"I do want the truth," I retorted. "What is it? You're a history class? At a college?"
Her eyes widened. "That's near enough true," she admitted. "I'm the teacher. The rest are pupils. But we're more than just a class. There are changes to be made."
"Changes? You're committing suicide, then? Change the past -- your past, if you insist -- and you change everything."
"No," she said patiently. "Time can't be changed, though bits of it can. Think of time as a river. It's an old idea, the river of time. But the analogy can be taken a good deal farther. Time is a river. And it's April 17, 2097 -- remember that, assume that, as a hypothesis, even if you're not convinced. Suppose we of 2097 interfere in the past, what happens?"
"You cease to exist," I said. "You wink out as if you never were."
"No," she said. "Remember the past is a river. Block a river, and what happens? Except in one case in a million, just what happened here. The river flows to the sea. Block it, and it takes another course. It still flows to the sea -- can you even imagine anything else? And except in the most unusual circumstances, the contour of the land forces the river to return to its original course rather quickly, and flow on as if it had never left it. Just think -- the very fact that a river exists means that gravity is forcing all the surplus water in the area to collect and flow in a certain direction. Stop the flow, and the water makes a detour, and then returns to the original direction, the original bed."
What she said made sense, but only in a limited way. Arguing by analogy proved nothing. She was saying, in effect, that because a river would act in a certain way, time must act in the same way.
I said so.
She agreed. "It doesn't always happen. A river flows one side of a hill. Divert it even a few yards at a certain point, and it must flow the other side of the hill. And then it's possible that it never gets back to the original course. Well, that can happen in time, too, but even more rarely than it does with a river. Make minor changes in the past, and your own time is certainly affected . . . but not in a catastrophic way. The river makes a detour, and returns to its original course."
She paused and then said quietly: "I ought to know, because I've done it more than once."
"You've done it? Changed the past?"
She stood up and began to walk about. The flames were dying, I saw, for the firelight flickering on her skin, making it yellow and orange and red but mainly a deep bronze, was far less bright than it had been when Jota and I fought.
"About twenty-five years ago it was discovered that it was possible to alter the past, for a purpose, without making vast, indiscriminate chaos of time. At this moment, all the force and life of time is in Wednesday, April 17, 2097. Any time diversion made anywhere has its effect, perhaps a vast effect on 2097, but in the changed world I still exist, I'm still a teacher, I still do the same things at the same time.
"The paradoxes of time travel have always fascinated some people, but I'd never been one of them. I had assumed, as most people did, that if you somehow managed to change even the tiniest event in the past, the consequences which must result would multiply, square and cube themselves with every passing millisecond, producing even in a few years a totally different world.
"If a girl were delayed ten seconds and consequently never met the man she would have married, never had the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren she would have had, naturally the future must be quite different. Yet far tinier changes must, I had believed and still believed, be just as significant."
"What sort of changes have you made?" I demanded. "And how do you know you've made them?"
She smiled and sat down again. But she was very restless. Something was bothering her, something that to her was far more important than the Great Fire of Shuteley -- which, after all, was only history.
"Anyone who moves in time," she said, "remembers everything. You were in a loop, so you know what happens. You experience and remember the entire loop -- the previous track, what happened, the return, the change in events, the consequence."
Jota and I had entered the camp, fought, Jota had been killed and I had killed. Then we'd been pushed back a few minutes and lived through a different version of the incident. And we remembered everything.
Miranda went on: "What have we changed? Sorry, Val, I can't tell you. It's better not -- they're all in your future. This is the farthest-back point where a change has been sanctioned -- "
"So it's sanctioned, is it?" I demanded. "Your parliament or senate or whatever you've got calmly decides to monkey with -- "
"Wait, please." She laid her hand on my arm. "Cool down. You know nearly enough now for me to tell you plainly and simply why we're here, what we intended to do, and how the operation is going."
She was, however, in no hurry to start. And now that it had come to the point, I felt no urge to hurry her.
We all like a safe, ordered world. Me more than most. The idea of people watching you, interfering with you, manipulating you makes the flesh creep. And yet, in this case, this very special case, if the giants had come to do the obvious thing and did it, if even now they could be persuaded to do it, I for one would have been delighted they came. Though afterwards, I wouldn't want any such interference again.
"We're here to save two people," she said. "One is Garry Carswell . . . not that he died in the original fire. If he had, we wouldn't have known his importance -- he wouldn't have had any importance. What did happen was that he lived, horribly scarred and mutilated, with the mind of a genius, but a traumatic genius who never really escaped the Fire of Shuteley. We believe that by saving him, which we've done -- letting him die might have been another way -- we can avert . . . "
She stopped. "No, I won't tell you about our time, your future," she said. "Nobody should ever want to know that, for certain. It's enough to say that our world may be a better place if Garry Carswell never grows up to be a brilliant diabolist. We've also saved his parents, Gil and Barbara, to live in our world. They died in the original fire, and that fact didn't help Garry . . . You won't see any of them again."
