by C. L. Moore
“Oh, that isn’t so new. It’s been suggested before that the supernatural beings of legend might be distorted memories of some other-dimensional visitors. But Rufus—”
“All right, Pete, say it.”
With an air of deliberate sacrifice, Morgan lifted his black-mustached lip in a snarl and said, “Rufus may be—he appears to be—an hereditary throwback to some inhabitant of another world. Is that what you want?”
“It’ll do.”
“It explains—” Morgan suddenly glowed with an idea that justified his sacrifice. “It explains his reaction to the picture of his mother. It explains why things look wrong to him here. It even explains his impossible memories, in part.”
Bill looked doubtful. “Yes—in part. There’s something more, Pete. I’m not sure what—I just know this isn’t all. It’s not quite so easy. The clock, and the calender, if that’s what the chessboard is—yes, you could say he senses a different time-scheme from ours and he’s groping to recapture something familiar from some other life-experience he can’t quite remember yet. But there’s something more. We’ll know before we’re through, Pete. He’s on his way back now. I’m scared. I don’t want to know about it. My mind panics when I think of it. It’s too close to me. But we’ll know. We’ll find out. We haven’t got to the root of the thing yet, but when we do we’ll see it isn’t as easy as all this.”
“The root? I wonder. There’s one thing, Bill. Rufus wasn’t like this during his normal growth-period. You remember what we were discussing once about the possibility of aberrations at birth that smoothed out in adolescence? He could be experiencing now the results of disturbing that adjustment. But you can’t mutate backward. It simply isn’t remotely conceivable, by any application of logic, on this or any other world. You can say he’s inherited a potentiality of Martian or other-dimensional chromosomes, but that still won’t explain it. Mutation is a … spreading out, a flowering, not a drawing in. And that must hold good anywhere in this—” He stopped, his heavy brows drawing together. After a while, he began again, gropingly.
“I’m wrong on that. It … let’s see. It holds good only as long as there’s the same temporal constant. And that’s just what doesn’t apply to Rufus.”
Bill scowled. “He’s going back in time, but it’s all subjective, isn’t it?”
“It started out that way. Could be the subjective’s affecting the objective.”
“That Rufus is warping time?”
Morgan was not listening. He had found pencil and paper in his pocket and was absorbing himself in meaningless squiggles. The heavy moments moved past. The pencil point stopped.
Morgan looked up, his eyes still puzzled. “Maybe I’ve got it,” he said. “Maybe. Listen, Bill—”
In a railroad yard there are many tracks. Each track carries a train, moving forward relentlessly in space—and parallel.
According to the theory of parallel time, each train is a spatial universe, and the tracks are laid on the dark roadbed of time itself. Far, far back, in the black beginning, there may have been one track only, before it branched.
As it branched and branched again, the parallel roads spread out, forming in little groups—the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Southern Pacificthe Santa Fe. The trains—the universes—of each are roughly similar. The Penn has many cars rushing headlong through the dim mistiness of time, but they all contain recognizable variations of homo sapiens. The tracks branched, but the system is still a unit.
There are other units.
One thing they have in common—no, two things. They are parallel in time, and originally they came from the same unthinkable source, hidden in the mind-staggering, vast mysteries of the womb of space and time. In the beginning—
But you can’t go back to the beginning. You can’t even go back along your timetrack. Because the train is moving on, it isn’t where it was twenty, fifty, eighty years before, and if you try to retrace your steps, you’re walking along a strange road. It isn’t quite spatial or temporal, really. It may involve—well, call it a dimension—that’s so remarkably alien to us that we can’t even conceive of it except as a—difference.
But it may be a bridge, a shortcut, this strange road the traveler finds when he tries to retrace time. It may be a tightrope stretched precariously between parallel time-tracks. The letter N expresses it. The vertical lines are the timetracks where the trains go by. The angled line is the shortcut—from the Penn to the New York Central.
