Tools are in the garage, I'm told. I carry them into the living room, arranging them according to their use. Then armed with a short rusty crowbar I head upstairs, finding the bathroom and a big steel bathtub, and with the crowbar I start to batter the mildewed tile and plaster, startled cockroaches fleeing the light.
After a little while the front door opens, closes.
I go downstairs, part of me curious. A handsome woman is waiting for me, offering a thin smile. She's dressed in quality clothes, and she's my age but with much less mileage. That smile of hers is hopeful, even enthusiastic, but beneath it is a much-hidden sense of terror.
What's her name? I wonder. But I won't ask.
Nor does she ask about me.
With two backs available, we start to clear the living room of furniture and the dusty old carpeting. By now the television has gone blank. I unplug it, and together we carry it to the curb. Electronics are an important resource. Our neighbors—mismatched couples like ourselves—are doing the same job, stereos and microwave ovens and televisions stacked and covered carefully with plastic. Firearms make smaller, secondary piles. Then around midnight a large truck arrives. I'm dragging out the last of the carpeting, pausing long enough to watch a crew of burly men loading everything into the long trailer. One of them seems familiar. He was a police officer, wasn't he? I remember him. He bullied me on several occasions for the fun of it. And now we are equals, animosity nothing but a luxury. I manage to wave at him. No response. Then I return to the house, never hurrying. Rain begins to fall, fat cold drops striking the back of my neck, and with them comes a fatigue, sudden and profound, that leaves my legs shaking and my breath coming in little wet gulps.
The Voice has already told us to sleep when it's needed. The woman and I move upstairs, climbing into the same bed without undressing. Nudity is permitted. Many things are permitted, we've been told. But I can't help thinking of the woman's terror as I lie beside her, looking as I do, unshaved and filthy, wearing sores and months of grime. It's better to do nothing, I decide. Just to sleep.
"Good night:' I whisper.
She isn't crying, but when she says, "Sleep well:' I hear her working not to cry, the words tight and slow. Was she married in her former life? She doesn't wear any rings, yet she seems like a person who would enjoy, even demand marriage. She's awake for more than an hour, lying as .motionless as possible, her ordinary old parts struggling to find some reason for the bizarre things that are happening now.
I feel pity.
Yet for the most part, I like these changes. The bed is soft, the sheets almost clean. I lie awake out of contentment, listening to the rain on the roof and thinking about my packing crate in the alleyway—feeling no fondness at all for that dead past.
I DREAM OF grass, astonishing as that seems.
Of an apeman.
No, that's a lousy term. Hominid is more appropriate. The creature walks under a bright tropical sky, minding its own narrow business. A male, I realize. I'm sitting in the future, watching it from ground level and feeling waves of excitement. Here is an ancestor of the human species, naked and lovely, and it doesn't even notice me, strolling past and out of sight. I have seen through time, changing nothing. Aren't I a clever ape? I ask myself.
Not clever enough, a voice warns me.
A quiet, almost whispered voice.
* * *
WE DIVIDE OUR jobs according to ability. Being somewhat stronger than the woman, I work to dislodge the bathtub from the wall, then lever it into the hallway and shove it down the splintering wooden stairs. And meanwhile the woman has cleaned the living room a dozen times, at least, the windows covered with foil and the air heavy with chlorine.
Vans and small trucks begin to deliver equipment. Thermostats and filters have been adapted from local stocks, I suppose. More sophisticated machinery arrives later. Jugs of thick clear fluid are stacked in the darkest corner. Perfect cleanliness isn't mandatory, yet the woman struggles to keep the room surgically clean, hoping that the Voice will applaud her efforts.
She's first to say, "The Voice comes from the future."
Obviously, yes.
"From the distant future," she adds.
I can't guess dates, but it seems likely.
"And this is a womb," she remarks, pointing at the old bathtub. "Here is where the future will be born."
The Voice speaks differently to different people, it seems. I assumed that the tub was an elaborate growth chamber, but how exactly does one grow the future?
Taking me by the waist, she says, "It'll be like our own child."
I make affirmative sounds, but something feels wrong. "I love you," she assures me.
"I love you," I lie. Nothing is as vital to her as her illusions of the loving family.
Does the Voice know that?
In the night, between work and sleep, she invites me to her side of the bed. It's been a long time. My performance is less than sterling, but at least the experience is pleasant, building new bonds. Then afterward we cuddle under the sheets, whisper in secret tones, then drift off into a fine, deep sleep, dreams coming from the darkness.
RAIN FALLS IN my dreams.
Motion, I learn, is matter shaped by the hand of Chaos. Tiny variations in wind and moisture will conspire to ignite or extinguish entire storms. And no conceivable machine or mind can know every fluctuation, every inspiration. It's not even possible to predict which minuscule event will produce the perfect day, leaving millions of lives changed, the fundamental shape of everything warped ever so slightly … .
