“Eternity?” The thought of it distracted the EeePavoosh further. “How do sixty years feel like eternity?”
“Livin’ the kind of life I’ve been livin’.” Tillie squinted up at the lavender clouds squirming in the hot pink sky. “Days have a way of feelin’ like decades.”
The EeePavoosh was having trouble paying attention to his work. “All time is like this on the other side? Days feel like decades? Years feel like eternity?”
“For me, they do.” Tillie scrubbed her hands through her stringy brown-and-gray mane. “Some more than others, I guess.”
The phenomenon she was describing excited the EeePavoosh. Was it possible, on the other side of the portal, that time was somehow amplified? That it could be extended beyond its usual properties?
The internal structure of the EeePavoosh’s avatar shivered with anticipation, and the structure of the parent leviathan in orbit around the planet did the same. “I want to know more.”
“I can tell.” Tillie smiled. “You’re really interested in this stuff, aren’t ya’?”
“I am,” said the EeePavoosh.
Tillie narrowed her eyes. “Makes you wanna open that doorway faster, doesn’t it? To see what’s on the other side.”
“It does.” Even as he said it, the EeePavoosh redoubled his efforts to analyze the portal. “Now tell me more about the longer times on the other side.”
Tillie nodded. “Why not, if it gets me home faster?” Pulling out the bottle in the bag, she opened and tipped it to her lips...tipped it high, almost straight up. The EeePavoosh heard a tiny trickle run into her mouth, then nothing. “Damn.” Tillie lowered the bottle. “Don’t suppose you could whip me up a little joy juice, couldja, buddy?”
“No joy juice,” said the EeePavoosh. “Now tell me about the longer times on the other side.”
Tillie pitched the bottle, and it shattered against a nearby boulder. “Where to begin?”
The EeePavoosh thought she was asking him a question. “Begin by telling me what makes time longer on the other side.”
“Suffering,” said Tillie. “That’s what makes it longer. Like, for example, the five years I spent married to Ray Coleman. They felt more like fifty years than five.”
“Married?” said the EeePavoosh.
“When a man and a woman get together,” said Tillie, “and make each other miserable for the rest of their lives.”
“How does this make time longer?” asked the EeePavoosh.
“Well, it’s like this,” said Tillie. “When I was a little girl, I used to dream about fallin’ in love and gettin’ married. I spent hours and hours imaginin’ what it would be like.
“I wanted a big, strong man to save me...to take me away from home, so my daddy couldn’t get me anymore. And the funny thing is, I got one. A big, strong man.” Tillie shook her head. “And he proceeded to kick my ass six ways from Sunday. I went from one man abusin’ me to another.”
“This kicking your ass,” said the EeePavoosh. “It made the time longer?”
“Longer than you can imagine,” said Tillie. “Every day felt like a year. The pain...the helplessness.” She sniffed and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “But the worst part, the longest, was the waiting. Waiting for my husband to come home. Then, when he got there, tiptoeing around him, waiting for him to go off. Because I knew it was only a matter of time until he hit me again.”
“A matter of time,” said the EeePavoosh.
“I remember.” As Tillie stared off into space, drops of clear fluid ran out of her eyes and down her cheeks. “He beat me for bein’ too pretty, ‘cause other men were lookin’ at me. He beat me so much, I wasn’t pretty anymore.” Reaching up, she lightly touched her face with her fingertips. “Then, he beat me for bein’ too ugly.
“He beat me for gettin’ pregnant, too...and then he beat me for losin’ the baby.” She wiped the fluid from her cheeks and rubbed her eyes hard. “As if I wanted to lose the only thing that had ever made me happy.”
“And this made the time longer?” said the EeePavoosh.
“God, yes,” said Tillie. “Each minute that he beat me lasted a century.”
“Each minute lasted a century?” The EeePavoosh couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice.
