Time Travel Omnibus, page 779
“Please.” she whined. “Let’s stop.”
I let her down onto a patio chair, went inside, found some coffee and set a pot brewing. I brought a blanket out, wrapped her in it. poked her to keep her awake until the coffee was ready. Eventually she sat there sipping coffee, holding the cup in both hands to warm them, hair down in her eyes and eyelashes gummed together. She looked tired. “How are you?” I asked.
“Alive. Bad luck.” She started to cry. “Cruel, all of them, all those bastards. Oh, Jesus . . .”
I let her go on for a while. I gave her a handkerchief and she dried her eyes, blew her nose. The most beautiful woman in the world. “Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Detlev Gruber. Call me Det.”
“What are you doing here? Where’s Mrs. Murray?”
“You don’t remember? You sent her home.”
She took a sip of coffee, watching me over the rim of the cup.
“I’m here to help you, Marilyn. To rescue you.”
“Rescue me?”
“I know how hard things are, how lonely you’ve been. I knew that you would try to kill yourself.”
“I was just trying to get some sleep.”
“Do you really think that’s all there is to it?”
“Listen, mister, I don’t know who you are but I don’t need your help and if you don’t get out of here pretty soon I’m going to call the police.” Her voice trailed off pitifully at the end. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m here to save you from all this.”
Hands shaking, she put down the cup. I had never seen a face more vulnerable. She tried to hide it, but her expression was full of need. I felt an urge to protect her that, despite the fact she was a wreck, was pure sex. “I’m cold,” she said. “Can we go inside?”
We went inside. We sat in the living room, she on the sofa and I in an uncomfortable Spanish chair, and I told her things about her life that nobody should have known but her. The abortions. The suicide attempts. The Kennedy affairs. The way Sinatra treated her. More than that, the fear of loneliness, the fear of insanity, the fear of aging. I found myself warming to the role of rescuer. I really did want to hold her, for more than one reason. She was not able to keep up her hostility in the face of the knowledge that I was telling her the simple truth. Miller had written how grateful she was every time he’d saved her life, and it looked like that reaction was coming through for me now. She’d always liked being rescued, and the men who rescued her.
The clarifier might have had something to do with it, too. Finally she protested, “How do you know all this?”
“This is going to be the hardest part, Marilyn. I know because I’m from the future. If I had not shown up here, you would have died tonight. It’s recorded history.”
She laughed. “From the future?”
“Absolutely.”
“Right.”
“I’m not lying to you, Marilyn. If I didn’t care, would you be alive now?”
She pulled the blanket tighter around her. “What does the future want with me?”
“You’re the most famous actress of your era. Your death would be a great tragedy, and we want to prevent that.”
“What good does this do me? I’m still stuck in the same shit.”
“You don’t have to be.” She tried to look skeptical but hope was written in every tremble of her body. It was frightening. “I want you to come with me back to the future, Marilyn.”
She stared at me. “You must be crazy. I wouldn’t know anybody. No friends, no family.”
“You don’t have any family. Your mother is in an institution. And where were your friends tonight?”
She put her hand to her head, rubbed her forehead, a gesture so full of troubled intelligence that I had a sudden sense of her as a real person, a grown woman in a lot of trouble. “You don’t want to mess with me.” she said. “I’m not worth it. I’m nothing but trouble.”
“I can cure your trouble. In the future we have ways. No one here really cares for you, Marilyn, no one truly understands you. That dark pit of despair that opens up inside you—we can fill it. We can heal the wounds you’ve had since you were a little girl, make up for all the neglect you’ve suffered, keep you young forever. We have these powers. It’s my job to correct the mistakes of the past, for special people. You’re one of them. I have a team of caregivers waiting for you. a home, emotional support, understanding.”
“Yeah. Another institution. I can’t take it.” I came over, sat beside her, lowered my voice, looked her in the eyes. Time for the closer. “You know that poem—that Yeats poem?”
“What poem?”
“ ‘Never Give All the Heart.’ ” Research had made me memorize it. It was one of her favorites.
“Never give all the heart, for love. Will hardly seem worth thinking erf To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss For everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight . . .”
She stopped me. “What about it?” Her voice was edgy.
“Just that life doesn’t have to be like the poem, brief, and you don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to give all the heart, and lose.”
She sat there, wound in the blanket. Clearly I had touched something in her.
“Think about it,” I said. I went outside and smoked another Lucky. When I’d started working for DAA I’d considered this a glamour job. Exotic times, famous people. And I was good at it. A quick study, smart, adaptable. Sincere. I was so good that Gabrielle came to hate me, and left.
After a considerable while Marilyn came outside, the blanket over her head and shoulders like an Indian. “Well, kemosabe?” I asked.
Despite herself, she smiled. Although the light was dim, the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes were visible. “If I don’t like it, will you bring me back?”
“You’ll like it. But if you don’t I promise I’ll bring you back.”
“Okay. What do I have to do?”
“Just pack a few things to take with you—the most important ones.”
I waited while she threw some clothes into a suitcase. She took the Lincoln portrait off the wall and put it in on top. I bagged the blood filter and set up the portable unit in the living room.
