by Anthology
There was an immense ferment in the lower gardens now and in the fields beyond and on the roads and in the air. Millions were still waiting. Where was the great arrival?
“Well, now,” said the old man, filling another glass with wine for the young reporter. “Aren’t I something? I made the machines, built miniature cities, lakes, ponds, seas. Erected vast architectures against crystal-water skies, talked to dolphins, played with whales, faked tapes, mythologized films. Oh, it took years, years of sweating work and secret preparation before I announced my departure, left and came back with good news!”
They drank the rest of the vintage wine. There was a hum of voices. All of the people below were looking up at the roof.
The time traveler waved at them and turned.
“Quickly, now. It’s up to you from here on. You have the tape, my voice on it, just freshly made. Here are three more tapes, with fuller data. Here’s a film-cassette history of my whole inspired fraudulence. Here’s a final manuscript. Take, take it all, hand it on. I nominate you as son to explain the father. Quickly!”
Hustled into the elevator once more, Shumway felt the world fall away beneath. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so gave, at last, a great hoot.
The old man, surprised, hooted with him, as they stepped out below and advanced upon the Toynbee Convector.
“You see the point, don’t you, son? Life has always been lying to ourselves! As boys, young men, old men. As girls, maidens, women, to gently lie and prove the lie true. To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. Here. Thus and so.”
He pressed the button that raised the plastic shield, pressed another that started the time machine humming, then shuffled quickly in to thrust himself into the Convector’s seat.
“Throw the final switch, young man!”
“But—”
“You’re thinking,” here the old man laughed, “if the time machine is a fraud, it won’t work, what’s the use of throwing a switch, yes? Throw it, anyway. This time, it will work!”
Shumway turned, found the control switch, grabbed hold, then looked at Craig Bennett Stiles.
“I don’t understand. Where are you going?”
“Why, to be one with the ages, of course. To exist now, only in the deep past.”
“How can that be?”
“Believe me, this time it will happen. Good-bye, dear, fine, nice young man.”
“Good-bye.”
“Now. Tell me my name.”
“What?”
“Speak my name and throw the switch.”
“Time traveler?”
“Yes! Now!”
The young man yanked the switch. The machine hummed, roared, blazed with power.
“Oh,” said the old man, shutting his eyes. His mouth smiled gently. “Yes.”
His head fell forward on his chest.
Shumway yelled, banged the switch off and leaped forward to tear at the straps binding the old man in his device.
In the midst of so doing, he stopped, felt the time traveler’s wrist, put his fingers under the neck to test the pulse there and groaned. He began to weep.
The old man had, indeed, gone back in time, and its name was death. He was traveling in the past now, forever.
Shumway stepped back and turned the machine on again. If the old man were to travel, let the machine—symbolically, anyway—go with him. It made a sympathetic humming. The fire of it, the bright sun fire, burned in all of its spider grids and armatures and lighted the cheeks and the vast brow of the ancient traveler, whose head seemed to nod with the vibrations and whose smile, as he traveled into darkness, was the smile of a child much satisfied.
The reporter stood for a long moment more, wiping his cheeks with the backs of his hands. Then, leaving the machine on, he turned, crossed the room, pressed the button for the glass elevator and, while he was waiting, took the time traveler’s tapes and cassettes from his jacket pockets and, one by one, shoved them into the incinerator trash flue set in the wall.
The elevator doors opened, he stepped in, the doors shut. The elevator hummed now, like yet another time device, taking him up into a stunned world, a waiting world, lifting him up into a bright continent, a future land, a wondrous and surviving planet . . .
That one man with one lie had created.
THE THREADS OF TIME
C.J. Cherryh
It was possible that the Gates were killing the qhal. They were everywhere, on every world, had been a fact of life for five thousand years, and linked the whole net of qhalur civilization into one present-tense coherency.
They had not, to be sure, invented the Gates. Chance gave them that gift . . . on a dead world of their own sun. One Gate stood—made by unknown hands.
And the qhal made others, imitating what they found. The Gates were instantaneous transfer, not alone from place to place, but, because of the motion of worlds and suns and the traveling galaxies—involving time.
There was an end of time. Ah, qhal could venture anything. If one supposed, if one believed, if one were very sure, one could step through a Gate to a Gate that would/might exist on some other distant world.
And if one were wrong?
If it did not exist?
If it never had?
Time warped in the Gate-passage. One could step across light-years, unaged; so it was possible to outrace light and time.
Did one not want to die, bound to a single lifespan? Go forward. See the future. Visit the world/worlds to come.
But never go back. Never tamper. Never alter the past.
There was an End of Time.
It was the place where qhal gathered, who had been farthest and lost their courage for traveling on. It was the point beyond which no one had courage, where descendants shared the world with living ancestors in greater and greater numbers, the jaded, the restless, who reached this age and felt their will erode away.
