by Anthology
So I begin to speak of the month of December in the year 2081. I know they will not be satisfied until I have told them all I know of the years between this time-locus and December 2, 2150. I know they will not be satisfied because they are not satisfied, have not been satisfied, will not be satisfied . . .
So I tell them of that terrible December nine years in their future . . .
December 2, 2150. I am old, old, a hundred and ten years old. My age-ruined body lies on the clean, white sheets of a hospital bed, lungs, heart, blood vessels, organs, all failing. Only my mind is forever untouched, the mind of an infant-child-youth-man-ancient. I am, in a sense, dying. Beyond this day, December 2, 2150, my body no longer exists as a living organism. Time to me forward of this date is as blank to me as time beyond April 3, 2040 is in the other temporal direction.
In a sense, I am dying. But in another sense, I am immortal. The spark of my consciousness will not go out. My mind will not come to an end, for it has neither end nor beginning. I exist in one moment that lasts forever and spans one hundred and ten years.
Think of my life as a chapter in a book, the book of eternity, a book with no first page and no last. The chapter that is my life-span is one hundred and ten pages long. It has a starting point and an ending point, but the chapter exists as long as the book exists, the infinite book of eternity.
Or, think of my life as a ruler one hundred and ten inches long. The ruler “begins” at one and “ends” at one hundred and ten, but “begins” and “ends” refer to length, not duration.
I am dying. I experience dying always, but I never experience death. Death is the absence of experience. It can never come for me.
December 2, 2150 is but a significant time-locus for me, a dark wall, an end-point beyond which I cannot see. The other wall has the time-locus April 3, 2040.
April 3, 2040. Nothingness abruptly ends, non-nothingness abruptly begins. I am born.
What is it like for me to be born? How can I tell you? How can I make you understand? My life, my whole life-span of one hundred and ten years comes into being once, in an instant. At the “moment” of my birth I am at the moment of my death and all moments in between. I emerge from my mother’s womb and I see my life as one sees a painting, a painting of some complicated landscape; all at once, whole, a complete gestalt. I see my strange, strange infancy, the incomprehension as I emerge from the womb speaking perfect English, marred only by my undeveloped vocal apparatus, as I emerge from my mother’s womb demanding that the ship from Tau Ceti in the time-locus September 8, 2050 be quarantined, knowing that my demand will be futile because it was futile, will be futile, is futile, knowing that at the moment of my birth I am have been will be all that I ever was/am/will be and that I cannot change a moment of it.
I emerge from my mother’s womb and I am dying in clean white sheets and I am in the office of Dr. Phipps watching the ship land and I am in the government cell for two years babbling of the future and I am in a clearing in some woods where a plant with broad green and small purple flowers grows and I am picking the plant and eating it as I know I will do have done am doing . . .
I emerge from my mother’s womb and I see the gestalt-painting of my life-span, a pattern of immutable events painted on the stationary and eternal canvas of time . . .
But I do not merely see the “painting”, I am the “painting” and I am the painter and I am also outside the painting viewing the whole and I am none of these.
And I see the immutable time-locus that determines all the rest—March 4, 2060. Change that and the painting dissolves and I live in time like any other man, moment after blessed moment, freed from this all-knowing hell. But change itself is illusion.
March 4, 2060 in a wood not too far from where I was born. But knowledge of the horror that day brings, has brought, will bring can change nothing. I will do as I am doing will do did because I did it will do it am doing it . . .
April 3, 2040, and I emerge from my mother’s womb, an infant-child-youth-man-ancient, in a government cell in a mental hospital dying in clean white sheets . . .
March 4, 2060. I am twenty. I am in a clearing in the woods. Before me grows a small plant with broad green leaves and purple blossoms—Temp, the Weed of Time, which has haunted, haunts, will haunt my never-ending life. I know what I am doing will do have done because I will do have done am doing it.
How can I explain? How can I make you understand that this moment is unavoidable, invariant, that though I have known, do know, will know its dreadful consequences, I can do nothing to alter it?
The language is inadequate. What I have told you is an unavoidable half-truth. All actions I perform in my one hundred and ten year life-span occur simultaneously. But even that statement only hints around the truth, for “simultaneously” means “at the same time” and “time” as you understand the word has no relevance to my life. But let me approximate.
Let me say that all actions I have ever performed, will perform, do perform, occur simultaneously. Thus no knowledge inherent in any particular time-locus can affect any action performed at any other locus in time. Let me construct another useful lie, Let me say that for me action and perception are totally independent of each other. At the moment of my birth, I did everything I would ever do in my life, instantly, blindly, in one total gestalt. Only in the next “moment” do I perceive the results of all those myriad actions, the horror that March 4, 2060 will make has made is making of my life.
Or . . . they say that at the moment of death, one’s entire life flashes instantaneously before one’s eyes. At the moment of my birth, my whole life flashed before me, not merely before my eyes, but in reality. I cannot change any of it because change is something that exists only as a function of the relationship between different moments in time and for me life is one eternal moment that is one hundred and ten years long . . .
So this awful moment is invariant, inescapable.
