“Wait; you’re a what?”
“I’m a curator, Greg. I’m trying to tell you; our national gallery is having a giant retrospective; tens of thousands of works of art from all over the world, and all over the world’s history. They sent us back to retrieve some of the pieces that had been destroyed. Expensive enough to send living biomaterial back; their grant wasn’t enough to pay for returning us to our time. So we’re going to grow our way there. Those of us that survive.”
There are more cars out on the road, more brakes squealing, more horns honking. “I’m not going to miss mass transit when I finally get home,” she says. “Your world stinks.”
“Yeah, it does.” We’re nearly to her parents’ place. From my side, I lock her door. Of course she notices. She just glances at the sound. She looks like she’s being taken to her death.
“I didn’t know it until yesterday,” she tells me, “but it was you I came for. That installation.”
And now the too-clever bloody child has me where I live. Though I know it’s all air pie and Kamla is as nutty as a fruitcake, my heart’s performing a tympanum of joy. “My installation’s going to be in the retrospective?” I ask. Even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m embarrassed at how eager I sound, at how this little girl, as children will, has dug her way into my psyche and found the thing which will make me respond to her.
She gasps and puts her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Greg! I’m so sorry; not you, the shell!”
My heart suicides, the brief, hallucinatory hope dashed. “The shell?”
“Yes. In the culture where I live, speciesism has become a defining concept through which we understand what it means to be human animals. Not every culture or subculture ascribes to it, but the art world of my culture certainly does.” She’s got her teacher voice on again. She does sound like a bloody curator. “Human beings aren’t the only ones who make art,” she says.
All right. Familiar territory. “Okay, perhaps. Bower birds make pretty nests to attract a mate. Cetaceans sing to each other. But we’re the only ones who make art mean; who make it comment on our everyday reality.”
From the corner of my eye, I see her shake her oversized head. “No. We don’t always know what they’re saying, we can’t always know the reality on which they’re commenting. Who knows what a sea cucumber thinks of the conditions of its particular stretch of ocean floor?”
A sea cucumber? We’ve just turned onto her parents’ street. She’ll be out of my hands soon. Poor Babette.
“Every shell is different,” she says.
My perverse brain instantly puts it to the tune of “Every Sperm Is Sacred”.
She continues, “Every shell is a life journal, made out of the very substance of its creator, and left as a record of what it thought, even if we can’t understand exactly what it thought. Sometimes interpretation is a trap. Sometimes we need to simply observe.”
“And you’ve come all this way to take that... shell back?” I can see it sticking out of the chest pocket of her fleece shirt.
“It’s difficult to explain to you, because you don’t have the background, and I don’t have the time to teach you. I specialise in shell formations. I mean, that’s Vanda’s specialty. She’s the curator whose memories I’m carrying. Of its kind, the mollusc that made this shell is a genius. The unique conformation of the whorls of its shell expresses a set of concepts that haven’t been explored before by the other artists of its species. After this one, all the others will draw on and riff off its expression of its world. They’re the derivatives, but this is the original. In our world, it was lost.”
Barmy. Loony. “So how did you know that it even existed, then? Did the snail or slug that lived inside it take pictures or something?” I’ve descended into cruelty. I’m still smarting that Kamla hasn’t picked me, my work. My legacy doesn’t get to go to the future.
She gives me a wry smile, as though she understands.
I pull up outside the house, start leaning on the horn. Over the noise, she shouts, “The creature didn’t take a picture. You did.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. With my precious video camera. I’d videotaped every artifact with which I’d seeded the soil that went onto the gallery floor. I didn’t tell her that.
She nods. “Not all the tape survived, so we didn’t know who had recorded it, or where the shell had come from. But we had an idea where the recording had come from.”
Lights are coming on in the house. Kamla looks over there and sighs. “I haven’t entirely convinced you, have I?”
“No,” I say regretfully. But damn it, a part of me still hopes that it’s all true.
“They’re probably going to institutionalise me. All of us.”
The front door opens. Sunil is running out to the car, a gravid Babette following more slowly.
“You have to help me, Greg. Please? We’re going to outlive all our captors. We will get out. But in the meantime...”
She pulls the shell out of her pocket, offers it to me on her tiny palm. “Please keep it safe for me?”
She opens the car door. “It’s your ticket to the future,” she says, and gets out of the car to greet her parents.
I lied. I fucking hate kids.
THE TIME TELEPHONE
Adam Roberts
Adam Roberts is a University of London professor and writer of science fiction, the most recently published of his fourteen novels being Jack Glass (Gollancz 2012) and Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (Gollancz 2013). He lives a little way west of London, England, with his wife, two children and no cats. “The Time Telephone” was first published in Infinity Plus in 2002.
1.
A mother phones her daughter. The call costs her nearly €18,000. The number she dials is several hundred digits long, but it has been calculated carefully and stored as a series of tones, so the dialling process takes only seconds. The ring tone at the far end makes its distant musical drumroll once, twice, three times, and with a clucking noise the receiver is lifted.
‘Hello?’
