Alan felt it would have been better to talk over a candle-lit dinner in a restaurant, like they did in the story, but he went ahead and told her everything, quoting parts of the story verbatim, such as the passage where she described him as the perfect lover she’d been longing for all her life.
When he was finished, she managed a frozen smile. “So you’ve come all the way from the future just to visit little ole me. Isn’t that nice.”
Oh Matrix, Alan thought. She’s humouring me. She’s convinced I’m insane and probably dangerous as well. “I know this must sound crazy to you,” he said.
“Not at all,” she told him, gripping the arms of her chair. He could see the blood draining out of her fingers.
“Please don’t be afraid. I’d never harm you.” He sighed and put a hand to his forehead. “It was all so different in the story.”
“But I never wrote any story. Well, I started one once, but I never got beyond the second page.”
“But you will. You see, it doesn’t get published until 1973.”
“You do know this is 1979, don’t you?”
“WHAT?”
“Looks like your timing’s off,” she said. She watched him sink his head into his hands with an exaggerated groan. She rested her chin on one hand and regarded him silently. He didn’t seem so frightening now. Crazy, yes, but not frightening. She might even find him quite attractive, if only things were different. He looked up at her and smiled. It was a crooked, little boy’s smile that made his eyes sparkle. For a moment, she almost let herself imagine waking up to that smile... She pulled herself up in her chair, her back rigid.
“Look,” he said. “So I’m a few years behind schedule. The main thing is I found you. And so what if the story comes out a bit later, it’s nothing we can’t handle. It’s only a minor problem. A little case of bad timing.”
“Excuse me,” Cecily said. “But I think that in this case, timing is everything. If any of this made the least bit of sense, which it doesn’t, you would’ve turned up before now. You said yourself the story was published in 1973 – if it was based on fact, you’d need to arrive here much earlier.”
“I did get here earlier, but I was too early.”
Cecily’s eyes widened involuntarily. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I was here before. I met you. I spoke to you.”
“When?”
“You wouldn’t remember. You were three years old, and your parents threw a party for you out in the garden. Of course I realised my mistake instantly, but I bluffed it out by telling your mother that I’d just dropped by to apologise because my kid was sick and couldn’t come – it was a pretty safe bet that someone wouldn’t have shown – and she said, ‘Oh you must be little Sammy’s father’ and asked me in. I was going to leave immediately, but your father handed me a beer and started talking about something called baseball. Of course I didn’t have a present for you...”
“But you gave me a rose and told my mother to press it into a book so that I’d have it forever.”
“You remember.”
“Wait there. Don’t move.” She leapt from her chair and ran upstairs. There was a lot of noise from above – paper rattling, doors opening and closing, things being thrown about. She returned clutching several books to her chest, her face flushed and streaked with dust. She flopped down on the floor and spread them out in front of her. When Alan got up to join her, she told him to stay where he was or she’d scream. He sat back down.
She opened the first book, and then Alan saw that they weren’t books at all; they were photo albums. He watched in silence as she flipped through the pages and then tossed it aside. She tossed three of them away before she found what she was looking for. She stared open-mouthed at the brittle yellow page and then she looked up at Alan. “I don’t understand this,” she said, turning her eyes back to the album and a faded black and white photograph stuck to the paper with thick, flaking paste. Someone had written in ink across the top: Cecily’s 3rd birthday, August 2nd, 1951. There was her father, who’d been dead for ten years, young and smiling, holding out a bottle to another young man, tall and blonde and dressed like a gas station attendant. “I don’t understand this at all.” She pushed the album across the floor towards Alan. “You haven’t changed one bit. You’re even wearing the same clothes.”
“Did you keep the rose?”
She walked over to a wooden cabinet and pulled out a slim hardback with the title, “My First Reader”. She opened it and showed him the dried, flattened flower. “You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you?” she said. “This is all true. You risked everything to find me because we were meant to be together, and nothing, not even time itself, could keep us apart.”
Alan nodded. There was a speech just like that in “The Love That Conquered Time”.
“Bastard,” she said.
Alan jumped. He didn’t remember that part. “Pardon me?”
“Bastard,” she said again. “You bastard!”
“I... I don’t understand.”
She got up and started to pace the room. “So you’re the one, huh? You’re ‘Mister Right’, Mister Happily Ever After, caring, compassionate and great in bed. And you decide to turn up now. Well, isn’t that just great.”
“Is something the matter?” Alan asked her.
“Is something the matter?” she repeated. “He asks me if something’s the matter! I’ll tell you what’s the matter. I got married four weeks ago, you son of a bitch!”
“You’re married?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“But you can’t be married. We were supposed to find perfect happiness together at a particular point in space that has always existed and always will. This ruins everything.”
“All those years... all those years. I went through hell in high school, you know. I was the only girl in my class who didn’t have a date for the prom. So where were you then, huh? While I was sitting alone at home, crying my goddamn eyes out? How about all those Saturday nights I spent washing my hair? And even worse, those nights I worked at Hastings’ Bar serving drinks to salesmen pretending they don’t have wives. Why couldn’t you have been around then, when I needed you?”
