Justine?
There’s always a problem when you run into somebody who’s underground, especially when they’re with someone. Even when it’s clearly not an accident, what do you call them? What do they call them? Who knows who and who knows what? Adding to the confusion, there’s never any time to think.
“Justine?”
“Actually, it’s Flo these days,” she said. “Don’t I get a hug?”
“Of course,” I said, complying, “but what the hell are you doing here? And with – ”
There was no way to cast a look toward Pell without seeming rude. I cast a look toward Pell.
Pell smiled and nodded. Smug? Stupid? Both. He went and stood beside Lee at the bar but didn’t, I noticed, order a drink. Of course not. He was on duty.
So was Justine, or rather, Flo. If you’re looking for a description, you won’t find it here. You probably don’t need it. She looked exactly the same as she had looked on America’s Most Wanted, except for the hair color. Six million people saw that, thanks to the two teenagers, both boys, who had broken into the Skyline Lodge looking for cell phones to steal.
Teenagers usually kill themselves and one another. They don’t ordinarily depend on environmentalists to do it, even as collateral damage. But I digress . . .
“Good to see you, Cole,” she said, checking to make sure the bartender was out of earshot. “Though this isn’t exactly a social call.”
“Why am I not surprised,” I said. “Good to see you too. I hope things are going okay. I haven’t heard much. That’s good in itself, I guess.”
“That’s good,” she confirmed. “Things have been quiet. We’ve been laying low. Laying off the ‘stupid stunts.’ I’m quoting you here, Cole. I knew you would approve. Bartender?!”
“Thought this wasn’t a social call.”
“It’s not but don’t worry. The bourbon is part of the deal, believe it or not. I wanted to introduce you to Dr. Lee, and this seemed the easiest way.”
“Introduce? He’s my office mate.”
“Yes, quite a coincidence, n’est-ce pas? I meant introduce politically. You are also comrades, as you have been discovering.”
“Quit beating around the bush, Justine. What does he know about Dear Abbey? Is that why we’re here?”
“It’s Flo. And yes, my friend and comrade, yes it is.”
By now either you know, and everyone knows, or you don’t, and it doesn’t matter any more, that Dear Abbey is a radical, long-range plan for saving the environment that will make Ted Kaczynski look like Mother Teresa. It involves an alarmingly complex but theoretically possible piece of genetic engineering that will, let us say, severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the environment. Severe is the operative modifier. You can’t call it terrorism because no one will be killed, directly at least, and no one even know for sure what is happening until it has been operating for almost a decade, by which time it will be too late to undo it. The human cost will be high but not nearly as high as the cost of doing nothing, or of simply continuing with the kind of pointless stunts for which the environmental movement is known.
Dear Abbey was the only thing that still connected me to EarthAlert. I hadn’t come up with the idea but I had been among the first to embrace it and argue for it. I had lost interest only when it became clear that it couldn’t be accomplished any time soon; the technology was still decades away. As far as I was concerned, these were decades the world didn’t have.
“Dear Abbey has aroused a great deal of interest in China,” Justine, or rather Flo, said. “As drastic and as necessary as Dear Abbey will be here, it is even more drastic in Asia. And more necessary.”
“Aren’t we forgetting one detail? That it can’t be made to work yet?”
“Tell that to the Chinese. They say they can make it work. They say they have found the missing link. Which is where our friend comes in.”
I felt a surge of hope, so sudden, so unfamiliar and so welcome that I distrusted it immediately. “Impossible! I was told it would take a whole new gene sequencing technology based on a mathematics that’s not even . . .”
She cut me off with a smile and a shrug. “Lee has found a fix. A way to access tomorrow’s technology today.”
“Right. Time travel.”
“You needn’t look so smug, Cole. No, it’s not science fiction, but yes, according to Lee it does involve some kind of quantum uncertainty math thing. The Chinese are way ahead of us. Isn’t Lee the guy who won that award for the computer program that executes commands nanoseconds before they are given?”
“Yes, nanoseconds, but . . .”
