Analog Science Fiction and Fact 12/01/10

by Dell Magazines

  She knew Americus had once had a wife, and that she had died, violently. Perhaps the wounds that inflicted made him unwilling to yield to Venus again. It could even be the reason for his greater melancholy, but she did not think so. One got on with life—at least she had after losing her Aulus.

  Marcia helped Eudokia in the kitchen, doing those little things she had meant Marcilla to do. The game in the atrium reached its end just as the clock—one of Americus’, naturally—chimed the hour. She brought out the vegetable bowl as young Aulus hurried to the table. “And did you win, son?”

  “No, Mother. Americus is too smart.”

  Marcilla joined him. “Very smart. But we’ll do better than him someday. Someday soon.”

  Americus patted their shoulders. “I’m sure you will.” He put on a smile, but Marcia saw straight through it. She could do nothing for his pain now, though, except possibly distract it.

  Vespern a was mainly what was left over from noontime cena. Plenty of garden vegetables filled the bowls, while one plate held the last scraps of cold chicken. Everyone sat at the table together, their distinctions of age and station set aside.

  Even with her raised circumstances, Marcia had never cared to buy couches for dining. It would cost something of the closeness: of having Eudokia nearby as she traded gentle words with Alastor, of seeing her children working together to pick individual favorites from the vegetable bowl, and of Americus’ quiet, benign company at her right hand.

  The meal passed with its familiar pleasantness. Americus seemed as happy as everyone else at the table. Perhaps he was happy, for this moment. Marcia still had not plumbed the sorrow beneath, but there was always tomorrow. She offered him the chicken platter, thinking to keep this moment happy.

  Marcia ate her jentaculum of bread and cheese quietly in her bedroom as dawn crept through the window shutters. Aulus and Marcilla were already off to Narnia for school, though she didn’t recall Americus walking with them, as he usually did. Perhaps he had left earlier.

  She was finishing off her last crust when she heard the sob. She listened close and heard it again. No muffling could disguise whence it issued, or from whom. Her first thought was to try to ignore this unexpected breakdown—but a more determined thought moved her.

  Marcia strode into the atrium, waving away both Alastor and Eudokia before they could approach his room. She swept aside the doorway curtain and looked down at Americus, sitting on his bed, his fists balled up against his eyes.

  “I don’t need anything, Eudokia,” he moaned. “Leave me.”

  “I will not.”

  He started at the unexpected voice and seemed to shrink, mortified at his exposure. “Forgive me, my Marcia. I’ve had a bad morning, that is all.”

  “It’s more than one morning.” She stepped inside, keeping her voice low, however useless it might be in keeping the servants from eavesdropping. “You’ve suffered for longer than that. Much longer. It’s time I knew why.”

  Americus said nothing, hoping for some escape Marcia wasn’t going to grant him. “I could demand to know as your landlady, but,” she said, her hand outstretched, “I’d prefer to hear it as your friend.”

  His pain and bewilderment faded, and he began to stir. “Yes. I suppose it’s finally time.” He rose unsteadily, taking Marcia’s hand. “I can explain this best down by the river. Will you walk there with me?”

  “Certainly, my Americus.” She glanced past him, to his cluttered worktable. “But would you go ahead of me? I have to give Alastor and Eudokia instructions. I’ll catch up as soon as I can.”

  “Very well.” Americus walked out of the room, and Marcia quickly snatched up the bread he had left uneaten on his table. Once he was out the front door, she hastened to the kitchen, where the servants had withdrawn.

  “You,” she snapped, pointing to Alastor, “why are you idling, with the fields unplowed? And Eudokia, help him somehow. Pull up stones, or weed the garden, or anything, but out of this house!” They fled the resurgence of her old temper as fast as they could manage.

  Once they were safely gone, Marcia opened the larder to take out a little cake of far grain, and then a second. She went to the hearth, and the lararium next to it, the statuette standing within its cupboard. Carefully, she placed a cake inside the hearth, taking care not to smother the fire with her offerings. The familiar smoke and odor rose into her nostrils.

