by Jerry
With stiff lips I uttered the year I thought correct, eyes frozen fast to the apparition standing before me. It was still staring at me with its lamp-eyes from between the shadowy spruce branches. Curious, hungry. The coldness of the engine flowed into my flesh, it was burning me like fire sculpted of ice, and by and by it seemed to me that if I didn’t leave its circle of influence soon, I was never going to move again.
And that was precisely the train ghost’s intention. It was trying to bewitch and freeze me, to make me wonder about its nature and surrender myself to be its prey. And it was close to succeeding. I knew I should have turned my back to it and left, but I just kept staring at the iron dragon breathing irrationality and at its identification numbers. The sense of touch escaped my flesh, I thought I could hear even my skin crackle while it was freezing.
3159, 3159, 3159 . . .
“That kind has been taken out of service ages ago,” Rupert continued somewhere out of sight. “Over twenty years ago already. Consequently it’s here sometime before it was taken off. And now and then some come here to turn which haven’t even been made yet. That’s why I couldn’t find the picture of one of them in any books. That’s why watches don’t work here: this place is outside the timetables. They wake up on the rails and they break out of their own timetables and find a suitable blind track and come here, where ever or whenever they are.”
“Whatever, Rupert,” I mumbled, lips numb with cold. I didn’t have the energy to try and understand his words. I only knew I was freezing to death. “Listen, are you really going to blow up that train?”
After a moment’s silence Rupert answered: “This place is full of dynamite. It’s by the rails, in the trees, under the snow. I’ve spent several nights making preparations. I have to do it. Even if you are going to be angry.”
“Can’t I stop you in any way? Reason with you? Make you realize how senseless this all is?”
“No.”
“Well then you’ve obviously got to do what you’ve got to do,” I muttered, relieved—the responsibility was no longer mine. I couldn’t take any more responsibility.
The train blew smoke in the air, and its steam pistons became tense and started to push the wheels where they were fixed; it was preparing to chase me again, to make its kill. To murder me.
I felt somebody gripping my shoulders. Rupert started to walk me away from there, fast. My feet had lost their strength to the cold, but Rupert was strong. The valley reverberated with the train’s hollow panting and the metallic screech of the steam machinery that was pushing it off.
We got as far as the junipers, and Rupert threw himself in the snow and dragged me down with himself. My face thumped against the snow. I was too benumbed to soften my landing.
“Mother, I ignited all the fuses,” my son whispered. “Hands to your ears!”
“We have to talk about this when we get home,” I sighed. “Let’s drink cocoa and really talk with each other for once.”
I thought there was something that I ought to have noticed and understood. Something to do with causes and consequences. If only my head hadn’t been aching so terribly.
With the growing pounding in my head I hardly even heard the explosions that suddenly started to tear apart the valley, the trees and the train that had left its timetable.
“We stood there an hour, hand in hand, and waited, Alice and I. Then we sat on the rails and waited yet another hour. The train didn’t come, the track stayed empty. I felt more and more miserable. My stomach was hurting and my head ached. “It’s not coming,” I said. “Let’s leave now.”
Alice angrily plucked a golden lock off her head and pouted. “It’s not showing up, indeed. We have to come back tomorrow.”
We went home, Alice disappointed and I feeling ill but relieved.
In the night I woke up feeling that I could hardly breathe. Twinges of pain were stabbing my temples. My first thought was that Alice was dead. I fancied I remembered how the train had come and swerved off the rails and crushed Alice in front of my horrified eyes. The image was so vivid I started crying in my bed. And yet I also remembered that the train had never come and we had returned home in peace.
In the morning I ran to see Alice; I had to make sure that she really was alive. She set about at once to get us going to the railway tracks, but I refused, even when she pressed me hard and called me a traitor and even a bad friend. She looked at me somehow strangely, and I knew something had changed between us.
We were still friends, of course, and went around together, but day by day our friendship got thinner and we met more and more infrequently—the magic was gone. It was pretty much my fault—I couldn’t relate to Alice naturally anymore, for I remembered her dying that afternoon on the railway, even while I also remembered we’d come back home together. I remembered her funeral, I even remembered the place she was buried, and her gravestone and the golden letters on it, and yet she was sitting next to me in school.”
—From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.
That is the night I think I lost my son; I remember the night and the explosions, but after that—nothing. I don’t remember coming home. A few times I’ve tried to return by myself to look for that strange blind track in the forest, but every time I’ve been driven aside from the way and ended somewhere quite different.
I remember Rupert’s birth. I remember him growing and his overactive imagination and the day he graduated from law school. I remember his love and the skull fracture that removed it from his head. I remember our night trip to the place where the trains turn, and that’s where I lost him in the worst way. All that I remember, but I also remember that I never had the child I wished for. My youth was spent in studying, and then I had to further my career. We often talked about children, I and my husband, but we put off the realization of the idea, and when we finally woke up to try, it was already too late.
