Kzine Issue 8

by Graeme Hurry

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t remember seeing you.” She moves to pat my arm. Hesitates. Doesn’t. “That’s one nice thing about the collapse. It made all my nightmares disappear.”

  “What about us?” I ask. “Do you remember who I am?”

  “You ask that every time,” she says, smiling.

  When first I reappeared I’d expected her to scream; I thought she’d run from her shack, panicked. She didn’t. She regarded me with a bemused smile and said, “Hello.” That’s the way things are since the event - the terrible blue flash that gouged a rift in time, swallowed reality, disgorged fire, left half of history a desolate waste. The uncanny has become mundane. Reality itself is eccentric. She told me what it was like, how she woke alone, directionless and confused. All that were left were the shadows.

  “Mom,” says Christiana, “I don’t think you should keep going back. What if there’s another cascade? Wouldn’t the past disappear altogether? Wouldn’t we lose everything?”

  “This is loss,” I say. “We need for you to know what real life was. We need to keep trying. Otherwise Lytkin wins.”

  “I don’t know,” says Christiana. “I think maybe we’ve won already.”

  She curls into a ball, clutching her knees to her chest, and I remember her back in her bed, down comforter to her nose. I see my reflection, a dull phosphorescent flicker guttering in her eyes. She’s older than my physical incarnation ever was. She’s outlived me, in a way.

  “When you were very young,” I say, “two, three years old, I used to worry that if something happened - if I died before you were old enough - you wouldn’t remember me. I’d just be a ghost at the edge of your mind, like a stranger you’d once passed in the street, like the toys that hung over your crib. I’d just be some blurry half memory.”

  “And yet,” she says, “the end of the world came and went, and still I remember.”

  I look into her eyes. My silhouette wriggles and melts. I tell her that I’m sorry and she says it isn’t my fault.

  “Listen, mom. You’ve got to let it go. What’s the use of living forever if your guilt lives forever also?”

  Sometimes it’s difficult for me to reconcile the two Christianas - the strong woman here and the frightened girl on the other side of the rift.

  “You were always strong, Christiana. You were always thinking. When you were a teenager you asked me this question. You said, if parents know the life they’re bringing into the world is guaranteed to die, that makes them all murderers, doesn’t it?”

  “I asked that? I was pretty bleak for a kid. What did you say?”

  “I said parents give life. We surrender potential into the world.”

  “Maybe that’s the key. If we don’t release, then everything gets suffocated. Right? So these guardians that are going to kill us - where do they come from?”

  She seems relaxed, willing to accept our fate with a smile. She inquires about the executioners casually, as if discussing the weather.

  “Some place Lytkin kept hidden,” I say. “There were rumors. Speculations. Something about a base squirreled away in the distant future, buried deep underground where no one would ever find it, populated with vagrants and lost orphans.”

  “Why do you think he wants to destroy us?”

  I look away, but in my heart I know. Lytkin wants me gone for the eternal curse I will rain down. His only hope for immortality is the preservation of his legacy. He needs to be praised for all eternity. But how can he become the sovereign genius of a world if over every city and every monument I appear, hovering like an angel, decrying him as the greatest murderer of all time?

  “Mom?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  I stretch out, pressing myself to the cusp of the horizon, searching shafts of temporal possibility. I know the guardians are closing in. I’ve seen them. They come in pairs and pairs of pairs with special weapons made to destroy me. They know exactly where to ambush me, and they know that my daughter - the only thing that matters to me - is the perfect lure.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Why don’t they go back and kill us earlier? Why don’t they take you out before you became so - ” She gestures obtusely at my ill-defined body. “So hard to kill.”

  “They can’t get there without passing through the event. It’s like a wall. I’m the only one who can make it through. But don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll be here when the time comes. I’ll never let anything happen.”

  She smiles and my hand drifts uselessly through her hair, as if my fingers are made of smoke.

  “Time,” said Demyan Lytkin, “is what keeps everything from happening at once. So said John Archibald Wheeler.”

  He was prowling around at the head of the training room, condescending to the volunteers, sneering over smudgy glasses. “Without time to moor us, we would be ships lost at sea.”

  When I heard that speech, I imagined myself tossed about on waves of delirium, history roaring in my ears. But that isn’t what it was like when time gave way. When the collapse occurred - when I was scattered across time - it felt cold, numb, disaffecting, as if I were in a thousand year long coma. Christiana was the lighthouse that brought me back. I traced her, focused on her, followed her through the fog. Returning was like waking from paralysis. My consciousness flickered and I regathered myself slowly, like an old woman sweeping fragments of shattered glass into a pile. When I woke my point of view had transformed itself completely. My eyes saw like the eyes of a fly, drawing countless impressions all at once, clustered moments converging in simultaneity.

  “The way the mosquito sees time,” said Lytkin, “is very different than the way a man does. Tomorrow we will look back at ourselves shaking our heads. We will consider ourselves little different than the mosquito.”

  It was true. As we learned about Lytkin’s Chronos Auger, and his ongoing experiments, the way we thought of time was forever changed. We used to think nothing was further away than a bygone second, we used to think of yesterday as inaccessible, hermetically sealed, lost. When Lytkin taught his unwitting volunteers about time, he represented it with an hourglass projected on a screen. The upper bulb was the future; the middle, the present; the lower, the past.