Suppose you can reach back in time, says my dream voice. Suppose you're aware of the dangers in changing what was, but you have ego enough to accept the risks. Channeling vast energies, you create your windows entirely from local materials. It is thermally identical to the surrounding ground. You limit your study to a few useful moments. All you allow yourself is a camera and transmitter, intricate but indistinguishable from the local sand and grit. The hominid can stare at the window. He can stomp on it. He can fling it, eat it, or simply ignore it. But nothing, nothing, nothing he can do will make it behave as anything but the perfect grain of dirty quartz.
And yet, says the dream voice.
Despite your hard work and cleverness, there is some telling impact. Perhaps heat leaked from the mechanism, atoms jostled by their touch. Or perhaps its optical energies were imperfectly balanced, excess photons added to or taken away from the local environment. There would be no way to know what went wrong. But the consequences will spread, becoming apparent, growing from nothing until they encompass everything.
The universe, I'm learning, is incomprehensibly fragile. How can any person, any intelligence, hope to put everything back where it belongs?
A YOUNG MAN delivers foodstuffs and other general supplies, coming twice a week, and sometimes he lingers on the porch, telling me what he has seen around town. Factories and warehouses have been refurbished, he says. Old people and eerily patient children work and live inside them. Some of the factories make the machines that fill my living room/nursery. But the majority of the products are stranger. He grins, describing brilliant lights and tiny power plants, robots and more robots. Isn't it all amazing? Wondrous? And fun?
I nod. Astonishment does seem like the day's most abundant product.
The woman dislikes my chatting with the young man. She feels that he's a poor worker, obviously not paying ample attention to the Voice. For the first time, for just an instant, I wonder if the Voice doesn't touch people with equal force. For instance, the woman claims to hear it all of the time, her initial terror replaced with energy and commitment, or at least the nervous desire to please it. But for me there are long periods of silence, of relative peace. It's the woman who wakes first in the morning. It's the woman who loses track of time and hunger, scrubbing the floor until her hands bleed. And she's the one who snaps at the delivery boy, telling him:
"You're not helping us at all!"
To which he says, "Excep
t I am." At once, without hesitation, he says, "Part of my job is to tell others what I see, to keep them aware of what's being done. How else can you know? You can't go anywhere. Your job is to stay put, and you're doing that perfectly."
The logic has its impact. She retreats with a growl, her anger helping her to polish the bathtub for the umpteenth time.
I wonder, in secret, if the delivery boy is telling the truth. Or is he a clever liar?
And how can I wonder about such things? Just considering the possibility of subterfuge is a kind of subterfuge. Particularly when I find myself admiring the boy's courage.
In secret.
THE PAST HAS been changed, I learn in my sleep.
Small events have evolved into mammoth ones.
Perhaps an excess heat caused an instability that altered the precise pattern of raindrops in a summer shower. Hominids made love in the rain. It's not that they wouldn't have had rain, but it's the delicate impact of thousands of raindrops that matter. Eggs and sperm are extraordinarily sensitive, I'm learning. Change any parameter—the instant of ejaculation; the angle of thrust; the simplest groan of thanks—and a different sperm will find its target. Even the drumming of raindrops will jostle the testicles enough, now and again, and produce different offspring. Which in turn means a different human evolution.
The species isn't altered appreciably. People remain people, good and not. Nor is the character of history changed. Humankind will master the same tools, then warfare and the intricacies of nation-states. What matters is that the specific faces will change, and the names, every historical figure erased along with every anonymous one, an enormous wavelike disruption racing out through time.
In order to kill myself, I don't have to kill my grandpa.
I just have to tickle his hairy balls.
THEY BRING THE embryo in, of all things, an old florist's van.
Each house on our street gets its own embryo, and the Voice fills everyone with a sense of honor and duty. We've sealed the bathtub's drain, then filled it with the heavy fluids. Tubes pump in oxygen. The workers connect the embryo to a plastic umbilical, then I help the woman check every dial and sensor, making certain that the tiny smear of living tissue is healthy.
It doubles in size, that day and every day, hands and feet showing before the end of the week. It's not growing like any human, but maybe that's a consequence of the fluids. Or synthetic genes. Or maybe all the generations of evolution between him and me.
The woman shivers, weeps. Holding herself, she announces, "At least one of us has to stay with it now. Always."
In case of some unlikely, unforeseen problem, yes. We can pick up the telephone, emergency services waiting to troubleshoot.
"Night and day," she says, with a thrill.
I'll give her the night shift, I decide.
"This is our child," she claims, repeating what the Voice tells her. Her own voice is stiff and dry. Unabashedly fanatical. "Don't you think he's lovely, darling?"
But he's not my child, or my grandchild, either. For an instant, I consider mentioning my dreams of Africa and the vagaries of time … but then I think again, some piece of me guessing that this woman has had no such dreams.
"Isn't he lovely?" she asks again.
I say, "Lovely," without feeling.
Yet the word itself is enough for her. She nods and smiles, her face lit up with the injected joy.
THE PAST IS a sea, I dream. A great flat mirror of a sea. Standing on the present, on a low shoreline, I carelessly throw a grain of sand over my shoulder. Its impact is tiny, too tiny to observe, but the resulting wave is growing, a small ripple becoming a mountainous wall rushing straight at me.