“Maf!” she said.
“What?”
“My dog!” She looked crushed, as if she were about to collapse. “Who’ll take care of Maf?”
“Mrs. Murray will.”
“She hates him! I can’t trust her.” She was disintegrating. “I can’t go. This isn’t a good idea.”
“Where is Maf? We’ll take him.”
We went out to the guest house. The place stunk. The dog, sleeping on an old fur coat, launched himself at me, yapping, as soon as we opened the door. It was one of those inbred overgroomed toy poodles that you want to drop kick into the next universe. She picked him up, cooed over him, made me get a bag of dog food and his water dish. I gritted my teeth.
In the living room I moved the chair aside and made her stand in the center of the room while I laid the wire circle around us to outline the field. She was nervous. I held her hand, she held the dog. “Here we go, Marilyn.”
I touched the switch on the case. Marilyn’s living room receded from us in all directions, we fell like pebbles into a dark well, and from infinitely far away the transit stage at DAA rushed forward to surround us. The dog growled. Marilyn swayed, put a hand to her head. I held her arm to steady her.
From the control booth Scoville and a nurse came up to us. The nurse took Marilyn’s other side. “Marilyn, this is a nurse who’s going to help you get some rest. And this is Derek Scoville, who’s running this operation.”
We got her into the suite and the doctors shot her full of metabolic cleansers. I promised her I’d take care of Maf, then pawned the dog off on the staff. I held her hand, smiled reassuringly, sat with her until she went to sleep. Lying there she looked calm, confident. She liked being cared for; she was used to it. Now she had a whole new world waiting to take care of her. She thought.
It was all up to me.
I went to the prep room, showered, and switched to street clothes: an onyx Singapore silk shirt, cotton baggies, spex. The weather report said it was a bad UV day: I selected a broad-brimmed hat. I was inspecting my shoes, which looked ruined from the muck from Marilyn’s garden, when a summons from Scoville showed in the corner of my spex: meet them in the conference room. Levine and Sally House were there, and the doctor, and Jason Cryer from publicity. “So, what do you think?” Levine asked me.
“She’s in pretty rough shape. Physically she can probably take it. but emotionally she’s a wreck.”
“Tomorrow we’ll inject her with nanorepair devices,” the doctor said. “She’s probably had some degree of renal damage, if not worse.”
“Christ, have you seen her scars?” Levine said. “How many operations has she had? Did they just take a cleaver to them back then?”
“They took a cleaver first, then an airbrush,” Sally said.
“Well fix the scars,” said Cryer. Legend had it the most dangerous place in Hollywood was between Cryer and a news camera. “And Detlev here will be her protector, right Det? After all. you saved her life. You’re her friend. Her dad. Her lover, if it comes to that.”
“Right,” I said. I thought about Marilyn, asleep at last. What expectations did she have?
Scoville spoke for the first time. “I want us into production within three weeks. We’ve got eighty million already invested in this. Sally, you can crank publicity up to full gain. We’re going to succeed where all the others have failed. We’re going to put the first viable Marilyn on the wire. She may be a wreck, but she wants to be here. Not like Paramount’s version.”
“That’s where we’re smart,” Cryer said. “We take into account the psychological factors.”
I couldn’t stand much more. After the meeting I rode down to the lobby and checked out of the building. As I approached the front doors I could see a crowd of people had gathered outside in the bright sunlight. Faces slick with factor 400 sunscreen, they shouted and carried picket signs. “End Time Exploitation.”
“Information, not People.”
“Hands off the Past.”
Not one gram of evidence existed that a change in a past moment-universe had ever affected our own time. They were as separate as two sides of a coin. Of course it was true that once you burned a particular universe you could never go back. But with an eternity of moment-universes to exploit, who cared?
The chronological protection fanatics would be better off taking care of the historicals who were coming to litter up the present, the ones who couldn’t adjust, or outlasted their momentary celebrity, or turned out not to be as interesting to the present as their sponsors had imagined. A lot of money had been squandered on bad risks. Who really wanted to listen to new compositions by Gershwin? How was Shakespeare even going to understand the twenty-first century, let alone write VR scripts that anybody would want to experience?
I sneaked out the side door and caught the metro down at the corner. Rode the train through Hollywood and up to my arcology.
In the newsstand I uploaded the latest trades into my spex, then stopped into the men’s room to get my shoes polished. While the valet worked I smoked the last of my Luckies and checked the news. Jesus, still hotter than a pistol, was the lead on Variety. He smiled, new teeth, clean shaven, homely little Jew, but even through the holo he projected a lethal charisma. That one was making Universal rich. Who would have thought that a religious mystic with an Aramaic accent would-become such a talk-show shark, his virtual image the number one teleromantics dream date? “Jesus’ Laying on of Hands is the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had over fiberoptic VR,” gushed worldwide recording megastar Daphne Overdone.
On Hollywood Grapevine, gossip maven Hedley O’Connor reported Elisenbrunnen GMBH, which owned DAA, was unhappy with third-quarter earnings. If Scoville went down, the new boss would pull the plug on all his projects. My contractual responsibilities would then, as they say, be at an end.
