A horrible thought occurred to me.
“We’re not going to stay here, until they go back?”
Miriam shrugged.
“I don’t know. I’m awaiting instructions from base.”
“Now look, we’re the ones that are here. Not them.”
“You know how it is, as well as I do, Stan.”
I stared at her.
“I know how it is,” I said, bitterly.
Her phantom features produced a faint smile.
I lay awake that night, thinking about the stalemate I had got myself into. Egyptians? If they had had time travel for so long, why hadn’t they visited future centuries? But then, of course, they probably had and we had run screaming from them, just as the goatboy had fled from us. They probably had a similar policy to ourselves: no interference, just record and return. So, on their umpteenth journey into the future, they had come to a halt, suddenly, and had no doubt come to the same conclusion as we had: someone was blocking the path.
It wasn’t difficult either to see how such a discovery might be lost to future civilizations. Hadn’t certain surgical techniques been lost too? Time travel would undoubtedly have been in the hands of an elite: probably a priesthood. Some pharaoh, his brain addled as the result of a long lineage of incestuous relationships, had destroyed the brotherhood in a fit of pique; or the priests had been put to death by invading barbarians, their secret locked in stone vaults.
On the current front, the Plataeans were still one jump ahead of the Spartans. They had abandoned their mining operations and instead had built another crescent-shaped wall inside their own, so that when the ramp was finally completed, the Spartans were faced with a second, higher obstacle. Peltasts tried lobbing spears over the higher wall, only to find the distance was too great. Archidamus had his men fill the gap between the two walls with faggots and set light to it, but a chance storm doused this attempt to burn down the city. We got a few indignant looks from the Spartans after that. As gods, we were responsible for the weather. The war trumpets of the invaders filled the air with bleating notes which we felt sure were a criticism of us and our seeming partiality towards the defenders.
Finally, battering rams were employed, over the gap between the walls, but the Plataeans had a device – a huge beam on chains – which they dropped on to the ram-headed war machines and snapped off the ends.
Archidamus gave up. He ordered yet another wall to be built, outside the palisade of stakes, and left part of his army to guard it. Winter was beginning to set in and the king had had enough of the inglorious mudbath in which he had been wallowing. He went home, to his family in the south.
The majority of the Egyptians also withdrew at this point. One of them remained behind.
We received our orders from base.
“One of us must stay,” said Miriam, “until a relief can be sent. If we all go back, the vortex will recede with us and the Egyptians will move forward, gain on us.”
“A Mexican stand-off,” I said, disgustedly.
“Right. We can’t allow them the opportunity to invade the territory we already hold...”
“Shit,” I said, ignoring a black look from John, “now we’ve got a cold war on our hands. Even time isn’t safe from ownership. First it was things, then it was countries... now it’s time itself. Why don’t we build a bloody great wall across this year, like Archidamus, and send an army of guards to defend it?”
Miriam said, “Sarcasm won’t help at this stage, Stan.”
“No, I don’t suppose it will, but it makes me feel good. So what happens now? We draw straws?”
“I suggest we do it democratically.” She produced three shards of pottery that she had gathered from the ground below, and distributed one to each of us.
“We each write the name of the person we think most competent to remain behind,” she explained, “and then toss them in the middle.”
“Most competent – I like the diplomatic language,” I muttered. John, I knew, would put down his own name. He was one of those selfless types, who volunteered for everything. His minor household gods were Duty and Honour. He would actually want to stay.
I picked up my piece of pot. It was an unglazed shard depicting two wrestlers locked in an eternal, motionless struggle, each seemingly of equal strength and skill, and each determined not to give ground. I turned it over and wrote JOHN in clear letters, before placing it, picture-side up, in the middle of the ring.
Two other pieces clattered against mine. Miriam sorted through them, turning them over.
My name was on two of them.
I turned to John.
“Thanks,” I said.
“It had to be somebody. You’re the best man for the job.”
“Bullshit,” I said. I turned to Miriam. “What if I refuse to stay? I’ll resign, terminate my contract.”
Miriam shook her head. “You won’t do that. You’d never get another trip and while you get restless in the field, you get even worse at home. I know your type, Stan. Once you’ve been back a couple of weeks you’ll be yelling to go again.”
She was right, damn her. While I got bored in the field, I was twice as bad back home.
“I’m not a type,” I said, and got up to go below. Shortly afterwards, Miriam followed me.
“I’m sorry, Stan,” She touched my arm. “You see it for what it is – another political attempt at putting up fences by possessive, parochial old farts. Unless I go back and convince them otherwise, they’ll be sending death squads down the line to wipe out the Egyptians. You do understand?”
“So it had to be me.”
“John’s too young to leave here alone. I’ll get them to replace you as soon as I can – until then...”
She held out her slim hand and I placed my own slowly and gently into her grip. The touch of her skin was like warm silk.
“Goodbye,” I said.
She went up the ladder and John came down next.
I said coldly, “What is this? Visiting day?”
“I came to say goodbye,” he said, stiffly.
