Time Travel Omnibus, page 938
When her mother had been a child, this now-barren patch of land had been an oasis of farmland, where a single tiny plot could keep three generations from starvation. But no more. The last remnants of the last planting were brown and shriveled. Survival now depended almost entirely on what the occasional relief agency plane dropped from the sky. Her parents and a small band of others had tried to leave, to search for land that would still accept seed, but they had been turned back from whatever oases they found by men with guns, men who laughed and snarled, who raped and killed, but who would not share even the driest morsel.
And now . . .
The intervals between food drops, irregular from the start, were getting longer. The drops that were made were ever more likely to be snatched up by brigands from one or the other of the renegade army forts still in existence, or by one of the gangs that roamed the drought-stricken countryside.
She couldn’t remember the last time her stomach had been full, the last time she had laughed or even smiled, the last time she hadn’t been resigned to the possibility that her life would be ended before the day was out.
She had long been tired of fighting the inevitable, tired of hoping that the distant sound of a plane was real rather than just a product of her fevered imagination, tired of living without even the slightest hope that the constant misery would ever end.
But she had persevered.
Somehow, a day at a time, she had managed to hang on in the face of everything.
But no more, a small voice inside her said.
No more!
It was time.
Time to let go.
With that thought came a feeling of relief so intense it momentarily blocked out the resurgent pain in her shriveled stomach.
And she let go, her stick-thin body slumping to the ground.
For just an instant, as the world seemed to spin about her, a pang of fear gripped her. Suicide, she had been taught, was a sin and would bar her from heaven.
If such an unlikely place existed. And this was not suicide, this was simply letting go.
Letting go of an existence that had been a living hell from the first moment she could remember.
She relaxed and, to her surprise felt her consciousness begin to fade almost immediately, as if, exhausted, she was simply falling asleep.
The last thing she saw was her husband’s scarred face as he leaned helplessly over her.
And in Cell 91, the first nightmare ended.
For a long moment, the man lay perfectly still, allowing his pounding heart to slow even as he tried vainly to fathom the meaning of the dream that had set it racing.
But even as his mind went back over those terrible, despairing minutes, it came to him that the dream was not like any he had ever had before.
For one thing, it had been so vivid, so realistic that, had it not been so outlandish, it would have been indistinguishable from reality.
For another, it remained crystal clear in his memory, not fading bit by bit, as all others had, until all he could remember was that he had a dream.
Even more disturbing, it was not only the few minutes of the dream itself that remained stuck in his mind but, he realized with new amazement, the entire life of the woman in the dream. He remembered her whole life as if it were his own, as if he himself had lived her every painful moment.
But that memory was nonsense, he told himself firmly, as all dreams are—but this one far more than most. He grimaced as the decades of memories darted through his mind, as if looking for a place to take firmer root. From what hidden corner of his mind had that nightmare world been dredged? A world in which the United States was nothing more than a loose collection of third-world-like fiefdoms, largely populated by roving gangs and tightly guarded military bases that provided only minor stability to those within their walls. And the rest of the world, that deceitful memory told him, was little better.
But then, as he struggled to make sense of the senseless, he felt the confines of Cell 91 melting away once again.
Within moments, he found himself once again inhabiting a body not his own, his mind overflowing with memories not his own.
A different—yet not different—body.
A different—yet not different—set of memories.
This time, in a starving body that could have been his own, he died somewhere in Europe, shot while he and a dozen others raided a food warehouse that was better defended than they had expected.
This time, Cell 91 barely flickered into existence at the moment of his death before it vanished once again, replaced by another sun-baked near-desert not unlike the first. But here he was surrounded not by dozens but by tens of thousands waiting with growing hopelessness for what was left of the world’s governments to send food and water.
Then that life, too, was gone, flickering out of existence, leaving behind only its memories of a world that could no longer be saved. The shifting climate, the crop failures, the famines, the resulting wars at every level had already sent it into a downward spiral that wouldn’t end until some new balance had been reached, a balance which, some said, could accommodate no more than one in ten, likely less.
The next life whose end he lived through was that of a missionary, not from a church but from an organization trying futilely to reverse or at least ameliorate the damage done by church missionaries and other zealots to whom the words “birth control” had been anathema, no matter the depths of misery that confronted them.
Then came a soldier in one of the myriad fragments of one-time massive armies. He died well-fed, but there was little else to differentiate his death from the others.
For another dozen deaths—or perhaps a hundred; he was no longer able to keep count—it was the same. The world, overburdened by humanity, was collapsing. Only China, which had been willing to employ truly draconian measures to maintain a stable population, had partially avoided the collapse that had overwhelmed the rest of the world. Despite the horrors that were each time loaded into his mind, he found he was becoming numb to it. The death of a single friend, he remembered someone saying, was a tragedy, but the death of a million in a faraway country is a statistic.
