“What about redundancy? They can get you on that.”
I shall always remember Greta’s patient reply. “Alexia,” she said, “morse code and semaphore and messenger boys have been around longer than your brother Graham and his crazy ideas. How’s the cat?”
“On the mend.”
“The ice-aeroplane, didn’t you say that was another of his latest inventions?”
“Yes, but the telephone is different! I think the telephone is going to work!”
Greta was unconvinced. “We’d be able to talk to each other without everyone in the teletype room knowing the message.”
“I know, I know.”
“It’ll mean the end of twentieth-century society as we know it!”
“No more censors!”
“Shhh!”
“Greta, I just can’t get through to Graham. I keep telling him: Graham, the telephone will lead to anarchy.”
“It won’t ever happen,” said Greta, as she lectured me on the moral desirability of the Censored State. “If we were meant to talk to each other down wires then God would have connected us up from birth.”
Graham just kept on working. “Today the passageway, tomorrow the world,” he announced when I came home one evening.
I found a land-line down the passage and a telephone hook-up in my bedroom. “Graham, you’ve gone too far this time,” I bellowed into the phone when it rang. “Get your inventions out of my room!”
“Alexia, will you step into the next room for a moment?” said Graham on the phone, polite and conscious of the historic moment.
I told him a thing or two. “Greta says you’re a social menace, and I agree with her!” This is a true account of the first telephone message. You may know part of the story.
First Graham wired up the passage, then he extended the line to every room in the house. Then he wanted more. He wanted to go down the street and clear across Australia, then out into the world.
And he managed to persuade people! Never mind the censors, they vanished, once the capitalist entrepreneurs took over. Graham had them convinced.
“Gas pipes, water pipes, and telephone pipes!” said Graham, his eyes gleaming and his fingers flying. “One system, one policy, one universal service!”
“One giant monopoly! And money!” replied the capitalist entrepreneur.
“One grand telephonic system linking each farm to its neighbor, each factory to its central office, each nation to the other!” said Graham, still the visionary.
Remember what it said in the paper? “We may confidently expect that Mr. Bell will give us the means of making voice and spoken words audible through the electric wires to an ear hundreds of miles distant.” It happened.
I tried to warn Graham. “There may be a few social problems.”
Graham didn’t pay attention. “Nothing a telephone in every house won’t fix,” he said.
“There may be a few economic problems,” I warned.
“Show me the economic problem that money won’t eliminate!” There was no stopping him.
“Contract distance, contract time!”
“Only a little bit! No one will ever notice!”
“Graham, don’t do it! You are going into the unknown.”
“No need to worry,” said Graham, “I know perfectly well what I’m doing.”
Of course, he got it wrong and we all paid the price. Poor old Greta was one of the first casualties.
“Alexia, what’s wrong? My life... it’s passing so quickly! It seems only yesterday that we worked in Central Control, and now... the telegraph! It’s vanished!”
I tried my best to distract her. “Happy birthday, darling! Fifty candles on the cake!”
“Then things changed so quickly. The telephone...”
“Time’s a funny thing.”
Greta blew at the candles. “Everything started to speed up, and things passed me by, so quickly!”
“There, there, you must have been enjoying yourself.”
“It’s not fair! I haven’t had time to enjoy myself!”
Of course, Graham could explain it. “The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion,” he said.
“It seems real, to me. How can yesterday become tomorrow?”
“If time contracts!”
“That’s my problem! What’s the solution?”
“I’m working on it,” Graham muttered.
“I can’t wait,” said Greta, “I need it now.”
I discovered that time is more than my perception of it. Time depends on the telephone.
“Nonsense!” you will say. “Time has been around for simply ages, but the telephone, why, it’s only been around for a couple of years!”
“A couple of years? Did you say a couple of years? Why did you say that? I’ve got you, there!”
“Did I say a couple of years?” you’ll say, puzzled. “Why, of course I meant a hundred years. I don’t know why I said a couple of years, and with such conviction. It was just a silly mistake.”
Aha, but silly mistakes always mean something! You’re confused about the issue, admit it. There’s something not quite right about the telephone, something that’s hovering on the edge of your comprehension but which can’t quite make the break out into your conscious mind. You know, more than you can tell.
Greta and I both noticed something happening. I’ve worked it out since then.
When Graham got the marketing men interested in his invention, and phones started appearing in every home, time started to speed up for most people. You know how it is, you feel that last year was only yesterday, and that the years of your life are flitting by so quickly. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation. It’s because last year was only yesterday, for you, though not for me.
The censors joined the unemployed, the messenger boys went off to two world wars, and wherever the telephone spread, time accelerated in its course. It’s only in countries where there are no phones that people still get full value for their lives.
I don’t know why it was that Graham and I have not shared the experience. We’ve either been spared, or punished, for our knowledge. We have stayed outside the onward rush of time. Graham’s happy. He thinks he must have invented the elixir of youth in that first experiment. Only the elixir isn’t a drug made from gold, or precious herbs, or genetically engineered DNA. The elixir is a unique form of radiation which comes from standing too close to a few tin cans, a thermo-amp, old wires, and a teletype junked in a quite specific way, at a time when Jupiter is on the cusp of Uranus and the moon is in the fourth quarter.
