Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  She didn’t need to see the paragraph that stood out from the page as if someone had expanded the type:

  . . . and with his loss, all of photography’s pioneers are dead. In the United States alone we have lost, in recent years, Alexander Gardiner, Samuel F. B. Morse, Edward and Henry Anthony, and Mathew B. Brady. Gardiner practiced the craft until his death, going west and sending some of the best images back home. The Anthonys sold many of their fine works in stereoscope for us all to see. Morse had other interests and quit photography to pursue them. Brady lost his eyesight after the War, and closed his studios here and in New York . . .

  Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps they wouldn’t laugh together. Perhaps she would be as angry as he was. He hadn’t died. He hadn’t. No one allowed him to show his work any more. He hadn’t even been to the gallery of his dreams since that confusing last dream, years ago.

  Brady placed the newspaper with the others near the door. Then he crawled onto the bed and pulled Julia close. Her small body was comfort, and in her sleep, she turned and held him back.

  1886

  One morning, he whirled into a place of such emptiness it chilled his soul. The buildings were tall and white, the grass green, and the flowers in bloom. His wagon was the only black thing on the surface of this place. He could smell lilacs as he walked forward, and he thought of Julia resting at their apartment—too fragile now to even do her needlepoint.

  This silence was worse than at the last place. Here it felt as if human beings had never touched this land, despite the buildings. He felt as if he were the only person alive.

  He walked up the stone steps of the first building and pushed open the glass door. The room inside was empty—as empty as his gallery had been when he first dreamed it. No dust or footprints marred the white floor, no smudges covered the white walls. He looked out the window and, as he watched, a building twenty yards away shimmered and disappeared.

  Brady shoved his hands in his pockets and scurried outside. Another, squarer building also disappeared. The shimmering was different, more ominous than the shimmering left by his benefactress. In these remains, he could almost see the debris, the dust from the buildings that had once been. He could feel the destruction and knew that these places weren’t reappearing somewhere else. He ran to his wagon, climbed inside, and peered out at the world from the wagon’s edge. And, as he watched, building after building winked out of existence.

  He clutched the camera to him, but took no photographs. The smell of lilacs grew stronger. His hands were cold, shaking. He watched the buildings disappear until only a grassy field remained.

  “You can’t even photograph it.”

  Her appearance didn’t surprise him. He expected her, after seeing the changes, perhaps because he had been thinking of her. Her hair was shoulder-length now, but other than that, she hadn’t changed in all the years since he last saw her.

  “It’s so clean and neat,” Her voice shook. “You can’t even tell that anyone died here.”

  Brady crawled out of the wagon and stood beside her. He felt more uneasy here than he had felt under the shelling at the first battle of Bull Run. There at least he could hear the whistle, feel the explosions. Here the destruction came from nowhere.

  “Welcome to war in my lifetime, Mathew.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Here we get rid of everything, not just a person’s body, but all traces of their home, their livelihood—and, in most cases, any memories of them. I lost my son like this and I couldn’t remember that he had existed until I started work on this project.” She smiled just a little. “The time travel gives unexpected gifts, some we can program for, like improved eyesight or health, and some we can’t, like improved memories. The scientists say it has something to do with molecular rearrangement, but that makes no sense to you, since most people didn’t know what a molecule was in your day.”

  He stood beside her, his heart pounding in his throat. She turned to him, took his hand in hers.

  “We can’t go any farther than this, Mathew.”

  He frowned. “I’m done?”

  “Yes. I can’t thank you in the ways that I’d like. If I could, I’d send you back, give you money, let you rebuild your life from the war on. But I can’t. We can’t. But I can bring you to the exhibit when it opens, and hope that the response is what we expect. Would you like that, Mathew?”

  He didn’t know exactly what she meant, and he wasn’t sure he cared. He wanted to keep making photographs, to keep working here with her. He had nothing else. “I could still help you. I’m sure there are a number of things to be done.”

  She shook her head, then kissed his forehead. “You need to go home to your Julia, and enjoy the time you have left. We’ll see each other again, Mathew.”

  And then she started to whirl, to shimmer. Brady reached for her and his hand went through her into the heated air. This shimmer was different; it had a life to it. He felt a thin relief. She had traveled beyond him, but not out of existence. He leaned against the edge of his wagon and stared at the lilac bushes and the wind blowing through the grasses, trying to understand what she had just told him. He and the wagon sat alone, in a field where people had once built homes and lived quiet lives. Finally, at dusk, he too shimmered out of the blackness and back to his own quiet life.

  1887

  Only Levin and Brady stood beside the open grave. The wind ruffled Brady’s hair, dried the tear tracks on his cheeks. He hadn’t realized how small Julia’s life had become. Most of the people at the funeral had been his friends, people who had come to console him.