And so it went, until . . .
This time, as Cell 91 yet again flickered into and out of existence, he was suddenly overwhelmed by shame and guilt. Not his own, any more than the tortures those other lives had survived had been his own, but of whoever, this time, he had been thrust into.
Flinching, he felt his stomach lurch painfully at the horror of the alien memories as they flooded into his mind, growing stronger, clearer by the second. Suddenly, he longed for the moment when his own memories would fade from existence, replaced by those of this new host as they had been replaced by those of his previous hosts.
But this time they did not fade. If anything, his own sense of identity grew even stronger, which only deepened the sick horror of what he was seeing in his host’s mind. What he was remembering!
Then, as he ceased his futile struggle to escape from this new nightmare and began to pay attention to what was happening now rather than on the remembered horrors of the past, he realized what was happening.
He realized that he was holding a gun.
And he was raising that gun.
Putting the trembling barrel in his mouth.
Crossing himself with his free hand.
And pulling the trigger.
As Cell 91 reappeared around him, he felt the nausea boiling up in his stomach. Lurching from the bed, he managed to reach the primitive chamber pot that came with each of the cells.
Shivering, he wiped his mouth and dropped back on the bed, too weak to stand or even sit up.
He was also too weak to thrust away the memories of this last host, no matter how much he longed to do so.
The man had been a priest.
And he had committed what he had always thought was the ultimate sin: the taking of his own life.
But in his case suicide had not been the worst sin he had ever committed. This man had committed worse sins—dozens, hundreds of times.
Until he had been found out.
Until some of the children had finally ignored his warnings and pleadings and told the truth to their parents.
Until his sins, no longer a secret of the confessional, had been broadcast to the world.
Until he could stand the guilt and the vilification and the shame no longer.
And now he was dead, by his own hand. But his sickening memories lived on in the occupant of Cell 91, to whom the worst knowledge was not that his host had killed himself. Nor was it what he had done to dozens of children. The worst, the knowledge that threatened to rip his heart from his chest, was the knowledge that such behavior was widespread and ongoing. This host, the memories insisted, had been but one of many who had inflicted their moral carnage on the most innocent of their flocks, year after year, decade after decade.
A mixture of relief and terror gripped him as he realized the room was once again vanishing from around him. Relief that he might be able to escape those memories he already possessed, terror that he might be on his way to even worse memories, if such a thing were possible.
His stay in the new host was shorter than in any of the previous ones. He was at the wheel of a car, racing down an empty highway at breakneck speed. A hundred yards ahead loomed a concrete bridge abutment.
A quick glance in the rearview mirror told his latest host there were no vehicles behind him, no one who would be injured by his own selfish act, by his escape.
This time, in the two or three seconds he had, he instinctively tried to control the host’s hands, to force them to twist at the wheel and bring the speeding car back into the traffic lane.
But he was, as before, only a passenger.
As the car crumpled around his host, first crushing him, then literally tearing his body to pieces, the host’s memories flooded his mind, and he found himself screaming at the walls of Cell 91, his whole body shaking.
This latest host, the new memories told him, had been one of the victims of the previous host. Unable to bring himself to tell anyone, even his parents, he had kept it all inside until, decades later, it had overwhelmed him.
Satan! he thought, shuddering. These mad visions can come from no one but Satan!
But why? What sins have I committed that make me subject to such punishments?
There was no answer, except for a renewed feeling of vertigo as Cell 91 once again wavered out of existence and he found himself in yet another body, another host.
But this one, he realized instantly, was different. This host was peacefully asleep and showed no signs of waking.
And the flood of memories he had come to expect and to dread did not come.
Instead, the only sensation he experienced was a muffled beeping that, he realized after a few seconds, or perhaps a few hours, matched his own pulse. His host’s pulse.
Is this one in a coma? he wondered. Is that why his memories have not been thrust upon me?
He had no way of knowing how long he lay there, thankful for the respite, however long it lasted, be it seconds or hours.
Or forever.
As the ill-defined minutes drifted by, an unexpected and sourceless feeling of familiarity crept over him. The same kind of gentle nostalgic feeling that washed over him whenever he returned to his boyhood home.
The feeling grew, slowly forcing out the apprehension and dread that he had felt as he waited for the merging with this new host.
Finally, the host’s eyes opened.
The host looked around the hospital room, slowly. The beeping accelerated, and he wondered: Is this it? Is it this host’s time, as it had been the others’ ?
But it wasn’t, not yet.
The host, not strong enough to sit up unassisted, crossed himself as best he could with his palsied hand.
“Who is here?” The words themselves were slurred, but they were crystal clear in his mind.
Abruptly, he realized with absolute certainty who this host was, why the sense of familiarity had been so great.
