Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  He tilted his head, the blue eyes twinkling. “You don’t find it an honor that I have chosen her? Ah, no. You are truly women of a different age. Then tell me the names of some of the men of science who have superseded me, from whom you would find his attention an honor. I would be glad to know.”

  “None, really,” Lorraine admitted. “I don’t know what we can tell you, without skewing history.”

  “Your mother fears temporal paradox as well. Your faces tell me enough. I am honored by history’s regard, then. It is most humbling. But I am not the one who is unhappy, signoras. Tell me your troubles. I will not judge, only listen.”

  “She always went away . . .”

  “She never spent time with just me . . . ”

  She and Marguerite burst out with all of the anger and disappointment that was inside them. Expressing herself in Renaissance Italian only rendered the litany of her woes into a poetic cadence, but it didn’t lessen the hurt of feeling abandoned by Genevieve, again and again, until this last utter disappointment. By the time her voice died away, she was feeling absolutely ashamed of herself, but Leonardo’s kindly expression did not change.

  “Your feelings are most understandable,” he said. “You find her an attractive personality. So many others do, too. She is a song in a world of cacophony. She is trying to show you her new world. You do not accept her as she is or what choices she has made. You are possessive of her. Can you accept perhaps that she was only lent to you by history for a time?”

  “Of course not,” Lorraine said. “She is our mother. But she won’t let us have what we want from her.”

  “But what is it you want? She is here. She has made you welcome.”

  “Under certain circumstances,” Marguerite said, bitterly.

  “But why are those so hard to accept? She wishes that you would love each other. You do, when she is not there, I think.”

  They glanced at one another. Lorraine saw an expression in Marguerite’s eyes that made her take a mental step back. Her sister was actually afraid she would say she didn’t love her. It forced her to be honest.

  “We do,” she said, and made the assertion more firm. “We really do love each other.” Marguerite reached out to squeeze her hand in both of hers. Lorraine squeezed back.

  Leonardo nodded. “I believe that is all she wants, for you two to cooperate, and to share what there is to enjoy together. Life is not long; even when you can jump back and forth between events, it does not increase the days you have to spend. Otherwise, I would want to live forever, leaping from year to year, seeing what marvels that men have dreamed. Do not waste the days.”

  “But she is sending us away, Ser Leonardo,” Lorraine said, sadly. “If all we had was two weeks . . . she’s making us go before it’s up.”

  He touched his chest with two fingers. “I will advocate for you. I am good at presenting my case before courts nearly as difficult and tough-minded as your mother.” He gave them a playful smile. Lorraine understood even more how her mother had fallen in love with him. She found herself halfway there, too. “You have a rare and marvelous opportunity that I can only dream of. I implore you to cooperate, if not for your own sake . . .”

  “For hers?” Lorraine asked. She was surprised at how eager she felt. Leonardo smiled.

  “No, for mine. Genevieve wants you to return to us once a year. I would hear of the marvels of your time. Will you do that for me, share with me the wonders that will come after this?” He looked from one woman to the other. “You are troubled that she has involved me in her work. But I keep many secrets. Yes, you think that writing mirror-fashion is a poor form of security. Most of that which I do not want known by anyone else I keep up here.” He tapped his broad forehead. “I know of the great inventions of the future. I wish I could see them, but it is forbidden to me. I must not be influenced. I understand secrets. This will be a gift to me that I think she was hoping to make. But only with your cooperation. She is so disappointed that you may not return.” He looked hopeful, and Lorraine realized that she could make a gift to Leonardo da Vinci. The thought made her feel humble.

  She smiled at him. “How can we say no? I know I’d be honored.”

  “Me too,” Marguerite said.

  He sprang to his feet and came to take each of them by the arm.

  “Genevieve will be so happy,” he said, as he led them back through the corridor toward the squawk of voices and twang of music. “Now, come back to the workshop with me. How brave your mother is to sacrifice all her future life for our ideal. I consider our studio is a place where we transform thought into reality, answerable only to our patrons. Genevieve has explained the modern system to me, and though my way requires bowing and scraping to rich men who do not understand, it is better than shouting at the wall of what she calls faceless corporations. Here, the loss of dignity is temporary, but the science and art we reveal lasts forever. I believe it is better.”

  Lorraine peered around him to meet Marguerite’s eyes. Her sister beamed at her, and she beamed back. It was better here.

  The rest of the time they spent in Milan was wonderful, in every way. Lorraine had the breathless feeling that they were watching history being made. Leonardo tasked his apprentices to create marvels of contemporary science, tweaking his inventions forward a bit at a time until they worked. When the workmen got the barrel of Leonardo’s model gun to spin freely on its axis, they all embraced one another for joy, Lorraine and Marguerite in the midst of a group hug.

  With their mother, they visited the court of the duke of Moro. Though they weren’t important enough to gain more than a moment of his attention, they were thrilled to see the pageantry of a ducal court in session. And in the evening, when the guests left and they were in private around a fire, Lorraine and Marguerite kept their word, and told stories of the future. Leonardo was as good a listener as a small child, hanging on every word. Beside him, her lap full of needlework, her mother smiled at them all. For the first time since they were small, the girls felt as if they were a whole family. It made Lorraine feel warm and loved. She was satisfied.