Different companies. Different lines. Different—groups.
So you can’t recapture your youth; you can’t go home again; that home isn’t there any more. It’s away back along the track, lost in the dusk where the dead ashes of Tyre and Nineveh have smoldered out.
And it isn’t just merely a matter of chromosomes. Not merely subjective. But going back, at an angle, into one of the parallel times where a certain equivalent of Rufus Westerfield existed.
Parallels do not imply similarity—not when the cosmic equations are involved. The basic matrix may not vary, but only a god can recognize such an ultimate basic. The mammal matrix, for example. Whales and guinea pigs are each mammalian.
So there were, perhaps, many equivalents of Rufus Westerfield, in the infinity of trains along the infinity of tracks—but he was not retracing his course along the Pennsylvania line.
The New York Central line was—parallel—but only on the Penn road were tickets sold to homo sapiens.
Rufus Westerfield was twenty-five. He lay at full length in the porch swing, somnolent in the hot July afternoon. One arm was behind his head and he tugged at the support-chain now and then to keep himself in lazy motion.
Laziness, indeed, was his keynote at this stage. Which seemed odd in contrast with the keen, humorous face so subtly unlike his face of forty-odd years ago, when he had once before been twenty-five. You would still have known at a glance that Rufus and Bill were closely related; the change was too subtle to alte that. But there was a sharpening of all the features now, a more than physical sharpening. And the contradictory indolence of him made Rufus look arrogant.
It was, given this outrageous setup, a normal indolence, but it went curiously with the youth of the man. At twenty-five a mind as keen and a face and body as forceful as Rufus’ should have had no indolence about them. But at twenty-five the normal man is just entering upon the most productive period of his life. All through adolescence he has been building impatiently toward this fulfillment of his maturity.
But there had been nothing immature about Rufus Westerfield’s immediate past. And life was not before him. The swift temporal current flowed away past him and out of sight. He moved toward the helplessness of infancy, not to the activity of his prime. And each day that went by was longer and more pellucid to him than the last. As the physical processes of his body moved faster and faster, nearing adolescence, so the temporal processes of his mind went slower. The thoughts of youth, wrote Longfellow, are long, long thoughts.
Rufus put out his free hand and deftly took up a glass from the porch floor as the swing lifted him toward it. Ice tinkled pleasantly; it was a rum Collins, his fifth today. He watched the flicker of leaf-shadows on the porch roof and smiled comfortably as he sipped the sweet, strong liquid, rolling it upon his tongue. Taste was developing more and more keenly in him as the years retrogressed. The infant’s whole mouth is lined with taste buds, and in Rufus’ mouth, little by little, those taste buds were returning.
He had drunk a good deal in the past two months. Partly because he liked to drink, partly because alcohol was one of the few things his changing digestion could tolerate. And it helped to blur that nagging sense in him which he could not put a name to, the feeling that much he saw about him was indescribably wrong.
Rufus was an intelligent young man. Also he was tolerant. He saw no point in letting the sense of wrongness color his life unduly. He dismissed it when he could. In part this was simply an admirable adjustment to environment. It was a great pity that
the man through whose changing phases Rufus moved so rapidly must remain only half known. He would have been a fascinating man, with his memories and mature wisdom accumulated over seventy years, his vigorous mind and body, and the sardonic keenness, the warmth and humor developing in him now. And with all these the enthralling subtleties of change from no source a man ever drew upon before. He was a blend, perhaps, of human and extra-human, and perhaps the best of each, but no one would ever know him wholly. The man he might have been was moving too swiftly for more than a glimpse at the life he might have lived. The stream that bore him along could not run slowly.
In part, then, it was a tolerant adjustment to life that let him accept what was happening so calmly. But it was also a form of precociousness in reverse. Because he was keenly intelligent, he would normally—at twenty-five going on twenty-six—have been in advance of his years. His brain would have fitted him to cope successfully with men many years his senior. And now, at twenty-five going on twenty-four he was still in advance of his age. But in reverse. In Rufus, it was efficiency that his mind was slowing leisurely toward the long thoughts of youth. It spared him a great deal.