  Marcia made sacrifice to the lar familiaris, the household guardian spirit, most mornings, but today she had a particular boon to ask. She put in the second far cake, then took Americus’ wedge of bread, tore it in half, and fed one piece to the flame. She then knelt before the lar’s cupboard. Her prayers were a cascading jumble, but the same desire moved them throughout.

  “... Show me how to help him ... he has enriched our household, allowed us to show you greater honor ... part of this familia, as though born here ... grant him your protection ... grant me the wisdom to help him ...” She continued her devotions as long as she dared, before starting off after Americus.

  Across the Via Flaminia, the land sloped, steeply in places, down to the Nar. She soon spied Americus, skirting the woods of oak and chestnut that formed the south border of Marcus Titurius Sabinus’ land. She reached him just ahead of a sharper slope.

  He looked curiously at her hand, where she realized she was still carrying part of his bread. “I thought you might want it,” she said, offering it. He took the bread, but only tucked it inside his tunic.

  “I suppose you’re ready to talk, not eat.” He replied with a silent, pensive nod. The ground beneath their feet turned steeper. “Will you take my arm?” Marcia offered.

  Americus declined, determined to traverse the ground unaided. His face twitched with pain and the effort to suppress it. Finally, with a sigh, he spoke. “You’ve told me a few times how clever you think me with devices and such.”

  “You needn’t be falsely modest with me. You’re a master of invention. Even Augustus knows this.”

  “Very well, I’m a master. In fact, you probably think me capable of building any contraption you can imagine.”

  “Well ... perhaps not anything,” Marcia said, “but I wouldn’t say it was impossible.”

  Americus chuckled, a dry and stony sound. “An excellent choice of words, my dear Marcia. For back home—quite close to Roma, actually—I had some part in building a device many people thought utterly impossible.”

  He hesitated, only pretending to concentrate on his footing to justify his silence. Marcia had to prod him. “Tell me.”

  Americus looked over, ready to read her face. “A time-traveling machine.”

  Marcia stopped. Sensations rushed through her, wonder and awe and enlightenment, but no doubt, not even an instant’s worth. This was power worthy of a god, even if Americus was far from a god.

  Americus diffidently turned away. He looked down at his hands, slapped one with the other, then shook his head as though disappointed in their solidity. “I wasn’t the true inventor, of course,” he said, starting to walk again. “Others formulated the theories. I was only building things to their specifications.”

  “But still ... so where are you from? I mean, when?”

  That elicited a smile. “The ‘where’ was not far outside Roma, as I said. I was actually born elsewhere, a place no Roman has ever traveled.”

  “Called America, I presume.”

  “Precisely. But I met ... the woman I would marry, and followed her to Italia.” His voice quavered. “Without her, I never would have been involved with the time machine.”

  “And the ‘when’?”

  “If you can believe it, something over two thousand years in your future.” The number staggered her, but again there was no doubt. “It’s an age of a million remarkable inventions, and I have only copied a few of the older and more practical ones, here and now. But the time machine was the greatest of them all.”

  “Truly, yours was an age of wonders. But not of perfection, was it? If it
could not keep Sofia safe?”

  He looked sharply at her. “No. It wasn’t. Let’s head to that rock there,” he said, pointing to a flat boulder wide enough for both of them to sit.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you, Americus, but you did say once she was killed by bandits. Or was that a story you used, to conceal the impossible truth?”

  “It was ... close enough to truth. Sofia was murdered, and I suffered. I suffered terribly.” He swallowed. “And then a week after Sofia died, I saw her.”

  They reached the rock, with an excellent view of the Nar River below. Marcia put her arm around his shoulders as he lowered himself gingerly, and let it linger there a second as she sat beside him. “Thank you,” he said absently.

  “I knew it was a hallucination, of course. I went to my doctor for an explanation. She did tests, and then more tests, and then she told me what I had: the earliest stages of Lewy body dementia.”