A few months ago I saw Gunnar in the television. He’d put on a lot of weight. I was startled; somehow I’d imagined he was dead. He spoke dryly about the big export sales his company had made, and I wondered whether he ever thought about the girl he had seduced by the railway tracks three decades since. So often had I wondered what would have happened if at the critical moment I’d prevented him from withdrawing and taken his seed and made him the father of my child. The thought had entered my mind at the time, however irrational and irresponsible it was. If I’d really done that, would the other line of my memories now be objective reality, not only subjective? Would Rupert now be objective reality?
Remembering makes me feel ill, but I can’t help thinking of Rupert. He feels so real, often more real than this real life of mine. I remember how my figure got rounder and I took a taxi to the hospital and gave birth to my son, I remember the pain and the tears and the joy, when I received the little wrinkled human being in my arms. I remember the sour midwife and the hospital ward. And yet I know nothing like that happened to me—on the day Rupert was born I was on a business trip to Moscow, it’s documented. I remember that quite well, too, the small hotel room and the chambermaid I surprised as she was rummaging in my bag.
Perhaps I’m crazy. How many sane persons have two sets of superimposed memories from 40 years’ time? Perhaps all those empty recollections that torment me are only the product of a brain that’s gone completely round the bend? That would be the easiest and also the most believable explanation—without one small problem: I could have invented Rupert, yes. He could very well be just a delusion, flung by an ageing woman suffering from childlessness into her past to soothe her pain. But what about the place where the trains turn? I do not have enough imagination to invent anything like that. I’m a very rational person, who keeps her feet closely and safely in the dust of the earth in all situations. Unlike some others, who used to let their imagination fly irresponsibly like a kite on a stormy Sunday afternoon; such was my lost son Rupert. The place where the trains turn could only have been invented by Rupert himself, and he couldn’t have done that if he
himself were nothing more than my invention.
I hunt my memories and study them from all angles, the way a scientist may collect and study extremely important samples. I draw charts of the two different lines of my life, they are sometimes hard to distinguish. And there is a pile of evidence on my desk:
There is a phone number: there’s a lawyer called Birgitta Donner in Helsinki, but she has never heard of Rupert Nightingale.
There is a Christmas card from Alice Holmsten, nowadays Frogge; she tells she’s married and works as a music teacher in a school in Turku. I hadn’t thought of her for years, but sometimes one receives cards from persons already forgotten even when there’s been no particular reason to remember them.
There is a collection of short stories by Miriam Catterton that I bought yesterday from Houndbury Books. I’m not acquainted with Miriam, although I also have other kinds of recollections of her. Most people know her since she’s a teacher, but I don’t have children, and we’ve never even talked with each other. She seemed surprised when I phoned her this morning and introduced myself. I told her I’d read her book and been especially fascinated by one of the stories, the one that tells about a little boy called Robert who loves railways and whose imagination his overly rational mother Anna tries to repress.
This is now quite silly, I explained, but I simply had to call and ask where you got the idea for Robert’s story.
Well, where do ideas come from, generally, Miriam said, sort of embarrassed.
They just are in the air. I often have dreams and I use them. For a couple of nights I dreamed about a little boy who loved railways, and it developed out of that, gradually.
I’ve read the story through several times already, trying to decide which truth its existence proves.
There’s also on my desk an article I clipped out from the newspaper 40 years ago and kept unto this day between the encyclopaedia pages. It tells about a whole goods train that vanished without a trace with its freight and engine driver somewhere in the Houndbury region. The authorities investigating the case were puzzled, but according to them it appeared probable that there was an extensive conspiracy of railway personnel behind the train theft—no way otherwise could such a crime be explained. The press clipping also seems to want to tell me something, but I’m not able to figure out how that event could be connected with Rupert’s disappearance, not yet.
I cannot let him pass away out of my reach into final oblivion. I cannot give him back to Nothingness. That is why I continue with my investigations. I have to finally understand, to find him on the eternal circle of cause and consequence. For the sake of my son I go on with this, for his sake I write these thoughts of mine on paper.
DOPPLER SHIFT
Matthew S. Rotundo
“Just relax,” he said—as if that were possible.
He was a small man with a boyish face and a serene air about him. Dr. Richard Wells, his name was.
The device he operated was surprisingly compact. I had expected a mnemonograph to be some mammoth computer bank with an octopus-tangle of wires and leads jutting out of it, to be attached to the skulls of the unfortunates who submitted to the treatment—quivering flesh fed to the machine, a kind of high-tech Inquisition.
Instead, only a lightweight headset rested on my ears. From the headset, twin leads fed into what looked like a simple handheld—a little fatter and longer than mine, the only extraordinary detail I could detect. It rested on a small table next to the padded seat I reclined on. The examining room bore no other equipment besides a second chair. The walls and floor were bare, painted space station gray.
The austerity of the place—deliberate, to minimize distractions, he had told me—did nothing for my unease. In all honesty, though, the circumstances would have made it difficult for me to like any examining room, however lavishly appointed, or any doctor in charge of one. Yet here I was, playing the role of the deep space mission hero—and flubbing it badly—and here the doctor was, telling me to relax. Christ.
