by Jerry
“And the past, Albert, do you think it’s possible to travel back into the past too . . . and return?”
“In theory, that’s no great problem. But in practical terms . . .”
My heart skipped a beat.
“What’s the practical problem?”
“Well actually, what you’re describing would take more energy because you’d need to send a second machine to accompany whatever you sent into the past, in order to allow retrieval. A second machine, with enough stored energy to power it. So frankly I don’t think time tourism is on the cards any time soon.”
I felt shattered. During those long nights spent under the stars or in some risky refuge, I’d gone over my notion again and again, considering every angle. But it would only work if travel into the past was doable. Now Albert had flat out squashed the idea. I decided to level with him.
He listened to me attentively, as was his way, and needless to say brilliance sparkled in his eyes, but I couldn’t say that the basic idea enthused him. That his discovery could be used to shed blood didn’t please him one bit. And yet he had to agree that what I was suggesting might be the best solution. But the problem of the energy source remained. In Vienna he’d used the energy produced by the prototype pile, and that only sent a clock weighing a few hundred grams three minutes into the future. As for what I envisaged . . .
Of a sudden he exclaimed, “We shan’t be able to transport a person any time soon, Otto—but, short-term, there’s an option you’re neglecting! You don’t need to go there yourself. All we need to do is open a window—quite a small one will do—and exchange the two objects, B for A. As for returning object A, I believe we could handle this with, well, let’s call it an auto-glider.”
“Meaning—?”
“Meaning it moves with its load and its own power unit, like an automobile.”
“Can such a thing be made quickly?”
“Alas, it’ll take several months since I’ll have to go about this discreetly. You do understand that from now on we’ll need to observe the utmost discretion?”
The following months dragged. I kept in touch with Albert through Ester when she returned to Vienna with her husband—I too had gone back there as clandestinely as I’d left. Emma had thrown me out and the situation was getting worse by the day. Pogroms were reported in the regions of Salzburg, Timifloara, Lake Balaton and Carinthia. In Turkey, the progressive government of Mustapha Kemal’s successors, which had massacred the Armenians and forced the survivors into exile, were rattling sabres, seeing a chance to grab territory from the Empire in disarray.
The situation was growing tense everywhere. Csar Michael had appointed old social democrat leader Kerensky as Prime Minister; so a united front was on the go from Saint Petersburg to Madrid, including Berlin where a revolutionary government had kicked out the old Kaiser and proclaimed a republic—which promptly went on to establish a long-term alliance with France in exchange for partial return of the areas confiscated in 1871 along with the breaking off of diplomatic and commercial relations with Franz-Ferdinand. Prince Otto, whom I liked not merely because we shared the same name, had publicly broken with his father and quit the country. All of this intensified my determination.
Through the Network, with the help of the Slav Resistance Front, I was able to get photos and detailed notes about the room in Sarajevo which Albert would need to carry out the plan; fortunately it seemed the room was just as it had been.
Things were getting urgent. It was already April 1943, and Franz-Ferdinand had surprised everyone by declaring his support for the Pact of Ceuta, and in this very same month the two other signatories to the pact, Franco and Gamelin, rebelled against their respective governments.
This didn’t suit the business we had in hand, not one little bit. Albert let me know, via Ester, that he’d been registered as a suspect person and suspended from teaching because he hadn’t spoken out clearly enough against the rebellions. Of course this delayed his work on our project.
I must confess I felt so discouraged that I thought of throwing in the towel even though I was well aware that our plan was the only thing that could stop our twentieth century from becoming known to history as the era of a world war, which I could see fast approaching.
With the shock of the Japanese landing in California in July, and the occupation of Provence by Gamelin a month later, matters became even more pressing. If we did nothing, the world was rushing towards doom. We absolutely had to succeed and there was no time to waste.
Another problem was that Fermi was supporting Mussolini’s national fascist government in Italy. But Albert let me know, always by way of Ester, that he hoped he still had enough contact with the scientific community to be sure of access to the necessary energy when the moment came. Nevertheless, he had to decamp, this time to Germany, which meant more delay.