“Yes, but nothing. You and Lee are supposedly using some see-into-the-future computer program to pick up a gene sequencing patch that will make Dear Abbey work. The missing link. The trigger. The one thing we don’t have, and for some reason it’s a two-person operation.”
“Time travel. Science fiction. But why me?”
“We wanted to be involved, and the Chinese requested you. Maybe it’s their idea of promoting racial harmony. Maybe it’s the prison thing; maybe they think it means you can be trusted. Maybe it’s because you are already hooked up with Lee, in a way, although I wonder if that was entirely coincidence.”
I was wondering too. “When does all this happen?”
“Tonight. In less than an hour. At nine.”
“Surely you jest.”
“No, Cole, I don’t surely jest. Maybe it’s you that surely jests. Maybe you were jesting when you told Big Bird that when we needed you for Dear Abbey, you would be there, no questions asked.”
Big Bird was EarthAlert’s central committee. “Here I am, aren’t I?”
“Then don’t ask so damn many questions. Think of it as the inscrutable Orient, and all that.” She looked around to make sure Lee wasn’t listening; he and Pell were at the bar, with their backs turned. “This whole thing sounds a little woo-woo to me too. Maybe it’s nothing but a make-nice between Big Bird and the Chinese; a little hand-holding to flatter a nutty professor. So what? If Lee’s for real, and this works, which I’m told it could, we have Dear Abbey now, when we need it. And even if it’s bullshit, which it probably is, you’ve gained us an ally and wasted an hour.”
“And gotten arrested or worse. What if this is some kind of stupid second-story job?”
“I doubt it. Lee got out of China and into MIT, didn’t he? Just go along with Dr. Lee and see where it goes, Cole. Your presence represents their trust for us; that in itself is a breakthrough. It’ll all be over in an hour, OK?”
I had already decided to go along with it. “OK. But first, you have to answer me one question.”
She looked at me warily. “What?”
“Where’d you come up with ‘Flo’?”
I finished my drink while Lee and Justine, or rather Flo, made their final arrangements. She looked as imperious, as mysterious as ever. Lee no longer looked the least bit woozy, but who knew how a whiskey-drinking revolutionary Chinese math wizard was supposed to look? Pell looked the same as always: insignificant and untrustworthy. But who was I to argue with Big Bird? Decisions had been made. When organizations are underground, and under attack, as EarthAlert certainly was in those days, decisions are not made democratically. The less one knows, the better.
Flo was looking at her watch. “Time,” she said. “Good luck, Cole.” Then she kissed me on both cheeks and split.
“What is this, the Resistance?” I said, as much to myself as to her, as she and Pell exited through the back. The only part of my life that made sense, and she had whittled it down to a point. A very sharp point. I set my empty glass down on the bar. It made a very loud noise.
“Dr. Lee, I’m your guy. Let’s do this thing.”
“Follow me.” The Chinaman was all smiles.
1
Lee and I exited through the front. Lee was carrying a briefcase decorated with formulas that accentuated his nerdy look. His cowboy English got better, explaining technical things. �
�According Barbour, Hawking, Liu-Hsun,” he said as we folded ourselves into his Prius, “Time is illusion. We live eternal present, in each moment coexist. Separate Universe, like beads on string.”
“I’ve heard that story,” I said. “We’re the beads, Time’s the string. But what does that have to do with anything?”
“Time string loops,” Lee said, rather mysteriously.
“Whatever.” I was not exactly drunk but not exactly sober either. I wondered where we were going but knew enough not to ask. My role was just to ride shotgun, the token Westerner, so to speak.
The Prius was unexpectedly noisy. It was the brick street. We were heading back toward the campus. I could barely hear Lee, who was explaining that since Time was relative, the algorithm had to be accessed by two people because of what he called the “subjective factory.”
“What algorithm?” I asked, just to be polite.
“See-tomorrow math.”
“So this time travel has something to do with math?”
“Straight shooting,” Lee said, turning into the campus.
