by Jerry
“Nothing so extreme. We’ll just take a little of your blood from time to time.”
“Vampires?”
The Peterson doppelganger closed his eyes momentarily before answering. “That demanded a long data search. Vampires indeed! No, we’re not blood-sucking monsters. Only occasionally we’ll want a tiny sample of your blood for genetic extraction and duplication.”
One of the others continued, in a voice eerily similar to Peterson’s: “The race needs ancestral genetic material very much, call it a foundation if you want to, a kind of graft from the ancestral taproot to replace everything blurred or lost over the millennia through genetic drift and engineering.”
Even if he didn’t know what genetic engineering meant, Ted wasn’t going to argue. He had a more important question. “So once you get that, you can send me back, right?”
“No,” they answered simultaneously. “Impossible.”
“But you sent this time machine or whatever back for me—”
“Our ‘time machine,’ ” the third one answered, “your name for something more subtle and unmechanical than you can imagine, was a complex and highly redundant interaction of elementary particles—all we could send back, because on the particle level past and future are only a matter of charge. And even that took the entire energy of a black hole.”
“Black hole?”
“We’ll explain later. Nothing more organized than particles can go back, nothing alive: life involves entropy, irreversibility.”
“But you brought me forward. It was time travel. Like H.G. Wells.”
“No,” said the Peterson double. “Not like H.G. Wells. We stopped you. To use a crude analogy, it was as if we’d frozen you instantaneously, or more accurately frozen time for you, while what you call time went on around you at the usual rate. It still took a million years for us to bring you 800,000 light years, and before that almost as long for our beam to reach Earth.”
“You mean you can’t send me back?” Ted groaned. “There’s no chance of sending me back?”
The Peterson shook his head, and as he did the illusion momentarily faded, revealing shifting lines and flecks of light across his real face and chest like neon tattoos. “No. We can’t. As we said, there’s no such thing as what you mean by time travel. There’s absolutely no way to go back.”
“That’s not fair!”
“True. It isn’t fair to you. But it was necessary.”
The local specimens of Homo sapiens proteus tried to make it up to him. Someone was always near to keep Ted company, amuse him or take him on tours, whether Peterson (actually Arthan Pardos-Detene-33) or another member of his crew of handlers or nursemaids.
Their constant companionship reminded Ted of the watch kept to prevent a condemned man’s suicide before his execution, except his unimaginably-remote descendants wanted to keep him cheerful and alive.
Reassuring, whether or not they had their own reasons.
Even with their company, he was terribly lonely, especially after the realization sunk in that the Earth he knew was a million years gone. Marge was dead, his fellow test pilots and flight crews dead, the United States of America one with the mastodon and sabre-tooth tiger.
Unlike earlier times he’d given blood, the genetic sampling had been gentle and unintrusive: instead of a needle a tiny flattened tentacle fastened itself painlessly over the inside of his elbow, with no visible wound or bruising afterwards. And according to Peterson, every bit of blood was quickly replaced by synthetic blood and nutrient.
Oh, he was precious to them indeed.
Gradually and gently they removed the protective illusion of Old Earth, layer by layer like peeling an onion, to allow him to adjust to this strange new world at his own pace.
The faces of the people he remembered from Edwards slowly dissolved, let him see the actual countenances beneath. Arthan was the first Ted got used to, with the pale firefly green moving across the almost metallic bronze of his skin. Eventually he could recognize each member of his entourage, no matter how constantly the light patterns on their faces changed.
The variety made it easier to tell them apart: some had long faces that were almost triangular, some were square, others round as Earth’s moon. The colors of the shifting patterns reminded him of printed circuits, writhing blue or green, yellow-white, or red-orange, complementary or contrasting to the hue of the skin, whether midnight black, pale gold, bronze, jade green or blue. No wonder they called themselves Homo sapiens proteus.
First Ted saw only hints of their forms, and when he was allowed clear vision of their bodies, understood why they’d let him see faces first. Some variety in faces was expectable, but their bodily variation was beyond expectation, and clearer because they were naked, except for shifting patterns of what were either symbiotic insects or tiny machines.
Some had squat and wide physiques, others were so tall and thin they made Ted think of praying mantises. And a few seemed even more insectlike, having a short second pair of arms with delicate many-fingered hands sprouting below their shoulders. Arthan was one, though in his case wide shoulders and narrow hips made the added pair of arms seem almost normal. One of the women had two rows of nipples and except for the preternatural knowingness of her expression, reminded him of an animal: in the end, he opted for the Sphinx as the only possible animal.
Ted never saw a child, though that seemed less of an anomaly after he mentioned it to Arthan.
“But ask yourself how many children you saw in Dryden or the X-15 servicing area? This part of the habitat is an equivalent research facility. Very special. Sometimes dangerous.”
“Am I the danger?”
Arthan nodded. “You are. Mostly psychological, though there is a faint risk of physical infection.”
“Extinct ideas and extinct germs both, huh?”
“Correct.”
At last they peeled the last level of illusion away, and let Ted see the habitat in actuality. This was the real shock, much more unsettling than the gradual revelation of faces and bodies: even if Homo sapiens proteus remained human, their living spaces were alien.