“What a mess you made of these shoes, Herr Gruber,” the valet muttered in German. I switched off my spex and watched him finish. The arco hired a lot of indigents. It was cheap, and good PR, but the valet was my personal reclamation project. His unruly head of hair danced as he buffed my shoes to a high luster. He looked up at me. “How is that?”
“Looks fine.” I fished out a twenty-dollar piece. He watched me with his watery, sad, intelligent eyes. His brown hair was going gray.
“I see you got a mustache, like mine,” he said.
“Only for work. For a while I need to look like you, Albert.”
I gave him the twenty and went up to my room.
TIME TRAVELERS NEVER DIE
Jack McDevitt
Thursday, November 24. Shortly before noon.
WE BURIED HIM ON A COLD, GRAY MORNING, THREATENING SNOW. The mourners were few, easily constraining their grief for a man who had traditionally kept his acquaintances at a distance. I watched the preacher, white-haired, feeble, himself near the end, and I wondered what he was thinking as the wind rattled the pages of his prayer book.
Ashes to ashes—
I stood with hands thrust into my coat pockets, near tears. Look: I’m not ashamed to admit it. Shel was odd, vindictive, unpredictable, selfish. He didn’t have a lot of friends. Didn’t deserve a lot of friends. But I loved him. I’ve never known anyone like him.
—In sure and certain hope—
I wasn’t all that confident about the Resurrection, but I knew that Adrian Shelborne would indeed walk the earth again. Even if only briefly. I knew, for example, that he and I would stand on an Arizona hilltop on a fresh spring morning late in the twenty-first century, and watch silver vehicles rise into the sky on the first leg of the voyage to Centaurus. And we would be present at the assassination of Elaine Culpepper, a name unknown now, but which would in time be inextricably linked with the collapse of the North American Republic. Time travelers never really die, he was fond of saying. We’ve been too far downstream. You and I will live for a very long time.
The preacher finished, closed his book, and raised his hand to bless the polished orchid-colored coffin. The wind blew, and the air was heavy with the approaching storm. The mourners, anxious to be away, bent their heads and walked past, laying lilies on the ‘ coffin. When it was done, they lingered briefly, murmuring to each other. Helen Suchenko stood off to one side, looking lost. Lover with no formal standing. Known to the family but not particularly liked, mostly because they disapproved of Shel himself. She dabbed jerkily at her eyes and kept her gaze riveted on the gray stone which carried his name and dates.
She was fair-haired, with eyes the color of sea water, and a quiet, introspective manner that might easily have misled those who did not know her well.
“I can’t believe it,” she said.
I had introduced him to Helen, fool that I am. She and I had been members of the Devil’s Disciples, a group of George Bernard Shaw devotees. She was an MD, just out of medical school when she first showed up for a field trip to see Arms and the Man. It was love at first sight, but I was slow to show my feelings. And while I was debating how best to make my approach, Shel walked off with her. He even asked whether I was interested, and I, sensing I had already lost, salvaged my pride and told him of course not. After that it was over.
He never knew. He used to talk about her a lot when we were upstream. How he was going to share the great secret with her, and take her to Victorian London. Or St. Petersburg before the first war. But it never happened. It was always something he was going to do later.
She was trembling. He really was gone. And I now had a clear field with her. That indecent thought kept surfacing. I was reasonably sure she had always been drawn to me, too, just as she was to Shel, and I suspected that I might have carried the day with her had I pressed my case. But honor was mixed up in it somewhere, and I’d kept my distance.
Her cheeks were wet.
“I’ll miss him too,” I said.
“I loved him, Dave.”
“I know.”
He had died when his townhouse burned down almost two weeks before. He’d been asleep upstairs and had never got out of bed. The explanation seemed to be that the fire had sucked the oxygen out of the house and suffocated him before he ever realized what was happening. Okay, I didn’t believe it either, but that was what we were hearing.
“It’ll be all right,” I said.
She tried to laugh, but the sound had an edge to it. “Our last conversation was so goofy. I wish I’d known—” Tears leaked out of her eyes. She stopped, tried to catch her breath. “I would have liked,” she said, when she’d regained a degree of control, “to have been able to say goodbye.”
“I know.” I began to guide her toward my Porsche. “Why don’t you let me take you home?”
“Thank you,” she said, backing off. “I’ll be okay.” Her car was parked near a stone angel.
Edmond Halverson, head of the art department at the university, drew abreast of us, nodded to me, tipped his hat to her, and whispered his regrets. We mumbled something and he walked on.
She swallowed, and smiled. “When you get a chance, Dave, give me a call.”
I watched her get into her car and drive away. She had known so much about Adrian Shelborne. And so little.
He had traveled in time, and of all persons now alive, only I knew. He had brought me in, he’d said, because he needed my language skills. But I believe it was more than that. He wanted someone to share the victory with, someone to help him celebrate. Over the years, he’d mastered classical Greek, and Castilian, and Renaissance Italian. And he’d gone on, acquiring enough Latin, Russian, French, and German to get by on his own. But we continued to travel together. And it became the hardest thing in my life to refrain from telling people I had once talked aerodynamics with Leonardo.