I can’t turn the clock back. I can’t personally dynamite every telephone in Australia. But I see I shall have to hijack Graham and take him off to Antarctica. He’ll come with me willingly enough. Where better to design the ice-aeroplane?
There’s a new factor entering into the story. Graham’s started to mutter about a new device to contract distance, only this time on a cosmic scale. He can do it, too. The problem with space travel, says Graham, is that space is too big. It’s one thing to design a spaceship, but then it takes aeons to get anywhere in it. The stars are too far away. So Graham is working on a device to shrink the galaxy.
Instead of us reaching out to the stars, Graham will have the stars reach down to us.
This is the end. The world has suffered enough.
I, Alexia Bell, being of sound mind, must take my brother Graham to Antarctica, and there build him an ice-hangar for his ice-aeroplanes. I shall lock the door and throw the key from a high window. I make this sacrifice, for you.
A NIGHT ON THE BARBARY COAST
Kage Baker
Kage Baker was an American writer who wrote both serious and funny stories and novels, most with a fantastical or science fiction slant. She was a finalist for the Hugo Award and winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Nebula Award. “A Night on the Barbary Coast” was the winner of the first of the Norton awards for San Francisco based speculative fiction i
n 2003. It was originally published in The Silver Gryphon anthology. You can find another Company story, “Noble Mold,” elsewhere in this anthology.
I’d been walking for five days, looking for Mendoza. The year was 1850.
Actually, walking doesn’t really describe traveling through that damned vertical wilderness in which she lived. I’d crawled uphill on hands and knees, which is no fun when you’re dressed as a Franciscan friar, with sandals and beads and the whole nine yards of brown burlap robe. I’d slid downhill, which is no fun either, especially when the robe rides up in back. I’d waded across freezing cold creeks and followed thready little trails through ferns, across forest floors in permanent darkness under towering redwoods. I’m talking gloom. One day the poets will fall in love with Big Sur, and after them the beats and hippies, but if vampires ever discover the place they’ll go nuts over it.
Mendoza isn’t a vampire, though she is an immortal being with a lot of problems, most of which she blames on me.
I’m an immortal being with a lot of problems, too. Like father, like daughter.
After most of a week, I finally came out on a patch of level ground about three thousand feet up. I was standing there looking down on clouds floating above the Pacific Ocean, and feeling kind of funny in the pit of my stomach as a result – and suddenly saw the Company-issue processing credenza on my left, nicely camouflaged. I’d found Mendoza’s camp at last.
There was her bivvy tent, all right, and a table with a camp stove, and five pots with baby trees growing in them. Everything but the trees had a dusty, abandoned look.
Cripes, I thought to myself, how long since she’s been here? I looked around uneasily, wondering if I ought to yoo-hoo or something, and that was when I noticed her signal coming from... up? I craned back my head.
An oak tree rose from the mountain face behind me, huge and branching wide, and high up there among the boughs Mendoza leaned. She gazed out at the sea; but with such a look of ecstatic vacancy in her eyes, I guessed she was seeing something a lot farther away than that earthly horizon.
I cleared my throat.
The vacant look went away fast, and there was something inhuman in the sharp way her head swung around.
“Hi, honey,” I said. She looked down and her eyes focused on me. She has black eyes, like mine, only mine are jolly and twinkly and bright. Hers are like flint. Always been that way, even when she was a little girl.
‘’What the hell are you doing here, Joseph?” she said at last.
“I missed you, too, baby,” I said. “Want to come down? We need to talk.”
Muttering, she descended through the branches.
“Nice trees,” I remarked. “Got any coffee?”
“I can make some,” she said. I kept my mouth shut as she poked around in her half-empty rations locker, and I still kept it shut when she hauled out her bone-dry water jug and stared at it in a bewildered kind of way before remembering where the nearest stream was, and I didn’t even remark on the fact that she had goddam moss in her hair, though what I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs was: How can you live like this?
No, I played it smart. Pretty soon we were sitting at either end of a fallen log, sipping our respective mugs of coffee, just like family.
“Mm, good Java,” I lied.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Okay, kid, I’ll tell you,” I said. “The Company is sending me up to San Francisco on a job. I need a field botanist, and I had my pick of anybody in the area, so I decided on you.”
I braced myself for an explosion, because sometimes Mendoza’s a little touchy about surprises. But she was silent for a moment, with that bewildered expression again, and I just knew she was accessing her chronometer because she’d forgotten what year this was.
“San Francisco, huh?” she said. “But I went through Yerba Buena a century ago, Joseph. I did a complete survey of all the endemics. Specimens, DNA codes, the works. Believe me, there wasn’t anything to interest Dr. Zeus.”
“Well, there might be now,” I said. “And that’s all you need to know until we get there.”
She sighed. “So, it’s like that?”
“It’s like that. But hey, we’ll have a great time! There’s a lot more up there now than fog and sand dunes.”
