Time Travel Omnibus, page 792
When the supplies had been unloaded and the camp had settled down for a round or two of good stiff drinks, Brinkman sought out Leveritt and asked her to walk with him along the bluff. They had scarcely put the camp out of earshot when he heaved a great sigh, his ebullient humor fell away from him like a cloak, and he suddenly looked tired and pale under his tan and more solemn than she could recall having seen him.
“I really came all the way up here,” he said, “to tell you this personally. Two days ago, they dug something out of the marsh down by the main camp. It was one of the—part of one of the gurneys they use in the jump station.”
“Ed Morris,” Leveritt said bleakly. She had not said the name aloud since her conversation with Michael Diehl. Now, as though invoked by her speaking it, a humid wind swept up the valley, bearing a faint fetid breath of the estuary.
Brinkman said, “A Navy security officer named Hales told me about it.”
“More surprises. I’d’ve thought he’d be swearing everyone to secrecy.”
“It was too late for that. Everybody in camp knew it by the time he heard about it. Everybody.”
“What about Ed Morris himself?”
“They’re digging around. They haven’t found anything else yet, and God knows if they will. The gurney’s all twisted up like a pretzel, and one end’s melted. God knows what that implies—besides the obvious, terrific heat. The thing was buried in a mud bank. Impacted. A botanist tripped over an exposed part.”
“How long had it been there?”
Brinkman shook his head. “They’re still working on that, but even the most conservative guess puts it before the manned phase of the expedition. As to how it got there—there has to be an inquest. You have to be there for it.”
Leveritt groaned. “I don’t have anything to tell.”
“So Hales said. But people higher up’re calling the shots. Everything’s got to be official, and you’ve got to be part of it.”
“I cannot get away from this thing!” Leveritt sat down on a knob of rock and angrily kicked at the ground. “Not from Hales and the Navy, and, most of all, not from Ed Morris. I thought I’d done it, finally worked it out by myself, but—”
“I’m sorry, Bonnie. You have to go back with me in the morning. I can find work for you to do until this thing’s over.”
“Making coffee?” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “I want to be here, Rob.”
“I’ve never known you not to be willing to do what you had to do so you could do what you want to do. While you’re there—the San Diego bunch has talked about holding a memorial service. I kind of gather none of them knew Morris all that well, or liked him, or something. But he is the expedition’s first casualty. Since you were almost the last person to see him, perhaps you could—”
Leveritt shook her head emphatically. “No.”
“Bonnie, the man is dead.”
“I couldn’t eulogize him if my life depended on it. What I know about him wouldn’t fill half a dozen sentences. He talked too fast and dressed like Jungle Jim. He said he liked mountain climbing and sky diving. And I’m very sorry about what happened to him, but it wasn’t my fault.”
“Who said it was your fault?” Brinkman knelt beside her and picked at his cuticle. “There has to be one meaningful thing you could say about him.”
Leveritt sighed. She looked down at the supply boat and imagined herself on it again, sitting, as before, under the white canopy with Brinkman, drinking coffee from a thermos bottle, and glimpsing the pier and the cluster of tents and Quonset huts through the fog. She saw it all as though it were a movie being shown in reverse. She would have to go back and back and back, until she reached a point before Ed Morris had taken over her life, and start anew. This time, she told herself, I will make things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. I will be the hero of my own story.
She said, “When he found out how nervous I was, he gave me a pep talk. And just before I went through the hole, he gave me a wink of encouragement.”
“Well, then, if nothing else, you owe him for that wink.” Brinkman could not have spoken more softly and been heard.
Leveritt closed her eyes and thought of the scene in the jump station, the purposeful technicians, Ed Morris’s face framed by the bars of the railing. She looked helplessly at Brinkman, who said, “What?”
The humid wind moved up the valley again, and again she smelled the estuary’s attenuated fetor of death and of life coming out of death. She exhaled harshly and said, “Nothing.” She had meant to say that she could not recall the color of Ed Morris’s eyes. “Never mind. I’ll think of something.” The wind passed across the rocky plain, toward the ancient crumbled hills and beyond.