Wisely, they had kept up the appearance of Earth and its diurnal round after the first momentary revelation of stars over the sunlit surface of Rogers Dry Lake, to the point where Ted slept on what seemed to be a cot in one of the offices of the Dryden Flight Research Center every night. But now the flat walls curved and twisted, the cot slowly changed shape till he became used to nesting inside a clam shell with a top half that darkened as it closed over him whenever he decided it was night. If he sat up momentarily or felt the least bit claustrophobic the overhead would brighten gradually, opening the moment he moved toward the edge, while the nest rose under him to lift him out.
At first he excreted and showered in a convincing replica of a bathroom attached to the office, though eventually any spot in the wall of the room around the clamshell would bulge out the temporary equivalent of a stool or urinal at his thought. Also his nest cleansed him better than any shower, even brushing his teeth once he accepted its first tentative probings.
But the rest of the habitat was worse. Things changed between sleeps until Ted was unable to find his way around without a guide. A step or two might take him from a place with a ceiling of luminous mist to one where nothing was between him and the star-studded blackness of space.
Strangest of all was taking a spiral shortcut across a sphere like a tiny moon and walking upright in a 1-G field all the way. “Collapsed matter inside,” Arthan said. “We use it to modulate the output from our black hole.”
“Oh.” (All Ted could say as he stepped across the cleated moon between the black metal trunks which might be antennas.)
Another time they skirted a pit that had appeared in the decking overnight. “Why no safety railings?”
Arthan smiled. “No need. Step closer and see.”
Ted did, and felt a jangling inside his skull, escalating to pain when he experimentally pushed himself a few inches near
er. “Neat trick.”
Food was the one completely familiar thing. The synthetic steak had the texture and sizzle of real beef, the coffee smelled like coffee, the peas tasted as if they’d just been shelled, there was whiskey and beer. Arthan explained they wanted to give him at least one firm link to his past to keep him sane. The room he ate in was rectangular, its windows showed Edwards outside, the table held linen and silver, even flowers sometimes.
Ted lost his appetite after another week.
Perhaps it started when Reetha smiled and began to hum at the same time Hurthan and Arthan did. Ted was used to two or three of them speaking in choral simultaneity—Arthan had explained it as computer interfacing, nothing like telepathy—but when they stopped humming Reetha began singing, at least Ted thought it was singing, even though the scale was wrong. When she stopped Arthan kept on beating time. After another minute or two Hurthan and Arthan improvised a duet of some sort, switching unpredictably between rhythmic talk and singing, until they merged with a ubiquitous steady drone, overlaid with complex percussion, that seemed to fill the habitat. Then voices came in from near and far, and he realized how isolated he was, no matter how Homo sapiens proteus tried to make him feel at home.
Ted grew more and more depressed.
He remembered walking his dog Skipper around the neighborhood when he was a boy. Skipper had been able to lift his leg and make any place his own, but Ted had no way to do that here, even with Arthan walking him on an invisible leash.
They noticed.
Reetha, who usually avoided physical contact, patted Ted on the shoulder, and asked him why he wasn’t eating. She told him not to be downhearted when he said he was lonely. Then Hurthan hinted something nice was coming, and Arthan promised that soon there would be an end to his solitude.
Eventually Ted understood the hints and promises, when Arthan brought in the girl who looked like someone from the twentieth century into the special room while he was eating lunch. They’d done a good job on the hairdo, though her dress was somehow wrong. She reminded him of Marge a bit, not just the color of hair and eyes, but the way she moved as well. Perhaps that wasn’t completely accidental. Anything to keep their specimen contented.
“This is Mary,” Arthan announced.
Eventually he explained to Ted in private: “Mary is partly your clone [Arthan had to explain the term] but with a good deal of genetic variation. Her physical and mental development was accelerated, and she has been programmed with memories of a past she never had. Mostly based on your memories, scanned while you were sleeping.”
But in the magic of the first moment Ted hadn’t wanted to understand. He’d risen and bowed self-consciously. “Hello.”
She’d blushed slightly. “Hello.”
By the time she seated herself while he held her chair a second lunch had appeared on the table before her. Ted was used to this by now, and Mary took it as a matter of course.
After Arthan left the two talked haltingly at first, looking at each other more than they spoke, barely touching their food, but soon they were comfortable.
“It’s been very frightening being brought so many years into the future,” Mary said. “I’d be very lonely if it wasn’t for you. They say you’ve been very lonely—”
“Yes,” he whispered.
She glanced up at him. “But now you have me.”
In the beginning it was wonderful. Ted and Mary told each other everything: about the time she crossed the street and got lost when she was five, how he decided to become a pilot watching planes land and take off at the local airport, having to limp back to his carrier after being hit by ground fire in Korea, how she made her own dress for the Senior Prom.
Ted showed her around the parts of the habitat he understood, and when she wanted grass and trees, Arthan arranged a picnic for them in a place Ted had never seen. One moment they were walking down a tunnel of open metal basketwork with space and stars above and below, the next they stepped through a wall of light and down a ramp into a park with glades filled with wildflowers and velvety turf between the trees.
