Time Travel Omnibus, page 839
“Recently, I began to have a recurring dream. It always starts the same way. I walk through my kitchen to the back stairwell and go down, not to my own basement, but to another house entirely, where I walk past empty bedrooms, then a kitchen with dishes piled in the sink and a greasy patina to the stove, coming at last to a parlor containing comfortable, out-of-style furniture. There are large windows on two of the walls and, in the corner, a front door. The whole of it has such an air of dust and neglect and familiarity and long abandonment that I often find myself reduced inexplicably to tears when I awake.”
“It was your subconscious,” said Doc, “playing with that unfinished basement.”
FitzHugh gave a brief shake of the head. “I thought that, too; at first. Only . . . Well, the first few dreams, that was all. Just a silent walk through an empty house accompanied by a feeling of loss, as if I had had these disused rooms all along, but had forgotten about them. Once, I reached the front door before waking up, and stepped outside. An ordinary-looking neighborhood, but no place I’ve ever seen. The house sat on a slight rise on a corner lot. Not much traffic. If I had to guess, I would say a residential neighborhood in a medium-big city, but somewhere off the major thoroughfares. I travel a great deal, going to conferences and such, but I have never identified that city.”
He looked deeply into his ale while the rest of us waited. “The dream had a curious air to it. It felt like a memory more than a dream. Maybe it was the dirty dishes in the sink, or the out-of-date furniture in the parlor.” Another quirky smile. “If a dream-world, why so drab and ordinary a one?”
I left the group to answer an urgent call at the front end of the bar, where a shortage of brew threatened several collegians with imminent dehydration. When I returned to the discussion, FitzHugh was answering some question of Doc Mooney’s.
“. . . so the more I thought about it and puzzled over it, the more real it grew in my mind. I remembered things I never actually saw in the dream. It seemed to me that the sink ought to have separate hot and cold water faucets. And that upstairs there would be an office and a sewing room and another bedroom. So you see, the details had the texture of memory. How could I remember those things unless they were real?”
Doc pulled the squint-eye like he always does. I think he still suspected some elaborate joke at his expense. “Imagination can be as detailed as memory. Your dream left blanks and you began to fill them in.”
FitzHugh nodded. “That’s an answer I yearn for. If only I could embrace it.”
“What happened next?” Himself prompted. “There must be more to it than you’ve told to account for such a melancholy.”
The physicist drew a deep breath. “One evening, reading at home, I became acutely aware of the silence. Now I am a man that likes his solitude and his peace and quiet; but just for a moment the silence seemed wrong, and I wondered, What’s he up to?”
“Who?” asked Danny. “What was who up to?”
FitzHugh shook his head. “I didn’t know, then. But I glanced at the ceiling as I wondered, even though there is nothing up there but a crawlspace and storage. And then I heard a woman’s voice.”
“A woman, was it?” said Himself. “And saying what?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t make out the words, only the tone of voice. I knew that I had been addressed, and inexplicably my heart both soared and sank. I can’t explain it any other way. It was as if I had been yearning for that voice and dreading it, all at once.
“Well,” he continued, “associative memory means that one recovered memory can lead to others; and having found a fragment of one hologram, other fragments began to surface in my mind. I had only to close my eyes and imagine the phantom house. With each return, it became more real, and the conviction grew that I had lived there at one time, and not alone. Voices—there were two of them—grew more distinct. Often angry, but not always. Once, I’m embarrassed to say, whispering a sexual invitation. And then, one day, I saw her.”