Tillie nodded. “When it was over, and the bruises set in, the minutes lasted even longer. I’d be doin’ the dishes or laundry, and my whole body would ache and sting from what he did, and the minutes would just crawl. I just wanted it all to be over...but the more I wanted that, the slower it went.”
The EeePavoosh worked faster. If what Tillie was telling him was true, he couldn’t wait to get to the other side of the portal.
“I know what you’re thinkin’,” said Tillie as she wiped away more fluid from her cheeks. “Why the hell did I stay with him for five years, right?”
The answer seemed perfectly clear to the EeePavoosh. “To continue to stretch out time. And consume it.”
“Consume?” Tillie gave him a strange look. “What do you mean, ‘consume’ time?”
“Ingest it for sustenance,” said the EeePavoosh. “Eat it.”
The look on Tillie’s face deepened. “Why do you say that?” She eased around to the other side of the portal and stared at him through the rippling oval.
“It is how I live,” said the EeePavoosh. “I consume time.”
“You actually eat it?” asked Tillie. “Hours, minutes, days, whatever?”
“As you understand time, that is correct,” said the EeePavoosh.
“Ain’t that somethin’?” Tillie gazed at him thoughtfully, pinching her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. “So, uh...what happens if you open that doorway?”
“When, not if,” said the EeePavoosh. “I have completed my analysis. I know how to open it now.”
“That’s wonderful. I can’t wait to get home.” Tillie kept staring and pinching her lower lip. “But what about you? What’ll you do when the doorway opens?”
“Go through, of course.” The EeePavoosh decoded an especially complex network of quantum filaments in the heart of the portal, beginning the process of unlocking it. “I will open the portal soon and go through.”
“Then what?” asked Tillie. “Will you start eatin’ up the time over there?”
“Yes,” said the EeePavoosh. “But if short amounts of time can be stretched into long ones on the other side, my eating will not disrupt the timeline significantly. Minutes can last centuries, correct?”
Tillie pinched her lip harder. “That’s true, but...”
“Then there will be plenty of time,” said the EeePavoosh. “Now tell me more about how that works, how time stretches on the other side.”
“All right then.” Tillie frowned thoughtfully. “Let’s see.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “I toldja about the longest five years of my life. How ‘bout the longest month of my life? How’s that grab ya’?”
“Fine and dandy,” said the EeePavoosh.
“So okay.” Tillie cleared her throat. “So I finally decided to run away from Ray. I finally got up the gumption to get away from him. Basically took the clothes on my back and a little cash I’d been socking away and headed out on foot one night. Headed straight for the bus station.” She smiled. “Let me tell you, it was the greatest feeling since I’d gotten away from my childhood home. The air was so sweet and cool. I was free, totally free.” She slumped and shook her head. “At least till the drunk driving the pickup slammed into me.”
“Drunk?” said the EeePavoosh as he unlocked another series of quantum filaments.
Tillie didn’t bother explaining. “He did a hit-and-run and just left me there. It took hours for someone to find me. And then I ended up in the hospital for a month with guess who watchin’ over me? Ray, that asshole.”
“Asshole?” said the EeePavoosh.
“Yep.” Tillie nodded grimly. “So there I am, layin’ in that hospital bed with just about every bone in my body broken...and they�
��re pumpin’ me full of drugs, but there’s still so much pain...and there’s Ray, tellin’ me what he’s gonna do to me when I get healed and go home. How he’s gonna make me suffer and pay for runnin’ out on him.”
“And this made the time longer?” said the EeePavoosh.
“Oh, yeah,” said Tillie. “That month in the hospital was a year to me. Ten years.”
“A month became ten years?”
“All I could do was lay there and pray I’d die before they sent me home.” Tillie turned away from the portal and stared off into space. “The hours crawled...with the pain and Ray’s awful voice and the casts and slings keepin’ me trapped there. Every minute lasted forever.”
The EeePavoosh felt a rush of excitement. “Every minute lasted forever?”
