Time Travel Omnibus, page 608
He’s still showing no real signs of wear, although the stories about his private doings are pretty hair-raising, some of those I’ve heard. I had a drink with him afterwards, and I was amazed at his condition. He wasn’t even sweating, and Pitman had gone out of there like a wet sponge. Every time we meet I expect him to mention “the other guy,” but he never does. But he’s still waiting for him, I can tell. He has that look in his eye, the one that says that there’s still one more mountain out there somewhere, and he won’t really feel that he’s made it until he stuck right up there at the top with no company in sight. Pitman was a milestone, but to Willie he’s still well short of the peak, and after tonight I guess he won’t be alone in thinking that.
Thus are the mighty fallen, for the time being, at least. But Pitman’s lucky, if only he knew it. Another twenty-six years for him, another fifteen months for Willie. It’s a strange, hard world.
Tuesday, June 14th, 1938
Room 88, Spicer’s Hotel,
New York
A complication of a kind; not drastic, but it’s something that I’ve been expecting for a long time, and I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
He played a radio date with the band last night, and I met him afterwards in a bar called Sutton’s, a place where musicians generally go after broadcasts. He had a cold, and he asked if he could come over here to put his feet up for an hour or so instead of going on to play somewhere. He said his throat was pretty sore, but he didn’t want to go home just then.
Right off I had an idea of what he was really after, but there would have been no point in stalling. We came back here and had a couple of drinks and talked, and after a while he asked if I still-had the gadget, as he called it.
I said that I didn’t, that I was still having trouble with it and I’d left it back in Baltimore until I had a chance to really work on it, get it right before I tried to market it again. He didn’t tike that. He stared at me, the kind of stare that suspects all kinds of nameless subterfuge but can’t make up its mind exactly what it could be. I tried to get the conversation going again, but he didn’t want to talk. He hadn’t even wanted my company, and now that he’d failed to get what he came for he wasn’t going through any more pretense that he did. He finished his drink without speaking, and said he was going. I said I hoped the cold would clear up soon, and that I’d be seeing him. He replied in just about as noncommittal a way as it’s possible to without actually spitting in your eye, and went.
As I say, it wasn’t too much of a surprise. He’s been very withdrawn with me on my last couple of trips, and it isn’t hard to see why. He thinks of me now as the one person who’ll be able to say who’s the original and who’s the plagiarist when “the other guy” does eventually turn up! What a tangle. I suppose it’s almost tragic in its way, but I must admit that it has its funny side as well.
It would be interesting to know just how closely he actually connects me with what’s been happening to him, though. The fact of our always meeting at the really crucial times and in such widely spaced locales must have got him speculating by now, surely. He suspects something, but whether or not it goes beyond some kind of sleight-of-ear, for God only knows what bizarre purpose, I can’t imagine. He certainly doesn’t think I’m his fairy godmother, anyway.
Bad joke. Less than four weeks to go now. It’s too bad about his cold, which is genuine “enough. If he knew how precious time was to him, he’d have spent the whole evening blowing somewhere instead of wasting it on an abortive business like his call here.
For the thousandth time I’m almost tempted to shoot the works and tell him. Almost, but not quite. I stretched the rules once, but only because there was no other way. He’s on his own, and that’s how it’ll have to stay.
Friday, September 10th, 2078
Lewiston, Maine
It won’t ever be possible to record this in a truly objective way, but I can’t put it off forever. I suppose I’ve been hanging onto the hope that time would at least blunt the edges before I tackled it, but if it does then it’s an imperceptibly slow process. It’s been over two months now, and the details are still as sharp and clear as if it was only yesterday. Maybe this will help to clear my thinking, which is still very confused. It may even help me to find answers of a kind, although this seems less than a possibility at the moment.
I’ll try to keep off the why’s and wherefore’s this time, too. I still can’t make up my mind just how much sense my speculations on the first couple of threads made, if they made any at all. This thing is so complex that it only emphasizes our inability to understand even our own time and place, if such an expression means anything any more. If only—
I’m getting bogged down already. Straight facts, inasfar as that’s going to be possible.
He still didn’t look really sick during the last few days, not even particularly tired. I’d expected to find him showing real signs, but even after the marathon at the Joyland, when he took on all the big guns and shot them to pieces like a flock of sitting quail, he looked pretty much as he had ever since K.C.; a little more pouchy under the eyes, maybe, but nothing more. But I was still of two minds how to wind things up. The actual product of the Consort session was on record, which was all that really counted, and the idea of actually witnessing his collapse had always been distasteful, really nothing more than an exercise in morbid curiosity that I’d already pretty well decided I could do without.
In the event, I went to West 44th Street on the evening of July 8th, stationed myself in a hamburger joint opposite the studios, and waited there; a half-hearted gesture of farewell, I admit, but one that I felt compelled to make. On the aural evidence he’d been in complete control at the session, and yet he’d died almost immediately afterwards. So it was curiosity that pulled me there; really, a partial resurgence of the unhealthy inquisitiveness that I’d rejected earlier, but which I found didn’t repel me in quite the same way in its modified form.