He lifted his mug to his lips, but it hovered there without him drinking as he gazed into the dark, reflective surface. “I was puttering in the parlor, sanding down some woodwork in order to stain it. It was the sort of mechanical task that allows the mind to wander. And so mine did, until it seemed to me that I was in the kitchen of my ‘secret house,’ drying dishes with a towel. A tall, straw-haired woman was standing beside me washing them in the sink. She had the nagging near-familiarity of a once-met stranger. Perhaps I had seen her at a party in college and I never got up the nerve to walk over and introduce myself—only maybe, once, I did. I knew she was angry because she would shove the dishes into my hands in that silent-aggressive way that women sometimes use. She bore the harried look of someone once very beautiful but for whom beauty had lately become a chore. No makeup. Hair cropped in the simplest, most ‘practical’ style. Perhaps she blamed the me-that-was. Later, I remembered cutting remarks. She could have been this, or she could have married that. I don’t know why she kept slipping such hurts into our conversation . . .” He smiled ruefully. “But this first time, she turned to me and said very distinctly, ‘You have no ambition.’
“I was so startled that I snapped out of my daydream, and there I was, back in my own parlor.” He grimaced, ran a finger up and down the condensate on the outside of his glass. “Alone.”
“It’s only natural,” said Doc Mooney, “that a man living alone might grow wistful and imagine a married life he never had.”
FitzHugh laughed without humor. “Then why imagine such an unpleasant one?”
“Because you need to feel that you made the right choice.”
“You’re a psychiatrist, then, and not a pathologist?” The tones were sarcastic and Doc flushed red. FitzHugh fell into a brown study, and fixed his eyes on the far wall. The rest of us, supposing the story had come to an unsatisfying conclusion, went about our own affairs: O’Daugherty and myself to filling glasses and the others to emptying them, which division of labor made for an efficient process. Once or twice, I glanced at FitzHugh, noted his unfocused eyes, and wondered on what inner landscape he gazed. There were tears in the rims of his eyes. When he lifted his glass to me and signalled, I gave Himself a look and he gave me the high sign, so I switched FitzHugh’s drink to a non-alcoholic beer. I don’t think the man ever noticed.
“I had a son,” he told me when I handed him the freshened glass. No one spoke. Doc, from wounded pride; Danny, because of a firm headshake I gave him.
“A son, was it?” said Himself. “Sure, that’s a comfort to a man.”
FitzHugh made a face. “Lenny was anything but a comfort. Sullen, secretive. Seldom home, even for meals. Lisa blamed me for that, too.”
“He was a teenager, then.”
FitzHugh started and a rueful smile curled his lips. “Yes. He was. Is that normal behavior for that age? For the sake of other parents, I hope not. I’ve remembered flashes of him mouthing off, and once or twice I’ve even heard echoes of the foul words he used. I’ve another memory of a policeman standing in the front door holding Lenny by the arm and lecturing me.” He sighed. “Sometimes I wished we had never met, Lisa and I; and that I had married someone else and had different children; that, well . . . that everything had turned out better than it had.”
“Then it was good fortune,” I said, “that some bubble in the foam erased it.”
FitzHugh was a big man; not muscular exactly, but not frail-looking, either. Yet, he gave me a desolate look and laid his head on his arms and began to weep. O’Daugherty and myself traded glances and Wilson Cartwright said, “I know where he lives. I’ll drive him home.” FitzHugh raised his head.
“Sometimes, I remember other things. Huddled over a kitchen table with Lisa, planning a future full of hope. A young boy bursting with laughter showing me a horse he had modeled out of clay. A camping trip in the Appalachians. Holding hands in a movie theater. Fleeting moments of simple pleasures. The joy had all leaked out, but once upon a time . . . Once upon a time, there had been joy.”
A wretched tale, for who among us has not known friend or family in a like situation? Sure, the wine may turn to vinegar in the bottle. And yet, who can forget how sweet it once tasted?
Himself nodded as he wiped a glass clean. “Are you ready to tell us now?”
FitzHugh grunted, as if struck. His eyes darted about our little group and found me. “It was no chance bubble,” he said, shaking his head sadly.
That startled me. “Then, what—?”
“I don’t know what sort of research my dream-self was doing. I recall enough tantalizing bits to realize it was down a different avenue than I’ve explored. But I do remember one especially vivid dream. I had built a chronon projector.”
Doc Mooney snorted, but Himself only nodded, as if he had expected it. Maura Lafferty wrinkled up her forehead and asked, “What’s a chronon projector?”
