Here, in part of a long sequence of stories that Utley has been writing throughout the ’90s (and that – unusual for a series, and a testament to the high regard in which editors hold Utley’s talent – have appeared in almost every leading market in the field, from Analog to Sci Fiction), detailing the adventures and misadventures of time-travelling scientists exploring the distant Silurian Age, millions of years before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, he offers us a parable of what’s important and what’s not – and wonders how you can be sure that you can tell the difference, when you can’t even be sure of the very ground under your feet.
EVERYTHING FELT LIKE A DREAM. The flight attendants seemed to whisper past in the aisle. The other passengers were but shadows and echoes. Through the window, he could see the wing floating above an infinite expanse of cloudtop as flat and featureless as the peneplained landscapes of the Paleozoic. I’m just tired, he thought, without conviction.
Ivan forced his attention back to the laptop. He had called up an old documentary in which he himself appeared. “Resume,” he said, very softly, and the image on the screen unfroze, and a familiar, strange voice said, “Plant life may actually have invaded the land during the Ordovician Period.” Is that really me? he thought. My face, my eyes, I look so unlived-in. “We know about two dozen genera of land plant in the Silurian,” and the screen first showed a tangle of creeping green tendrils at his younger self’s feet, “such as these, which are called psilo-phytes,” then a glistening algal mat. “The big flat things you see all over the mudflats are Nematophycus. The point is – ”
His earphone buzzed softly. “Pause,” he murmured to the laptop, and the image on the screen froze once more. He said, “Hello?” and heard his brother say, “How’s the flight?”
“Don. I hope you’re not calling to rescind my invitation.”
“Michelle’ll pick you up at the airport as planned. I’m just calling to warn you and apologize in advance. I just got an invitation I can’t refuse to a social event tomorrow evening.”
“No need to apologize.”
“Sure there is. This is a soirée of Hollywood swine.”
“I can use the time to rest up for Monday.”
“Well, actually, I’d sort of like to take you along. In case I need somebody intelligent to talk to. Unless, of course, you think you’d be uncomfortable.”
Ivan examined the prospect for a moment, then said, “On Tuesday I’m going to read a paper on Paleozoic soils at the Page Museum. Young snotnoses keen to establish their reputations on the ruins of mine will be there. In light of that, I can’t imagine how people who undoubtedly don’t know mor from mull could possibly make me uncomfortable.”
“Good. To the extent possible, I’ll camouflage you in my clothing.”
“What’s the occasion for the party?”
“The occasion’s the occasion.”
“Let me rephrase the question. Who’s hosting the party?”
“Somebody in the business who’s throwing himself a birthday party. None of his friends will throw one for him, because he doesn’t have any friends. If I hadn’t come within an ace of an Oscar last month – which by the way is the limit of his long-term memory – it’d never have occurred to him to invite a writer. If I was a self-respecting writer and not a Hollywood whore, I’d duck it. But, hey, it’ll be entertaining from a sociological point of view.”
“As long as I get to ogle some starlets.”
“Starlets’d eat you alive.”
“That would be nice, too. Look, please don’t think you have to entertain me the whole time I’m out there.”
“Oh, this place’ll afford you endless opportunities to entertain yourself.”
“I look forward to it.”
“See you soon.”
“Goodbye.”
“Resume,” he murmured to the laptop. “The point is.”
“The point is,” his younger self said, “they can’t have sprung up overnight, even in the geologic sense. The Silurian seas are receding as the land rises, and the plant invasion’s not a coincidence. But there were also opportunities during the Ordovician for plants to come ashore in a big way. Only they didn’t. Maybe there was lethal ozone at ground level for a long time after the atmosphere became oxygen-rich. If so, a lot of oxygen had to accumulate before the ozone layer rose to the higher levels safe enough for advanced life-forms. Our – ”
“Stop,” he said, and thought, What a lot of crap. Then he sighed deeply and told the laptop, “Cue the first Cutsinger press conference.”