“This is the place,” Mary said a minute later, and Arthan grounded the chest that had been following at shoulder level. It opened like an origami flower, extruding a ground cloth, offering sandwiches and snacks on one shelf, chilled splits of champagne on another.
Arthan gave a hint of a bow before he turned back. “Enjoy yourselves. Press that button for music, turn it to select. If you want me, just call my name.”
“Birds!” Mary exclaimed when they were alone. “Hear them?”
Ted could. And already he had identified the familiar shapes of oaks and beeches, though some of the flowers in the clearing were taller and brighter than anything he remembered. “Almost like home.”
“They must have brought a little bit of home along with them,” she murmured, “across so much distance, a million years.”
Mary fiddled with the music knob while he opened the champagne. Ted winced inside, hoping she wouldn’t find any samples of what Homo proteus considered music. Surprisingly, she soon had on a song by the Beatles, the new group she admired so much. Or more accurately, what had been the new group a million years ago. Something called “Norwegian Wood.” Ted knew the song because the kid who lived next door in Mojave played it constantly.
The next few days were happy.
Till Ted mentioned the Cuban missile thing in passing, and Mary gave him a blank look and a smile. The missile crisis had been just a few years before he was snatched into the future—his squadron had been on prolonged alert, and Marge had told him about people cleaning out the supermarket shelves—people were still building fallout shelters.
So he tested her with an allusion to Dealey Plaza and the Book Depository. Again no response.
But Mary knew the words to “Norwegian Wood.”
He kept testing her over the next day or two, and discovered that talking to Mary was like talking to a mirror with bits of backing gone. Though the mirror reflected most things perfectly, there were surprising voids.
Finally he forced Arthan to admit that Mary was a clone. “There are reasons for the gaps. First, we could only recover a fraction of your sleeping memories without endangering your sanity, because dreams and memory are intertwined.”
“So?”
Arthan said “Dreaming is essential to sanity. Take that for granted.”
“If you say so.”
Ted tried to keep acting the same with Mary after he learned what she was; either he succeeded, or she had been conditioned to accept him no matter what—it was impossible to tell. They still shared the clamshell bed, still picnicked among the trees and flowers.
But now Ted felt worse, even more alone.
Whether or not she noticed, Arthan certainly did. Sometimes his abductors knew so much Ted wondered if the clothes they’d made up for him at his arrival were more than clothes, giving them constant readouts on his physiology and mood.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you about Mary.”
Ted thought that over for a moment. “No. It would have been worse if you hadn’t, because I’d have kept wondering. At least this way I understand.”
For many wakings it went on like that, with Ted grateful for Mary’s company, but never certain if the answer to anything he said would be a nod of understanding or a bright, blank smile: like trying to walk a tightrope that stretched on forever.
The situation seeped into his dreams. He’d be explaining something to Mary—though what he never remembered—when her head would suddenly lengthen into a cow’s long-eared, patient muzzle, or she would pull her mask of a face aside (with a noise like the door with creaking hinges on Inner Sanctum) and reveal a clockwork skull with chromed teeth and clicking eyeballs.
Finally Hurthan and Arthan and Reetha insisted on a conference.
Ted had just given another blood sample, and felt a little nauseated and dizzy in spite of the instant synthetic replacement. “So what do you want?”
“You’re not happy here,” Hurthan announced.
Ted frowned at that statement of the obvious. “You maybe want Gene Kelly singing in the rain?”
Reetha closed her eyes before answering. “A dancer in a movie of that title, I believe. What you called a musical comedy.”
“I’m happy again,” Hurthan sang, returned from the same data search.
“We think we can send you back to where you came from,” said Arthan.
“You said it was impossible.”
“It was,” said Reetha. “Then.”
“In a sense it still is,” Hurthan added. “We can’t send you back, we send you around.”
“So what’s that mean?”
Hurthan frowned, trying to find the right words. “It means that if space-time is a closed system you can—circumnavigate it, so to speak.”
“Like a clock face?” Ted said. “Sort of go to the end to get back to the beginning.”
“Yes,” said Arthan. “And past the beginning to your own time. The theory goes back more than a decade of your Earth-years. But the techniques for implementing it have just been developed.”
“So how soon?”
“A ten-day or two.”
“Than you’ll know?”
“Then it will be doable,” Arthan corrected. “We already know.”
“What about Mary?”
Reetha touched his forearm. “Don’t worry. Mary will be taken care of.”
“All right. But don’t tell her about my leaving just yet.”
The next weeks were hard.
Ted kept wondering if they could really keep their promise, though Arthan murmured encouragement whenever he had a chance. Two or three times Mary caught him staring at nothing and asked him what was on his mind, and he dredged up some memory from his Korean War days or some other excuse.
“Tomorrow,” Arthan whispered as Ted followed Mary in to breakfast. Ted waited till he and she were sipping coffee afterward before telling her. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done—it took what felt like hours to get to the point, and when he did he felt ashamed—but at the end Mary merely nodded, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”