  He could hear the trees rustling behind him. The breeze carried a scent of lilacs—how appropriate, Julia dying in the spring so that her flower would bloom near her grave. She had been so beautiful when he met her, so popular. She had whittled her life down for him, because she had thought he needed her. And he had.

  Levin took Brady’s arm. “Come along, Uncle,” Levin said.

  Brady looked up at his nephew, the closest thing to a child he and Julia had ever had. Levin’s hair had started to recede, and he too wore thick glasses.

  “I don’t want to leave her,” Brady said. “I’ve left her too much already.”

  “It’s all right, Uncle,” Levin said as he put his arm around Brady’s waist and led him through the trees. “She understands.”

  Brady glanced back at the hole in the ground, at his wife’s coffin, and at the two men who had already started to shovel dirt on top. “I know she understands,” he said. “She always has.”

  1887

  That night, Brady didn’t sleep. He sat on the bed he had shared with Julia, and clutched her pillow against his chest. He missed her even breathing, her comfortable presence. He missed her hand on his cheek and her warm voice, reassuring him. He missed holding her, and loving her, and telling her how much he loved her.

  It’s all right, Uncle, Levin had said. She understands.

  Brady got up, set the pillow down, and went to the window. She had looked out so many times, probably feeling alone, while he pursued his dreams of greatness.

  She had never said what she thought these past few years, but he saw her look at him, saw the speculation in her eyes when he returned from one of his trips. She had loved him too much to question him.

  Then he felt it: the odd sensation that always preceded a whirling. But he was done—he hadn’t left in over a year. He was just tired, just—

  spinning. Colors and pain and dust bombarded him. Smells he would briefly catch and by the time he identified them they had disappeared. His head ached, his body felt as if it were being torn in fifteen different directions. And when he stopped, he stood in the gallery of his dreams . . . only he knew that he was wide awake.

  It existed, then. It really existed.

  And it was full of people.

  Women wore long clingy dresses in a shining material. Their hair varied in hue from brown to pink, and many had jewelry stapled into their noses, their cheeks and, in one case
, along the rim of the eye. The men’s clothes were as colorful and as shiny. They wore makeup, but no jewelry. A few people seemed out of place, in other clothes—a woman in combat fatigues from one of the wars Brady had seen, a man in dust-covered denim pants and a ripped shirt, another man dressed in all black leaning against a gallery door. All of the doors in the hallway were open and people spilled in and out, conversing or holding shocked hands to their throats.

  The conversation was so thick that Brady couldn’t hear separate voices, separate words. A variety of perfumes overwhelmed him and the coolness seemed to have left the gallery. He let the crowd push him down the hall toward his own exhibit and as he passed, he caught bits and pieces of other signs:

  . . . IMAGE ARTIST . . .

  . . . (2000-2010) . . .

  . . . HOLOGRAPHER, AFRICAN BIOLOGICAL . . .

  . . . ABC CAMERAMAN, LEBANON . . .

  . . . PHOTOJOURNALIST, VIETNAM CONFLICT . . .

  . . . (1963) . . .

  . . . NEWS REELS FROM THE PACIFIC THEATER . . .

  . . . OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER, WORLD WAR I . . .

  . . . (1892- . . .

  . . . INDIAN WARS . . .

  And then his own:

  MATHEW B. BRADY EXHIBIT

  OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER:

  UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR

  (1861-1865)

  The room was full. People stood along the walls, gazing at his portraits, discussing and pointing at the fields of honored dead. One woman turned away from the toddler, shot in the back; another from the burning church. People looked inside Brady’s wagon, and more than a few stared at the portraits of him, lined along the Doric columns like a series of somber, aging men.

  He caught a few words:

  “Fantastic composition” . . . “amazing things with black and white” . . . “almost looks real” . . . “turns my stomach” . . . “can’t imagine working with such primitive equipment” . . .

  Someone touched his shoulder. Brady turned. A woman smiled at him. She wore a long purple gown and her brown hair was wrapped around the top of her head. It took a moment for him to recognize his benefactress.

  “Welcome to the exhibit, Mathew. People are enjoying your work.”

  She smiled at him and moved on. And then it hit him. He finally had an exhibit. He finally had people staring at his work, and seeing what had really happened in all those places during all that time. She had shown him this gallery all his life, whirled him here when he thought he was asleep. This was his destiny, just as dying impoverished in his own world was his destiny.

  “You’re the artist?” A slim man in a dark suit stood beside Brady.

  “This is my work,” Brady said.

  A few people crowded around. The scent of soap and perfume nearly overwhelmed him.

  “I think you’re an absolutely amazing talent,” the man said. His voice was thin, with an accent that seemed British but wasn’t. “I can’t believe the kind of work you put into this to create such stark beauty. And with such bulky equipment.”