It was the place where hope ended. Oh, a few went farther, and the age saw them—no more. They were gone. They did not return.
They went beyond, whispered those who had lost their courage. They went out a Gate and found nothing there.
They died.
Or was it death—to travel without end? And what was death? And was the universe finite at all?
Some went, and vanished, and the age knew nothing more of them.
Those who were left were in agony—of desire to go; of fear to go farther.
Of changes.
This age—did change. It rippled with possibilities. Memories deceived. One remembered, or remembered that one had remembered, and the fact grew strange and dim, contradicting what obviously was. People remembered things that never had been true.
And one must never go back to see. Backtiming—had direst possibilities. It made paradox.
But some tried, seeking a time as close to their original exit point as possible. Some came too close, and involved themselves in time-loops, a particularly distressing kind of accident and unfortunate equally for those involved as bystanders.
Among qhal, between the finding of the first Gate and the End of Time, a new kind of specialist evolved: time-menders, who in most extreme cases of disturbance policed the Gates and carefully researched afflicted areas. They alone were licensed to violate the back-time barrier, passing back and forth under strict non-involvement regulations, exchanging intelligence only with each other, to minutely adjust reality.
Evolved.
Agents recruited other agents at need—but at whose instance? There might be some who knew. It might have come from the far end of time—in that last (or was it last?) age beyond which nothing seemed certain, when the years since the First Gate were more than five thousand, and the Now in which all Gates existed was—very distant. Or it might have come from those who had found the Gate, overseeing their invention. Someone knew, somewhen, somewhere along the course of the
stars toward the end of time.
But no one said.
It was hazardous business, this time-mending, in all senses. Precisely what was done was something virtually unknowable after it was done, for alterations in the past produced (one believed) changes in future reality.
Whole time-fields, whose events could be wiped and redone, with effects which widened the farther down the timeline they proceeded. Detection of time-tampering was almost impossible.
A stranger wanted something to eat, a long time ago. He shot himself his dinner.
A small creature was not where it had been, when it had been.
A predator missed a meal and took another . . . likewise small.
A child lost a pet.
And found another.
And a friend she would not have had. She was happier for it.
She met many people she had never/would never meet.
A man in a different age had breakfast in a house on a hill.
Agent Harrh had acquired a sense about disruptions, a kind of extrasensory queasiness about a just-completed timewarp. He was not alone in this. But the time-menders (Harrh knew three others of his own age) never reported such experiences outside their own special group. Such reports would have been meaningless to his own time, involving a past which (as a result of the warp) was neither real nor valid nor perceptible to those in Time Present. Some time-menders would reach the verge of insanity because of this. This was future fact. Harrh knew this.
He had been there.
And he refused to go again to Now, that Now to which time had advanced since the discovery of the Gate—let alone to the End of Time, which was the farthest that anyone imagined. He was one of a few, a very few, licensed to do so, but he refused.
He lived scattered lives in ages to come, and remembered the future with increasing melancholy.
He had visited the End of Time, and left it in the most profound despair. He had seen what was there, and when he had contemplated going beyond, that most natural step out the Gate which stood and beckoned—
He fled. He had never run from anything but that. It remained, a recollection of shame at his fear.
A sense of a limit which he had never had before.
And this in itself was terrible, to a man who had thought time infinite and himself immortal.
In his own present of 1003 since the First Gate, Harrh had breakfast, a quiet meal. The children were off to the beach. His wife shared tea with him and thought it would be a fine morning.
“Yes,” he said. “Shall we take the boat out? We can fish a little, take the sun.”
“Marvelous,” she said. Her gray eyes shone. He loved her—for herself, for her patience. He caught her hand on the crystal table, held slender fingers, not speaking his thoughts, which were far too somber for the morning.
They spent their mornings and their days together. He came back to her, time after shifting time. He might be gone a month; and home a week; and gone two months next time. He never dared cut it too close. They lost a great deal of each other’s lives, and so much—so much he could not share with her.
“The island,” he said. “Mhreihrrinn, I’d like to see it again.”
“I’ll pack,” she said.
And went away.
He came back to her never aged; and she bore their two sons; and reared them; and managed the accounts: and explained his absences to relatives and the world. He travels, she would say, with that right amount of secrecy that protected secrets.
And even to her he could never confide what he knew.
“I trust you,” she would say—knowing what he was, but never what he did.
He let her go. She went off to the hall and out the door—He imagined happy faces, holiday, the boys making haste to run the boat out and put on the bright colored sail. She would keep them busy carrying this and that, fetching food and clothes—things happened in shortest order when Mhreihrrinn set her hand to them.
He wanted that, wanted the familiar, the orderly, the homely. He was, if he let his mind dwell on things—afraid. He had the notion never to leave again.
He had been to the Now most recently—5045, and his flesh crawled at the memory. There was recklessness there. There was disquiet. The Now had traveled two decades and more since he had first begun, and he felt it more and more. The whole decade of the 5040’s had a queasiness about it, ripples of instability as if the whole fabric of the Now were shifting like a kaleidoscope.