Thus far, war was raging in Spain and in the French colonial empire as well as in the USA; the Americans were hard put to block the Japanese advance at the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile, my own life was getting harder. We were totally at the mercy of Hitler’s gangs of thugs, abusing and assaulting us freely. I’d started attending the synagogue and became friends with the rabbi, Eliazar Ben Rahhem, with whom I studied the Torah twice a week. The rest of the time I spent struggling to survive, mostly by giving lessons to the kids of our community, who weren’t allowed into the state schools any more.
Ester’s husband was now ambassador in Rio de Janeiro, at the cost of leaving his wife behind—there was some Jewish blood in her ancestry. She let me know that she was now under surveillance; contact between us was increasingly difficult.
By the start of 1945 I was seriously thinking of giving up and going to join our people’s settlements in Palestine. Then the Emperor suddenly banned all emigration and decided to gather all the Jews into special camps. Happily for me, the Network helped me get out of Austria so that I could finally meet Albert and hand over the object which Ester had managed to get to me the day before her arrest. Namely, the very gun which the Crime Department of the Ministry of the Interior had kept stored in the capital. In Berlin a gunmaker friend, to whom I couldn’t of course spill the beans, quickly worked out why the pistol had jammed and supplied me with an identical, but functioning, twin.
In September Albert and I both took up residence in Munich where we could now work together. At last Comrade Albert (as one needed to call oneself under Rosa Luxemburg’s regime) and I had almost reached our goal. Munich was the right place to be because of its close proximity to the German Energy Commissariat, which now had a Fermi-style pile in operation. Albert managed to get me a post as a secretary in the Physics department of the university, and in any spare time I worked on the necessary geographical co-ordinates while he was busy perfecting the autoglider. A wit once said that history is geography in practice, yet I had to be so exact with the maps and large-scale street plans.
Even though I can’t go into too much detail, I think that I can safely say that with the help of the Network I managed to have a beacon sent to Sarajevo to be installed inside the wall just above the table, in the drawer of which the man had confessed during his pre-trial interrogation to having kept his pistol. Whereupon Albert installed the geographic co-ordinates, then proceeded to adjust the device “bite by bite”, as he put it, to the date that concerned us.
I received news of Ester from a woman writer who’d been interned with her before being expelled, because of some quibblings about her national origin. This woman, Milena Jesenska, made no secret of how much worse conditions were in those special camps than anyone imagined. There’d been typhus epidemics. My poor Ester! I couldn’t help thinking that I was partly to blame for what had happened to her. We absolutely had to succeed!
I can hardly believe it: the moment has come! Today, we did it. We met up at the nuclear lab at Dachau. The countryside was glorious in the May sunshine. In the morning I’d thought about Emma. Her birthday was on the 8 May .. . May the Lord (bless His name!) hel
p me forget what she did to me. But in a few minutes that won’t matter and even the sheets of paper I’m writing on probably won’t have existed. Our task will be accomplished: Franz-Ferdinand will never have been the Emperor of Austria, never will he have called Hitler to power, and the twentieth century will be known to history as the century which brought happiness and prosperity to humanity.
I’m content. The involvement of a historian was essential to settle on the crucial moment as being the failed assassination attempt in Sarajevo, on the 28 June 1914. How often have we thought during the past years: “If only Prinzip’s pistol hadn’t jammed . . .”
Well, in ten minutes, that’ll be it. Gavril Prinzip will be known as the one who assassinated Franz-Ferdinand, the world will be at peace and I, here in Dachau, will enjoy the happy tranquillity of a nice spring day, not even knowing what I’ve escaped.
FUTURES IN THE MEMORY MARKET
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
You can’t do anything else when you emp one of Geeta Tilrassen’s memory modules. Her senses seize you; you see through her eyes, taste with her tongue, hear with her ears. And touch? You’ve never felt air against your skin until you’ve felt it breathe across hers. In a desert environment, there’s a sense of cinnamon in the air. When Geeta’s on a water world, you feel the humidity as embrace instead of torture, as though you are constantly being kissed. Every module Geeta makes is fresh and innocent, and every time you use one, you feel as though it’s the first time.
