THE TIDES OF TIME

by John Brunner

  “For example?”

  “Oh, you tried to tell us…” Gene squeezed his eyes shut with effort, but it was useless. Concepts, phrases, images that sprang to mind vanished instantly, lost to him behind as dense a barrier as the one that walled the universe. He found himself saying over and over, “It’s solid! You’ve got to understand me—got to!”

  The man raised his eyebrows, once more glancing at his companion Hoy, and now they were at last joined by the one Gene still thought of as Scarface… but he differed most from recollection. Clad in a quilted cotton jacket, he was thickset and square-faced, and his cheek was as remembered scarred, but it was pitted with the traces not of a wound but of disease. At any rate, though, he was sallow and his eyes were shaded by the epicanthic fold.

  He said, “Make sure he realizes who he’s talking to.”

  “I know only too well,” Gene muttered. “You’re Professor Yiu—hah! You’re yiu! Of course! Sorry about that. Bad joke. It’s just that I need to find something funny in the world, or I’ll go mad… And”—forcing himself into a sitting position despite the reluctance of his too-soft couch, so he could look directly at the captain—“I’m shaw about you as well: Benedict Shaw.”

  “So you finally accepted that,” the other murmured. He had a clear and level gaze. He had never actually worn a brown velvet hat. “What else do you recall?”

  “Infinitely more than you, if you live to be a million.”

  “That isn’t quite what I wanted to know,” Shaw returned patiently. “You recall my name. But do you remember—ah—what post I hold?”

  “I held a sharpened one. Used it to dig that bad salty ground.”

  “We’ll come to you in a moment. We’re talking about me.”

  Abruptly further obstinacy seemed fruitless. Gene let himself slump back on the couch.

  “You’re the chief psychologist of Project Go.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s all to do with ships.”

  “What kind of ships? Ships like this? Ships like Boat? Look, there she is yonder.” He pointed.

  Reflexively Gene turned his head. Indeed, she rode at anchor off the western cape of the beach where he and Stacy had—had… That, though, was beyond him to define.

  She was somewhat battered after nine months at anchor off this rocky shore, but not greatly harmed. Also she was no longer alone. She had been joined by half a score of other vessels.

  “I’m waiting for an answer,” Shaw prompted gently.

  “Oh, damn you…” Gene passed a hand across his forehead. “Why do you have to pester me like this?”

  “Because you accepted it might be necessary. Now we say it is.”

  That was logic he could not dispute. He murmured, “If there is a hell, perhaps it consists in living up to all one’s promises.”

  “What?”—from Hoy and Yiu together, while Shaw knit his brows in search of meaning.

  “Oh, never mind. Of course I know what sort of ships!” (The stark metal hulls; the scentless stench of artificial air; the vacancy beyond; the rawness of the force they summoned from the sun… His body was pouring sweat in torrents.) “Just as I know who I am and Stacy was!”

  “Then say it, man! Say it aloud!”

  “Ships to exceed the speed of light! And we your sole successful guinea pigs!”

  Hoy uttered a yell of delight and flung her arms around both Shaw and Yiu. Shaw, though, pushed her brusquely aside.

  “You said: ‘who Stacy was’—” he had begun, when a harsh voice interrupted from the air. The sound was directionalized, and Gene could not hear clearly, but the other three instantly lost interest in him and Shaw began to issue a series of brisk orders. A few moments later, there was an indistinct commotion on the beach. Shortly the helicopter’s blades blurred and it rose swiftly from the sand and headed back this way.

  A premonition clutched Gene’s heart. With immense effort he forced himself over the side of the couch and rose, swaying. Nobody made any attempt to stop him. Anyhow, it was too late to do more than he had done already. Maybe three thousand—maybe a million years too late…

  “The baby!” he exclaimed. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with the baby,” Shaw said curtly. “By the way”—in a more placatory tone—“it’s a girl.”

  “Then what—?

  “We don’t know! We’ll have to wait!”

