual to it,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain.”
Now his laughter had a bitter edge.
“Spiritual? Seeing one giant animal tear another one to pieces?”
“It’s not that—”
But it was. The blood sport of the thing had excited her.
“—or not that alone, anyway. It was the thing’s purity of purpose, I think. So devoid of confusion or . . . or ambiguity. Just pure appetite. Every sinew of its body had evolved to serve it.”
She said, “It doesn’t make any sense. I know it doesn’t make any sense.”
In the silence that followed, she felt once again the distance between them: continental drift, something so big she couldn’t quite shape it in her mind.
“You weren’t ill,” she said.
“No.”
“You could have come.” Then: “What are we going to do?”
He was silent for a long time.
“Was it worth it, Gwyneth?”
She stared into the moon-silvered dark.
Peter turned on the bedside lamp.
Her face hovered in the glass, hollowed out and half transparent, ghost-like.
“Turn it off. Turn it off, Peter.”
He did, and the Cretaceous dark rose up to envelop her.
“Another shot at Kronosaurs, tomorrow,” he said, and she felt a doorway open between them.
Some things you could not speak of. Some wounds healed in silence.
“We should get some sleep,” he said.
Gwyneth stood in the threshold. Her body was wide awake. She felt like she might never sleep again. Peter swept back the veils of the eggshell bower and stood, tall in the darkness, and came to her. He put a hand to the small of her back and leaned over, brushing her ear with his lips.
“Come to bed, Gwen,” he said.
But she only stood there, his hand at her back, his breath at her ear. The night deepened. Even the moon was gone. Something huge and bright streaked across the sky. It erupted on the horizon, red and orange, a god-light towering into vacuum far above. Shockwaves followed, flattening the trees on the distant ridges in a broad expanding circle, as though a great fist had slammed down upon the planet, rocking them so that they had to clutch at one another to stay on their feet. The thick glass spider-webbed in its frame. Somewhere in the depths of the hotel, something crashed. Someone screamed. Then the fire, burning from horizon to horizon as it ate the dark. Some things could not be saved, Gwyneth thought. Some wounds did not heal. Then the yoke took her. It was just as Wilson had said: it was like being turned inside out.
MY WIFE HATES TIME TRAVEL
Adam-Troy Castro
From the very beginning—which I guess is also the middle and the end if you follow the bent logic involved and arrange events by some scheme other than strict chronological order—there was never any way of knowing which one of us, my wife or myself, was going to invent time travel. Neither one of us was a physicist, theoretical or applied; we weren’t even qualified for rewiring the wall sockets or fixing the dead laptop. As far as life skills were concerned, I had a little more imagination and she had a little more practicality. She did more of the household repairs and I did more of the heavy lifting. That was it. Neither one of us seemed equipped to completely rewrite the laws of space and time, and before we found out that it’s what we were fated to do, neither of us had ever particularly included it among our ambitions.
Before we found out that one of us was fated to invent time travel, my wife always had a little more antipathy toward the premise than I did. Whenever we sat on the couch watching some show where somebody traveled into his personal past and intersected with his past self in some way that either rewrote his personal history or somehow cemented his pre-existing destiny in place, I was always the one who thought it cool and my wife was always the one who complained that it made her head hurt. She had no head for paradoxes. Whenever she encountered one of those narrative Möebius Strips, she always winced and declared that time travel made no sense.
Since finding out that one of us was going to invent time travel, we’ve argued almost nonstop over the likely suspect. I foolishly concluded in her hearing that it was going to be me. She read this as me calling myself smarter than her. Maybe she was right. I had to apologize for condescending. Then I said it was probably her and she got mad again, because it blamed her for everything that’s happened since. Sometimes I think that if I had a working time machine now I’d go back and warn my prior self that it’s not an argument worth having, that I’m fated to be wrong whatever position I take. Then I realize that believing it desirable to tinker with the small mistakes and larger heartbreaks of one’s past is precisely the kind of messed-up thinking that has made our current lives, the lives before we create time travel, such a parade of hellish interruptions.
This much we’ve agreed on. Since we’re both fairly bright but not world-class geniuses, the secret to time travel has to be fairly simple, the kind of thing so obvious in retrospect that it just gets overlooked until somebody woolgathering about something else entirely makes a connection nobody has ever made before, slaps his forehead, and cries, “Eureka!” That could turn out to be either one of us. We’re not brilliant, but we’re both Eureka prone. Maybe in some versions of the future it was her and in other versions it was me and in still other versions it was both of us collaborating, maybe on one of those long drives where there’s nothing but us and the highway, heading toward my in-laws, or hers.