I stared hard at him, hoping I was making it difficult, hoping the bastard was uncomfortable and squirming.
“Why me, John? You had a reason.”
He suddenly looked very prim, his spectral features assuming a sharp quality.
“I thought about volunteering myself, but that would have meant you two going back alone – together, that is...” He became flustered. “She’s a married woman, Stan. She’ll go back to her husband and forget you.”
I rocked on my heels.
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Miriam. I’ve seen the way you two look at each other.”
I stared at him, finding it difficult to believe he could be so stupid.
“You’re a fool, John. The worst kind of fool. It’s people like you, with twisted minds, that start things like that war out there. Go on – get out of my sight.”
He started to climb the ladder, then he looked down and gave me a Parthian shot. “You put my name on your shard. Why should I feel guilty about putting yours?”
And he was right, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to jerk the ladder from under him and breaking his bloody neck.
They were gone within the hour, leaving me to haunt the Greeks all on my own, a solitary ghost moving restlessly around the parapet of the tower. I saw my Egyptian counterpart once, in the small hours, as a shimmering figure came out into the open to stare at my prison. I thought for a moment he or she was going to wave again, but nothing so interesting happened, and I was left to think about my predicament once more. I knew how slowly things moved back home. They had all the time in the world. I wondered whether Egyptians could learn to play chess. It was a pity Diogenes wasn’t yet alive, or I might have been tempted to wander down to Corinth. He would certainly have enjoyed a game, providing I stayed out of his sun. Me and Diogenes, sitting on top of his barrel, playing chess a thousand years before the game was invented �
�� that would have been something. Plato was a newborn babe in arms. Socrates was around, in his early forties, but who would want to play with that cunning man. Once he got the hang of it, you’d never win a game.
Flurries of snow began to drift in, over the mountains. The little Plataeans were in for a hard winter. I knew the result of the siege, of course. Three hundred Plataeans and seconded Athenians would make a break for it in a year’s time, killing the sentries left by Archidamus on the outer wall and getting away in the dark. All of them would make it, to Athens, fooling their pursuers into following a false trail, their inventive minds never flagging when it came to survival. Those Plataeans whose hearts failed them when it came to risking the escape, almost two hundred, would be put to death by the irate Spartans. The city itself would be razed. Perhaps the Spartans would learn something from the incident, but I doubted it. There was certainly a lot of patience around in the ancient world.
Patience. I wondered how much patience those people from the land of the pharaohs had, because it occurred to me that the natural movement of time was on their side. Provided we did nothing but maintain the status quo, standing nose to nose on the edges of our own vortices, they would gain, ever so gradually. Hour by hour, day by day, we were moving back to that place I call home.
We might replace our frontier guards, by one or by thousands, but the plain fact of the matter is we will eventually be pushed back to where we belong. Why, they’ve already gained several months as it is... only another twenty-five centuries and I’ll be back in my own back yard.
Then again, I might receive that terrible message I have been dreading, which would turn me from being the Athenian I believe I am, into a Spartan. Which would have me laying down my scroll and taking up the spear and shield. A ghost-warrior from the future, running forth to meet a god-soldier from the past. I can only hope that the possible historical havoc such action might cause will govern any decision made back home. I can’t help thinking, however, that the wish for sense to prevail must have been in the lips of a million-million such as me, who killed or died in fields, in trenches, in deserts and jungles, on seas and in the air.
The odds are stacked against me.
ALEXIA AND GRAHAM BELL
Rosaleen Love
Rosaleen Love is an Australian writer who has commented on Australian science and society, in both fiction and nonfiction, for the past forty years. She has published two collections of short fiction with the Women’s Press in the United Kingdom: The Total Devotion Machine, and Evolution Annie. Her most recent books are Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney and Washington, and The Traveling Tide, short fiction, with Aqueduct Press, Seattle. She is the recipient of the Chandler Award for lifetime achievement in Australian Science Fiction. “Alexia and Graham Bell” was first published in Aphelion 5 in 1986.
I suppose you know about the telephone by now, and you’ve heard a version of its story. Perhaps you think it’s an invention we’ve had for eighty years or so.
You’ll be wrong.
The telephone was invented two months ago by my brother Graham, on a cold winter’s afternoon when he had nothing better to do than fiddle around with a few tin cans, a thermo-amp, some wires, and a junked teletype I found on the tip. I heard some strange noises and when he yelled “Alexia” down the hall to me, I came running, because I thought he was up to his usual dopy experiments, dropping the cats upside down off the roof to see if they’d land on their paws, that kind of thing. But it wasn’t the cats this time. He’d hitched the teletype up so it spoke! I saw it myself, the first time he got it working, and it was playing away like a pianola, but sounding out the words! Words which Graham was speaking into a tin can on the other side of the room! The telephone! Which you’ve all heard about by now, though what you don’t know is its secret. That it’s only been around for two months. Truly.
Why should you believe me? When the history books tell the story differently and antique telephones fetch high prices at the market?