The pleasant blur of drunkenness had another effect, too. It released the surface tension of his mind and let strange flotsam drift upward. Memories and fragments which he knew had no place in the past he had already lived. Knowing it, he made no effort to reconcile the paradox. More and more as time went by he approached that period when the individual questions only the superficial aspects of his world. Basically, he accepts it, turning trustfully to the protection of those around him. And in Rufus, his very intelligence forced him backward prematurely into that state of mind which belongs to childhood, because it was in that state that he could find the greatest protection from a peril his subconscious must have sensed and would not let the surface of his mind suspect.
On the surface, memories from two pasts floated and merged and sank away again, lazily, evoked by alcohol. In the beginning, memories of that other past had been thin as smokewreaths drifting transparently across the face of his clearer remembrance, indistinguishable from realities. It was a long time before he became consciously aware that two sets of memories, many of them mutually exclusive, were moving at once through his mind. By the time he was sure, he had passed beyond the stage of caring. Things beyond his control were happening with inexorable rhythms that carried him smoothly toward a goal he did not try to glimpse yet; it would come in good time, he could not miss it, he was ready.
Now the memories from that other past were superimposed over nearly all his Westerfield memories. He looked back upon Westerfield years more dimly, through a haze of obscuring events that did not seem in the least strange to him, and no more alien than his remembrances of Bill’s youth, and of his long-dead wife. He could no longer distinguish at a mental glance which memory belonged to the Westerfield period and which to the other. But they had been different. Very different indeed. Individuals moved past and through his memories of Bill and Lydia, individuals whose names he knew but could not yet pronounce, beings who had played tremendous roles, perhaps, in that other past, in that other place.
But they too were veiled in this all-encompassing indifference which was his protection and his precociousness. Like the Westerfields, they belonged to an era that was moving too fast to be savored much. He had not time to spare for leisurely evocations of the past.
So he remembered, pleasantly, not questioning anything, letting the liquor release the double stream of memories and letting the memories glide by and go. Faces, colors, sensations he did not try to name, songs—like the song he was singing under his breath, now, to the slow rhythm of the swing.
Bill, coming up the steps, heard the song and tightened his lips. It was no tune at all. It was one of the nagging, impossible harmonies Rufus hummed so constantly, not really knowing that he did it. The words were not English, when he sang them in absent-minded snatches, and the melody was more alien than the cacophonies of oriental music. Bill had given up trying to understand. He had given up a great deal in the past month, since it became obvious that Rufus was going on beyond the thirty-five which was to have been his stopping point. Bill had met failure halfway and acknowledged the meeting with what equanimity he could summon. There was nothing to salvage now but sufficient grace to confess defeat.
Rufus in the swing seemed half asleep. The lids were lowered above the tilted black eyes, and the face had no expression beyond indolence. It worried Bill that although this was not a Westerfield face any more, it remained akin to his own. Again and again of late he felt with unreasoning discomfort that as Rufus changed in feature, he pulled Bill’s own features awry to conform. It was not true, of course, the change was indescribably outside the mere matter of facial angles, but the effect remained disconcertingly the same.
Rufus did not open his eyes as his son’s step sounded on the porch, but he said lazily, “Want a date tonight, Bill?”
“No thanks, not with one of your girls. I know when I’m well off.”
Rufus laughed without lifting his lids, blind, indolent laughter that showed his white teeth. Then he stirred a little and looked up at his son, and Bill felt sudden helpless horror congealing in him. It was too abruptly inhuman a thing to face with no warning at all.
For though the lids had lifted, Rufus was not looking directly up with the black gaze that had once been sardonic and was now only lazy and amused. Something thin and blind stretched over his eyes, something that drew back slowly, with the deliberation of a cat’s gaze, or an owl’s. Rufus sometime in the immediate past had developed a nictitating membrane, a third eyelid.