“I see,” I said, as the little car bounced over the first speed bump. Do the Chinese think they mean speed up? The return to campus was a surprise, and a reassuring one. It fit right in with the nutty-professor theory. It meant a wasted hour in familiar surroundings; a favor done for Big Bird; and a promise to Helen fulfilled. I had promised I would stay away from the apartment until ten. At least now I had something to do. Never mind, Moviefone.
The next surprise was less reassuring. Lee drove past the Faculty Extension and parked at the Student Union, a building I rarely visited. Even though classes were done for the holiday, and only a few students were around, the SU was filled with thumping music, rap, advertising the thuggishness of Swick’s student body, as if it weren’t obvious already from the appearance and demeanor, if it can be called that, of the few that were left on campus.
The next surprise was, Lee had a key to the basement.
He closed the door behind us and turned on the light. We were in a large, windowless bare room with a concrete floor, like a church basement from the Tennessee half of my childhood. It even had a big wall clock like the one I had watched – and watched and watched – as a kid.
It was 8:47. Still early in what turned out to be, by far, the longest evening of my life.
In the center of the room was a familiar if unexpected sight. It was a “glider,” the old fashioned metal kind that served as a swing on my Tennessee grandmother’s porch. It was painted dull orange and blue-gray, and it hung in a low, square frame that kept it level, or almost level, which is the difference one supposes between a glider and an ordinary swing.
I thought it was for a flea market or an antiques sale. Then I saw Lee’s inscrutable smile.
“This is it?” I gave it a push. It squeaked. “This is your Time Machine?”
“No way, José.” Lee pulled a PalmPC out of his briefcase and tapped its tiny screen. “PC see-tomorrow math. Glider just seat.”
Thinking this could turn out to be a rather long hour, I sat down and started to swing. I remembered the squeak from my childhood. More of a squeal. I used to think of it as an army of mice.
“Subjective factory,” Lee said. He set the briefcase on the floor beside the glider, then sat down beside me. “Sit same metal. Field equations matched. Move but staying still. All good for see-tomorrow math.”
See-tomorrow math. “Whatever,” I said. “So what do we do, swing?” I kicked the glider higher.
“Hold horses,” Lee said, dragging his feet, so that the glider twisted, then stopped. He pointed at the clock. “Loop at nine.”
“Whatever.” It was 8:56.
“Hold horses, Jersey Kaczynski!” Smiling, he reached into another pocket of his hideous safari jacket and handed me what I thought at first was a Zippo lighter. It was a tiny (and rather lovely) brushed aluminum digital camera.
“Have a look-see!” Lee said.
I slipped the camera into my pocket and shrugged. According to the clock on the wall, it was 8:58. I figured that if I played along for an hour, until ten, everyone would be happy, and I could go home. I knew what the place would be like without Helen. I was wondering what it would be like without her little dog.
Lee was noodling with numbers on his PalmPC, moving things around on the tiny screen. “Three ways,” he said, not looking up. “Three maybe happens. One, algorithm not work, in which case nobody lost or gain. One probably most probable. Two, see-tomorrow algorithm too good, in which case we pull too far, all way to End of Time. Or three, algorithm work right, in which case pull through multi-verse a microsecond, then larger slice, then larger slice, ekcetera [he pronounced it Texas style], until three . . .”
“Whoa,” I said. “The End of Time?”
“Not likely,” said Lee. “Only if square root of the square root of the first Infinity Progression divisible by the third integer of the under-equation, which here doubt. No problem.”
No problem? It was 9:00 according to the clock on the wall. “So, okay, let’s do it.” I kicked the swing to start it going, just enough to squeak.
“Hold horses!” Lee took my hand. “Hold hands! Subjective factory.”
Hold hands? But before I could complain Lee hit RETURN on his PalmPC. The screen filled with numbers, dancing, swapping places.
Lee kicked the glider higher, and I kicked to even it out (just as I’d had to do with my grandma), and there they were: the army of mice, squeaking in regular time.