  “We used to believe we could not defy gravity. We used to believe we could only reach the moon with our eyes. We used to believe that the sands of time fell irretrievably into the gutter.”

  Even though I only understood a fraction of Lytkin’s science (the manipulation of Higgs singlets, planes of existence that had always existed, but until recently outside our perception) I well understood the irrevocable way he’d altered reality. Now there were lines connecting the disparate grains; now there were Lytkin’s tunnels. The volunteers learned it was possible to access the past, to move about freely in time, to compensate for the Earth’s whirlwind rotation, to slip across columns of years as easily as we’d step into an adjoining room.

  “Until now philosophers and scientists have been on equal footing,” said Lytkin. “There were those that said there was no such thing as time - that time was merely a map we’d made to chart our changing world. They were unable to perceive the potential hinted at by the mind itself.”

  He presses a button and the image of the hourglass explodes.

  “What is the mind if not a time machine, moving back to relive the past and traveling forward to create the future? Throughout history great men have followed their thoughts through to fruition, and in so doing have made real the things they’d imagined. And now, you yourselves will take part in making real the unimaginable.”

  I didn’t know then that he wasn’t referring to time travel. That was old hat. He’d already sent his pilgrims through the tunnels to commandeer a world thousands of tomorrows away. The experiments we were to participate in would be different.

  I don’t need Lytkin’s tunnels anymore. I’ve been split apart from the vessel that anchored me to the forward ebb of time. I move back across the years like a retreating
rook, sliding into a shattered square of yesterday. It looks different than it did the first time I was here. The walls flicker and shift. This patch of time is ruined, scorched by the collapse, made into a dull impressionistic sketch.

  A blackened specter sits on a molded plastic chair. It is the shadow of a woman burnt into a featureless wraith. She is more deficiency than presence, like the outline of something cut from a newspaper; she is the void left behind when I was blasted across time after the explosion. (Though it seems narcissistic, these sightings of self, I promise - I know this shadow belongs to me. No one else was here in this sealed-off room, waiting, fidgeting, tapping her feet against the floor, oblivious to the antimatter wave destined to crash through the walls in a few scant minutes.)

  Who do the other shadows belong to? Are they all that remains of man? I recall the first one I saw. It wandered up and down a street full of wreckage. With clockwork regularity it leaned, extended an arm, then went back the way it came, repeating its drowsy pantomime every few yards. I watched for some time, then it clicked. A mailman! - this shadow used to be a mailman, and now it was another doddering shade. The event had damned this soul to relive its outmoded purpose for all eternity, to mill about as if an old man with dementia lost in the halls of a nursing home.

  And still, accustomed as I am, seeing my own shadow is greatly disconcerting, for the drama my shadow relives is the day I was scheduled to test Novikov’s self-consistency principle. Novikov said that a time traveler witnessing his future self’s actions would be forced to act in accord. For Lytkin, this conclusion was unacceptable. He needed to disprove it. He needed ignorant volunteers.

  Dozens of hours of instruction and debriefing culminated with my sitting in this room, waiting for the gateway to open. Lytkin regarded me intensely as he spoke. He enunciated each word as if trying to impress something of great importance on a child.

  “If, when it opens, no one steps through, then you are to wait ten seconds, stand, and walk through the tunnel. This is your determination. Visualize yourself doing this. Standing. Going. One foot and then the other. Repeat it in your head. ‘I will stand. I will walk. I will go through the tunnel.’ Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor Lytkin. I understand.”

  “Good. Now understand this also. Something else may happen. When the tunnel opens you may see a woman step out, even before the ten seconds have passed. And this woman may look exactly like you. If this happens you are to defy your determination. You are to stay seated. Even if you feel the urge to stand, even if it tears at your mind - you will stay seated. Understood?”

  It seemed absurd, but at the same time exciting. Was it really possible that I would come face to face with myself? More likely it was theoretical madness and a complete waste of time. But whenever I found myself questioning Lytkin’s sense, I visualized something else clearly and repeatedly: the reality of the paycheck to come.

  “Yes, Doctor Lytkin.”

  Lytkin hurried from the room with the anxious gait of a man running late at the airport, the door sealed behind him, and the experiment began.

  I understood the basics. Disobeying the future would force a paradox - it would disprove Novikov’s theory. This in turn would prove that Lytkin could change the past without disturbing the future. It would verify M-verse theory, branching realities, and other hotly debated notions. The world’s philosophers, politicians and theoreticians were still fretting over the potential of Lytkin’s dissertations, babbling about time travel in the hypothetical; none of them aware of the countless guardians he’d already deployed, or of the base he’d already constructed “beyond the range of consequence” - none of them aware of the experiment taking place despite them this afternoon, the scientific equivalent of a back room game of poker.

  I am here. It is then. Reality is a fuzzy rebroadcast of the day we killed the world. My shadow proxy sits in her chair. The speaker in the ceiling crackles to life.

  “Tunnel activating.”