  Deep within himself Gene found some resource of calm, and though he realized it might be due to drugs was grateful for it. Without such help, he would have gone berserk. Aching, he stared as the helicopter touched down the other side of the invisible barrier. Its door was flung open and Stacy was lifted out on a stretcher.

  On seeing her clear, he felt terror no chemicals could disguise.

  For her face was covered by an oxygen mask, and even as the stretcher was lowered to the deck a technician scrambled after, striving to keep in position on her naked chest a shiny chromed electrode.

  “I did say ‘was,’ didn’t I?” he whispered.

  Shaw nodded, and his face turned paper white.

  After the stretcher, they unloaded something else from the helicopter: an oblong box with a soft but tough transparent lid, an incubator, with two nurses in attendance and many tubes and instruments attached to it.

  “Let me out!” Gene cried. “I must go to her!”

  Shaw, having listened to the air again, laid a hand on his arm.

  “There’s nothing you can do, Gene. I’m desperately sorry. It seems there’s nothing anyone can do.”

  “What?”—not wanting to understand.

  “Her heart will not respond. They don’t know why.”

  Gene’s hands fell to his sides in a posture of uttermost defeat. Turning away, he muttered, “I do. I said to Hoy: you came to kill her. And you have.”

  “We came to help her!” Hoy exclaimed.

  “Help her? Help her? She didn’t need your help! She was doing exactly what was right to save herself! If only you’d let me tend her—she’d taught me well… Oh, you idiots!” Clarity was returning to his thoughts by giant strides as his subconscious found ways to turn insight into words. Had they not drugged him—

  No, it would have been too late in either case.

  As well as rage, a hint of resignation showed in his voice when he went on.

  “Haven’t your computers figured it out yet? No? Then what use are they?” He took a pace toward them, and they flinched back against the unseen wall.

  “There’s Stacy dead, and you wouldn’t even let me hold her hand while she was dying, and you don’t know why it happened anyhow! I do! She sent you a message by the only means you left her, and you ignored it because you thought you knew it all—didn’t you?”

  “We never claimed—” Shaw began. Gene cut him short.

  “The message that she’s sent you is her death in birth! She opted to die! Opted to, d’you hear me? Because she knew she could never find her way back to any world that we call real unless she bore our child when it was due—three thousand years in the past! And you, you fools, dragged her back to the here and now without a by-your-leave!

  “Now you’ve stranded me on my own, without her, without anybody, loster and lonelier than any refugee that ever was! Oh, I’ve found my way home—she’s made me whole by leaving me to spell out a message you lot are too thick to interpret, and I know that because I’m mourning her! I can feel again! I’m no longer just responding like a robot, and I only wish I could hate you as much as you deserve!” Glaring, he clenched his fists.

  “I want to hate you for all the reasons in the universe! I don’t care how much time, how much effort, how many people you’ve spent on trying to find a way to reach the stars! You’ve had your chance, and for all I ought to care you and everybody else might find your own way to hell! You’ve sent me there, and now you’ve slammed the door on my escape! Because I dare not hate you—not after the sacrifice she’s made for all your sakes! I’d be betraying h
er!”

  Abruptly there were tears streaming down his cheeks. He turned to the side of the ship’s bridge and leaned his forehead against its smooth white surface. After a while he began to beat his fists on the painted metal, moaning what sounded like a blend of all the names by which his mistress had been known to him.

  This too was recorded by the dutiful machines.

  PART TWELVE

  THE EXHIBIT

  is small and weak and ignorant and helpless… but alive.

  It’s you, and me, and everyone, as we once were

  THE MONTH

  is any month

  THE NAME

  is its mother’s, and your mother’s, and mine too

  “So here’s another child who’ll only ever know her real mother.”

  Gene’s words hung heavy on the air. It was warm, but in his heart there was eternal winter.

  Shaw responded after a dreadful interval, leaden as the silence of the grave. His face was gray and lined, as though he had aged a lifetime in a single day.

