Spot the paradox in what I’ve just said.
*
When I stepped in I found that I was the Marquis Louis de la Centaire and I was on my way to the guillotine. I was delighted. That was a gain of the best part of two thousand years, and who knew where Gaston had ended up, or any of the rest? A few more lucky steps and I would be home and free, unlike the Marquis. I kept my eyes peeled, because the sort of extreme haircut that the French Revolution preferred for feckless aristocrats would inconvenience my career as a professional jumper. Besides, it was only a matter of time, if you’ll forgive the pun, before someone else caught up.
In fact there was a disturbance in the crowd: someone was running. Bad news, but it did me some good. Never more than in a tyrannical regime is running a proof of guilt, and suddenly half the soldiers around me were chasing after him, no doubt imagining some fiendish Scarlet Pimpernel with liberté pour l'aristocratie on his mind. I took my chance and took off.
It caught them by surprise, for the Marquis had been a willowy sort of a chap and hardly the sort to break shackles by simply flexing his wrists, but beneath his foppish exterior now lurked all the muscle control that 2144 could instil, and a wanton disregard for any permanent injury he might do himself in exercising it. Off I dived from the platform, accelerating the invention of crowd-surfing by a few centuries.
I ran like one of those lizards that walk on water, skipping over heads and shoulders to an accompaniment of cries of pain and insults in French, which the vestige of the Marquis’ mind translated perfectly. My opponent had a head start, but he was on the ground and having to shoulder his way through the press. I had quickly out-sped my erstwhile jailers and was gaining. It was Gaston again, always my fiercest rival. I saw him glance over his shoulder and put an extra sprint on. The Gap was ahead, a watery disturbance in the midst of the throng. Was this a leap forwards or back? Gaston seemed to want to take it, but I wasn’t sure. It was devilishly hard to tell, and that was why the sport was worth the candle. I’d still take it before him if I could.
He reached it just ahead of me and vanished, leaving his vacated body, a bewildered French peasant, staggering on suddenly weak legs. The Marquis was due to have a bad day any moment, but perhaps they’d write a ballad about his daring escape attempt. Of course, to escape he’d need to go rather further, whereas all I needed to go was here.
The Gap I passed through was not the Gap that Gaston had passed through. The seconds that separated us made mine a different door entirely.
*
The invention of time travel happened in 2144 because that was the absolute earliest moment that the social and technological resources were available to construct and manage the various components, wormhole, black holes etcetera – and don’t think that people didn’t try to make it work earlier. That the people of the mid-22nd Century would not originally have realised the technological gem within their grasp was not important: the information got shunted back down the timestream to them, and so they were none the wiser that once they would have been none the wiser. Once activated, that initial time machine – or machines, as there were a large number of simultaneous on-switches pressed in that first possible moment – had a fairly drastic effect on the future.
You’ve spotted of course that, as soon as you can travel through time, then everyone has been travelling in time all the time, an infinite number of times, instantaneously, the very moment time travel becomes possible. On that instant, on the flicking of the first switch, we were living in a four dimensional society where travelling a thousand years into the future and back, to watch a play with some distant descendants perhaps, was as free of trouble as travelling to the next country, or town, or street, or indeed house . Or not even that troublesome as it quite literally took no time at all and you could arrive back the moment you set off. Or before, providing you did not set off before the flicking of that first switch. The entirety of post-switch human history became homogenised right then and there, and forever after. The realisation of time travel destroyed the future.
Or so say the people who claim that there would have been a natural future – had time travel not have been invented – and that we have overwritten and destroyed it with our incessant and humdrum self-multiplication.
Everyone else says that you can’t destroy the future, that the future is just what it was always going to be, meaning our perpetual 2144, filled with us, lots of us, any number of each of us, doing the same banal things, having the same conversations and reading the same books over and over again. Frequently we end up having the same conversations with ourselves because the more one travels through time, the more of oneself one meets. I’ve been to parties where I outnumbered everyone else almost two to one. Now I admit, I’m a good bon vivant and I love the sound of my own voice, and I can quite understand why a host – in this case myself – might want to invite more of me than anyone else, just to keep the talk flowing and put other people at their ease.
Even I have to admit, though, that I have heard all my jokes before, and there’s always one of me that thinks he’s a lot funnier than he really is.
As for whether there really was some doomed future that we’ve trampled over, well, I’m just an athlete. It’s not a topic of conversation that turns up much at those parties that I’m invited to, at least not if there are enough of me there to steer the conversation away from the subject.
*
When I stepped in I was Thuthamet, skilled mason in the quarries of the Giza Plateau, for the greater glory of Pharaoh and the furtherance of my craft. The beating sun was heavy on my shoulders, my hands were calloused from the chisel and I had a hundred tons of sandstone to shift before the day was out. All of that, of course, was secondary. Disaster! I’d lost three thousand years on the competition from being just seconds too late.
I gave vent to some of Thuthamet’s impressive range of curses, each of which would have taken a scribe a full hour to tap out in hieroglyphs. Sure enough I could sense a Gap, but not close. I was in for a long run this time.