“Well, I’ve only got the first five pages of the manual...” He walked over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. She didn’t move away. He gently pulled her closer to him. She didn’t resist. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m a real zarkhead. I’ve made a mess of everything. You’re happily married, you never wrote the story... I’ll just go back where I came from, and none of this will have ever happened.”
“Who said I was happy?”
“But you just got married.”
She pushed him away. “I got married because I’m thirty years old and figured I’d never have another chance. People do that, you know. They reach a certain age and they figure it’s now or never... Damn you! If only you’d come when you were supposed to!”
“You’re thirty? Matrix, in half an hour you’ve gone from a toddler to someone older than me.” He saw the expression on her face, and mumbled an apology.
“Look,” she said. “You’re gonna have to go. My husband’ll be back any minute.”
“I know I have to leave. But the trouble is, that drebbing story was true! I took one look at your photo, and I knew that I loved you and I always had. Always. That’s the way time works, you see. And even if this whole thing vanishes as the result of some paradox, I swear to you I won’t forget. Somewhere there’s a point in space that belongs to us. I know it.” He turned to go. “Good-bye Cecily.”
“Alan, wait! That point in space – I want to go there. Isn’t there anything we can do? I mean, you’ve got a time machine, after all.”
What an idiot, he thought. The solution’s been staring me in the face and I’ve been too blind to see it. “The machine!” He ran down the front porch steps and turned around to see her standing in the doorway. “I’ll see you later,” he told her. He knew it wa
s a ridiculous thing to say the minute he’d said it. What he meant was, “I’ll see you earlier.”
Five men sat together inside a tent made of animal hide. The land of their fathers was under threat, and they met in council to discuss the problem. The one called Swiftly Running Stream advocated war, but Foot Of The Crow was more cautious. “The paleface is too great in number, and his weapons give him an unfair advantage.” Flying Bird suggested that they smoke before speaking further.
Black Elk took the pipe into his mouth. He closed his eyes for a moment and declared that the Great Spirit would give them a sign if they were meant to go to war. As soon as he said the word, “war”, a paleface materialised among them. They all saw him. The white man’s body was covered in a strange bright garment such as they had never seen, and he rode a fleshless horse with silver bones. The vision vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving them with this message to ponder: Oops.
There was no one home, so he waited on the porch. It was a beautiful day, with a gentle breeze that carried the scent of roses: certainly better than that smoke-filled teepee.
A woman appeared in the distance. He wondered if that was her. But then he saw that it couldn’t be, the woman’s walk was strange and her body was misshapen. She’s pregnant, he realised. It was a common thing in the days of overpopulation, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a pregnant woman back home – it must have been years. She looked at him questioningly as she waddled up the steps balancing two paper bags. Alan thought the woman looked familiar; he knew that face. He reached out to help her.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m looking for Cecily Walker.”
“My name’s Walker,” the woman told him. “But I don’t know any Cecily.”
Matrix, what a moron, Alan thought, wanting to kick himself. Of course he knew the woman; it was Cecily’s mother, and if she was pregnant, it had to be 1948. “My mistake,” he told her. “It’s been a long day.”
The smell of roses had vanished, along with the leaves on the trees. There was snow on the ground and a strong northeasterly wind. Alan set the thermostat on his jumpsuit accordingly and jumped off the bike.
“So it’s you again,” Cecily said ironically. “Another case of perfect timing.” She was twenty pounds heavier and there were lines around her mouth and her eyes. She wore a heavy wool cardigan sweater over an oversized tee-shirt, jeans, and a pair of fuzzy slippers. She looked him up and down. “You don’t age at all, do you?”
“Please can I come in? It’s freezing.”
“Yeah, yeah. Come in. You like a cup of coffee?”
“You mean liquid caffeine? That’d be great.”
He followed her into the living room and his mouth dropped open. The red sofa was gone, replaced by something that looked like a giant banana. The television was four times bigger and had lost the rabbit-ears. The floral wallpaper had been replaced by plain white walls not very different from those of his apartment. “Sit,” she told him. She left the room for a moment and returned with two mugs, one of which she slammed down in front of him, causing a miniature brown tidal wave to splash across his legs.
“Cecily, are you upset about something?”
“That’s a good one! He comes back after fifteen years and asks me if I’m upset.”
“Fifteen years!” Alan sputtered.
“That’s right. It’s 1994, you bozo.”
“Oh darling, and you’ve been waiting all this time...”
“Like hell I have,” she interrupted. “When I met you, back in 1979, I realised that I couldn’t stay in that sham of a marriage for another minute. So I must have set some kind of a record for quickie marriage and divorce, by Danville standards, anyway. So I was a thirty-year-old divorcee whose marriage had fallen apart in less than two months, and I was back to washing my hair alone on Saturday nights. And people talked. Lord, how they talked. But I didn’t care, because I’d finally met my soul-mate and everything was going to be all right. He told me he’d fix it. He’d be back. So I waited. I waited for a year. Then I waited two years. Then I waited three. After ten, I got tired of waiting. And if you think I’m going through another divorce, you’re crazy.”