  “I wish I could believe you’re mouthing nonsense. But I’m terribly afraid you’re talking more sense than I can grasp, even if it is wrapped up in riddles.”

  An hour remained before sunset, but for the sake of the inevitable concealed cameras multiple lamps shed their brightness in the ship’s resplendent cabin, where he, Hoy and Yiu sat opposite Gene on deep comfortable couches. At least they were treating him like a human being again, instead of trapping him in a barless cage for computerized interrogation, which was what he had been most afraid of.

  Because they were shamed by Stacy’s death? Because he had guessed right when they were wrong, even though they believed him to be crazy? Who was to say what was sane when nothing like it had ever happened before?

  At least Shaw was making a valiant attempt.

  “You have a beautiful daughter,” Hoy ventured. She seemed to be very far from understanding. “The obstetrician assures us she’s in perfect health.”

  Their eyes turned to the incubator on its shiny metal trolley. Gene was staring down at the baby’s wrinkled features through its transparent hood. He had insisted on placing it where he could see her clearly. The others, at worse angles, saw only patches of reflected light.

  He had also insisted on certain objects being brought from the cave where, magpie-fashion, he had accumulated them over the past nine months: a brochure from a last-century travel agency, its colorful photographs smudged by seawater; a handful of empty shell cases from a World War II gun; a Victorian preserving jar, its glass lid chipped and its rubber sealing ring long perished, but its wire closure intact despite corrosion; a weathered icon recovered from the half-drowned church; the hilt of a sword, its blade shortened to a stump; several shards of decorated pottery which he had painstakingly assembled until their common form appeared, hinting at a jar for wine or oil; a broken tile bearing the graffito SEP:IUL:CORN:LEG… but the rest was lost; and a fragment of a preclassical idol, half a head, showing one ear, part of the chin, and hair in braided lines as neat as well-plowed furrows. All these were landmarks in what had happened to him and Stacy.

  The survivor said eventually, “Have you worked out yet why it had to be her and me, not any of the others?”

  The others exchanged glances. Hoy said at length, “We’re evaluating various hypotheses.”

  “You can take your hypotheses and—!” But Gene’s reflex fury died before he completed the sentence. Wearily he corrected himself.

  “After what I said just now, I hoped you would have. Your minds seem to work so slowly, though… Okay, I’ll have to do it the long way.

  “You weren’t responsible for choosing us, I admit. But it should have been you who figured out why Stacy and I proved more resilient than the rest. I know why we were allowed to volunteer, of course. Everything had gone wrong when they used smart people like trained scientists. So maybe it would succeed with someone ignorant, who could be relied on to react instead of reasoning.”

  “Gene!” Hoy was half out of her seat. “That’s scarcely a fair description of either of you!”

  “Yeah, it applies better to Shanti, right? I recall we talked about her one night. But you must have all that down in your computer records.” He appended a sour grin.

  The other three were tense as skyhook wire, aware that now Gene alone might hold the key to the universe, desperate to find out what he could teach them to help in planning future expeditions, but at a loss to know what they could safely say without provoking a renewal of his fugue.

  Making a desperate effort, Yiu/Scarface ventured, “If you’ve figured it out, we’d be glad to hear your views. Can you express them for us?”

  Express…

  The word was /pregnant/ with meaning. Gene said reflectively, “Can I convey the truth to you? I doubt it! If you could be so unforgivably stupid as to kill Stacy, you must be too thickheaded to catch on! In fact you are! You didn’t hear what I said about my—our—daughter!”

  But even after silent consultation of the computers which were monitoring everything that transpired in the cabin, the others continued to exchange baffled glances. Gene lost patience.

  “Oh, get me a drink and a bite to eat, and I’ll explain… Has she been fed?” he added, indicating the cot.

  “Yes, exactly as if Stacy—” Hoy bit her lip.

