Shiva and Other Stories
Page 18
“What are we supposed to do?” Saleth Sar says. “You surely cannot think to give us such an evaluation and simply disappear. We are not fools here, we are serious people. Even he is a serious person,” he says pointing to de Gaulle, “even though like all of his countrymen he is full of grand designs and stupid dreams. Serious stupid dreams, however. You must take responsibility for that as well as much else.”
Well, that seems fair enough. Perhaps that is so. “Regrette,” Sperber says. What else is there to say? In just a moment he will take the extradimensional calculator out of his briefcase, calculate the dials, and make his departure. He hopes that the café personnel will not take the calculator for a grenade or plastique; that they will not interpret his intentions as violent. His intentions are not violent, they are simply pedagogical in all of the better senses of that word.
* * *
Next assignment: This one the standard interview (in all of its hopelessness) which no one in training can avoid. “Don’t do this,” Sperber therefore says to JFK, appearing in the President’s private quarters at Hyannisport with the help of his speedy and selective instrument. “Don’t go to Dallas to resolve a factional dispute, the factions are hopelessly riven, there is nothing that you can do but interfere and otherwise, if you go there, horrendous personal consequences may follow. I am not even talking about the future of the country.”
Kennedy looks at him kindly, helps himself to another breadstick from the stack next to the table, seems to regard Sperber in a unique and favorable light. Jacqueline is ensconced upstairs, Dave Powers is pacing the corridors outside: This is a quiet night in the fall of 1963, quieter than most of them and therefore good for sitting by the calculator. Sperber has come to Kennedy noiselessly, with no disturbance whatsoever.
“You’re not the first from whom I’ve heard this, you know,” Kennedy says. “There has been a whole group of you who have come in mysteriously with a similar plea over the past few weeks. It’s a good thing I know I’m only hallucinating. Or are you really all emissaries from the future on some kind of training plan? That’s what I’m beginning to believe but I can’t get a straight answer out of any of you. It strikes me as the most reasonable guess; either that or you’re all really extraordinary actors and Lyndon is even more demonic than I think, trying to make me crazy here. But I don’t think I’m crazy; I have a rigorous, robust intelligence and know a hawk from a handsaw.”
Sperber knew of course about all the others. Kennedy in the fall of 1963 was one of the most popular destinations: unlike de Gaulle and Saleth Sar in the café, who were really unusual and almost secret. Certainly, Sperber would never make his knowledge of that site public. Still, you could not use only the most popular destinies; you had to do some original warning and rebutting or risk falling into imitation, the inattentiveness of the assessors. Alternate history was not merely an odyssey; it was a work of art, it had to be particularly shaped.
“What can I do to convince you that I’m different from the others?” he said. “I’m a specialist, I work on historical causation, on first cause, on original motivation, it’s been my field of study for years and if I didn’t have this opportunity, I would be abandoning the future to mindless consequence. It’s got to mean more than that.”
“I can’t get into arguments of this sort,” Kennedy says. He rocks back in his chair, sighing a little as his weak back is momentarily shifted from axis, then recovers his purchase. “All of you are so insistent, all of you seem so convinced that you carry the real answers.” He smiles at Sperber, his fetching smile, the smile that has been preserved in all of the living and dead histories through the hundreds of years between them, then pats Sperber on the hand. “It’s a fated business anyway,” Kennedy says. “And if I’m not mistaken, if I understand this correctly, it’s all happened anyway from your perspective.”
“It’s happened,” Sperber says, wishing that he had managed a university education so that he could put this in more sophisticated terms. The trades were not a good place to be; this work was really too delicate for someone training fundamentally as a technician and yet that was the only way it could be financed. “It’s happening and happening but there’s a chance, just a chance, that if you avoid in the future the events which I know so well, that it can happen in a different way. I’m not doing this for recompense,” Sperber says unnecessarily. “I have a genuine interest in improving the quality of our lives in the present.”
“Well,” Kennedy says. “Well, well, there’s no answer to that then, is there? There’s no canceling travel and political commitments at such a late time unless there’s a proven disaster lying there and we know that that’s not the case. Sorry, pal,” Kennedy says, patting Sperber’s arm almost lovingly, “there’s just no way around this. Besides, I’m getting a little tired of all these visits anyway. They’re distracting and there’s nothing that I can do to change the situation anyway.”