What can I do? Flee into the future? But with each step the future becomes the present, and I can never run so far that the wave won't catch me, utterly and forever dissolving my existence.
But there is one answer. Pack a bag, bend at the knees, and wait. Wait, then leap. With care and a certain desperate fearlessness, I can launch myself over the wave, evading it entirely. Then I'll fall again, tumbling onto the calm past, creating a second obliterating wave, but my own life saved regardless.
Fuck the costs.
OUR "CHILD" Is less childlike with each passing day.
Even the woman is having difficulty sounding like the proud parent.
Curled in a fetal position, this citizen from the future resembles a middle-aged man, comfortably plump and shockingly hairy, lost in sleep while his memories are placed inside his newly minted mind.
I can't help but notice, his brain is huge.
I sit alone with him in the morning and again in the early evening, nothing to do but watch his slumber as well as the humming and clicking machines. It's ironic that this creature, having his existence threatened by the most trivial event, is now employing the coarsest tomfoolery to save his ass. The entire Earth must be involved. Every human and every resource is being marshaled to meet some rigorous schedule. This is an invasion; and like any invasion, success hinges on the beachhead.
The future is attempting to leap over its extinction, very little room for error.
And I'm beginning to notice how the Voice, busy speaking to this superman's mind, speaks less and less to me.
The Voice has its limits, of course.
Yet at night my dreams persist, that different voice showing me wonders as fascinating as anything in my waking life.
THE DELIVERY BOY begins to arrive at irregular intervals, but never as often as before.
"To save gas," he claims, always smiling. But that smile has a satirical bite to it. "And from now on, sorry. There's no more meat or eggs"
For health reasons, perhaps. Or the invaders could be vegetarians.
"Let me look at yours," says the boy, stepping indoors for the first time. He doesn't wait for approval, walking up to the bathtub and staring at the sleeping shape. "I wonder what he's like. When he's finished, I mean"
I have no idea. And that bothers me.
"Of course he'll be grateful for your help. I'm sure of that."
I'm nervous. It's against every rule to have visitors. What if the woman wakes early and finds the boy here? What if a neighbor reports me? Touching a shoulder, I try easing him toward the door, asking in a whisper, "What have you seen lately?"
He mentions giant machines that have rolled to the north. Bright lights show at night, and there's rumbling that might mean construction. A new city is being built, he hears. From others.
I ask about the people who built those rolling machines. Where have they gone?
"They've been reassigned, of course. There's always work to be done somewhere. Always, always."
He smiled at me, the message in his eyes.
Then we reach the door, and again he stands on the porch, telling me, "Once a week, and I don't know which day. No meat, no eggs. And that's a lovely boy you've got there. A real darling."
I WASH MYSELF daily, using a shower in the basement. Rationing my soap, I've managed to stay clean for six months in a row. My loose-fitting clothes come from the closets and drawers. When they're gone, I put the soiled ones in the sun, cleaning them with light and heat.
I wanted to seem more attractive to the woman, and for a little while she was responding.
But now she has doubts about sex, always distracted, needing to be in some position that leaves her able to monitor the dials. More and more she complains about being tired or disinterested. The man-child's presence makes her edgy. I wish she'd become pregnant, except of course a pregnancy would be a problem. A division of allegiances. But then I realize that if the Voice can speak to a mind, interfacing with its network of interlocking neurons, then shouldn't it be able to speak to glands as well? Couldn't it put all of our bothersome sperm and eggs to sleep?
One night, waking alone in bed, I feel a powerful desire to make love to a woman. I come downstairs and ask permission, and the woman's response is a sharp "Not here, no!" Which leads me to suggest that she abandon her post f
or a few minutes. I promise to hurry, and where's the harm?
She gasps, moans, and nearly collapses. "I can't do that."
We'll never couple again. I know it, and it both saddens and relieves me. Alone, I feel free. An old reflex lets me wonder where I could find someone else. A lady more amiable, someone that I've selected for myself.
Beginning tomorrow morning, the woman sleeps in the living room, on sheets and pillows spread over the clean hard floor.
She won't leave me alone at my post.
She has a bucket next to the door where she pisses and shits. And when she looks at me, in those rare moments, nothing can hide her total scorn.
THIS IS MY last lucid dream.
I'm standing on the beach, sand without color and a wall of radiant ocean water roaring toward me. And a woman appears. Like the man in my bathtub, she has an elongated skull and a superior intellect, but her face is completely human, showing a mixture of fear and empathy, as well as a sturdy strength born of convictions.
"We think they are wrong," she begins. "Please remember this. Not all of us are like them."
I nod, trying to describe my appreciation.
But she interrupts, telling me, "This is all we can do for you"
I can't recognize her language, yet I understand every word.
"Best wishes," she says.
Then she begins to cry.
I try to embrace her. I step forward and open my arms … but then the water is on me, the beach and her dissolving into atoms … and my hands struggle to reassemble her from memory, the task impossible for every good reason … .
A NEW DELIVERY boy arrives.
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