Frustration laced the physicist’s voice. “I’m not sure. A device to excite time quanta, I think. Into the past, of course. There’s nothing but formlessness future-ward of the bow wave. Perhaps I had some notion of sending messages to warn of tornados or disasters. I don’t know. The projector was only a prototype, capable only of emitting a single chronon to a single locus. Enough to create a ripple in the pond; not enough to encode a message.” He upended his mug and drained it and set it down hard on the bar top. “Call it a ‘cue stick,’ if you wish. Something to send a billiard ball into the packed chronons of yesterday and start random ricochets of cause and effect.
“Yesterday, I had no classes to teach, so I stayed home to paint my dining room. I was thinking about mutable time; and I had my hand raised, so.” And he held his right hand just before his face. “There must have been some congruence of my train of thought and my posture, because in that instant I was standing in a lab before some great machine and my hand was gripping a switch, and I remember . . . Lisa and I had had an argument over Lenny, and I remember . . . I remember thinking that if I projected the chronon to the locus when Lisa and I met—to that time and place—I could create a ripple in the Dirac Sea, a disturbance in the probabilities and . . . It would all never have happened. None of it. The heartache, the bitching, the sullen anger—” He fell silent.
Himself prompted him. “And . . .?”
“And I awoke in a strange house, silent and alone.” He looked a long way off, seeing what, I do not know. Himself laid a hand on his arm.
“Wisht. What you had, you lost well before you threw the switch.”
FitzHugh grabbed O’Daugherty’s hand and held it tight. “But, don’t you see? I lost all the hope, too. The memories of all the joy that went before; of a bright-eyed five-year-old whose smile could light the room. Of the possibility that Lisa and I might have worked it through.” He and O’Daugherty exchanged a long, mutual look. “I owed her that, didn’t I? I owed it to her to try to solve our problems and not abolish them as things that never were.”
“Sure,” said Himself, “the bad comes mingled with the good; and if you excise the first, you lose the other as well.”
“There’s one thing I hold on to,” FitzHugh said.
“And what’s that?”
“That Lisa—whoever she is, from whichever college mixer or classroom where we never met—that in this revision, she’s had a better life than the one I gave her. I hold that hope tight as a shield against my crime.”
“Crime?” said Danny. “What crime was that?”
FitzHugh wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. “Lenny. He was never born. He’ll never have a chance to grow out of his rebellion and become a better person. Lisa is out there somewhere. Lisa has . . . possibilities. But there is no Lenny. There never was that bright-eyed five-year-old. There never will be. When I disturbed the time-stream, I wiped him out. I obliterated his life: all the hopes and fears and hates and joys . . . All the possibilities that were him. How is that so different from murder?”
The silence grew long.
Then FitzHugh pushed himself away from the bar and stood a little uneasily. Alarmed, Professor Cartwright took him by the elbow to steady him. FitzHugh looked at the rest of us. “But it all never happened, right? There oughtn’t be any guilt over something that never happened.”
It was Danny who spoke—hesitantly, and with more kindness than I had looked for. “Could you not build another of those chronon projectors and aim it back and correct what you did . . .?” But he trailed off at the end, as if he already suspected what the answer must be.
FitzHugh turned haunted eyes on him. “No. History is contingent. There’s no chance that a random disturbance to the revision would recreate the original. You may break the pack on a pool table with a well-aimed shot. You cannot bring the balls back together with another.” Cartwright guided him to the door, and the rest of us watched in silence.
“The poor man,” said Maura, when he had gone.
O’Daugherty rapped hard on the maple counter top, as if testing its solidity. “So fragile,” he said, almost to himself. “Who knows if another time wave might be roaring down on us even now, a vast tsunami to wash all of us away?”
The O Neil returned from the back room with a glower on his face. “Ireland will get the Six Counties back before I get that pool table,” he said. “Let’s go on back to the house, Mickey.”
“I’ll catch you later,” I told him. “It’s a busy night and Himself can use the help as much as I can use the cash.”