“Je regrette,” Sperber says in poorly stressed French, carrying over his response from an earlier interview, “Je regrette all of this, Mr. President, but it’s important for you to understand the consequence—”
“There is no consequence,” Kennedy says; “there is only outcome,” and Sperber in a sudden and audacious wedge of light, an extrusion that seems to come from Kennedy’s very intellect, which fires and concentrates his features, bathing them in a wondrous and terrible life, understands that Kennedy is right, that Sperber has been wrong, that he has been pursuing consequence at a distance in the way that a platoon of guards with rakes might trail the line of a parade, clearing the landscape. Sperber was no more consequential to Kennedy than such a crew would be to the parade.
“Don’t do it!” he says nevertheless, seizing the opportunity as best he can. “You still shouldn’t do it, no matter how right you feel; you will be surrounded by enemies, taunted by a resisting crowd, then you will perish among roses. You have got to heed me,” Sperber says, and jiggles the extradimensional calculator into some kind of response, already too late, but he is willing to try to get Kennedy to listen to reason even as the storm begins in his viscera and he feels himself departed through yet another wedge of history, spilled toward a ceaseless and futile present.
* * *
Sperber takes himself to be addressing Albert Einstein in a hideous cafeteria in Einstein’s student days, the unformed Alfred nibbling an odorous salami, calculations and obliterated equations on the table between them. “Don’t do this,” Sperber says in what he takes to be a final, desperate appeal, “don’t do it, don’t complete the equations, don’t draw the conclusions: This will lead to the uniform field theory, it will lead to one devastating anomaly after the next, it will unleash the forces of atomic destruction upon a hapless and penitential humanity surrounded by consequence. Don’t you understand this? Put it away, put it away!”
Einstein, another infrequent site, stares at Sperber with a kind of terror, not for him the cool insouciance of Kennedy, the political fanaticism of Saleth Sar and de Gaulle. Einstein is as fully, as hopelessly, astonished as Sperber was when informed, five or six subjective hours ago, of his mission.
“Change history?” Sperber had said. “I can’t even spell history,” and similarly Einstein shudders over his equation, stares at Sperber in a fusion of shyness and loathing. “I can’t shape history, I don’t even know myself,” Sperber, the student, had shouted when informed of his mission, and the implacable sheen of their faces when they had responsively shoved the extradimensional calculator into his hands was like the sheen of the salami that Einstein held in one hopeless, hungry hand.
“I don’t know of what you are speaking,” Einstein said. “Physics is too difficult a subject for me to understand; I can do nothing, don’t you know this? I can do nothing at all.” In Einstein’s despair, Sperber can glimpse the older Einstein, the saintly and raddled figure whose portrait adorns the site, a musty extrusion from the journals, who played the violin badly at Princeton and blamed everyone else for the bomb
.
“Yes you can,” Sperber says, and resists the impulse to spout French again: the language of diplomacy, he had been told, but that was just another cracked idea of the assessors. “You can do something, all of you could have done something, you have to take responsibility, don’t you see? You must take responsibility for what you have given us.”
Sperber would have a great deal more to say but the sound of the assessors is suddenly enormous in the land and Sperber finds himself, however unwillingly, ground to recombinant dust in the coils of the calculator.
He is taken back.
He ponders the landscape, the faces of the assessors, neither unsurprisingly changed at all. The program is sustained, after all, by failure. What point in resisting?
“Oppenheimer is next,” someone says to him. “Are you prepared for Oppenheimer?”
Well, no, in fact he is not, but Sperber tries as ever to be hopeful. He is Shiva after all, destroyer of worlds.
Also by Barry N. Malzberg
The Engines of the Night
Winner of the Locus Award.
In The Engines of the Night, Malzberg reviews his own ambivalent relationship with science fiction up to 1980 and gauges its past and future potentials. Would science fiction have been better off without Hugo Gernsback and the pulp-literature stigma with which he cursed it? What are the seminal works of science fiction? Can science fiction kill you? His answers are brilliant, unequivocal, and surprising. Updated with a 2001 introduction, this award-winning essay collection remains an essential and enduring history and critique of a fascinating and problematic genre.
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