I’ve got one legitimate copy of a Geeta memod; I’m only allowed one at a time, and I’ve kept this one for a while. It’s her visit to the Hallen people. Nothing very exciting happens. She walks into their village. (The red sand gets into your sandals, but instead of grinding against your feet or raising blisters, it’s a pleasant friction.) The air smells of woodsmoke, charred flesh, and sage.
Hallen burrows are mostly underground, but they have built delicate aboveground structures of woven withies, beautiful as spider webs, with small crystals at the intersections that flare in the red sunlight.
The Hallen greet Geeta, draw her into one of the withy shelters, and give her the only thing it’s safe for her to ingest from their cuisine, some kind of berry drink with bits of leaf in it. She drinks. The liquid is cool on your tongue, a nice contrast to the desert heat. You taste the essence of that drink a long time after she’s swallowed the last sip, a sour-sweet merging of bright and dark flavors. She presses palms with the head lizard, smells his individual scent that shares species straw-tones with the others in the shelter but smells a shade more like sulfur and ginger. She listens to their drum-intensive music and sits in a woven-leaf chair with a Hallen egg in her lap. The music gets inside you like a second heartbeat, chasing your blood until you want to rise and dance. You can feel how warm the egg is, how there’s something moving inside that leather shell. You sense Geeta’s delight, the way it feathers her insides.
It only lasts about a minute real-time, maybe twenty minutes mod time. It’s my favorite possession. I save it for the most difficult days, when I hate being Itzal Bidarte, the man who lost his home as a child and has never found another. I long for roots, and all I do is wander.
If I had Geeta’s power, perhaps my memories of my homeland would be stronger. They are fragments, mostly visual, a plane of light on my mother’s cheek as she leans to kiss me, my father settling in a deep chair beside the hearth and lighting his pipe with a coal on a wire he’s fished from the fire.
I acquired a memod made by a cousin of mine, dead now. When I play it, I see again the stream beside our village, smoke rising from the chimneys of the white-plastered, red-shuttered houses on a cool morning, pots of red geraniums beside the doors, and even, I think, I catch a glimpse of my father leading a donkey down to drink. My dead cousin’s memory is too flat, too simple. There are only muted sounds, distant scents, no touch. I don’t feel as though I’m there. It is more like seeing something in a smoked mirror.
I’ve emped Geeta’s memory module of the Hallen about twenty times. I notice different things each time. She is so alert to every sensation that a normal person can’t take it all in at once.
What I don’t see in the memod are Geeta’s bodyguards. GreaTimes, the memory merchants who have the sole license to distribute Geeta’s mods, edits us out. Even though I’ve gone on memory missions with Geeta, you will never sense me in one of her mods.
As the ship approached our next destination, I pressed the alert beside Geeta’s cabin door. The door slid up and let me in.
Geeta stood in the middle of the cabin, with colored outfits draped over the omnishapes of furniture whose functions she hadn’t set. The scentser laid down a faint, unobtrusive smell that covered any other odors in the cabin, and the audio was playing very low, something melodic without any percussion. Aside from the colors, this was Geeta neutral, as close as she could get to shutting down her senses and living on a par with the rest of us.
“Itzal,” Geeta said, “you know more about this than I do. What should I wear on Tice?”
She had been to Tice before, but she didn’t remember.
I looked over all her outfits and pointed to the scarlet one with the gilt, point-edged hem. “We’re going to a big city on Tice, lots of energy and interaction. That dress will attract attention and intensify your experience.”
She looked at me sideways, her broad mouth quirked at one corner. She was not beautiful in any of the regular ways, but her face was full of character, elastic enough to reflect her moods and thoughts. Only lately had I learned that she might be a different person behind her face, that there were parts of herself she had been hiding. “What if I want to have a quiet time?”
“Do you?” I asked.