  “Beauty?” Brady could barely let the word out of his throat. He gazed around the room, saw the flowered woman, the row of corpses on the Gettysburg Battlefield.

  “Eerie,” a woman said. “Rather like late Goya, don’t you think, Lavinia?”

  Another woman nodded. “Stunning, the way you captured the exact right light, the exact moment to illuminate the concept.”

  “Concept?” Brady felt his hands shake. “You’re looking at war here. People died in these portraits. This is history, not art.”

  “I think you’re underestimating your work,” the man said. “It is truly art, and you are a great, great artist. Only an artist would see how to use black and white to such a devastating effect—”

  “I wasn’t creating art,” Brady said. “My assistants and I, we were shot at. I nearly died the day the soldiers burned that church. This isn’t beauty. This is war. It’s truth. I wanted you to see how ugly war really is.”

  “And you did it so well,” the man said. “I truly admire your technique.” And then he walked out of the room. Brady watched him go. The women smiled, shook his hand, told him that it was a pleasure to meet him. He wandered around the room, heard the same types of conversation, and stopped when he saw his benefactress.

  “They don’t understand,” he said. “They think this was done for them, for their appreciation. They’re calling this art.”

  “It is art, Mathew,” she said softly. She glanced around the room, as if she wanted to be elsewhere.

  “No, he said. “It actually happened.”

  “A long time ago.” She patted his hand. “The message about war and destruction will go home in their subconscious. They will remember this.” And then she turned her back on him and pushed her way through the crowd. Brady tried to follow her, but only made it as far as his wagon. He sat on its edge and buried his face in his hands.

  He sat there for a long time, letting the conversation hum around him, wondering at his own folly. And then he heard his name called in a voice that made his heart rise.

  “Mr. Brady?”

  He looked up and saw Julia. Not the Julia who had grown pale and thin in their small apartment, but the Julia he had met so many years ago. She was slender and young, her face glowing with health. No gray marked her ringlets, and her hoops were wide with a fashion decades old. He reached out his hands. “Julia.”

  She took his hands and sat beside him on the wagon, her young-girl face turned in a smile. “They think you’re wonderful, Mr. Brady.”

  “They don’t understand what I’ve done. They think it’s art—” he stopped himself. This wasn’t his Julia. This was the young girl, the one who had danced with him, who had told him about her dream. She had come from a different place and a different time, the only time she had seen the effects of his work.

  He looked at her then, really looked at her, saw the shine in her blue eyes, the blush to her cheeks. She was watching the people look at his portraits, soaking in the discussion. Her gloved hand clutched his, and he could feel her wonderment and joy.

  “I would be so proud if this were my doing. Mr. Brady. Imagine a room like this filled with your vision, your work.”

  He didn’t look at the room. He looked at her. This moment, this was what kept her going all those years. The memory of what she thought was a dream, of what she hoped would become real. And it was real, but not in any way she understood. Perhaps, then, he didn’t understand it either.

  She turned to him, smiled into his face. “I would so like to be a part of this,” she said. She thought it was a dream; otherwise she would have never spoken so boldly. No, wait. She had been bold when she was young.

  “You will be,” Brady said. And until that moment, he never realized how much a part of it she had been, always standing beside him, always believing in him even when he no longer believed in himself. She had made the greater sacrifice—her entire life for his dream, his vision, his work.

  “Julia,” he said, thankful for this last chance to touch her, this last chance to hold her. “I could not do this without you. You made it all possible.”

  She leaned against him and laughed, a fluted sound he hadn’t heard in decades. “But it’s your work that they admire, Mr. Brady. Your work.”

  “They call me an artist.”

  “That’s right.” Her words were crisp, sure. “An artist’s work lives beyond him. This isn’t our world, Mr. Brady. In the other rooms, the pictures move.”

  The pictures move. He had been given a gift, to see his own future. To know that the losses he suffered, the reversals he and Julia had lived through weren’t all for nothing. How many people got even that?

  He tucked her arm in his. He had to be out of this room, out of this exhibit he didn’t really understand. They stood together, her hoop clearing a path for them in the crowd. He stopped and surveyed the four walls—filled with his portraits, portraits of places most of these people had never seen—his memories that
they shared and made their own.

  Then he stepped out of the exhibit into a future in which he would never take part, perhaps to gain a perspective he had never had before.

  And all the while, Julia remained beside him.

  THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM

  William Gibson

  Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to be-come an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid un-folding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wave-length of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Tele-vision helped a lot.

  I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen’s corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy “trade” paperbacks: illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan. I’d gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-Glo jogging shoes had capered for me down the escalators of St. John’s Wood and across the platforms of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.