March 4, 2060. I reach down, pluck the Temp plant. I pull off a broad green leaf, put it in my mouth. It tastes bittersweet, woody, unpleasant. I chew it, bolt it down.
The Temp travels to my stomach, is digested, passes into my bloodstream, reaches my brain. There changes occur which better men than I are powerless, will be powerless to understand, at least up till December 2, 2150 beyond which is blankness. My body remains in the objective time-stream, to age, grow old, decay, die. But my mind is abstracted out of time to experience all moments as one.
It is like a déjà vu. Because this happened on March 4, 2060, I have already experienced it in the twenty years since my birth. Yet this is the beginning point for my Temp-consciousness in the objective time-stream. But objective time-stream has no relevance to what happens . . .
The language, the very thought patterns are inadequate. Another useful lie: in the objective time-stream I was a normal human being until this dire March 4, experiencing each moment of the previous twenty years sequentially, in order, moment, after moment, after moment . . .
Now on March 4, 2060, my consciousness expands in two directions in the time-stream to fill my entire lifespan: forward to December 2, 2150 and my death, backward to April 3, 2040 and my birth. As this time-locus of March 4 “changes” my future, so too it “changes” my past, expanding my Temp-consciousness to both extremes of my life-span.
But once the past is changed, the previous past has never existed and I emerge from my mother’s infant-child-youth-man-ancient in a government cell a mental hospital dying in clean white sheets . . . And—
I, me, the spark of mind that is my consciousness, dwells in a locus that is neither place nor time. The objective duration of my life-span is one hundred and ten years, but from my own locus of consciousness, I am immortal, my awareness of my own awareness can never cease to be. I am an infant am a child am a youth am an old, old man dying on clean white sheets. I am all these mes, have always been all these mes will always be all these mes in the place where my mind dwells in an eternal moment divorced from time .
. .
THE WIND OVER THE WORLD
Steven Utley
The attendant barely looked up from the clipboard cradled in the crook of his arm when Leveritt came in. The room was devoid of personality, but just as she entered through one door, a second man dressed in a lab coat went out through a door directly opposite, and in the instant before it swung shut, she glimpsed the room beyond—brightly lit, full of gleaming surfaces—and heard or thought that she heard a low sound like a faint pop of static or the breaking of waves against a shore. She shuddered as an electric thrill of excitement passed through her.
“Please stretch out on the gurney there.” The man with the clipboard continued writing as he spoke. “You can stow your seabag on the rack underneath.”
Leveritt did as he said. She said, “I feel like I’m being prepped for surgery.”
“We don’t want you to black out and fall and hurt yourself.” He finished writing, came around the end of the gurney to her, and turned the clipboard to show her the printed form. “This,” he said, offering her his pen, “is where you log out of the present. Please sign on the line at the bottom there.”
Leveritt’s hand trembled as she reached for the pen. She curled her fingers into a fist and clenched it tightly for a second. She gave the attendant an apologetic smile. “I’m just a little nervous.” She tried to show him that she really was just a little nervous by expanding the smile into a grin; it felt brittle and hideous on her face. “I did volunteer for this,” she told him. I am more excited than scared to be doing this, she told herself.
The attendant smiled quickly, professionally. “Even volunteers have the right to be nervous. Try to relax. We’ve done this hundreds of times now, and there’s nothing to it. Ah!”
His exclamation was by way of greeting a second attendant, so like him that Leveritt felt she would be unable to tell them apart were she to glance away for a moment, who escorted a slight figure dressed in new-looking safari clothes and carrying, instead of the high-powered rifle that would have completed his ensemble, a seabag and a laptop. He stowed the bag and climbed on to the gurney next to Leveritt’s without being told, signed the log with a flourish, and lay back smiling. He turned his face toward Leveritt and said, “Looks like we’re traveling companions—time-traveling companions!” He talked fast, as though afraid he would run out of breath before he finished saying what he had to say. “Allow me to introduce myself—Ed Morris.”
“I’m Bonnie Leveritt.”
“Pleased to meet you, Miz Leveritt—or is it Doctor?”
She wondered if he could utter sentences not punctuated with dashes. “Miz,” she said, “working on Doctor. I’m on my way to join a field team from Texas A and M.”
One of the attendants consulted his wristwatch and nodded to the other, and each picked up a loaded syringe. The man looming over Leveritt gave her that quick, professional smile again. “This is to keep you from going into shock.”
She had no particular horror of needles but turned away, nevertheless, to watch Morris, who lay squinting against the glare of the fluorescent lights. She heard him grunt softly as the needle went into his arm.
“It’ll be another few minutes,” said Leveritt’s attendant. He and his twin left. Leveritt and Morris waited.
After a minute or so, he asked her, “How you holding up?”
“Fine.” Her voice sounded strange to her, thick, occluded, like a heavy smoker’s. She cleared her throat and spoke the word again; improvement was arguable. “Actually,” she confessed, “I’m nervous as hell. This is my first time. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to lie here waiting.”