“Then, just before I was supposed to go home, a miracle happened. The nurse came and told me some joker’d killed Ray in a bar fight. I was free again.” She turned back and smiled. “And that was when time started speeding up.”
“Speeding up?” said the EeePavoosh.
“Didn’t I mention that?” said Tillie. “Time speeds up sometimes on the other side.”
The EeePavoosh suddenly became alarmed. “It does?”
Tillie narrowed her eyes and fixed her gaze on him. “You don’t like that, do you? Is it because the time wouldn’t be as good to eat?”
“Faster time is shorter time,” said the EeePavoosh. “There is less of it to eat.”
“You don’t say.” Tillie nodded thoughtfully. “Well, it happens a lot over there. And here’s the thing.” She pinched her lower lip. “It might start out longer, but then it gets shorter all of a sudden. You just never know.”
“It starts out longer?” said the EeePavoosh. “Then gets shorter?”
“That’s right,” said Tillie. “Like, for example...” She stared up at the sky, thinking, then looked back down at him. “When I found out earlier this year that I was terminal. I was drinkin’ heavy and livin’ on the street...and I started coughin’ up blood. When I went to the free clinic, the doctor told me I had lung cancer, and it was gonna kill me in six months.” Tillie sighed. “The hour I spent in the room with that doctor, when he told me all that, was probably the longest hour of my life.”
“The longest hour?” Again, the EeePavoosh grew excited. In a flurry of subatomic space-time reengineering, he unlocked the biggest sequence of filaments yet.
Tillie shook her head slowly. “Maybe I shouldn’t’ve cared after the shitty life I had...but I did. It still ripped my heart out.” Droplets of clear fluid again trickled from the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks. “It was like I was trapped again. I wanted to run away, but all I could do was sit there and listen. And there was a clock in the office, an old-fashioned clock that ticked away the seconds...and it seemed like it took an hour between ticks.”
“A second took an hour,” said the EeePavoosh.
“That’s right,” said Tillie. “But ever since that hour, time’s been goin’ a million times faster. A zillion.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Because it’s runnin’ out. And the closer I get to the end, the faster it goes.”
A wave of disappointment rolled through the EeePavoosh. “Instead of getting longer, time is going faster?”
“You wouldn’t believe how much faster,” said Tillie.
The EeePavoosh thought it over, processing what she’d told him. How could time go faster? It was true that travel at relativistic speeds, those approaching the speed of light, could slow the passage of time for the traveler...but making it speed up was another matter.
Based on the stories Tillie had told, the flow of time must be very different on the other side...and not always in a good way. In some situations, it stretched out; in others, it shrank. How was that even possible?
And then there was an even more important question. “How do you control it? How do you make time longer or shorter?”
“I wish I knew,” said Tillie. “I’d stretch out the time I’ve got left and make it last forever.”
The EeePavoosh reached the last few quantum filaments keeping the portal shut. He was almost done with his work. “You eat time, too, then? You consume it as I do?”
“Time eats me, is more like it,” said Tillie. “Every day, it wears me down a little more.”
“And yet, the way you talk about time, you need it to survive.”
Tillie nodded. “There’s never enough.”
“Then we both want the same thing.”
“And I can’t have it!” Tillie laughed bitterly. “You know what’s funny? Most of my life, time dragged because things were so shitty. I just wanted it to speed up so the shittiness would end. But ever since I found out about the cancer, I just want it to slow down. I just want more of it.”
On the verge of throwing the portal wide open, the EeePavoosh paused and gazed at Tillie through the rippling oval. More droplets ran down her cheeks; those droplets, and the way the breath was catching in her throat, had more to do with sadness than any kind of joy.
It was a sadness the EeePavoosh could identify with—the sadness of hunger. The sadness that came when there wasn’t enough time to feed the ferocious craving that kept him alive.
Suddenly, a strange feeling took hold of him—a feeling of alignment, of connection with a living being. How many life forms had died screaming when he’d gulped down their timelines? And yet here he was, surging with affinity for one tiny creature from an alternate reality.