EMPTY RING
Francine Pelletier
Gertrude died yesterday and I weep
With the empty ring of loneliness
Émile Nelligan, “La Sorella dell’amore”
Friday, June 9, 2024
I arrived this morning, a little bewildered among the travellers in the brand-new terminal; construction had barely begun the last time I came through, but it already looks old, worn by the throng, by the herd endlessly thronging there. I was afraid of crowds. After all, I’m no longer young enough to push my way through the panhandlers, canvassers, beggars and other assorted moochers. I was prepared for it though. I had gone to the exchange counter before leaving Dorval, and I had my pockets full of small change. I was ringing like a bell. The beggars watched me like a dog when the butcher takes away a bone. Because I had no reason to be afraid—I was expected, a tall thin guy was holding in his blasé hand a white cardboard sign with my name written in red ink. Vanier must have thought of everything. He was the one who asked me to start this journal, in order, he said, to “reawaken” my emotions. Actually, I haven’t spoken with him since our conversation in New York, last year, but he wrote to me, of course, and his assistant had left a long list of recommendations for me, in the car, which the tall thin man handed to me over the back of the front seat.
Reawaken my emotions. Forty-one years. Such a long time, and I’m so tired tonight. I’m already regretting coming. Stupid. I took a walk around the city, trying to rid myself of some of the jet-lag. To think that I wrote somewhere that the Montreal-Paris trip would one day be made by suborbital shuttle, as fast as a trip across town. Science fiction writers should never set their plots in the near future, especially a future they’re likely to know in their lifetimes. Because the future always catches up with us, and gives us a good boot in the rear. Anyway, I won’t complain too much. It could have been much worse. I could have been stuck more than three hours on the runway, and that bucket of bolts they call an airbus could have never taken off at all.
Where was I? If someone reads this damn journal, they’ll think I’m going senile—at sixty-five!—or that I have more to say and don’t want to admit it.
Walking in Paris, I was saying. I don’t think I realized what a state the city was in. For all the gimmicks you see on Channel 2000, TV is still TV: a small screen between us and reality. After the collapse of the Saint-Jacques Tower, I thought to myself that the rain does more damage than they like to admit, that the erosion of time is sometimes less insidious, more brutal. But it was when I put my hand on the edge of the Saint-Michel Fountain that I suddenly felt old. It wasn’t that the scenery was different. There were still gangs of kids—not quite so many shaved heads, a few more masks than in ’14—the clothes all looked like they were from second-hand stores, even mine. Not many were jacked in—anyway, they don’t need implants. Those kids always listen to music (music!) full blast. But the stone . . . The stone doesn’t know how to lie with facelifts or gaudy make-up. The stone crumbled under my hand, fell into dust, ashes of a mineral world that we have succeeded in killing, as if the slow erosion of the animal world was not enough for us.
(Not bad that. Use this passage in a story?)
Hmm. Vanier won’t be happy. He wanted to prepare me to face emotions.
Saturday, June 10, 2024
They get their revenge.
I can’t get to sleep. Of course, as soon as the screen goes black, they assault me like an army of ravenous ghouls. The harsh light hurts my eyes, but I can no longer “keep quiet” (no, I’m not using voice, as stupid as that might seem for someone who has yearned so much for them to develop that confounded gadget. Need privacy, silence.)
Anger. That’s what comes back fastest, anger. Diluted a bit, all the same, but the emotion has remained familiar, close to the heart.
Slip into the hospital where the other one is supposed to be (she survived, paralysed, handicapped, fragile but alive). Slip into her room, I would reach towards her neck and break her life in my hands, right where she broke mine, I’d smash her vertebrae—I don’t know how, my hands would find the movement, the pressure, the effort. Yes, but she wouldn’t know who, or why.