The numbers went faster and faster, until Lee’s little LCD screen was a multicolor blur. We were swinging back and forth, glider style: no up, no down, no arc. There was a flickering, either in the room’s lights or in my eyes. I couldn’t find the clock on the wall. I couldn’t find the wall. Then suddenly the squeaking stopped although the flickering kept going. There was a sudden pain in my knee, and an old, familiar smell . . .
Then the swing was squeaking again, slowing, and the screen on Lee’s laptop was empty, except for a blinking cursor dead center, which I noticed, because it was an odd place for a cursor to be. I looked around and everything looked totally unfamiliar, the way even your own room does when you suddenly wake up from a deep sleep in the afternoon.
The clock said 9:55.
Whoa! I pointed at the clock. “How did you do that?”
Lee was smiling. That inscrutable, enigmatic . . .
“What happened?”
I asked, pulling my hand from Lee’s. The pain in my knee was gone. The smell was still there, but fading fast, like a dream. It was familiar, almost identifiable, then gone.
+1
“Beats me,” Lee said. “But OK.” He was already moving numbers around. “Try other slice quick.”
Before Cole could register his disagreement with this strategy, Lee hit RETURN and the screen started filling with numbers again. He grabbed Cole’s hand and pushed off with one foot.
Cole added his little kick to even out the glider, and there was the army of mice again. Squeaking in cadence. The clock had no hands and then there was no clock. The walls were flickering again. Cole tried closing his eyes. There was the old, almost familiar smell, and then it was gone. And the same sudden, sharp pain in his knee . . .
The glider stopped squeaking. Stopped moving altogether at the back of its swing. The world was tilted just slightly . . . but the swing was still.
Cole looked for the clock but the wall was gone. He saw something in the distance like the spine of a dinosaur, and felt a moment of terror until he realized it was the Sill, the little basalt outcropping that runs through the campus of Swick.
“Picture,” said Lee. Of course he said it Texas style: pitcher.
Cole had forgotten he had the little camera. It had a zoom but it was too dark to see anything but the jagged outline of the rock. He snapped two pictures, hoping for the best. “Where are we?” he asked Lee.
“Beats me!” Lee’s voice sounded far away, as if he were speaking
through a tube.
“How did we get outside? What’s going on?”
“Sill!” Lee said, pointing. The air was cold. Cole sniffed, looking for the smell, but it was gone. He realized they were swinging again. He could still see the Sill. Then it was gone. Lee had let go of his hand, and he was looking at the basement wall.
The clock said 9:07.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Cole asked again. He was beginning to sound stupid, even to himself. “Now the clock is right again.” Or had he misread it before?
“Sill.” Lee pointed at the camera. “Pitcher?”
There was a display on the back of the camera. Cole hit a button and there was the Sill, just a dark stegosaur silhouette.
But how? “Lee, what the fuck is going on? What happened to the wall?”
“Future!” Lee shrugged. “Maybe no wall. Or see through time slice, like propeller. Beats me.”
“Whoa. No building? What if they replace it with a parking lot and we end up in solid concrete?” Cole seemed to remember something like that from an old Superman comic. His Tennessee grandmother hadn’t allowed them, but he had kept his stash in Brooklyn. His mother didn’t care what – or if – he read at all.
“No sweat!” Lee picked up Cole’s hand again. Cole tried to pull away but Lee’s grip got tighter; he was like a Chinese puzzle. Hell, he was a Chinese puzzle. “More slice quick. Get three!”
“Wait!” Cole liked it less and less the more it dawned on him that they had actually traveled in time. But Lee had already hit RETURN, and there was the army of mice, back again. They were swinging. Cole straightened the glider out, as best he could.
This time he recognized the pain in his knee. It was what he called an old football injury, from high school. Actually he had fallen off a ladder decorating the gym for the Homecoming Game. The smell was more elusive . . .
It was cold. They were stopped again. There was silence; no squeaking, nothing at all. The wall, the clock, the basement room itself had all disappeared, and they were hanging in cold, dark air. Cole could see snow – he could smell it in the air. He heard a popping, and thought of the way swing chains used to pop when he was a kid, but gliders don’t have chains.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 Page 103