After a moment, Cutsinger’s image appeared on the screen. He was standing at a podium, behind a brace of microphones. He said, “I am at pains to describe this phenomenon without resorting to the specialized jargon of my own field, which is physics. Metaphor, however, may be inadequate. I’ll try to answer your questions afterward.”
This is afterward, Ivan thought bitterly, and, yes, I have a question.
“The phenomenon,” Cutsinger’s image went on, “is, for want of a better term, a space-time anomaly – a hole, if you will, or a tunnel, or however you wish to think of it. It appears, and I use the word advisedly, appears to connect our present-day Earth with the Earth as it existed during the remote prehistoric past. We’ve inserted a number of robot probes, some with laboratory animals, into the anomaly and retrieved them intact, though some of the animals did not survive. Judging both from the biological samples obtained and from the period of rotation of this prehistoric Earth, what we’re talking about is the Siluro-Devonian boundary in mid-Paleozoic time, roughly four hundred million years ago. Biological specimens collected include a genus of primitive plant called Cooksonia and an extinct arthropod called a – please forgive my pronunciation if I get this wrong – a trigonobartid. Both organisms are well-known to paleontologists, and DNA testing conclusively proves their affinities with all other known terrestrial life-forms. Thus, for all practical purposes, this is our own world as it existed during the Paleozoic Era. However, it cannot literally be our own world. We cannot travel directly backward into our own past.”
Ivan looked up, startled, as a flight attendant leaned in and said something.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“We’ll be landing soon. You’ll have to put that away now.”
“Of course.”
She smiled and withdrew. He looked at the laptop. “The anomaly,” Cutsinger was saying, “must therefore connect us with another Earth.”
“Quit.”
Michelle met him as he came off the ramp. For a second, he did not recognize her and could only stare at her when she called his name. He could not immediately connect this young woman with his memories of her as a long-limbed thirteen-year-old girl with braces on her teeth; then, he had never been quite able to decide whether she was going to grow up pretty or goofy-looking. It had been a matter of real concern to him: he had first seen her cradled tenderly in her mother’s arms, eyes squeezed shut and oblivious of her beatific expression; baby Michelle was not asleep, though, but had seemed to be concentrating fiercely on the mother’s warmth, heartbeat, and wordless murmured endearments. Tiny hands had clasped and unclasped rhythmically, kneading air, keeping time, and when Ivan had gently touched one perfect pink palm and her soft digits closed on, but could not encircle, his calloused fingertip, the contrast smote him in the heart. He had no children of his own, and had never wanted any, but he knew immediately that he loved this child. He had murmured it to her, and to Don and Linda he said, “You folks do good work.”
The discontinuous nature of these remembered Michelles, lying unconformably upon one another, heightened his sense of dislocation as he now beheld her. She was fresh out of high school, fair-skinned, unmade-up, with unplucked eyebrows and close-cropped brown hair. It cannot be her, he told himself. But then the corners of her mouth drew back, the firm, almost prim line of her lips fractured in a smile, and she delivered herself of pleasant, ringing laughter that had a most unexpected and wonderful effect on h
im: his head suddenly seemed inclined to float off his shoulders, and he found himself thinking that a man might want to bask for years in the radiance of that smile, the music of that laughter. Now he was convinced, and he let himself yield to the feeling of buoyant happiness. As a child she had had the comically intent expression of a squirrel monkey, but her father and her uncle had always been able to make her laugh, and when she had the effect was always marvelous. She closed with him and hugged him tightly, and his heart seemed to expand until it filled his chest.
As they headed into the hills north of Hollywood, she concentrated on her driving and he stole glances at her profile. He decided that the haircut suited her vastly better than the unfortunate coiffures she had been in the habit of inflicting upon herself. Well, he thought, you turned out pretty after all.
And he thought, I love you still, darling, and I always shall. Whether it’s really you or not.