I downed tools and took to my heels, to the surprised calls of some of my colleagues. Nobody tried to stop me as I exited the quarry double time and I was off down the road as fast as my feet could manage, forcing Thuthamet to keep a pace that he probably wasn’t going to get the chance to regret in the morning.
Ahead stretched the desert, already dominated by the great work in progress; ramps and scaffolding surrounding the truncated mass of what would become the Great Pyramid. Within was the Gap, of course, along with a thousand workmen and overseers.
I put on a fresh turn of speed. I was pushing Thuthamet beyond all his limits, but then this was history and they’d all been dead thousands of years, so what’s the loss?
Soldiers tried to stop me getting to the pyramid, but then I was dashing up the sloped side, seeing the sudden cut-off point ahead where the most recent blocks were laid. I reached the brink and jumped.
It was a long way down. There were more foundations and chambers to the Great Pyramid than I had realised. Still, there was the Gap, and I angled my body as I fell, feeling my speed increase. No, Thuthamet was definitely not going to survive this one. If I was off my mark then this was going to be a bit unpleasant.
I’m a professional, though. I can hit a target like that from any distance you care to name. All I hoped was that it would throw me forwards and so back into the game.
*
I’m sure you spotted my little paradox earlier. If the machines allowed time travel only back as far as the flicking of the switch, how did anyone manage to keep pushing back the building of the first machine to 2144?
As soon as the time machine was originally built, that Year X in the now-defunct post-2144 timeline that would have been, the future from that point was compromised by the inventors, leaving everyone else trying to close a time machine gap. And of course, duelling time machines is a mug’s game unless you can somehow arrange to flick that switch just a second earlier than the last man
. Find that kind of better loophole and you can dictate terms to history.
So it was that someone, in that future that now never was, devised the reverse quantum punch. This involves accelerating some truly eccentric little particles towards a collapsing black hole so that they end up escaping oblivion in a direction not even gravity can follow. The result of this, as you observe the experiment, is that you simply cannot account for your missing particles, and initially this probably became the experiment that not even grant money could escape from. Eventually someone put together the maths. The particles escaping the singularity were having an effect further back in the time stream, before the experiment had actually taken place. It probably took a half century of clever brains to work out what that effect was but, as I’ve said, time is both relative and irrelevant for our purposes.
What had actually happened was that someone had created a Gap in the past, a pinpoint singularity that had no effect whatsoever on the particles of the period into which it had been shoved. Another generation of science led to the discovery that such a singularity would, however, react in interesting new ways to objects and particles existing now. It probably took centuries before someone successfully sent a proton backwards in time to the day before the switch was flicked, but time was all they had, and nothing else to do with it. Sending any appreciable mass back was prohibitive, but by then they’d probably been isolating and storing minds for centuries, and minds are just information. Once someone had thought of that, it was simple enough to send your lab assistant’s thoughts back into a suitable body from before the switch was flipped and have him put together a Thornhole device by rote. Hey presto, your side had reinvented the time machine a day earlier than scheduled.
Repeat ad infinitum until you get back to 2144 which, as noted, is the earliest that, weasel as you might, producing the device became viable. In 2144, everyone who was anyone invented the time machine.
But of course, everyone who was anyone invented the reverse quantum punch at the same time and, whilst the black-hole-and-wormhole type of time travel was pretty much a one-trick pony – once you’d done it, that was the future instantly as bland and samey as meatloaf – the reverse quantum punch offered infinitely more entertaining possibilities.
*
When I stepped in it was another disaster: I was Grandfather Thag sitting at the mouth of my cave wearing mammoth furs, and I’d lost tens of thousands of years. I could only hope that my competitors were having some bad luck of their own or I was going to break whole new records in coming last.
Thag’s mind was sufficiently simple that I could not tell precisely what he had been doing, save that he had been about to try something interesting and new with the two sticks and the little pile of wood shavings in front of him. I had more important fish to fry: there was a Gap out there, and it could hardly lead anywhere worse than where I was at the moment. Hitching up my furs I was off at the gallop to the hooting, grunting surprise of the rest of the family.
I loped across the permafrosted ground, bounding over glacial moraine and dodging the occasion pile of mammoth dung. On the way I managed to attract the attention of a particularly belligerent woolly rhinoceros, which did wonders for keeping me motivated. Had I been left at Thag’s shambling gait then the rhino would have even then been making radical alterations to my direction of travel as it tossed me in the air on the end of its horn. My years of athletic training kept his body just ahead of the beast until I could see the Gap ahead of me. At least put me somewhere north of the year 1600, I asked silently, and hurled myself through, wishing Thag luck with the rhino.
I stepped into... Oh this was atrocious. Someone had been having far too much fun with the reverse quantum punch. I stepped into... let’s call him Rrrrhrrghghr, stalking through a forest of conifers and early flowering plants, enormous head swinging from side to side with a clatter of knife-like teeth, and tiny, tiny forearms twiddling uselessly in front of me. First time for me, but my colleagues had mentioned that things got a bit random if you ended up before the evolution of humanity. I was now all of seventy million years behind the game and I was going to be the laughing stock of the lecture circuit. I stomped about the prehistoric treescape until I picked up the next Gap, and then started to lumber towards it.