The mother takes a quick breath. ‘Marianne?’
‘Speaking. Who’s this, please?’
‘This is your mother, Marianne.’
‘Ma? I thought you were in Morocco. You calling from Morocco?’
‘No, dear, I’m here, I’m in London.’
‘Here?’
‘This is a call from the past, my darling,’ says the mother, her heart stabbing at her ribs. ‘As I speak now, as I speak to you now, I’m actually pregnant with you. You’re inside my tummy here, and I’m speaking to you there.’
For a moment there is only the polluted silence of a phone line; that slightly hissing, leaf-rustle emptiness of a line where the person at the other end is quiet. Then the daughter says, ‘Wow, ma. Really?’
‘Yes my dear.’
‘It’s that time telephone thing? Yeah? I read about that, or, or I watched a thing about it, on TV. You’re really calling me from the past?’
‘Yes my dear. I have a question I want to ask you.’
‘Wow, ma. Like, wow. I watched this programme about it on TV, it was a whole big thing, like, decades ago. And now it’s actually happening to me! And I’m only on a, like, regular phone.’
‘It uses the ordinary phone system, you know.’
‘It’s incredible, though. Isn’t it?’
‘I want to ask you this thing, my darling, and I want you to answer truthfully. I know that you are sixteen there, aren’t you. Aren’t you?’
‘Sweet sixteen.’
‘Well, from where I’m calling you’re not born yet. So I want to ask you.’ She takes a breath. ‘Are you glad you were born? Are you pleased to have come into the world?’ The drizzly silence of the phone line. ‘I mean the question absolutely seriously, my darling, absolutely. I mean the question, in the way that a child will say...’ But she finds it hard to find the words. ‘The way a child will say I hate you, I wish I’d never been born. That’s an unbearable thing for a parent to hear,
my darling. Do you see?’
‘You’re weirding me out, ma. This whole conversation is weirding me out. This whole concept is weirding me out.’
‘But I have to ask it of you, because now you’re sixteen, you can tell me. Are you glad you were born?’
‘Sure.’
‘Are you sure? Really sure?’
‘Ok, sure I’m sure, I’m really sure.’
Which is what the mother hoped to hear. She even sighs. And the remainder of the question is conversational scree, just talk about the weather and the chit-chat. So I go to Morocco? Well, yeah, ma. Hey, Scannell just won the board championship. You should make a bet. You could be rich. I don’t think it works that way, my darling. You look after yourself. Hey, you too. That sort of thing. You know the sort of thing, the sort of chit-chat a mother and daughter will make on the phone.
2.
The world cable telephone network is some 7,672,450,000 miles long in total, when the different international, national and local lines are added up. And they are all interconnected. They would hardly function as a telephone network if they weren’t. We are talking about cable, copper or some other electron-conducting material; optical fibre is no good for us, because photons travel only at the speed of light no matter how you slice and dice them. Neutroelectrons – a self-contradictory-sounding name, but better than the alternative mooted by the Italians of ‘anti-electrons’, for surely an anti-electron is a proton? – anyway – these ghostly particles travel so fast as effectively to travel instantaneously, but they can only do it in a material that conducts their shadowy anti-selves, their phase-inverted electrons. By plotting out a pathway along the telephone network, a neutroelectron can be passed instantly across the seven billion miles of cabling. The phone line becomes a gateway into the past; when they arrive they arrive from the past, if you see what I mean. This is because it would take light about eleven hours to travel the pathway mapped diligently through the phone lines. Which means that the far end of the cable is eleven hours away, so that the instantaneous transmission of the phased particle actually passes eleven hours back in time. For it to happen any other way would violate laws of cause-and-effect. I’m sure you’re following me.
Technicians carefully map out a route around the millions of miles of telephone cabling, turning innumerable sharp corners, fleeting back and forth underneath the oceans, rushing along smile-sagging lines propped up every fifty yards by another pole, curling and spinning around the electronic spaghetti of the bigger cities. A path through all this is mapped, and particles are fired along it.
In a year, light travels approximately 5,865,696,000,000 miles.
Looping the signal 900-or-so times around this loop, the neutroelectron effectively opens a phone line a year into the past. The problem is that the repeated passage through the same cable degrades the integrity of the signal. The scientists experimenting with this new phenomenon were able to obtain fax signals, and internet connection, over the time distance of eleven hours. Extending it to just under a day, looping the signal twice, the internet connection becomes choppy, unreliable, and painfully slow: too slow, in fact, to be cost-effective, when the large expense of running the time telephone system is taken into account. The fax signal works better, but only a small amount of visual information is carried by fax tweetings. Any more than a day and the bandwith is too small and too fragile to allow internet access. But even looping it two thousand times allowed a signal of reasonable, if crackly, integrity. More than this and the noise and static swallowed meaningful information exchange.