Seated at the metal table, screened from the sun by the eucalyptus tree and with his book lying open on his lap, he admired the blue and orange blooms and banana-shaped leaves of the bird of paradise flowers in his brother’s backyard. He could look past them and the fence and right down the canyon on the hazy blur of the city. The morning had begun to heat up, and there was a faint ashy taste to the air. He noticed a small dark smudgy cloud where the farthest line of hills met the sky.
Michelle emerged from the house carrying two ice-flecked bottles of imported beer on a tray. She set it on the table and sat down across from him and said, “Daddy’s still talking to the thing that would not die.”
He nodded in the direction of the smudgy cloud. “I hope that’s not what I think it is.”
She looked. “Fires in the canyons. It’s the season.” She opened one of the beers and handed it to him. “What’re you reading?”
Unnecessarily, he glanced at the spine. “The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant.”
She clearly did not know what to say in response.
“It’s about the lives of the great philosophers,” he went on after a moment, “and their thoughts on being and meaning and stuff.”
She made a face. “It sounds excruciating.”
“It is. I think the great philosophers were all wankers, except for Voltaire, who was funny. Nietzsche was probably the wankiest of the lot.”
“Why’re you reading it if you think it’s so awful?”
“Let’s just say I’m in full-tilt autodidact mode these days. Nowadays I carry the same three books with me everywhere I go. This one, a book about quantum mechanics, and the latest edition of the People’s Almanac. The almanac’s the only one I really enjoy.”
“What’s that, quantum mechanics?”
“Didn’t they teach you anything in school? Advanced physics. Probably just a lot of philosophical wanking set to math. But it interests me. Somewhere between physics and philosophy is the intersection of the real world. Out of our subjective perception of an objective reality of energy and matter comes our interpretation of being and meaning.”
“Whatever you say, Uncle Ivan.”
“Are you going to this party tomorrow night?”
She shook her head emphatically. “I’m going to a concert with my boyfriend. Anyway, I don’t much care for movie people. Oh, some of them are nice, but – I’ve never been comfortable around actors. I can never tell when they aren’t acting. No, that’s not it, it just makes me tired trying to figure out when they’re acting and when they’re not. The directors are mostly pretentious bores, and the producers just make Daddy crazy.” She gazed down the canyon. “The fact is, I don’t much like movies. But my boyfriend” – she gave him a quick, self-conscious glance – “my boyfriend loves ’em. And he loves dinosaurs. He says he judges a movie by whether he thinks it’d be better or worse with dinosaurs in it.”
“Did he have anything to do with that recent version of Little Women?”
“No. He’s not in the industry, thank God. I wouldn’t go out with anybody who is. I wonder what genius thought of setting Little Women in prehistoric times. Anyway, you’d be surprised how many movies flunk his dinosaur test.”
“Probably I wouldn’t.”
“He and Daddy like sitting around coming up with lunatic premises for movies. What they call high-concept. He cracks Daddy up. Daddy says he could be making movies every bit as bad as anybody else’s if he just applied himself.”
“Give me an example of high-concept.”
“‘Hitler! Stalin! And the woman who loved them both!’” They laughed together. Then she suddenly regarded him seriously. “I hope you’re not going to let yourself be overawed by these people.”
“People don’t awe me.” She looked doubtful, so he added, “They can’t begin to compete with what awes me.”
“What’s that? What awes you?”