It was a long wait, almost an hour and a half. I got a couple of mildly curious looks from the counterman after a while, but every so often I bought a fresh coffee and carried on checking the traffic across the way while it gradually got dark outside. Cee Hall arrived first and unloaded his kit from a cab, and Charlie Williams turned up with his bass ten minutes or so afterwards. Willie and Lacey and a couple of girls arrived twenty minutes later, sharing a cab.
It wasn’t really possible to gauge his complexion in that light, but if anything he looked more relaxed and cheerful than he normally did as he paid off the cab while Lacey and the girls went on inside. He had good reason to be happy, I suppose; his first recordings under his own name, with just about the best supporting talent available, and he must have been particularly pleased about getting Lacey to duck his Swingtone contract and play the date. He always was the perfect accompanist for him, and they never jelled better than on the two tracks that they were going to cut that night.
I sat there for a minute or two after he’d gone into the studio, wondering about it, but more relieved at that moment than curious. It really did look as though it was going to be as clean as could be reasonably expected, which at least meant that there would be no gradual enfeebling decline to be borne and fretted over, the kind of ending that had no place in the existence of a comet as bright as he had been.
Cheered, in a bleak kind of way, I left and walked back to the hotel; a longish pull, but I wanted to take a final look at the town by night, because this was the place and the time that for me summed up most of the attractions of the era. But my principal feeling when I finally walked in off the street was one of relief. I’d suddenly become obsessed with the idea that I had no right to be there at all; that despite the facts of history the setting and myself were two different kinds of incompatible shadow, intermingling only to the extent that oil and water do; touching at the surface, but nothing more. It’s a contradiction, I know, but it was very real to me just then, and it has at least a suggestion of logic on its side. Different kinds of experience and thought and feeling, all born of the circumstances of their time; how can such things ever do more than just show their skins to the stranger? The concept of such a fusion has an unreal quality about it, one that I somehow think I shall never be able to accept completely.
I settled my account with the usual excuse that I’d probably have to leave at very short notice in the morning, and went up to my room. I got rid of excess clothing down the laundry chute at the end of the corridor, packed, and put on the transfer suit.
As I checked and set the power packs on the suit and my case, I had this nagging thought that the thing was finishing all wrong, that a flat ending simply didn’t fit in with the spirit of what had happened during the past few weeks. The dying fall is the right close to lots of encounters, but not this one, I was sure. It had been excitement and discovery right from the start, the kind of experience that demanded a statement summarizing all that was best in what I’d found.
I dug out the spool with “Willie’s Blues” on it, fitted it, and ran it back to the program number, put the recorder back in the case and switched to play. Then I activated both power packs, sat down on the edge of the bed, and listened.
It’s music that I’ve heard God alone knows how many times, and it’s one of the few pieces that has stood the test of frequent repetition, the only real test as far as I’m concerned. I must know every note, almost every nuance of what’s played, and yet it always sounds as though it’s being created right at the very moment of my listening to it. It’s a genuine miracle of a kind, dovetailed so perfectly that there Isn’t a note or a beat that isn’t an essential part of its structure. But it was sad music then, despite its buoyancy, because it was a requiem, shadowed by the things I knew about its creation.
I had my head lowered; so I didn’t see the door open as they were working through the final bars. But then the latch clicked shut, and I looked up, and there he was, leaning against it and staring at me with wide, blank eyes. And then the music cut out, and the only sound in the room was his breathing; a ragged, grating, desperate noise that filled my head and choked off my own breath as if my heart had suddenly been grabbed by a huge, cold hand.
I can’t for the life of me imagine what he thought or felt at that God-awful moment. I can list my own reactions easily enough—disbelief, fear, and then pity and remorse when the truth of what must have happened and was happening right then hit me. But as for him, I simply don’t know, and his reading of the implications of what he saw is going to remain a mystery that I have no particular desire to solve.
How was it possible for me to have been so completely blind for so long? I’ve always thought of myself as a reasonably intelligent person, but intelligence is the ability to think past the surface of events and see the reality that lies underneath. I hadn’t done this at all. I’d been too flattered by the importance of my role as catalyst to see that I wasn’t simply showing him the road to tragically short-lived glory and enduring legend. In effect, what I’d done was implant something in his mind; something that, when the time came for him to create that particular pattern of sound, would strike through him with all the awful force of an internal explosion, devastating his reason and triggering the physical disaster that his abuse of his body had already paved the way for.
The clues had all been there. The detailed reports of his death told how he’d recovered from the initial attack sufficiently to leave the building on his own, brushing aside all offers of help, and had finally been found in an alley an hour or so later, where he’d apparently collapsed for the last time. Remembering these things now was like the revelatory moments I’d experienced when we first met, the sudden flashes of insight that showed the puzzle neatly interlocked, a beautifully tooled exercise in cause and effect. But until that moment I’d seen no link, no unifying thread to tie them all together and show the whole picture. Like any scavenger, or dumb, brainless bird, I’d seen only the bright side of the coin, all the time blind to the shadows on its reverse. But even when it isn’t out in plain view, the balancing factor is never really absent, always there, always visible to eyes with thought and imagination behind them.