  Before she knew it, the appointed time was over. Leonardo and his workers heaped them with gifts to take home. Side by side, the sisters packed the fans and hats and scale models into new cases bought for them in the market.

  Lorraine was silent through the process, though not out of spite. She had had to come to terms with having a mother who was a part of history, all of it. She must share her, not just with one sister but with the entire world and future generations. The hope for an ideal mother-daughter relationship was gone, but she never really had it. She would have to settle for the one that she had, with which she had grown up, like it or not.

  “We can’t rewrite history,” Marguerite lamented. Lorraine laughed, realizing she had been thinking exactly what her sister had been thinking.

  “No,” Lorraine said. “We’ll write our portion of it.” She held out a hand. “At least we have each other.”

  Marguerite looked at the hand suspiciously, and then her expression softened. “I suppose we do.” She took the hand, and, to Lorraine’s surprise, squeezed it.

  The apprentices carried the cases out to the street where Iskander was waiting in an open carriage. Grinning, they helped the sisters up into the bouncy seats.

  Mother came rushing out, her work veil tied tightly around her forehead. She did belong here, Lorraine realized. She never looked so at home in California. “I’m glad I caught you, darlings. I have something I need you to take back with you.”

  She handed Lorraine a heavy, square bundle. “I don’t dare leave it here, darling,” she said. “In any case, I know it was never found. If you don’t think you can find it a safe place, give it to Rolf. He will take care of it.”

  Lorraine undid the knotted linen cloth and found a huge book. The binding of the enormous volume had knobbly rungs in it, as if a ladder had been plastered against the spine underneath the leather. The cover itself was made of wood. Inside
, a frontispiece showed the two sisters, in their visiting finery. The girls gasped in delight.

  “That’s by Leonardo,” their mother said. “He worked on it from a sketch he made of you one evening. A wonderful gift. An original, darlings, all yours.”

  Lorraine turned over the heavy parchment leaf and saw page after page of designs, drawings, and Leonardo’s inimitable backward writing. The images were familiar: the round-winged helicopter, the mechanical carriage, the boat-hulled submarine, all of Leonardo’s most famous inventions. With a shock she realized what she held.

  “It’s a codex. I’ve seen a couple in museums. Is this one special for you?” she asked her mother.

  “More than that, darling,” Mother said with a twinkle. “These are the ones that work. All Leo ever lacked was a power source. I showed him the formulae for internal combustion engines and nuclear engines, and he was so pleased. We bring so many things to each other.” She smiled with almost catlike pleasure.

  Lorraine felt a slight twinge of the old jealousy. She still didn’t like sharing her mother, but if she had to, the most famous inventor and artist of the Renaissance was almost worthy. She hugged the codex to her. “Thank you. We’ll treasure it.”

  “It’s a one of a kind book,” her mother reminded them with a knowing smile. “You’ll have to share.”

  “I get it first,” Marguerite said, immediately.

  Had nothing really changed? Lorraine opened her mouth to say that she did. Then she closed it.

  “All right,” she said, handing her the codex. “Share and share alike.”

  Marguerite’s mouth opened in surprise, and then she grinned, too.

  Genevieve stepped back and waved to Iskander to whip up the horse. “See you next year, darlings. Together.”

  TIME WELL SPENT

  George Zebrowski

  As usual, I would have to leave before I arrived. Memory threw me there, exiling me from all my other times with her, no matter how much I concentrated. She was alive in all our pasts, but only these earlier presents were open to me.

  “Me again?” she asked in our present, jealous and prideful.

  “No one else,” I said.

  I kissed her before I bridged, fighting off Maxim Gorky’s claim that “love is the failure of mind to understand nature.” If so, then love was an opposed way, an uphill fight at best.

  She was asleep back there in our off-campus apartment, as I came up by train from New York City. I would have just enough time to get there and spend some time with her before the train arrived.

  I always prepared by losing a pound or two, colouring my hair a bit and exercising, even using some make-up to look younger than my late 60s, so that she would not notice in the dim light of the apartment at night. Nearsighted and in bed, it helped that she would not be wearing her glasses.

  I grasped my key from decades past, and summoned the vision of the pale-skinned young woman who had dyed her hair black after a silly blonde experiment, and then cut it short when I was away. I would again compliment the change.

  My appearance at my old door shook the back porch for a moment. I stood before the curtained glass, but no light went on. I was fearful that this might be my last chance to regain this time, so I had to make it count. Other times with her might open to me if this one closed, but that was far from certain.

  The theory of jumps was not perfect. There might not even be any real time displacement at all, but instead a reality-like recreation of significant memories that suddenly occupied a mind with a quantum flood of insistence to the point at which it made no difference to the experience; it might just as well be happening in the naive sense. Time probably did not exist outside the biology of human perception except as a timeless persistence, a stubborn duration, inexpressible endurance beyond time-like words.

  I turned my key in the lock, pushed the door open and went in, closing it behind me.

  “Who’s there?” asked her voice, from somewhere inside me, it seemed.

  “It’s me,” I said, hoping to sound younger.