And it headed for the End of Time. It had become more and more like that age, confirming it by its very collapse.
People had illusions in the Now. They perceived what had not been true.
And yet it was when he came home.
It had grown to be so—while he was gone.
A university stood in Morurir, which he did not remember.
A hedge of trees grew where a building had been in Morurir.
A man was in the Council who had died.
He would not go back to Now. He had resolved that this morning. He had children, begotten before his first time-traveling. He had so very much to keep him—this place, this home, this stability—He was very well to do. He had invested well—his own small tampering. He had no lack, no need. He was mad to go on and on. He was done.
But a light distracted him, an opal shimmering beyond his breakfast nook, arrival in that receptor which his fine home afforded, linked to the master gate at Pyvrrhn.
A young man materialized there, opal and light and then solidity, a distraught young man.
“Harrh,” the youth said, disregarding the decencies of meeting, and strode forward unasked. “Harrh, is everything all right here?”
Harrh arose from the crystal table even before the shimmer died, beset by that old queasiness of things out of joint. This was Alhir from 390 Since the Gate, an experienced man in the force: he had used a Master Key to come here—had such access, being what he was.
“Alhir,” Harrh said, perplexed. “What’s wrong?”
“You don’t know.” Alhir came as far as the door.
“A cup of tea?” Harrh said. Alhir had been here before. They were friends. There were oases along the course of suns, friendly years, places where houses served as rest-stops. In this too Mhreihrrinn was patient. “I’ve got to tell you— No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’m through. I’ve made up my mind. You can carry that where you’re going.—But if you want the breakfast—”
“There’s been an accident.”
“I don’t want to hear.”
“He got past us.”
“I don’t want to know.” He walked over to the cupboard, took another cup. “Mhreihrrinn’s with the boys down at the beach. You just caught us.” He set the cup down and poured the tea, where Mhreihrrinn had sat. “Won’t you? You’re always welcome here. Mhreihrrinn has no idea what you are. My young friend, she calls you. She doesn’t know. Or she suspects. She’d never say.—Sit down.”
Alhir had strayed aside, where a display case sat along the wall, a lighted case of mementoes, of treasures, of crystal. “Harrh, there was a potsherd here.”
“No,” Harrh said, less and less comfortable. “Just the glasses. I’m quite sure.”
“Harrh, it was very old.”
“No,” he said. “I promised Mhreihrrinn and the boys—I mean it. I’m through. I don’t want to know.”
“It came from Silen. From the digs at the First Gate, Harrh. It was a very valuable piece. You valued it very highly.—You don’t remember.”
“No,” Harrh said, feeling fear thick about him, like a change in atmosphere. “I don’t know of such a piece. I never had such a thing. Check your memory, Alhir.”
“It was from the ruins by the First Gate, don’t you understand?”
And then Alhir did not exist.
Harrh blinked, remembered pouring a cup of tea. But he was sitting in the chair, his breakfast before him.
He poured the tea and drank.
He was sitting on rock, amid the gr
asses blowing gently in the wind, on a clifftop by the sea.
He was standing there. “Mhreihrrinn,” he said, in the first chill touch of fear.
But that memory faded. He had never had a wife, nor children. He forgot the house as well.
Trees grew and faded.
Rocks moved at random.
The time-menders were in most instances the only ones who survived even a little while.
Wrenched loose from time and with lives rooted in many parts of it, they felt it first and lived it longest, and not a few were trapped in back-time and did not die, but survived the horror of it and begot children who further confounded the time-line.
Time, stretched thin in possibilities, adjusted itself.
He was Harrh.
But he was many possibilities and many names.
In time none of them mattered.
He was many names; he lived. He had many bodies; and the souls stained his own.
In the end he remembered nothing at all, except the drive to live.
And the dreams.
And none of the dreams were true.
THE TRUTH ABOUT WEENA
David J. Lake
1
“The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.”
That was how I began my famous story of the Time Machine; the foundation of my success as an author—and of much else beside. That story figured largely, around 1900, in the movement of Household Socialism, and all that that led to. The tale was laughed at, praised, used in serious social and political argument—yet by most people was treated as nothing but a fiction. Well, in its hitherto published form it was partly fiction, because at the time—1895—I could not write the full truth. The full truth was even more fantastic than the fiction—too fantastic, surely, to be believed; or if believed, too disturbing to received notions of Time. And besides, there were living people to protect: in particular, one young person who was very dear to us.
It was agreed, therefore, among our small group that I must abbreviate the ending, and publish the story as a novel, an invention. I did, and the novel served its purpose. But now, in 1934, the time has come (the time! a nice phrase; well then, a time) in which I can tell the whole truth—of those famous dinner parties in Richmond in 1891, and what really resulted from the second party.