He leaned sideways in his chair, scooped some dirt out of a flowerbed. “This,” he said, and as he went on talking he spread the dirt on his palm and sorted through it with his index finger. “When we were kids, teenagers, while your daddy sat up in his room figuring out how to write screenplays, I was outdoors collecting bugs and fossils. We neatly divided the world between us. He got the arts, I got the sciences. Even our tastes in reading – while he was reading, oh, Fitzgerald and Nabokov, I’d be reading John McPhee and Darwin’s journal of the voyage of the Beagle. There was a little overlap. We both went through phases when we read mysteries and science fiction like mad. I’d read The Big Sleep or The Time Machine and pass ’em onto Don, and then we’d discuss ’em. But we were usually interested in different parts of the same books. Don was interested in the characters, the story. Who killed so and so. I loved Raymond Chandler’s, Ross Macdonald’s descriptions of the southern California landscape. I was like a tourist. My feeling was that setting is as vital as plot and characterization. A good detective-story writer had to be a good travelogue writer, or else his characters and action were just hanging in space. Don argued that a good story could be set anywhere, scenery was just there to be glanced at. If the plot was good, it would work anywhere.”
“Daddy says there are only three or four plots. At least he says that out here there are only three or four.”
“Well, anyway, your dad and I have art and science all sewed up between us. Science to help us find out what the world is. Art to – I don’t know, art’s not my thing, but I think – ”
“Daddy says you’re trying to write a book.”
“Trying is about as far as I’ve got so far. I have all the raw material, but . . .” But. “I’m not creative. Anyway, I think we have to have both science and art. Everything in the universe partakes in some way of every other thing.”
“What about philosophy?”
“Maybe it’s what links science and art.”
“Even if it’s a lot of wanking?”
“Even wanking has its place in the scheme of things. What about this boyfriend?”
“Interesting segue.”
“Is this a serious thing? Serious like marriage?”
She shrugged, then shook her head. “I want to do something with my life before I get into that.”
“What?”
“I wish I knew. I feel I have so much to live up to. Your side of the family’s all overachievers. My father’s a hot Hollywood screenwriter. My uncle, the scientist, has done just the most amazing things. My grandparents were big wheels in Texas politics. It’s almost as bad as having movie-star parents. The pressure on me to achieve is awful.”
“It was probably worse for the Huxleys.”
“Mom’s always felt outclassed. Her family’d always just muddled along. She felt utterly inadequate the whole time she and Dad were married.”
“With a little help from him, she made a beautiful daughter.”
She looked pleased by the compliment but also a little uncomfortable. “Thank you for saying that.”
“It’s true.”
“You used to call me Squirrel Monkey.”
Don came outsi
de looking exasperated. “Ever reach a point in a conversation,” he said, “where, you know, you can’t go on pretending to take people seriously who don’t know what they’re talking about?”
“Are we talking rhetorically?”
Don laughed a soft, unhappy sort of laugh. He indicated the unopened bottle of beer. “Is that for me?”
“Just that one, Daddy.”
“I need it.” He said to Ivan, “Tell me the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard. I’m trying to put something into perspective here.”
Ivan thought for a moment. “Well, there was the low point, or maybe it was the high point, of my blessedly short stint as a purveyor of scientific knowledge to college freshman. I had a student tell me in all earnestness that an organism that lives off dead organisms is a sacrilege.”
Don laughed again, less unhappily than before. “Been on the phone with someone who makes deals and gives off movies as waste. He’s got the hottest idea of his life. He’s doing a full-blown remake of The Three Musketeers in Taiwan.”
Ivan felt his eyebrows go up. He made them come back down.
Don nodded. “That was my reaction. I said to him, I gather you’ve taken a few liberties with the novel. And he said, Novel? By Alexandre Dumas, I said. You mean it? he said. Excuse me for a moment, and he gets on his AnswerMan and says, To legal, do we have exclusive rights to alleged novel by Doo-dah-duh. Dumas, I scream, Dumas, you dumbass!” He shook his head as though to clear it of an irritating buzz. “Well. I go on and tell him the novel’s in the public domain, Dumas has been dead for a little while now. He drums his fingers on his desktop. He screws his face into a mask of thoughtfulness. He says, Well, it’s always best to be sure, because if what you say is true, we’ll have to see about getting it pulled out of circulation. I beg his pardon. He says, We don’t want people confusing it with our book based on the movie.”
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