  Whorling open in the center of the room comes a brilliant circle of light. The doppelganger arrives (another shadow proxy version of myself) she steps through, head bowed, ignoring her double, and reaches for the door. My earlier self clings to the chair, fighting the urge to enact the occurrence. Her resistance cleaves the moment in two unleashing a force far greater than the splitting of the atom. The walls convulse. The world blossoms bright blue and tears itself apart. The event repeats in a cordoned off island of time, as if an atrocity replayed on the news. I give up, loosing myself from the shambles, spreading my chronometrical pinions, going like a falcon gliding across the years, returning to her falconress.

  “Could you stop it?” asks Christiana.

  “No,” I say. “The entire stretch is worthless. Killed by the collapse.”

  “How can time be worthless? I don’t understand.”

  “The event is replaying itself on another plane, gouging deeper and deeper into actuality. Whether or not anyone is there to witness the event, it will keep replaying, and that stretch will fall away all together. The present will drift free of the past like a broken off iceberg. Everything that happens after that is a theoretician’s nightmare.”

  “You don’t have to keep going,” she says.

  “I want to. I mean - even if I do trigger another collapse, who’s to say that’s bad? Maybe, if it were severe enough, it would swallow the event itself. Maybe we’d get to try this all over again.”

  “You’ve tried enough,” says Christiana. “You can stop going back now. You can stay here and concentrate on me. Our conversations are turning into these little blinks of nothing where you say something about the collapse and then shoot off again, shoot off again, over and over.”

  “There’s something else I need to try while I can still cross the threshold. Before it’s too late.”

  She closes her eyes and bows her head, and it looks to me like she’s praying.

  I come as an assassin, silently ascending the ornate stair like the warning fin of a shark. My luminous reflection flits from the marble walls. I must extinguish Demyan Lytkin. He is the spark that brings the inferno. His destruction could circumvent the sinkhole, decades may reappear suddenly, regurgitated by the abyss, billions of souls could be saved, Christiana might regain her stolen lifetime.

  There is, of course, another possibility.

  Lytkin’s death could trigger another causation cascade - another event - and with whip-crack immediacy there could be another collapse, one great enough to devour all eternity.

  I’ve grown desperate enough to find out.

  I pass through the oaken door leading into his bedroom. I see him, lying there, stranded in the middle of his bed. He appears as if a shriveled baby swaddled in satin sheets. The idiot. He’s left a vintage revolver on the nightstand. (I guess not all Russians read Chekov.)

  I bring my hand around the handle, concentrating, pacing myself against the flow of time. This is a new trick - one I’ve spent hundreds of hours learning. Having gathered my segmented self from the far reaches of eternity, I know anything is possible. If I concentrate I will cumulate to the point where I can lift this weapon, hold it level, pull the trigger, empty its contents into Lytkin. I chase the tick of the clock, letting myself solidify, gradually amassing density. I feel my forefinger against the trigger, the handle’s curve against the back of my palm.

  I fight my disquieting thoughts. This is justifiable. More than that. This is justice. Lytkin is a selfish monomaniac deserving of death. He is the tunnel visionary; all is disorder outside his cyclopean point of view. By auguring his way through time, connecting things that should have stayed separate, he undermines the foundations of the universe. He is guilty of nine billion counts of second-degree murder. Isn’t that a crime that should be punishable by death? I think of what may be gained if he perishes before unsealing the tunnels. The gash could heal itself, things may return to normal - or else the whiplash will rend reality in two, blighting all that remains. There’s only one way t
o know for certain.

  Still, the gun will not rise. Three pounds are a thousand in my vaporous hands.

  Lytkin stirs. His eyes flutter open.

  “Bozhe moy!”

  My presence sends him retreating to the headboard, babbling Russian curses, and I wonder whose apparition he thinks hovers at the side of his bed. Does he think me a jilted lover, a bitter business partner? His eyes follow my hand to the gun.

  “If you are anything other than still,” I say, “I will blow a hole through your head wider than a tunnel through time.”

  His eyes swell with terror.

  “What are you?”

  I say, “I am what happens when you tamper with things you shouldn’t. When you defy the laws of physics.”

  “Time?” he asks. “Are you to do with time?”

  I wait. I let him worry. I drink in his reaction.

  “Yes,” I say. “I am someone you killed. You killed me by tampering with time.”

  Lytkin lifts a shaking hand and points - and then something I wasn’t expecting. He smiles. “Yes.” His grin spreads like infection. “Yes. I was waiting for something like this, some strange visitation. I knew that if I were headed in the right direction, I was sure to receive a sign.”

  I’m disgusted. He’s every bit as hubristic as the man I remember. “The thing about signs,” I say, “is you need to discern their meaning. Do you know what this sign means, Demyan?”

  “It means my theories are correct.” He pauses. Points. “I can see through you. It’s like you’re made of vellum.”

  “You’re transparent too, Lytkin. You wear the clothes of a scientist, but you have the heart of a salesman.”

  My physical self synchronizes with the time stream and my senses return. My nose fills with the musk of perspiration and the reek of his overfilled ashtray. I feel the room’s warmth. I strain and the gun begins to rise. Lytkin coils like a snake. His bloodshot eyes widen.