“Supplies go through first—we’re down on the priority list, below soap and toilet paper. My first time, I was nervous as hell, too. Nobody gives people in my line of work credit for much imagination. Except . . .” he made a breathless kind of chuckle “. . . when it comes to creative accounting. Yeah, I’m one of the bean-counters. But let me tell you—the night before my first time, I didn’t sleep a wink. Not a wink. I kept imagining all sorts of things that might go wrong—plus, it all seemed so unreal, it was all so thrilling—and it was going to happen to me. Man! Oh, sure, the concept’s more exciting than the reality. There’s not much to where we’re headed—a little moss and a lot of mud. Beats me why they couldn’t’ve made a hole into some more interesting time period.”
“I suppose that depends on your definition of interesting. Besides, as I understand it, they didn’t make the hole, they sort of found it. We’re lucky it didn’t open up on somewhere we couldn’t go or wouldn’t want to.”
“You mean, like my hometown—Dallas?”
Leveritt smiled; she was from Fort Worth. “Worse. For all but the few most recent hundred millions of years, the Earth’s been pretty inhospitable—poisonous atmosphere, too much ultraviolet light, things like that.”
“Spoken like a true scientist!”
“Not quite a full-blown one yet,” she said, “but I guess I’ve got pedantry down.”
“Ah. Well, anyway, as I was saying—I was nervous before my first time. Scared, in fact. You might not think it to look at me,” and he paused long enough for her to realize that she was now to take a good look at him, so she did, “but I am no shrinking violet. I have a real active lifestyle—mountain climbing, sky diving. I guess I like heights.”
Leveritt was willing to give Morris the benefit of the doubt, but he was a balding little fortyish man whom she could not imagine working his way up a sheer rockface. Dressed in his great-white-hunter outfit, he lay clutching the laptop to his narrow chest, drumming his middle, ring, and little fingers on the case. He looked as calm as though he were waiting for an elevator, but he also looked like what he was, an accountant.
“Still,” he went on, “it’s one thing to jump out of a plane at ten thousand feet—another to jump through a hole in time. Straight out of the twenty-first century—straight into the prehistoric past! So, I didn’t get any sleep. The next day, when it came time for me to make the jump, I was a wreck—all because I was scared, see. But I hid the fact I was a wreck—and you know why? Because I was even more scared that if anybody found out, I wouldn’t get to make the jump—getting to do it meant that much to me.”
Leveritt gave him another, more heartfelt smile. “It does to me, too. But was it rough? The jump itself? I ask everyone I meet who’s done it.”
Morris screwed up his face and gestured dismissively. “It’s no worse’n hitting a speed bump when you’re driving a little too fast. Oh, sure, you hear sometimes about people who got bounced around kind of hard, but—speaking from personal experience—I honestly think I could’ve walked right out of the jump station afterwards with nothing more’n a headache and upset stomach. It was nothing. Now I’m less nervous about making the jump than I am about talking funding to this group of entomologists when I get there. Uh, you’re not an entomologist yourself, are you?”
“Geologist.”
“You ever tried to talk to an entomologist about anything but bugs?”
“Not knowingly, no.”
“Then you’ve never had to pretend to listen to whatever gas some guy wants to vent—”
Leveritt had to laugh. “You obviously have never dated some guys!”
“Ah?” Morris frowned. “No. I sure haven’t.” Then he got it, or got part of it, anyway, and made another breathless chuckle. “Anyhow, I have to go talk to these entomologists, and they never can—I deal in the definite, see. All they can talk about is the great contributions they’re making to science—how vital their work is. I know they’re making contributions to science—that’s why they’re there, right? They understand all about bugs. I understand all about money—and never the twain shall meet . . .”
Leveritt found herself tuning out the sense of the words, but she could not tune out the sound of them. The drugs were taking effect; she wanted to relax and drift, but Morris’s voice would not let her. She closed her eyes. Scarcely five seconds later, th
e attendants suddenly returned; one of them announced, “Time to go, folks,” and Leveritt’s gurney struck the door sharply as it lurched into motion. The air in the jump station had an unpleasant tang to it. Leveritt saw people moving briskly about, heard them muttering to one another, heard that low sound of static or surf again. A technician seated behind a console said, “One minute to next transmission.”
“Doesn’t matter which one of us goes through first, does it?” Morris asked his attendant, who answered with a shake of his head. The little man grinned at Leveritt. “Then I’ll go first and wait for you on the other side.”
“No. Please, I need to get this over with. Let me go first.”
“Well, guys—you heard the lady.”
Leveritt’s attendant pushed her gurney quickly past Morris’s, past a metal railing, on to the sending-receiving platform. He lightly touched her arm with the back of his hand. “Have a nice trip.”
“Thanks.”
“Deep breaths, now,” he said as he stepped back off the platform.
“Standby to send,” said the technician at the console. “Five seconds. Four.”
Leveritt inhaled deeply.
“Three.”
Morris caught her eye through the bars of the railing. She was touched by and grateful for his wink of encouragement.
“Two.”
She started to exhale. Everything turned to white light.
The Navy doctor held her eye open between his thumb and forefinger and directed the beam from a penlight into it. She moved her tongue in her mouth, swallowed, and managed to say, “Where’m I?”
“Sickbay.”
“I made it? To the Silurian?”
The doctor put away the penlight. “Now, what do you think?”