This didn't bother me: most people who had the choice of living in 2097 or dying in 1966 would find the choice easy. Many would even be glad to make the change.
"And the other you came to save was Jota," I said. "Well, that shouldn't cause you any trouble. Make one of your loops, as you call them, and give him a third life, or a fourth or fifth, or whatever it is. I've lost count."
"That might be possible, but for Greg."
"Yes, it all comes back to Greg, doesn't it?"
She shivered, probably partly at the thought of Greg and what he had done and what he still might do, and partly because it was rather cool and airy in the stasis, in comparison with the various kinds and degrees of heat we had all been experiencing. Jumping up, she pulled at her two-piece and with no trouble at all the scraps of material became a leotard, knitting at her waist with no apparent join. It was only a trivial miracle, hardly worth mentioning.
"The loops," she said,' "are legal. They're allowed. Only minimal apparatus is required, and the effect is extremely local. A few people are affected; the rest of the world is quite unaffected."
"Legal?" I said. "Allowed?"
"The moment time-molding became possible, there was immediate, irresistible public pressure for loops."
Sitting down again, she snuggled close to me, quite impersonally, merely for warmth. I had been nothing, then a lover; now I was a friend, if that.
"Think how the very possibility of loops instantly transfigures the world. Most accidents can be averted up to five seconds before they happen. A precious vase is dropped . . . turn back the clock, undrop the vase, and it lasts another thousand years. More important . . . a driver is careless for a fraction of a second, and a car plunges into a river. Regain the last five seconds, and drowned people are undrowned -- "
"As Jota and Wesley were unkilled," I murmured.
"Exactly. The permitted technique works only over a short period
, a few minutes at most, and a tiny area. But it's saved thousands of lives, a lot of valuable property and prevented many disasters. Now, you want to know about Greg -- "
"Yes, Greg," I said. "Tell me about Greg. Explain the inexplicable."
"Why he's here? Well, he's got the Gift."
"The gift?"
"He's a witchdoctor. Only his magic works."
The introduction of further gobbledegook irritated me. I was just beginning to figure out how this business made sense. And then she introduced something fantastic which could never make sense.
Before I could speak, she said sharply: "Don't say it. Val, you haven't been very bright. You could tell me far more about the Gift than I can tell you. You know all about it. Or you would, if you'd ever opened your eyes."
I could think of only one explanation. " I've got it?" I exclaimed.
"No, not you -- Jota."
Step by step she made me remember, and interpret. And I lived through years of my life with her, prompted by her.
Chapter Ten
Although Jota was my cousin, I didn't know him until he was three. His mother was my father's sister, but they had never been close and the two people they married disliked each other.
When the Mulliners came to live next door to us, I was three too. Family feeling had nothing to do with the move. The house was available and convenient, that was all.
I never knew Mrs. Mulliner as Aunt Jean. There was no contact between the two families, but Jota and I, being only children of the same age, almost inevitably played together.
We used to be put out together in one back garden or the other, and allowed to run wild in ours (because neither my father nor my mother had any interest in gardens, and ours was a jungle), but had to be very careful in Jota's, because Jota's father was an amateur horticulturalist. He called himself that, and even at three Jota and I were trying to say the word, without much success, and with no idea what it meant except that because Jota's father was a horticulturalist we had much more fun in my garden.
(Miranda led me through memory quite fairly, not explaining although she did direct. She reminded me of very little, and never forced her sometimes more accurate information on me. All she did, really, was direct my attention to facts which I had never considered particularly significant, because if I had, I'd have had to believe the unbelievable. The unbelievable then . Anyway, sometimes, quite often, indeed, my memory contained important things of which she knew nothing whatever.)
We must have been about four and nearly ready to go to school when we had contact for the first time with the nastiness of the outside world. What happened in my own house I naturally took for granted, and anyway it was never nasty, merely baffling at times. I loved my mother and depended on her like any child, and ninety-five percent of the time she was like anybody else's mother. It was only occasionally that the world turned upside-down, that there was screaming and rushing about and slammed doors and sobbing, and I knew then to keep quiet and pretend not to exist.
The garden behind ours belonged to Mr. Sylvester, who was a fat red-faced man whom I used to like quite well. He used to give us aniseed bails, always throwing them and laughing all over his fat body when we failed to catch them, as we always did.
Later, however, Mr. Sylvester changed. Jota (who was Clarence then -- the name didn't seem strange to either of us until we went to school) and I didn't understand why he had changed. Until Miranda made me think about it, I didn't realize that he was simply a gardener jealous of Jota's father's achievements. He didn't throw aniseed balls to us any more. Over the fence, he asked at times why we didn't run about in Jota's garden the way we did in mine.