If he knew it, he gave no evidence. He was grinning in amusement. The lid slipped back and vanished, and might never have been there. Rufus stretched and got up with a long, slow litheness, and Bill found it possible to forget for the moment what it was he had just seen.
Rufus’ body had a beautiful muscular co-ordination which was in its own way tragic just now. And within it, the mechanism must differ impossibly from the norm. Bill had not checked upon the changes in the past two weeks, changes which he knew must be taking place almost while one watched. He should be fascinated, from a purely clinical viewpoint, in what took place. But he was not. He could accept the knowledge of failure, because he must, but he had in this case no urge to probe the reasons for failure. It was more than an unsolved problem. It was a matter intimately involving his own flesh and blood. As a man with an incurable disease might shun the sight of his infirmity, so Bill would not investigate any further the impossible things that were changing in this body which was half his own.
Rufus was looking at him and smiling.
“How you’ve aged,” he murmured. “You and Pete both. I can remember when you were just youngsters, two or three months ago.” He yawned.
“Have you got a date?” Bill asked. The young Rufus nodded, and for a moment his black eyes almost closed and the third lid slid drowsily forward, half veiling the irises. He looked like an aloof, contented cat. Bill could not watch him. He had become calloused enough by now to these changing paradoxes and he was not shocked out of self-possession, but he still could not look straight at this latest evidence of abnormality. He only said, “Don’t look so smug,” and went into the house abruptly, letting the screen slam behind him.
Rufus’ eyes opened a little and the extra lid slid back, not all the way. He gazed after his son, but calmly, as incurious as a man might feel who watches a cat withdraw, disinterest in an alien species clouding his eyes.
He came in that night very late, and very drunk. Morgan had been waiting with Bill in the parlor, and they went out in silence to the taxi to bring Rufus in. His limp body was graceful even in this extremity. The driver was nearly in hysterics. He would not touch his passenger. It was impossible to make out exactly why—something that Rufus had done, or had not done, or perhaps had only said, on the way home.
“What was he drinking?” the driver kept demanding in a voic
e that broke on the last word. “What could he have been drinking?”
They could not answer that, and could get no coherent reason from the man why they should. He went away as soon as Bill had paid him—he refused to accept or touch money from Rufus’ wallet—driving erratically with a great clashing of gears.
“Has this happened before?” Morgan asked over Rufus’ lolling, dark-red head.
Bill nodded. “Not so bad, of course. He—remembers—things when he’s drunk, you know. Maybe he remembered something big this time. He always forgets again, and maybe that’s just as well, too.”
Between them Rufus moved a little, murmured a word, not in English, and waved both hands in an abortive gesture of expansion, rather as if vast landscapes were spread before him. He laughed clearly, not a drunken sound at all, and then collapsed entirely.
They put him to bed in the big carved bedstead upstairs, among the purple curtains. He lay as limply as a child, his familiar-strange face looking curiously like a solid mask with nothing at all behind it. They had turned to leave him, both of them tight-lipped and bewildered, and they were halfway across the room when Bill paused and sniffed the air.
“Perfume?” he asked incredulously. Morgan lifted his head and sniffed, too.
“Honeysuckle. Lots of it.” The heavy fragrance was suddenly almost sickening in its sweetness. They turned. Rufus was breathing with his mouth open, and the fragrance came almost palpably from the bed. They went back slowly.
Deep waves of perfume rose to meet them as he breathed. There was no smell of liquor at all, but the honeysuckle sweetness hung so heavy that it left almost a sugary taste upon the tongue. The two men looked blankly at one another.
“It’d suffocate anyone else,” Morgan said finally. “But we can’t very well get him away from it, can we?”
“I’ll open the windows,” Bill said with restraint. “There’s no way now to tell what’s going to hurt him.”