Let me explain. It’s one of those things which was never intended to happen. It was only after the event that all kinds of things fell into place, retrospectively.
I think the responsibility for our present mess must rest firmly with great-grandfather Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, back in 1870 he’d planned to migrate from England to Canada but he missed the boat! So he stayed at the docks and caught the next ship out, to Australia. West, east, what’s the difference? said great-grandfather, but he was wrong. Ever since Alexander overslept, the world of invention and discovery has taken an alternative path. Yes, the path of the telegraph and the censors and communal messenging.
Let me explain. It was only after the telephone was invented that it started influencing the past. Graham’s explanation goes like this: in our day-to-day activities, we are usually working toward a future goal, I am studying to become a censor in Central Control, or I was then, all that’s changed, now, and Graham is saving money so he can invent the ice-aeroplane. Okay, so we’re here, in the present, and the way we perceive the future is influencing what we’re doing. Equally, our present, now, is at this moment an influence on the past of our former selves and others. Graham says it’s obvious to anyone with the intellect of an ant, but I don’t know about the ants, they may be smarter than we give them credit for.
I can see that Graham’s argument has a certain elementary logic all its own.
“Graham,” I had to say, after I’d congratulated him on inventing something that worked for once, even though it was probably going to be good for nothing in the world, then that’s my brother Graham, what can I expect? “Graham, what will Mother say when she sees what a mess you’ve made of her thermo-amp?”
Graham glared at me and made for the cat, but I grabbed it before he could upend it. Surely he knows enough about how the cat uses its tail as an inertial paddle? He doesn’t have to go in for the experimental overkill! That’s Graham, though, a perfectionist. A perfectionist in the creation of knowledge we could perfectly well do without.
He had all the time to experiment because he was on compo from his job as messenger boy, second class. It’s not what Graham thought he was meant for in this life. So he did his best to fall down every flight of stairs between Central Message Control and the jobs he was sent on until finally he broke a few bones and got some time off to recover. Of course what he’s done is make himself retrospectively redundant now we’ve got the telephone, and messenger boys are out of work in a big way. Yes, along the way Graham created our present crisis in unemployment.
This is how it happened. I’ve been a privileged witness to the scene and I have a responsibility to tell the story properly.
The telephone’s great achievement is the contraction of distance. Pick up a phone and dial a number, and it doesn’t matter whether the person on the other end is down the street or across the country.
Now mess around with distance, with length, and you’re going to be messing around with time. That’s what we’ve just recently come to realize. Though we should have known, I suppose. Einstein told us about it. So, basically, what has happened since Graham got busy is that the last two months have expanded out of all proportion, expanded in time that is. Two months have blown out into eighty years! It’s true!
So Graham did something clever, something that worked, for once. The trouble is, it worked only too well.
At first Graham just tinkered about in the workroom. He was excited and chatty about what he was up to, but I’d heard all I wanted to know about cats and aerodynamics and the possibilities of the ice-aeroplane, so I didn’t really listen as closely as I should have. “Imagine!” said Graham. “Imagine being able to speak at a distance, without a written record of the conversation! Think what it’d be like! Privacy! No censors snooping into all the details of our lives! We’ll be able to talk about something without the entire teletype room knowing what’s happening!”
When he said that I was listening, that’s for sure, and I tried to arg
ue back. Imagine, a world without censors reading all the messages! I took him to task on that one, I can assure you. “Graham, if someone can pick up your telephone and speak to anyone else without a record being kept, it will lead to the breakdown of law and order as we know it.
“Besides,” I added, and Graham grew white about the eyes at this. Ha! I scared him properly! “If the censors get to hear about what you’re doing, why, you’ll do them out of a job” (and I was right about that!) “and they’ll be absolutely livid!”
Graham clutched his throat with a strangled cry. “The censors? After me? No! I’m only a child! My mother loves me! How would they get to know about it?”
“Walls have ears,” I said, very smugly.
“Alexia! No! Don’t tell on me! I’m your brother! You’d never!”
Ha! I had him worried! But he’s right. I’m not a censor-snooper. It’s true, I wanted a job as a censor, but I wanted it for the pay packet and the security. I didn’t have to believe all the guff they teach us about law and order. “Be careful,” I said to Graham, but of course he wasn’t. Once he found out what he was able to do, he just had to go ahead and do it. I didn’t tell on Graham. I now know I did wrong. After all, Graham succeeded in subverting the social fabric of twentieth-century society.
I was too busy to notice, at the time. I had my work to do. I confided to my friend Greta, though. We worked together at the telegraph office.
“Mind you, if Graham’s invention works, we’ll soon be out of a job,” I said to Greta, between the dots and the dashes.
Greta didn’t believe me. “At the telegraph office? At Central Message Control? No, Alexia, that won’t happen. No one ever gets sacked from here.”
“They can get you for unnatural interference with the messages,” I reminded her.
Greta was shocked. “Alexia, that’s never happened! No one would do that! It’d be... monstrous!”
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 62