He was already far gone when he came into the room; wet, greying face, weak movements that he couldn’t co-ordinate properly any more. Whatever it was he’d expected to find there, it couldn’t have been what was actually waiting for him; a man dressed in a black, skintight suit, with a control-box of some kind strapped to his chest; a crazy, unbelievable portrait in smoke that was fading even as he watched it. It was like kicking a man who’s already three quarters of the way over a cliff edge, providing the final impetus to his fall. As I moved away, with everything breaking up into the extraordinary grained effect that occurs during the period of actual transfer, dots and flecks that dance and multiply and hurt your eyes, I saw him reach out a hand; whether to try and grab me and hold me there or to push me away I’ve never been able to decide.
He was posed like that, shrinking and dying and dissolving into a billion pieces when the blackout pulled me under.
He didn’t actually die right then, not in the true physical sense. He must have had just enough strength left to scramble away from the nightmare, only to find himself in a dark, grimy place where he fell again and escaped from it forever. But even without my unwitting final assistance, it would still have happened, not right then, but soon. He was sick, possibly without his even knowing it, and the way he pushed himself, squeezing life for all it was worth, meant that there was only one possible ending.
But what was he thinking while he ran? Even if he’d had the time or the strength to consider it rationally, did he have the kind of imagination that could link the pieces together and accept a proposition as farfetched as the truth would have seemed in his own time? I can’t imagine that he would, or could. I think he died frightened and confused, after suddenly finding himself in the middle of a situation that defied everything he knew and understood, destroyed by an assault on his mind and body that it had been impossible for him to anticipate or defend himself against. Poor Willie. It must have been a terrible moment for him there in the recording studio, when time suddenly overlapped and he found himself transmitting his contribution to the echoes that had stayed in his memory ever since his one hearing of them; recognizing them, knowing them to be impossible, but committed to their completion; sounds that came from the past but were being made in the present, originating there.
I killed him. I can say it now without actually flinching, externally at least; so perhaps I’ve found what I was hoping to find when I started this personally prescribed therapy. The images are still there, but I think they’ve lost a little of their sharpness now. I suppose it means that I’ve learned to accept what I’ve known all along but, because of my final role, just couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge; that the pattern was set and that my own part in it was an immutable fact that all the cursing and railing and struggling in the world wouldn’t have canceled out. It’s a familiar pattern, too, on reflection—not exactly exclusive to people who hear unique sounds or possess unique vision or who mold language to suit the singular rhythms that fill their minds, but they seem to fit it more easily than most. But how many of them, I wonder, have been directed by people like myself—wide-eyed, narrow-visioned trippers who blunder through time like clumsy children, totally unaware of the real effect that they are having on people and history? I daren’t think of some of the possible implications, not even now.
But why me? Perhaps it’s a kind of compensation for a total lack of creative talent, history’s method of making the achievement a collective thing in an oblique and cruel kind of way. I’ll just have to learn to be grateful for having been the chosen recipient of this particular apple with the shiny skin and the big dark worm inside, ignore the sugar content in my feelings and applaud the monstrous humor of the powers of creation with the wry detachment that I guess it deserves.
Not easy, but necessary, now. And I have a feeling it’s something we’re all going to have to learn.
FOREVER TO A HUDSON BAY BLANKET
James Tiptree, Jr.
DOV RAPELLE was a nice person, personally. He was so nice you didn’t notice that he wasn’t overpoweringly bright in a survival sense. He also owned a long skier’s body and a lonesome dreamy Canuck face that he got from his fifth grandfather who came out to Calgary, Alberta as a dowser. By the time the face came down to Dov a solid chunk of Alberta Hydroelectric came with it. But the Rapelles lived plain; Calgary, Alberta was one of the few places in the twenty-first century where a young man could be like Dov and not be spoiled silly.
Calgary has the tallest water-tower on the continent, you know, and all that tetra-wheat and snow-sports money. And it’s a long way from the Boswash and San Frangeles style of life. People from Calgary still do things like going home to see their folks over winter vacation. And in Calgary you aren’t used to being phoned up by strange girls in Callao, Peru at 0200 Christmas morning.
The girl was quite emotional. Dov kept asking her name and she kept crying and sobbing, “Say something, Dovy, Dovy, please!” She had a breathy squeak that sounded young and expensive.
“What should I say?” asked Dov reasonably.
“Your voice, oh, Dovy!” she wept, “I’m so far away! Please, please talk to me, Dovy!”
“Well, look,” Dov began, and the phone went dead.
When his folks asked him what that was he shrugged and grinned his nice grin. He didn’t get it.
Christmas was on Monday. Wednesday night the phone rang again. This time the operator was French, but it was clearly the same girl.
“Dovy? Dovy Rapelle?” She was breathing hard.
“Yeah, speaking. Who’s this?”
“Oh, Dovy. Dovy! Is that really you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Look, did you call before?”
“Did I?” she said vaguely. And then she started crying “Oh Dovy, oh Dovy,” and it was the same dialogue all over again until the line quit.