So I wouldn’t kill her. I’d get a position as a nurse’s aide or a housekeeper, I’d get myself hired by her family to take care of her, like in a murder mystery, I would become indispensable. She would trust me completely, would be totally dependent on me. Then, one day when she’s told me how much she appreciates me, or how much she cares for me, I would reveal all, I would pelt her with hate.
I would throw in her face everything her suicide had cost me, when she demolished my life taking away her own, because she wanted to put on a show, because she didn’t care if she took someone with her, my twin sister, half my soul, sacrificed to her exhibitionism. I’d ask if she knows what it is to be two, then only be one, what it’s like to tell a mother that her daughter had been killed, what it’s like for a traveller to go home alone, when two set out, to just go home, you feel like screaming, Mama, I didn’t mean to do it, Mama. Vero is dead, Mama, I didn’t mean to, it wasn’t my fault, I’m coming home without her. I’d ask her, that slut, if she knew how you can be the survivor, when you’ve endured everything, the crushed cadaver, the numbness, the disbelief, the brutality of the shock, the morbid curiosity of the crowd, and then that night, the first night, all alone in your hotel room, when the journalists telephone from Quebec to find out how you’re feeling, when you’ve gone through all that, how do you face the love of others, their love for Vero, for me, how can you live with that ridiculous guilt, and how do you look yourself in the mirror and justify still being alive?
I would ask her, that scum, if she knew that by throwing herself from that spire that she was throwing my life with her, forty-nine metres below, my disjointed life, not to mention love—no longer loving anyone, and yet loving with all your being, with all the longing of your twenty-four years, loving desperately and finding only loneliness.
I would ask her, that bitch, if she knew how you can return to daily life, how not to be totally consumed by your career, because that’s all that’s left after the ashes are buried, mask your grief, with ink and paper, with books and trophies, and have no desire other than climbing the podium to receive the reward, no desire other than to beg: please, please, I want no more of your applause, give me back my sister, give me back my life.
I would ask her, that pathetic wreck, if she knew that for years Vero would come home at night, back from her infinite voyage, not knowing that she was dead, astonished to find her room occupied by another, her drawers empty, her wardrobe scattered, wondering if her employer would take her back, and me, biting my lip, not knowing how to make her understand that she was dead, wondering how not to lose her again, not to let her vanish in a puff of smoke, then, the dream gone, regret, missing the image, even though false.
I would ask her, that nobody, if she knew that by killing herself she was killing me too.
Sunday, June 11, 2024
I’m back from a “weekend in the country” (that’s what I said at the hotel desk), a Vanier-style weekend, of course. I found the old guy as I had known him in New York, the one who looked like a psychoanalyst, with whom you let yourself go, nice as could be, without really being aware of it. Yes, in his suburban bunker, I surprised myself by referring to our conversation in New York, in Thompson’s suite, quietly, in the wee hours of the morning, with the butler snoring in the comer. Dawn was breaking when I left the hotel, but I hadn’t noticed the time passing.
Time! Our main subject of conversation. I don’t know how the topic came up—well I think I do. We had talked about SF literature, books on the theme of going back in time. This was related to the activities of the day. During the convention, one of the guest scientists had stated the time travel was absolutely impossible. I don’t know why Vanier didn’t respond during that panel (he wasn’t there by invitation, of course). I suppose he wanted to be discreet. That night, in the almost-deserted suite, we discussed the current theories, then the conversation drifted. Vanier confided in me that he belonged to the TRI, the Time Research Institute, that he was completing the development of material for experiments with the theory of his research group. According to him, the mind, sometimes followed by the body, can travel in time by following a very specific line in the temporal matrix, the emotional line. I told him of my feelings of déjà vu and the flash that I’d had once of myself old, my hands on my knees, my clothes in dark colours, the very clear sensation of the seat under my buttocks. Instead of laughing at me, he took me very seriously. He was looking for experiment subjects, rich preferably, as a way of financing the project, to kill two birds with one stone. I had very quickly calculated what I had, but it wasn’t enough, of course, not one third of what he wanted to extract from his guinea pigs.