Here he was, an avatar of a light-years-long leviathan accustomed to straddling universes and devouring epochs, and he actually felt sympathy for one little anomalous female primate. Because just as she was running out of time, he’d been running out of it, too...with only one day left to devour in all the known feeding grounds.
At least until she’d shown him the portal and told him about the other side where time stretched out in ways he’d never imagined. Thanks to her, he stood on the threshold even now, ready to plunge into those rich new feeding grounds and gorge himself on the time they had to offer.
“I am ready to open the portal now,” he announced.
“Wait a minute.” Tillie scowled and pinched her lower lip. “Didn’t you hear what I said about time speeding up? What if there isn’t enough for you?”
“Hopefully, the stretched-out, longer time will make up for it,” said the EeePavoosh.
“What’ll be left when you’re done?” said Tillie.
“When all time is devoured, nothing remains,” said the EeePavoosh. “But if time can be made longer on the other side, there is nothing to worry about. If a little time can become a lot, the timeline will survive.”
“That’s true, that’s true.” Tillie shuffled her feet nervously. “But, uh, what if time doesn’t work exactly the way you expect over there? If it runs the same as it does here, and it can’t be made longer, you’ll eat up all the time a lot sooner, right? The timeline won’t survive.”
“Theoretically,” said the EeePavoosh.
“Then why take the chance?” said Tillie.
“Because I must feed. I must have more time in order to survive.”
“Okay, listen.” Tillie moved to stand between him and the portal. “Please don’t do this. Don’t go to the other side.”
“I must,” said the EeePavoosh. “I am hungry.”
“So go somewhere else,” said Tillie. “This is my home we’re talkin’ about here.”
“There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere that I know of.”
“Please,” said Tillie. “For me. Don’t do it.”
“I must,” said the EeePavoosh.
“Wait.” Tillie threw her hands out in front of her. “Remember when I talked about my life meaning something? That maybe there’s somethin’ I’m supposed to do? What if this is it? Why I came here. To save my world.”
“You should not care,” said the EeePavoosh. “Your life was shitty.”
“Not all of it, though,” said Tillie. “There w
ere good parts, I swear.”
The EeePavoosh thought for a moment, gazing into her eyes. To ensure his survival, he could not do what she asked...yet the pull of his alignment with her was strong. The sympathy he felt for her demanded he do something.
Something, perhaps, that would repay the debt he owed her for leading him to the new feeding grounds. Something that would give her back the time she was running out of.
“Then tell me about one of the good parts,” said the EeePavoosh. “If you could make one time of your life longer, which would it be?”
Tillie frowned. “Will that make you not go to the other side? Will that save my world?”
The EeePavoosh thrashed his tail. “Just answer the question, Tillie.”
***
The air shimmered in a corner of the dimly lit hospital room. A rectangular outline appeared from floor to ceiling, traced in soft silver light...and then the space within the outline flashed, and Tillie stepped through.
She blinked hard, adjusting to the low light. Then, as the portal vanished behind her, her eyes went straight to the room’s one bed. She couldn’t see the occupants, because they were surrounded by a huddle of women with their backs turned to her...but she knew who they were. She knew exactly who was in that bed.
Instantly, a smile spread across her face. Tears ran from her eyes, and she didn’t bother to wipe them away.
“Go ahead,” said a soft voice from the shadows. “Go to them.”
Turning, Tillie saw that the voice belonged to herself...another version of herself. And there were more besides, many more crowding around the room as well as huddling around the bed.
“Don’t be afraid.” One of them moved out of the shadows and took her arm. “There’s nothing to be scared of anymore.”
Tillie stared in wonder at her other self, the one holding her arm. The EeePavoosh had told her it would be like this, yet it was still so very strange seeing her mirror image staring back at her.
“This is your first time through the loop, isn’t it?” said the other Tillie.
“Yes.” Tillie nodded.
Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Page 23