Just as I thought that things were just going to get worse, I saw another dinosaur heading in the same direction, this one a little plant-eater with a crested head. Well now, Gaston, I thought, and licked my chops. I guess I’m still in the race after all. He saw me at the same time and started to run, and I was after him in a flash. The instincts of my host were abruptly in the forefront of my mind, and it seemed entirely appropriate that I should get one up on my opponents by eating Gaston Passaverde. What a party ice-breaker that topic of conversation would make!
He ran, and I ran, and we both discovered that we weren’t very good at it. Although we were athletes, this was the first time we had been in hosts designed to run considerably faster than we could, and our control limited the dinosaurs to mere human speeds. So it was that predator and prey were pursuing each other through the antediluvian forest with tiny, tiny baby steps, shuffling along like a pair of demented reptile pensioners.
The Gap was ahead of us, and Gaston put on a desperate burst of miniature speed, no doubt prompted by his host’s mortal terror of mine. I had bet on the better horse, however, and my enormous jaws swung down agape.
It would have been funny, I think, to have eaten him, but if I had done so then I would have lost valuable time, and so I forced the tyrannosaur to shoulder the smaller beast out of the way so I could get to the Gap first. This had better be one leading up, I thought. If I ended up as some kind of glop in the primordial slime then my career was frankly over.
*
At first people were serious about history. Very serious groups of very serious men and women, many of them with serious beards, would head through a Gap and conduct studies to prove this thing or that about history, just as it if were still dust and bunkum. They would do studies to show how the ancient Sumerians washed their feet. Why bother? Anyone who wanted to see how they washed their feet could make their own Gap and go look. And the historians, being human, had stories they wanted to tell about the past, pet theories they wanted to vindicate, and if they found out that the past wasn’t cooperating, well... I’m sure most of them were terribly principled people, but that’s the problem with unlimited time travel. It only takes a few, and soon everyone’s at it, and there’s no point being purist about history because it’s impossible to tell what was originally there once someone’s mucked about with things.
But lo! cried the serious historians. Cease and desist! You are changing our own past. You will destroy the universe with your paradoxes, or else cause us to destroy our own future that we came from, or some such business. I was never too hot on the theory. Nobody paid them much attention, anyway, and people kept on fiddling with the past, for reasons of academic prestige, aesthetic preference or mere personal amusement, and the present, meaning the Eternal Year 2144, remained stubbornly in existence and unchanged, no matter how many butterflies people went back and stood on.
At last the truth dawned. One of the remaining serious academics, a breed that is now for all intents and purposes more extinct than the dinosaurs, did a very complicated study and declared that the sum total of the current state of the past could not possibly lead to 2144. We were cut off from history. We had killed our own grandparents and were being let off without even a slap on the wrist. The year 2144, which comprised all future human history, was self-sufficient and immortal, and the past was our plaything.
And we were bored, so very bored by that point.
*
When I stepped in I was Esocleon, tugging at my beard as the wind tugged at my robes, pondering the precise relationship of the angles in the geometry that I had sketched out on my sand tray. There was some mathematical principle maddeningly close to the top of his mind, but I crashed through there just as he wa
s about to grasp it and set him running. At last! Although Greece circa 500BC was hardly the yellow jersey of the front runner, it beat the late Cretaceous by a mile and tens of millions of years. I was off, kicking the sandbox over with my robes flying behind me, skinny old man’s legs pumping madly as I ran out of my villa, if Greek philosophers had villas. Maybe that was the Romans. I never really cared much about the fiddly details of history.
The Gap was close this time. I had a brief glimpse of an overweight young Greek lad rushing naked from an outhouse, Gaston Passaverde caught with his toga down, but I was through first and by a length.
Without breaking my stride I stepped into the Contessa Estella di Consiglieri just as she was being introduced to Queen Isabella of Spain. The last thought in her mind was, “I shall always remember this moment.” As it turned out, so would everyone else, as the Contessa went on the lam out of the royal palace with seven layers of skirts flying about her knees. I seldom got women when I jumped, which several separate sexual partners have independently claimed is because I’m a loathsome chauvinistic swine. But what do they know?
The Contessa was being hotly pursued by one of the royal halberdiers, and Gaston – no gentleman he – did his best to trip me up with the hook-shaped part of it, but I was nimble and light, and leapt...
I stepped into General Gian Che Soon, who was in the middle of planning the next morning’s battle against the encroaching Chinese forces that were trying their best to overrun what was left of Korea. I rushed out of the camp, scattering the carefully positioned map pieces, sensing the Gap some considerable way towards the enemy lines. With a panicked mob of servants and aides-de-camp in hot pursuit, I leapt onto a horse and kicked it into gear, or whatever one does with horses. Thankfully the general knew, and I borrowed it from him. Two miles of fierce riding later and an arrow sprouted from the beast’s flank a mere dozen yards from the Gap, sending me flying over its head. Gaston charged past, a barbarous Mongol horse-archer, and hit the Gap a moment ahead of me. I was already running, though, and...
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