Then he started complaining about our garden, saying the weeds were coming through the fence. To Jota and me this was manifest nonsense, because we had never seen a plant walk.
Anyway, there was constant trouble between Mr. Sylvester and Jota's father, and between Mr. Sylvester and my father, and even between my father and Jota's father, because Jota's father said weeds did go through fences and it was time my father did something about the jungle.
Jota and I never understood the situation, but what we did know was that we could never play in either garden any more without being shouted at by Jota's father or my father or Mr. Sylvester. And we both managed to work out, without the slightest trouble, that the whole thing was Mr. Sylvester's fault.
Really, it was quite a crisis in the life of a couple of four-year-olds. We were not allowed to wander about the town, to play in the streets, to disappear for hours. In the back gardens, until Mr. Sylvester spoiled everything, we'd spent whole days of childish delight every time it didn't rain. We needed our sanctuary, because although I didn't think about it at the time, Jota's home too, where there was a perpetual tug-of-war for power, was also a place he was instinctively glad to escape from, and nobody had ever bothered us in my garden at least until Mr. Sylvester started making a nuisance of himself.
One day Mr. Sylvester ceased bothering us. He was dead. Neither Jota nor I had any clear idea what that meant, except that we were free again to play in my garden as we liked, and in Jota's garden with circumspection. We were honestly delighted that Mr. Sylvester was gone, and there was no shadow on either of our lives until we went to school.
It was the day we went to school that Jota and I fell out for the first time. Of course we had argued and sulked, but until then we had both been too dependent upon each other ever to cut off our nose to spite our face. My parents and Jota's parents both accepted our friendship as something that caused them less trouble than any other acquaintance, and if we fought we suffered for it, and we knew it. Other kids either of us brought home were not welcome. Neither Jota's parents nor mine wanted outsiders poking their noses in, even children -- behind children were adults, usually.
So Jota and I, fairly intelligent kids, had realized long since that fighting with each other didn't pay.
At school, a maelstrom of noise, high laughter, peculiar smells, unaccustomed regimentation, girls (neither Jota nor I had ever had anything to do with girls and had quite made up our minds we never would), harsh-voiced adults pretending to be on our side, huge windows, endless corridors, electric light in the daytime, stairs, frightening large boys and girls, even more frightening people in black coats and square hats, one thing stood out in my memory -- the howl of laughter when Jota said his name was Clarence.
The teacher laughed too, though she tried to pretend she hadn't.
They laughed again, twice as loudly, when he added the second half, Mulliner.
I wanted to jump up and hit the whole lot of them. They hadn't laughed when, just before, I had said I was Val Mathers. My real Christian name was Valentine, but I'd always been called Val, so that's what I said. Now everybody was laughing at Clarence Mulliner, my pal.
I didn't jump up because . . . well, I didn't jump up.
The funny thing was that as we were going home, free for the rest of the day -- the first day was a half day -- I giggled myself at the recollection of the childish laughter when Clarence, all unwittingly, gave his name. It was childlike -- when they laughed at Clarence, my friend, I wanted to fight them all (though I didn't). But afterwards . . . well, I laughed so much I could hardly walk.
Clarence -- I called him Clarence then, and went on doing so until he became, for all time, Jota -- didn't lose his temper at once. He waited for me to return to normal. But I couldn't. The more I laughed the funnier it all became.
And then he hit me once, on the chest, and ran away.
My laughter slowly died, not because I'd been hurt, not really because I was sorry I'd laughed, but mainly because I had, after all, been laughing at Jota. So long as he stayed to be laughed at I went on doing it. But there's no point in laughing at someone who doesn't hang around to be laughed at.
I went home. I tried to see Jota, but nobody answered the door.
At tea-time I wasn't hungry. Later I was sick. My father, even my mother, began to get concerned.
I went to bed with a hot-water bottle.
Next morning I was no better and the doctor was sent for. He examined me thoroughly, and then he and my father talked at the foot of the bed in low tones. Later my father came and sat on the bed and talked quietly. to me.
At the time I didn't understand, didn't realize there was anything to understand except that I was ill.
But many years later it was easy to guess what the doctor had said and what my father thought about it, and what must have been in his mind when he talked to me.
The doctor had been unable to find anything wrong with me, yet obviously I was quite seriously ill. Being a young, up-to-date doctor, he immediately thought of psychosomatic illness. It figured. I lived in a strange home -- he knew that, being the doctor for the whole family. I had just gone to school. He had found a case, a quite interesting case, of a child of five, otherwise apparently normal, prostrated by psychosomatic illness.
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