“You mean you’re married again?”
“What else was I supposed to do? A man wants you when you’re forty, you jump at it. As far as I knew, you were gone forever.”
“I’ve never been away, Cecily. I’ve been here all along, but never at the right time. It’s that drebbing machine; I can’t figure out the controls.”
“Maybe Arnie can have a look at it when he gets in, he’s pretty good at that sort of thing – what am I saying?”
“Tell me, did you ever write the story?”
“What’s to write about? Anyway, what difference does it make? Woman’s Secrets went bankrupt years ago.”
“Matrix! If you never wrote the story, then I shouldn’t even know about you. So how can I be here? Dammit, it’s a paradox. And I wasn’t supposed to cause any of those. Plus, I think I may have started an Indian war. Have you noticed any change in local history?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Look, I have an idea. When exactly did you get divorced?”
“I don’t know, late ’79. October, November, something like that.”
“All right, that’s what I’ll aim for. November, 1979. Be waiting for me.”
“How?”
“Good point. Okay, just take my word for it, you and me are going to be sitting in this room right here, right now, with one big difference: we’ll have been married for fifteen years, okay?”
“But what about Arnie?”
“Arnie won’t know the difference. You’ll never have married him in the first place.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be back in a minute. Well, in 1979. You know what I mean.” He headed for the door.
“Hold on,” she said. “You’re like the guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and doesn’t come back for thirty years.”
“What guy?”
“Never mind. I wanna make sure you don’t turn up anywhere else. Bring the machine in here.”
“Is that it?” she said one minute later.
“That’s it.”
“But it looks like a goddamn bicycle.”
“Where do you want me to put it?”
She led him upstairs. “Here,” she said. Alan unfolded the bike next to the bed. “I don’t want you getting away from me next time,” she told him.
“I don’t have to get away from you now.”
“You do. I’m married and I’m at least fifteen years older than you.”
“Your age doesn’t matter to me,” Alan told her. “When I first fell in love with you, you’d been dead three hundred years.”
“You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you? Anyway, don’t aim for ’79. I don’t understand paradoxes, but I know I don’t like them. If we’re ever gonna get this thing straightened out, you must arrive before 1973, when the story is meant to be published. Try for ’71 or ’72. Now that I think about it, those were a strange couple of years for me. Nothing seemed real to me then. Nothing seemed worth bothering about, nothing mattered; I always felt like I was waiting for something. Day after day I waited, though I never knew what for.”
She stepped back and watched him slowly turn a dial until he vanished. Then she remembered something.
How could she ever have forgotten such a thing? She was eleven and she was combing her hair in front of her bedroom mirror. She screamed. When both her parents burst into the room and demanded to know what was wrong, she told them she’d seen a man on a bicycle. They nearly sent her to a child psychiatrist.
Damn that Alan, she thought. He’s screwed up again.
The same room, different decor, different time of day. Alan blinked several times; his eyes had difficulty adjusting to the darkness. He could barely make out the shape on the bed, but he could see all he needed to. The shape was alone, and it was adult size. He leaned close to her ear. “Cec
ily,” he whispered. “It’s me.” He touched her shoulder and shook her slightly. He felt for a pulse.
He switched on the bedside lamp. He gazed down at a withered face framed by silver hair, and sighed. “Sorry, love,” he said. He covered her head with a sheet, and sighed again.
He sat down on the bike and unfolded the printout. He’d get it right eventually.
IF EVER I SHOULD LEAVE YOU
Pamela Sargent
Pamela Sargent is an American writer who has won the Nebula and Locus awards, been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and Sidewise Award, and was honored in 2012 with the Pilgrim Award, given for lifetime achievement in science fiction and fantasy scholarship by the Science Fiction Research Association. She has written many novels including Cloned Lives, Eye of the Comet, Homesmind, Alien Child, and The Shore of Women. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, New Worlds, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, Universe, and Nature, among others. “If Ever I Should Leave You” was first published in a much different form in Worlds of If, February 1974, and in this preferred text in Afterlives, edited by Pamela Sargent and Ian Watson, Vintage, 1986.
When Yuri walked away from the Time Station for the last time, his face was pale marble, his body only bones barely held together by skin and the weak muscles he had left. I hurried to him and grasped his arm, oblivious to the people who passed us in the street. He resisted my touch at first, embarrassed in front of the others; then he gave in and leaned against me as we began to walk home.
I knew that he was too weak to go to the Time Station again. His body, resting against mine, seemed almost weightless. I guided him through the park toward our home. Halfway there, he tugged at my arm and we rested against one of the crystalline trees surrounding the small lake in the center of the park.
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