  “Oh,” she said uncertainly.

  I crossed the small living room to the double bed in the alcove and sat down. Her head came out from beneath the covers, hair cut short and dyed black. She looked up at me like a queen on a divan.

  “Beautiful!” I said, and she giggled as I lay down beside her.

  “You must be tired,” she said as I sighed. “It’s okay, we can just sleep,” she whispered. “We have all tomorrow.”

  She dozed. I lay there, afraid to disappoint her.

  After a while I looked at my watch and saw that I would soon arrive, and it would not matter. Were anachronisms real or only apparent? You can have all the anachronisms you want in your mind, where they happen all the time. Was I asleep up ahead? I felt a rocking sense of loss as I heard the train whistle.

  “What is it?” she asked softly as my moments with her fled into some deep abyss where I could not follow.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said and got up. She turned over and closed her eyes, expecting that I was only undressing. I stood there, looking at the glory of her bare back. To kiss her now might be fatal if I arrived early.

  I went out the door and breathed the night air, knowing that I was coming down the street, and that I could leave it all to him.

  The starry night was blue. I went across the yard and stood by the brick wall of the garage. I would come through the narrow alleyway from the street beyond, less than a block from the train station.

  My memory moved within him. I was waiting here only to see him walk by in the dark. The unreality of time seized me, and seemed about to inflict a wretched pain, but relented.

  Time could show mercy if you remembered well enough, a collective delusion, the setting of human psychology, biologically based, to conceal the fact that everything was in one place and happened all at once.

  I would return, inexactly, to this very time and place as often as my force of memory struck out against loss. I looked around the dark yard. I was present here in these shadows more than once, similarly aware, only moments apart.

  He came through the dark alleyway, and I felt the flow of love for his waiting beloved; love then, not my love now. His step was sure, the past his own, his youth holding back the incoming future. The same key I still held was in his pocket.

  He would not disappoint the dark-haired goddess in her bed.

  I was gone before I got to the door.

  TIMETIPPING

  Jack Dann

  Since timetipping, everything moved differently. Nothing was for certain, anything could change (depending on your point of view), and almost anything could happen, especially to forgetful old men who often found themselves in the wrong century rather than on the wrong street.

  Take Moishe Hodel, who was too old and fat to be climbing ladders; yet he insisted on climbing to the roof of his suburban house so that he could sit on the top of a stone-tuff church in Goreme six hundred years in the past. Instead of praying, he would sit and watch monks. He claimed that since time and space were meshuggeneh (what’s crazy in any other language?), he would search for a quick and Godly way to travel to synagogue. Let the goyim take the trains.

  Of course, Paley Litwak, who was old enough to know something, knew from nothing when the world changed and everything went blip. His wife disappeared, and a new one returned in her place. A new Golde, one with fewer lines and dimples, one with starchy white hair and missing teeth.

  Upon arrival all she said was, “This is almost right. You’re almost the same, Paley.

  Still, you always go to shul?”

  “Shul?” Litwak asked, resolving not to jump and scream and ask God for help. With all the changing, Litwak would stand straight and wait for God. “What’s a shul?”

  “You mean you don’t know from shul, and yet you wear such a yarmulke on your head?” She pulled her babushka through her fingers. “A shul. A synagogue, a temple.

  Do you pray?”

  Lit
wak was not a holy man, but he could hold up his head and not be afraid to wink at God. Certainly he prayed. And in the following weeks Litwak found himself in shul more often than not—so she had an effect on him; after all, she was his wife. Where else was there to be? With God he had a one-way conversation—from Litwak’s mouth to God’s ears—but at home it was turned around. There, Litwak had no mouth, only ears.

  How can you talk with a woman who thinks fornicating with other men is holy?

  But Litwak was a survivor; with the rest of the world turned over and doing flip-flops, he remained the same. Not once did he trip into a different time, not even an hour did he lose or gain; and the only places he went were those he could walk to. He was the exception to the rule. The rest of the world was adrift; everyone was swimming by, blipping out of the past or future and into the present here or who-knows-where.

  It was a new world. Every street was filled with commerce, every night was carnival.

  Days were built out of strange faces, and nights went by so fast that Litwak remained in the synagogue just to smooth out time. But there was no time for Litwak, just services, and prayers, and holy smells.

  Yet the world went on. Business almost as usual. There were still rabbis and chasids and grocers and cabalists; fat Hoffa, a congregant with a beard that would make a storybook Baal Shem jealous, even claimed that he knew a cabalist that had invented a new gemetria for foretelling everything concerning money.

  “So who needs gemetria?” Litwak asked. “Go trip tomorrow and find out what’s doing.”

  “Wrong,” said Hoffa as he draped his prayer shawl over his arm, waiting for a lull in the conversation to say the holy words before putting on the talis. “It does no good to go there if you can’t get back. And when you come back, everything is changed, anyway.

  Who do you know that’s really returned? Look at you, you didn’t have gray hair and earlocks yesterday.”

  “Then that wasn’t me you saw. Anyway, if everybody but me is tripping and tipping back and forth, in and out of the devil’s mouth, so to speak, then what time do you have to use this new gemetria?”