She spun around, stopped, hugged herself. “You know me better than I know myself.” She took the red dress and hung it from a ceiling ring. I helped her pick up the other clothes and store them behind the wall. She controlled the furniture into two chairs and a table, and we sat facing each other.
She tapped her wrist. I lifted my own wrist and swept the room with the spystopper. No glow: Geeta’s corporate masters weren’t watching us.
“Did you get me one?” she asked.
I shook my head. Sentients all through the interlinked worlds could buy Geeta’s memods, but access to them was strictly limited aboard The Collector. Each crewmember could own one at a time, and Geeta was not allowed to use any of them. She didn’t have an implanted emp receptor like the rest of us. She had to use an external one to get the cultural gloss and language of the places we visited before we arrived. Her corporate masters allowed her some forms of entertainment so she would be stimulated during our tween-worlds journeys through the skip nodes and in and out of systems. Nobody wanted Geeta to get bored.
“Maybe I can pick up something on Tice,” I said. “I’m not sure how to get it aboard, though.”
“Could you disguise it as something else?” she asked.
I thought about that. “Maybe. If I have enough money. I’d need to find an underground tech there who could make it look like your normal entertainment emps, so you could put it into the emper without them knowing what you’re doing.” I tapped my lips with my index fingers. Before I landed this job as Geeta’s bodyguard, I had done some less-than-legal things—most of my guard training had come from people operating at the fringes of the linked worlds, in shadowy spaces often called Underground. I knew a few signs of the Starlight Fraternity that might lead me to someone on Tice who could successfully disguise an emp. Or the signs might have expired, and using them could get me into trouble.
I shook my head. “I don’t think I can pay enough.”
“I’ll give you money.”
“But Geet, you don’t have any.”
Geeta made the best memods in the business, according to her fans, who were legion across many worlds. GreaTimes bought her contract when she was very young, recognizing her memory potential even then; they had automated observers on most worlds,
watching for talented children like Geeta. Geeta was kept in luxury, given everything she needed and wanted so long as it wouldn’t interfere with her memories, but she had no salary, and no real freedom.
“I’ll trade something.” She looked around her cabin, went to the wall and opened a drawer full of jewelry. She had a robber bird’s delight in sparkling things, so she often asked for and received jewel gifts when she had completed a memory job. She got out the Kudic rubies, a necklace with raw chunks of pink stone. It was one of her most expensive pieces.
I felt a prickle of excitement. We usually visited backwater planets, because people who bought memods seldom went there, and they were hungry for Geeta’s fresh experiences. Tice was bigger than our usual stop; I might successfully fence jewels like these. They’d have a wider choice of memods for sale there, too. “Which memory do you want most?” I asked, tucking the jewels in an inner pocket.
“The horse people,” she said. Though she wasn’t allowed to emp her own memods, she could check the infostream and see the GreaTimes catalog, read the blurbs.
“I’ll see what I can do.” Geeta had a second guard, Ibo; we alternated shifts when we were in relatively safe environments. I had some leave due, and Tice had some quiet places Geeta was scheduled to visit.
“Thanks, Itzal.” She pressed her cheek to the back of my hand. I wondered what that was like for her. Did she like my smell? The feel of my skin? These were small random memories no one would ever buy. GreaTimes let Geeta keep all her memories between missions, the dull details of shipboard life; it was only the planet visits they siphoned off, leaving her with amnesia of all her adventures, unknowing of any lessons she might have learned. They kept her in a state of confused innocence. She wanted to change that. She wanted me to help her recover the memories she had lost.
Ibo and I flanked Geeta as she stepped out of the shuttle, through the docking tunnel, and into Tice’s “Welcome Outworld Travelers” Terminal. She looked everywhere, smiling wide. Hanging baskets of local plants with long, colored fronds filtered the light coming through the hazed sky-ceiling, scattering spots of green and lavender on the floor. People attended by companion animals moved through the distance, intent on their own business. A mother with triplet daughters dangled a star on a string in front of her babies. They laughed and reached for it, and Geeta laughed, too.