“I’ll say there is,” she said grimly. “I just accessed the historical record for October 1850. There’s a cholera epidemic going on. There’s chronic arson. The streets are half quicksand. You really take me to some swell places, don’t you?”
“How long has it been since you ate dinner in a restaurant?” I coaxed. She started to say something sarcastic in reply, looked down at whatever was floating in the bottom of her coffee, and shuddered.
“See? It’ll be a nice change of scenery,” I told her, as she tossed the dregs over her shoulder. I tossed out my coffee, too, in a simpatico gesture. “The Road to Frisco! A fun-filled musical romp! Two wacky cyborgs plus one secret mission equals laughs galore!”
“Oh, shut up,” she told me, but rose to strike camp.
It took us longer to get down out of the mountains than I would have liked, because Mendoza insisted on bringing her five potted trees, which were some kind of endangered species, so we had to carry them all the way to the closest Company receiving terminal in Monterey, by which time I was ready to drop the damn things down any convenient cliff. But away they went to some Company botanical garden, and, after requisitioning equipment and a couple of horses, we finally set off for San Francisco.
I guess if we had been any other two people, we’d have chatted about bygone times as we rode along. It’s never safe to drag up old memories with Mendoza, though. We didn’t talk much, all the way up El Camino Real, through the forests and across the scrubby hills. It wasn’t until we’d left San Jose and were picking our way along the shore of the back bay, all black ooze and oyster shells, that Mendoza looked across at me and said: “We’re carrying a lot of lab equipment with us. I wonder why?”
I just shrugged.
“Whatever the Company’s sending us after, they want it analyzed on the spot,” she said thoughtfully. “So possibly they’re not sure that it’s really what they want. But they need to find out.”
“Could be.”
“And your only field expert is being kept on a need-to-know basis, which means it’s something important,” she continued. “And they’re sending you, even though you’re still working undercover in the Church, being Father Rubio or whoever. Aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“You look even more like Mephistopheles than usual in that robe, did I ever tell you that? Anyway – why would the Company send a friar into a town full of gold miners, gamblers, and prostitutes?” Mendoza speculated. “You’ll stick out like a sore thumb. And where does botany fit in?”
“I guess we’ll see, huh?”
She glared at me sidelong and grumbled to herself a while, but that was okay. I had her interested in the job, at least. She was losing that thousand-year-stare that worried me so much.
I wasn’t worrying about the job at all.
You could smell San Francisco miles before you got there. It wasn’t the ordinary mortal aroma of a boom town without adequate sanitation, even one in the grip of cholera. San Francisco smelled like smoke, with a reek that went right up your nose and drilled into your sinuses.
It smelled this way because it had been destroyed by fire four times already, most recently only a month ago, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the place. Obscenely expensive real estate where tents and shanties had stood was already filling up with brand-new frame buildings. Hammers pounded day and night along Clay, along Montgomery and Kearney and Washington. All the raw new wood was festooned with red-white-and-blue bunting, and hastily improvised Stars and Stripes flew everywhere. California had only just found out it had been admitted to the Union, and was still celebrating.
The bay was black with ships, but those closest to the shore were never going to sea ag
ain – their crews had deserted and they were already enclosed by wharves, filling in on all sides. Windows and doors had been cut in their hulls as they were converted to shops and taverns.
Way back in the sand hills, poor old Mission Dolores – built of adobe blocks by a people whose world hadn’t changed in millennia, on a settlement plan first designed by officials of the Roman Empire – looked down on the crazy new world in wonderment. Mendoza and I stared, too, from where we’d reined in our horses near Rincon Hill.
“So this is an American city,” said Mendoza.
“Manifest Destiny in action,” I agreed, watching her. Mendoza had never liked being around mortals much. How was she going to handle a modern city, after a century and a half of wilderness? But she just set her mouth and urged her horse forward, and I was proud of her.
For all the stink of disaster, the place was alive. People were out and running around, doing business. There were hotels and taverns; there were groceries and bakeries and candy stores. Lightermen worked the water between those ships that hadn’t yet been absorbed into the city, bringing in prospectors bound for the gold fields or crates of goods for the merchants. I heard six languages spoken before we’d crossed Clay Street. Anything could be bought or sold here, including a meal prepared by a Parisian chef. The air hummed with hunger, and enthusiasm, and a kind of rapacious innocence.
I grinned. America looked like fun.
We found a hotel on the big central wharf, and loaded our baggage into two narrow rooms whose windows looked into the rigging of a landlocked ship. Mendoza stared around at the bare plank walls.
“This is Oregon spruce,” she announced. “You can still smell the forest! I’ll bet this was alive and growing a month ago.”
“Probably,” I agreed, rummaging in my trunk. I found what I was looking for and unrolled it to see how it had survived the trip.
“What’s that?”
“A subterfuge.” I held the drawing up. “A beautiful gift for his Holiness the Pope! The artist’s conception, anyway.”
“A huge ugly crucifix?” Mendoza looked pained.
“And a matching rosary, baby. All to be specially crafted out of gold and – this is the important part – gold-bearing quartz from sunny California, U.S.A., so the Holy Father will know he’s got faithful fans out here!”
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 63