It was himself, decades in his own future.
How long did I serve, he found himself wondering? Twenty years? Thirty?
And the answer came, appearing in his mind as the countless other memories had: twenty-six. Followed by the words themselves, slurred as the host’s lips tried to form them.
As his own dying body tried to speak them.
Does this future self know the truth, he wondered? Does he remember this night more than twenty-six years in his past? Is that why I am here, merging with that future self? To learn what the nightmares meant? Who had sent them? And why?
Even as he silently asked the questions, the same voice that had spoken to him wordlessly moments before the first of the nightmares spoke again: you are here to learn your destiny.
And the memories flowed.
But not randomly, as they had flowed into his own mind during each incarnation. This time, as they flowed from his younger to his older self, they were organized, and both selves instantly recognized the starting point: Humanae Vitae, the document that his older self had upheld and defended zealously all these years. Its convoluted but meticulous logic, its carefully chosen words, its elaborately constructed arguments, its sometimes arcane references had not changed. Its conclusion was still, to them both, as obvious and irrefutable as ever.
Without warning, it was juxtaposed with the countless memories of war and famine and starvation, and the links between those catastrophes and the enforcement of the document’s conclusions suddenly were made inescapably obvious by one memory after another.
Too many people, too few resources. A deadly combination.
Still, both selves resisted, convinced that it was nothing more than a Satanic trick, that Satan was indeed the source of these hideous visions. Surely the thoroughly reasoned and eloquent defense of God’s law put forth in that sacred document could not have been the cause of such tribulations! Surely—
Abruptly, the memories of the last two hosts, the suicides, overwhelmed all the others.
The older self crumpled inwardly, shocked to his core not by the suicides alone but by what had driven them to it. By the hundreds of evils the one had inflicted on the other. By the knowledge that this one offender was not alone in his actions, but only one of many within the Church.
For an interminable moment it was as if his older self had ceased to exist, and he wondered if the end had come, if that terrible memory had utterly destroyed him.
But then his answer came.
I knew, but I did not believe, the older self’s mind confessed, the unspoken words a cry of agony that assaulted the younger self’s mind. I was told, time and again, but I would not believe. I could not believe!.
But now, suddenly and belatedly, he believed. They both believed as the memories settled firmly into their minds, establishing their reality. And it was not just the abuse that they believed. They now knew that those terrible visions of starvation and war and cruelty and, most importantly, the relationship that had been revealed by the countless memories, were not the work of Satan. While they might not be directly from God Himself, they were most certainly a miracle—and a warning! They could both now see that they and countless others in the upper reaches of the Church hierarchy had been cruelly deceiving themselves. They had in their pride convinced themselves that their esoteric logic and eloquent words about respect and love and responsibility could truly bring about the Utopian marital relationships they desired and God demanded. They both knew that, despite their own memories of the death camps and a thousand other historical atrocities, they had not taken human nature with all its flaws sufficiently into account. And those flaws, like those of the abusive priests, had inevitably led to disaster.
And they both realized what must be done.
With that realization, the hospital room and his older self simply vanished, and he found himself back where his terrifying journey had begun: Cell 91, the room in the papal residence to which he and one other had been assigned while the elections were held and to which he had returned, alone, to spend the last night before his installation in solitary contemplation.
Resisting the totally impractical urge to rush from the room with the news of how his attempt at contemplation had been rewarded, he lay quietly, formulating his plans.
He might well fail, but at least he would have tried.
In his first act as pope, John Paul II startled the world by using the traditional speech following his installation to call for preparations for Vatican III, including a new and thorough examination of his predecessor’s encyclical on the regulation of birth, the controversial Humanae Vitae. In the following months, he also earned—and gladly accepted—the nickname The Great Reformer, by exposing and waging relentless war against the child abuse that had been going on within the Church for decades. Already one of the most powerful popes in centuries as a result of his boundless energy and charisma, his series of major victories in that war gave him even more influence, so that when, at the conclusion of Vatican III, he issued a new encyclical in which birth control was not only accepted but encouraged. Objections were heard only from a minuscule and hidebound minority. From then on, birth control was no longer anathema but was promoted in all its forms around the world by this wildly popular and utterly fearless pope, who traveled and proseletyzed more widely than any previous pontiff.
And he succeeded.
By the end of the millennium, world population had leveled off and become stable, and abortions were at an all-time low. The specter of famine, while not entirely vanquished, was no longer the leading cause of death. He knew there were of course other problems, other disasters that would afflict humanity as long as it existed in all its imperfections, but at least irresponsible procreation, the worst of the self-inflicted disasters, was, for the time being, off the board. It would not be looming over everything, ready to multiply the effects of the natural disasters, the wars and all the rest.
Humanity still might some day succumb to the darker side of its nature, but now at least it had a chance.