“Okay,” he said, looking up from the device. His smile seemed natural. “We’re all set, Captain Schaeffer. Ready?”
“Sure,” I said, with a nonchalance I did not feel. Even his mention of my rank made me twitchy.
He input a command, and instantly the headset vibrated against my skull. A faint hum, low and oddly pleasant, accompanied the vibration. A tingling ran through my body.
Presently, the device beeped and the humming ceased. He reached over and removed the headset.
I looked at him with surprise. “That’s it?”
He chuckled. “The readings only take a minute or two. Now they must be collated, which will take much longer—usually about four hours. Meanwhile, we’ll talk.” He gestured to his office door.
Four hours. That’s all it takes to encapsulate a person’s life. And hidden somewhere in that careful encapsulation, I knew, a dark unknown waited.
With growing trepidation, I followed as he led the way out of the examining room.
O O O
“Please have a seat,” Dr. Wells said, gesturing to an empty chair. He moved with practiced ease in Station Nineteen’s spin-induced gravity, the mark of a veteran stationer. Still, I’d never heard of him. A fair bet that he wasn’t from around here.
His office, with its wood grain and plush carpeting, was considerably friendlier than his examining room. Earth landscape stills—lush rain forests, rolling oceans, distant mountain ranges—adorned his walls. Small flowering plants, faintly fragrant, topped twin cabinets that flanked a small desk, also wood grain, its surface clean and polished. His chairs had tall backs and reclined slightly.
I thought he would sit behind his desk and bring up my file, but instead he took the seat next to mine. “So,” he said with a grin, “how did you like being zapped?”
His offhand use of the pejorative surprised a chuckle out of me. “It wasn’t quite what I expected,” I said.
His grin widened. “Everyone seems to expect shock treatments or some similar horror. Sometimes people are almost disappointed.”
His attempts to put me at ease, though seemingly sincere, fell a little short. The flight from the orbital launch site to Station Nineteen had been a brief one, but just long enough for me to mull over the implications of what had happened. I had seen it in the eyes of the review board when they’d made their recommendations to me: the launch would not be delayed, No Matter What. If this doctor couldn’t help me, I was screwed. And the launch was now less than two weeks away.
Eclipse I, the ship was called. Docked in Martian orbit, over fifty meters long, driven by twin q-thrusters. Trumpeted by the International Space Council as the next great step in stellar exploration. With quantum vacuum fluctuations as a fuel source, it had no need to carry propellant. The techs projected max speed at around .4C—nearly one-half light speed, easily the fastest ship ever built.
Eclipse I. Scheduled to launch on her maiden voyage—the first at relativistic speeds—in less than two weeks, with me as captain. But after what had happened at the test firing . . .
I shook myself from such musings and sized up the small man in the chair next to mine. I said, “So when do you start telling me my life story?”
“Beg pardon?”
“You know.” I gestured to the examining room door. “The readings.”
“I’m afraid you don’t understand. A mnemonogram, or memory print, is very similar to an EEG. The untrained eye would only see a jumble of peaks and valleys. I am trained to look for patterns—groups of signals—which, when combined with therapy, may help a patient to overcome internal blocks he may not be aware of. That’s really all there is to it. Hardly the same as telling you your life story.”
“Oh.” I still had no idea what he was talking about. “It sounds so easy.”
“It isn’t. But I’m hoping it isn’t necessary.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Captain Schaeffer, I’m a fully-trained psychologist. Mnemonology is merely a field in
which I specialize. I want to work this out between the two of us, if possible. If not—”
“—then you’ll plug into my brain and fix me, right?”
He sagged. “Actually, I won’t ‘plug into’ your brain at all. You will. But let’s worry about that later. For now, why don’t we just talk?”
I sighed, slightly ashamed. It wasn’t really fair of me to poke at him like that. “What do you want to talk about?”
“It’s your time.”
I snorted. “So you live here on Nineteen, doc?”
“Actually, no. I normally work out of Station Seventeen.”
A smile crept onto my face. “Another Mars station. Funny. I figured you for an Earth station.”
He laughed. “Why? Do I seem foreign to you?”
“I just . . . thought I would have seen you around. And given the décor—”
“I have a small practice. As for the office”—he opened his hands, glanced around—”belongs to a colleague of mine. She’s on sabbatical in Peru. You’ve been away from Earth too long, I think. It’s not that bad there. Not so foreign.”
“If you say so.”
He leaned forward. “How long has it been since you’ve been to Earth?”
I had to think about that one. “Oh, I’d say about ten years. And that was for my mother’s funeral.”
“I see. No ties back there, then?”
“None.”
“And you’ve spent the last two years working on the Eclipse project, right?”
“Just about. I took a break after the Titan flight.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Tell me about the Titan flight.”
Then of course I saw where he was going. “I get it. You think the Titan flight has screwed me up somehow. Or is that just what the ISC board told you?”
“No one has told me anything. Nor have I drawn any conclusions about the effects of the Titan mission. But I’d like to hear the story.”
“Why?”
“Humor me.”