The initial researchers established an integral network of connections to the past: in effect they set up standing-wave each-way passageways for the neutroelectron connection. The theory owes something to wormhole physics, but it is much more limited on account of its need for a physical infrastructure. They phoned scientists from the past; sometimes phoning themselves, sometimes others. They explained the situation, giving them the know-how necessary to set up neutroelectron generators themselves, and plumbing them back into the phone line. And once the network was established, and people in the past had been contacted, it became evident that people in the past could reuse the connections to speak to people in their future, many years, to such phone terminals as had been utilised by the original scientists.
Soon crosstalk filled the time-phone lines. The future-people move through time at an hour an hour, dragging their envelope of past-talk with them at an hour an hour. But the past-time scientists could act as way-stations, taking the signal and relaying it further back, or further forward. In this way the envelope was extended to more than sixteen years. But no further. The generation of scientists at this blockage time, back in 2004, refused, for some reason, to be beguiled by these whispery voices on the phone, that declared themselves future humans; refused to spend the money on the ridiculous expense of setting up neutroelectronic generators, refused to believe the physics of it. Without their assistance the reach of the time telephones stopped dead. People before a certain date had no knowledge of the technology at all; for them, it had not happened yet.
In the future, researchers tried and failed, tried again and failed, to raise the money to build an enormous cable, billions upon billions of miles long. They wanted a space probe sent to an asteroid, to mine and refine and spool out huge stretches of cable through space, cable that earth people could hook up to the phone line and use to call back further in time. To call back in time before the 2004 blockage. But the expense was too much, and the project had not brought about any useful improvement in the quality of life. A person could place a bet in 2010, and call up an internet page from the following day to guide him; with the result that, under such circumstances, betting shrank to long-term wagers only. People could find out tomorrow’s news today, but almost always tomorrow’s news is merely an extrapolation of today’s news.
As the network grew, people called their friends and family in the past, warned loved ones of imminent death and told them which stock to buy, but the past is fixed in curious, physics-consistent ways. You are not fixed, as you read this sentence, I’m not suggesting that! But, then again, as you read this sentence you are at the now, between the past and the future. That is where you always are. I, writing it, am in the past. That’s just the truth. And even if you could call me up, so that my telephone here on my desktop, this blueblack-plastic Buddha-shaped machine here would ring and you could talk to me, it would make no difference, almost certainly no difference, in almost every case. You can’t really reach me, not easily, hardly at all. I’m sorry to tell you this, but it is the truth, it’s better you know the truth. Information does flow backwards, but sluggishly, treacly. It rushes much more forcefully the other way. So although people warned loved ones of imminent death and told them which stock to buy, the loved ones still died, and nobody found themselves suddenly rich because their earlier selves had invested more wisely. None of that happened. It might still happen, of course. There is nothing in the theory that suggests it could never happen.
And so 2019 turned into 2020, and 2020 into 2021, and people could talk to one another from any time from 2004 to 2038, but nobody built the superlong cabling that would have enabled the technicians to get clear neutroelectron signals that reached further back in time than 2004, to get internet access from the past and into the future. There seemed little point.
3.
A phone rings.
The phone is shaped something like a tapered loaf, cast from blood-brown plastic, with a broad steel ring like a buckle on the front that is rimmed with little circular holes. The receiver, bone-shaped, shivers in its cradle in time to the rings. The bell is a mechanical bell, located inside the hollow body of the thing, so that, ringing, it vibrates the whole device a little bit. The receiver is connected to the body of the phone with a brown flex, a flex which had come from the manufacturer curled as precisely as DNA, but which now is gnarled and knotted, unwound in places, scrunched up in others.
The phone s
its by the wall on a shelf in a small kitchen area. You might, perhaps, describe the area as a kitchenette. Against the west wall there is a unit containing a small sink, and next to it a dwarf-fridge on a shelf, with a kettle on top of it, and next to that a two-ring hob. On the south wall at tummy-height is a shelf upon which storage jars of coffee and of tea and of sugar, and three mugs, stand next to the phone. A door in the east wall, the north wall decorated with a poster for the film Gladiator. Somebody has pasted a photocopy of the face of an individual called Vernon St Lucia over the face of the star of the film, the humour of this gesture deriving from the ironic contrast between the muscular good looks of the film star and the weedy, querulous nature of St Lucia, who has authority over the three laboratory technicians who work here.
Only one of these technicians is in the building. It is shortly after seven o’clock in the evening, and everybody else has gone home for the night. The single technician remaining is called Roger. He comes through to the kitchenette.
The penetrating chirrup of the phone-bell stops.
‘Extension three-five-one-one?’
A rainy, white-noise sound, overlaid with a rhythmic distant thudding, and behind it, as if very far away, a tinny vocalisation, or singsong, or whistling. But no words.
‘Hello?’ says Roger. ‘Hello?’
The hissing swells and subsides like surf, the crackles pop more frequently. The oo-aa-ooing in the background might be words.... couldn’t get through earlier...
‘Hello? The connection,’ Roger says, ‘is not good.’
Crunching and flushing noises, and then sudden clarity: ‘... imperative that we get a message through...’ but then, with a swinging, horn-like miaow the line dissipates into static.
‘Hello? This is a very bad line.’
Nothing but noise.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 135