I don’t know why I told him my old fantasy. I revealed everything to him: my bitterness with owing my career to the death of someone I loved, the dream of going back, of changing history, even if it meant sacrificing all the successes that constituted my universe. I would sacrifice all the success I’d known in exchange for my sister’s life. Vanier’s sweet smile, his soft voice explaining to me that changing an event in the past was equivalent to throwing a pebble in a pond, a tiny little pebble in a very big pond, or conversely, according to the importance of the event. Like the waves created by a pebble in water, the effects of the change would spread out slowly from the “centre” of the event towards of the outer edges, the extremities of the temporal matrix, gradually dissipating. Which was the same thing as saying, according to him, that my current situation would likely not be much different even if I succeeded in preventing Vero’s death. I didn’t agree. That death was my motivation for throwing myself totally into my work, and the resulting emotions had fuelled me for forty years. How could my career be at the same point? Vanier believed that, in any case, I would have found such a motivation for writing elsewhere, in another event, another turning point in my life, so that the long-term result, my success and public recognition, would end up being the same. We discussed the ripple effect for hours.
The next afternoon, when I ran into Vanier in the lobby, he’d changed. He asked me, dryly, “Would you really do it?”
I didn’t understand, of course. He had to explain. Would I really do it, would I return to the past to change it? In short, was I ready to be his guinea pig? His coldness surprised me, I think I even stuttered. Why not? But I didn’t think he was serious.
Our correspondence after that took on an official tone, which comforted me by giving me the impression that I’d dreamed the first Vanier, the one with the compassionate ear.
Today I found him again.
When I arrived at the bunker for the first tests, Saturday, I only saw Lanoix, his assistant, who introduced me to the centre’s technicians and researchers, whose names I quickly forgot. I was assigned a room for the duration of the experiment, a monk’s cell (or nun’s in my case), with a narrow bed, a metal table, and a chair whose main function seemed to be making you want to stay standing. No windows, of course, even though it was not in the bunker but in the annex, a large building that looked like a clinic. The “bunker” itself was a huge concrete hangar, connected to a nearby nuclear power plant. That contraption took an insane amount of energy. Under this shell of concrete there was the protective structure where the forcefield formed when an experiment was under way. According to Lanoix, this was enough to protect the measurement instruments from the “ripple effect.” The bunk was the objective core that would remain unchanged when time changed. Others, at the TRI, claimed that that was bullshit, that Vanier would do better to save the energy eaten up by his direct hook-up to the power plant, because nothing could stop the wave of change when it “vibrated” the temporal matrix (with their metaphors, they always made me think of a big black spider, very hairy, crawling along a timeline in absolute darkness, an Arachne come out of her lair, fat and bloated, with big white phosphorescent eyes).
They put me through tests for resistance to hypnosis, tests with the encephalogram and I don’t know what else. Fit for duty was the diagnosis. Finally, I was able to meet the master in person, that afternoon, for a brief conversation over a cup of tea. He wanted to make certain I was still favourably disposed. I reconfirmed my desire to attempt the experiment.
And that was it. He sent me here, because the bunker was not available before Thursday, and because he thinks it wouldn’t do me any harm to be alone in my hotel room so I could take myself back forty-one years. I promised him I would meditate a long time. Prepare myself.
Haven’t I had enough already—forty-one years of preparation?
Monday, June 12, 2024
What a splendid evening! Vanier won’t be happy, of course, but I don’t care. It’s not every day that you’re received by the Franco-Quebec Bureau of the French Language, with ambassadors, the Minister of Culture and the whole kit and caboodle, as they say. I know, I promised to immerse myself in meditation. But to what end? I’d still be the same naive Francine made fun of by her friends, who gets involved in things without thinking, who wastes her money, her time and her energy in enterprises as crazy as they are useless. Vanier and his colleagues are scientific Don Quixotes and I’m grist for their mill.