The O Neil shook his head. “O’Daugherty, you need to take on a partner, and that’s a fact.”
Himself shrugged and served him a parting glass of black Guinness. “Someday, maybe,” he said. Me, I glanced over at the photograph on the wall, where O’Daugherty stood, arms crossed and legs akimbo, before his newly opened pub; and it seemed to me, though I don’t know why, that the picture was all out of kilter, as if something large were missing.
IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?
Kim Newman
“Is there a presence?” asked Irene.
The parlour was darker and chillier than it had been moments ago. At the bottoms of the heavy curtains, tassels stirred like the fronds of a deep-sea plant. Irene Dobson—Madame Irena, to her sitters—was alert to tiny changes in a room that might preface the arrival of a visitor from beyond the veil. The fizzing and dimming of still-untrusted electric lamps, so much less impressive than the shrinking and bluing of gaslight flames she remembered from her earliest seances. A clamminess in the draught, as foglike cold rose from the carpeted floor. The minute crackle of static electricity, making hair lift and pores prickle. The tart taste of pennies in her mouth.
“Is there a traveller from afar?” she asked, opening her inner eye.
The planchette twitched. Miss Walter-David’s fingers withdrew in a flinch; she had felt the definite movement. Irene glanced at the no-longer-young woman in the chair beside hers, shrinking away for the moment. The fear-light in the sitter’s eyes was the beginning of true belief. To Irene, it was like a tug on a fishing line, the satisfying twinge of the hook going in. This was a familiar stage on the typical sitter’s journey from scepticism to fanaticism. This woman was wealthy; soon, Irene would taste not copper but silver, eventually gold.
Wordlessly, she encouraged Miss Walter-David to place her fingertips on the planchette again, to restore balance. Open on the round table before them was a thin sheet of wood, hinged like an oversized chessboard. Upon the board’s smoothly papered and polished surface was a circle, the letters of the alphabet picked out in curlicue. Corners were marked for YES—“oui”, “ja”—and NO. The planchette, a pointer on marble castors, was a triangular arrowhead-shape. Irene and Miss Walter-David lightly touched fingers to the lower points of the planchette, and the tip quivered.
“Is there anybody there?” Miss Walter-David asked.
This sitter was bereft of a fiancé, an officer who had come through the trenches but succumbed to influenza upon return to civilian life. Miss Walter-David was searching for balm to soothe her sense of hideous unfairness, and had come at last to Madame Irena’s parlour.
“Is there—”
The planchette moved, sharply. Miss Walter-David hissed in surprise. Irene felt the presence, stronger than usual, and knew it could be tamed. She was no fraud, relying on conjuring tricks, but her understanding of the world beyond the veil was very different than that which she wished her sitters to have. All spirits could be made to do what she wished them to do. If they thought themselves grown beyond hurt, they were sorely in error. The planchette, genuinely independent of the light touches of medium and sitter, stabbed towards a corner of the board, but stopped surprisingly short.
Y
Not YES, but the Y of the circular alphabet. The spirits often used initials to express themselves, but Madame had never encountered one who neglected the convenience of the YES and NO corners. She did not let Miss Walter-David see her surprise.
“Have you a name?”
Y again. Not YES. Was Y the beginning of a name: Youngman, Yoko-hama, Ysrael?
“What is it?” she was almost impatient.
The planchette began a circular movement, darting at letters, using the lower tips of the planchette as well as the pointer. That also was unusual, and took an instant or two to digest.
M S T R M N D
“Msstrrmnnd,” said Miss Walter-David.
Irene understood. “Have you a message for anyone here, Master Mind?”
Y
“For whom?”
U
“For Ursula?” Miss Walter-David’s christian name was Ursula.
N U
“U?”
“You,” said Miss Walter-David. “You.”
This was not a development Irene liked a bit.
There were two prospects in his Chat Room. Women, or at least they said they were. Boyd didn’t necessarily believe them. Some users thought they were clever.