  “I get it,” Gene said with heavy irony. “You’ve programmed a computer to synthesize colostrum. As though any machine, any creation of our own… Never mind. That can wait.”

  He leaned back and crossed his legs, staring through the portholes toward the silhouette of the island which had almost the shape of the sphinx, poser of the riddle he had unforeseeably learned how to answer. After a while he began to weep again, soundlessly.

  Later on, though, setting aside an empty glass and a plate with nothing on it but crumbs, he spoke calmly enough—indeed, in a meditative tone, aware he was putting everything he said on record, aware it would be analyzed and dissected by a thousand strangers. But he was used to that.

  “I kept saying: ‘The universe is solid.’ Did you at least latch on to what I meant by that?”

  The others nodded uncertainly. This exceeded the boundary of their own specialisms, but they had perforce been brought in contact with the concept.

  Shaw said at last, “I think we did, but we’d rather you explained it to us.”

  “What’s to explain? Even at the lowest level beyond the ordinary quark, every time an event occurs which can have more than a single outcome, all the outcomes do in fact take place. This makes the cosmos solid, in the sense that there is no more room inside it for anything else.”

  He hesitated, tilting his head to one side as though striving to hear a voice at the limit of audibility, and added in a half-surprised tone, “Hmm! Maybe that accounts for the way I used to claim that thanks to my ancestors my subconscious pictured the universe as a continent which could be trekked across… until I realized that Stacy’s view was precisely the reverse, and she’d survived at least as well as I had, so one of us had to be wrong. In the upshot, of course, we both were, so—

  “Never mind that, though. It’s for later, when I can spare time to mourn her properly. Right now what matters is that this explains why, for so long, people were content to accept it was impossible to exceed the speed of light.

  “Not that most of us imagined it would ever become necessary to try and do so. Here we were, on this small but comfortable planet, cheerfully abusing her hospitality as though her resources were inexhaustible, fighting wars, squandering our children’s patrimony as though she belonged to just one generation, smugly convinced the rest of the universe was much too far away to worry about—except perhaps the sun, and so long as that rose every morning!…

  “And then—!” Gene uttered a harsh laugh. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder whether something out there decided to teach us better!”

  Suddenly afraid he might have disturbed the baby, he leaned toward the cot,
but she was sleeping peacefully, and he resumed.

  “At all events, that sun we’d taken for granted for so long turned out to be a variable star, didn’t it?

  “Oh, the experts who educated me and Stacy before our respective trips had worked it all out afterward: how minimal the fluctuation, how long the periodicity, how difficult to detect at a distance of even a few light-years… Nonetheless, it was enough to change the world.

  “Not just by melting so much ice that the ocean level rose and half the people on the planet died, either as a direct result or because of the wars we fought to claim the remaining land. More importantly, it scared the rich and powerful among us in a way they’d never been scared before.

  “Space travel had been a toy for the wealthy countries, hadn’t it? They put up their communications satellites, they dreamed of establishing a High Frontier, they spent a little time and money on exploring the Moon, Venus and Mars—but always in the expectation of a payoff, if not in cash then in prestige. Survival was very far from people’s minds in those dead days. Oh, some planned against the risk of war, but only a handful thought about keeping human stock alive were some universal catastrophe to overtake the Earth. And then, all of a sudden, our so-trustworthy sun—! Hence desperation; hence meteor mining and crewed trips to the other planets, which served only to confirm they could never be rendered fit for habitation. Hence, in the upshot, Project Go.”

  Shaw leaned forward. “It’s hard for me to say this, but I think I must. Our first volunteers all died or went out of their minds. Would it be true to say that you and Stacy too became what’s generally regarded as insane—if less extremely so—but that you had to because there was no alternative?”

  Gene looked at him with fresh respect. He said, “Now it’s your turn to spell something out. I can tell by their expressions that neither Hoy nor Yiu have caught on yet.”

  The others confirmed with nods. Dismayed, Shaw leaned back, gazing into nowhere.