  Marcia shuddered. She did not know what a Lewy was, but she understood dementia.

  “Hallucinations are a classic symptom. They gave her a lucky clue. I had a couple years before serious problems would develop—more serious than being haunted by my dead wife—but of all our miracles, a cure still wasn’t one of them. I’m going to fall apart, physically and mentally, until I’m helpless and senile.

  “It’s a terrible way to die, and it scared me so much. I wanted to die, right then, to end the agonies I had and the agonies coming.” His head sank. “But I couldn’t. I just was not capable.”

  The bald statement disturbed Marcia. She turned away, to hide the flush of disgust, even of contempt, his admission brought. He noticed anyway.

  “Yes, perhaps that makes me a coward. Or perhaps my Christian upbringing has deeper roots than I realized.”

  Marcia turned back. “Christian?”

  “Something after your time. A widespread religion in the future, one of whose teachings is of the evil and futility of suicide. Faith in our God lets us bear whatever may come.”

  “So, like the Stoics, then?”

  “No. Well, maybe a little, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t overcome my nature. It left me trapped.”

  In the midst of pitying Americus, Marcia thought of her own Aulus. He had proved his bravery before age twenty, fighting for Julius Caesar. His service gained him his land, which brought him his wife, and then his children. And all of those were not enough to hold him when Octavian and Antony began to clash. Withholding his service felt like an act of cowardice, despite what he had done before. So he went, and he died.

  Strange, for her to realize that brave Aulus and fearful Americus were the same in this way. Each man had his nature, and neither could escape it. So she could not truly despise Americus for a coward or a Christian or whatever.

  “I needed a way to escape,” Americus said, “any way. And almost like a vision, I saw this one: coming to this time and place. I knew the language and the history; I was in Italia, so the spatial displacement was no great problem. I took a few days to prepare, gathering goods to support me and my work, collecting plans for my inventions, paper and pens—”

  “But why?” This sudden torrent had left Marcia baffled. “Did you hope to find a cure here?” she asked, and his face instantly showed he hadn’t. “So what could this accomplish?”

  His smile was as sad as his earlier weeping. “To achieve indirectly what I could not do by my own hand. To end my life mercifully—by preventing myself from ever having existed.”

  This was nonsense. From any other person, she would take these words as a token of madness. Only because this was Americus was she incredulous instead of purely disbelieving.

  He saw the incredulity, accepting it as if expected. “I will try to explain. Take a look at the Nar.”

  The river was still partly shadowed by the hillside, turning its olive-gray waters to a clouded darkness. The Nar flowed south passing the town, then curved west near where they sat, running down to a small shipyard they could just see past the woods. Birds followed the course of the river, well above the water but below Marcia and Americus.

  He stretched out his arm. “Say that today is there, below us. My era would be down there, by the docks. Time in its natural course flows from the past,” he said, waving toward Narnia, “to the present, to the future.”

  “And you found a way to walk upstream along the bank.”

  “More like a leap, but yes. I came here and I began carving a new channel for the river, intending to change its course. Your time didn’t originally have all the inventions I’ve brought to it, so the flow of time, of the river, is now different. Once time is running in its new course, the old riverbed would dry up. The future from which I came would be gone. I would never have been.”

  Marcia envisioned what he was saying, imagining the Nar cutting through the hillside on the opposite bank and off into the distance. “Does time truly work that way?”

  He sighed. “Nobody really knows. The scienti—” He grimaced. “Latin doesn’t have the word, or really the concept. Call them ‘natural philosophers,’ instead. They were able to design the time machine, make it work, without fully understanding why it worked, what physical laws it followed. That’s part of why nobody went through before I did: Everyone feared what effects it might cause in their present.”

  “But you knew? Or thought you did?”

  “Most of us thought we knew. There were many congenial mealtime arguments about which overarching theory of time travel was the true one. I had my ideas, but they dismissed them. I wasn’t one of them; I didn’t understand.” He pounded a fist into his thigh, a startling burst of violence. “But their theories were such violations of common sense!”

  “More so than causing yourself never to have existed?”

  Americus winced at the sharp question, but made no reproach. “Judge for yourself, my Marcia. Their most popular theory was that, instead of diverting the river, my actions would instead make two branches, coexisting.

  “You’re about to say that makes sense—but the same theory states that this same thing happens every time some decision is made in the world. When we sat here instead of walking farther down the valley; when you came into my room rather than letting me weep in privacy.” He pointed down to a black bird cruising above the river. “When that jackdaw flew straight instead of turning left or right. Down to the tiniest instance where something could happen one way or another, it happens both ways.

  “And each time, the river splits, and splits again, and again, into millions of millions of channels. The waters constantly dividing and re-dividing, until there’s less than a drop for each time-stream—and that drop is itself dividing even as you look at it. Either that, or there are infinite waters gushing from nowhere to fill each riverbed. Absurdity, whichever way you turn.”

  He slumped, drained from his outburst. “I am not a genius, Marcia, just a practical man. I didn’t have the great ideas, I just built what other geniuses had imagined. Much like I’ve done here.” Marcia took this in somberly. “So I’m not so loftily intelligent that I can make myself believe garbage like that.”

  Marcia covered her mouth, faking a cough to cover a laugh. “I do find it hard to credit—but then I am practical like you. Surely I am no genius. But I wonder ...”

  “Yes?”

  “When engineers change a river’s course, it’s against the natural inclination of the river. It wants to flow where it is. Could time act the same way? Could it seek its old bed, guided by ... by whatever’s underneath, its own hills and valleys? Could it regain its course, before the shipyard downstream, so you would remain alive?” Americus stared. Marcia turned aside. “I’m sorry if that’s terribly stupid.”

  “Marcia, no.” He took both her hands. “That theory, regression to the original, an idea the experts struggle with, you’ve just intuitively grasped after five minutes’ exposure to temporal theory. Why, next you’ll be reinventing Polchinski’s paradox.”

  “I—what—?”
/>
  “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m babbling. Anyway, all my inventions should have prevented that. We should have diverged so far from the original history that all my changes couldn’t be lost or forgotten.

  “But ... it hasn’t worked that way. Maybe my works will vanish into history, or maybe making a second branch of time doesn’t erase me from the first. I’ll never know why, but I was wrong.” His voice cracked. “And I’m trapped.”

  “You mean you cannot return home?” Marcia said. “Has your machine broken? Can you not repair it?”

  “It didn’t travel with me. It doesn’t carry you like a wagon, it hurls you like a catapult. Somebody back home could have located me and pulled me back, but that would have happened by now. I’m never going back. I’ll be here until I die—and through everything that comes before then.”

  He was trembling, barely holding himself together. Marcia waited quietly, not daring to speak any unwise word that would shatter him. He finally spoke in a whisper. “I saw her this morning, Marcia. I saw Sofia.”

  Marcia nodded gravely. “I’m sorry your hallucinations have come again.”

  “Oh, I’ve had them these past two years. I’ve learned to recognize and ignore them.” His voice was rising; the shakes were worsening. “But I couldn’t remember—” He turned his eyes on Marcia, and tears were welling there. “Not until you spoke it yourself—I couldn’t—oh, Marcia, I couldn’t remember my wife’s name!”

  It all came pouring out, the anguish and terror and helplessness. Marcia took him in her arms, laying his head on her lap, stroking him as she might Marcilla after a nightmare. And she began to think.

  “It’s going to come on me fast now,” he sobbed. “I’ve had the muscle stiffness slowing me down, and now the tremors are coming. Soon I’ll be confused and delusional—or maybe I am already. How would I know?”

  “You aren’t. Trust me.” The notion that his stories of time-traveling were a grand delusion flashed briefly through her mind before she killed it.