by Anthology
“You mean you’re married again?”
“What else was I supposed to do? A man wants you when you’re forty, you jump at it. As far as I knew, you were gone forever.”
“I’ve never been away, Cecily. I’ve been here all along, but never at the right time. It’s that drebbing machine; I can’t figure out the controls.”
“Maybe Arnie can have a look at it when he gets in, he’s pretty good at that sort of thing—what am I saying?”
“Tell me, did you ever write the story?”
“What’s to write about? Anyway, what difference does it make? Woman’s Secrets went bankrupt years ago.”
“Matrix! If you never wrote the story, then I shouldn’t even know about you. So how can I be here? Dammit, it’s a paradox. And I wasn’t supposed to cause any of those. Plus, I think I may have started an Indian war. Have you noticed any change in local history?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Look, I have an idea. When exactly did you get divorced?”
“I don’t know, late ’79. October, November, something like that.”
“All right, that’s what I’ll aim for. November, 1979. Be waiting for me.”
“How?”
“Good point. Okay, just take my word for it, you and me are going to be sitting in this room right here, right now, with one big difference: we’ll have been married for fifteen years, okay?”
“But what about Arnie?”
“Arnie won’t know the difference. You’ll never have married him in the first place.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be back in a minute. Well, in 1979. You know what I mean.” He headed for the door.
“Hold on,” she said. “You’re like the guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and doesn’t come back for thirty years.”
“What guy?”
“Never mind. I wanna make sure you don’t turn up anywhere else. Bring the machine in here.”
“Is that it?” she said one minute later.
“That’s it.”
“But it looks like a goddamn bicycle.”
“Where do you want me to put it?”
She led him upstairs. “Here,” she said. Alan unfolded the bike next to the bed. “I don’t want you getting away from me next time,” she told him.
“I don’t have to get away from you now.”
“You do. I’m married and I’m at least fifteen years older than you.”
“Your age doesn’t matter to me,” Alan told her. “When I first fell in love with you, you’d been dead three hundred years.”
“You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you? Anyway, don’t aim for ’79. I don’t understand paradoxes, but I know I don’t like them. If we’re ever gonna get this thing straightened out, you must arrive before 1973, when the story is meant to be published. Try for ’71 or ’72. Now that I think about it, those were a strange couple of years for me. Nothing seemed real to me then. Nothing seemed worth bothering about, nothing mattered; I always felt like I was waiting for something. Day after day I waited, though I never knew what for.”
She stepped back and watched him slowly turn a dial until he vanished. Then she remembered something.
How could she have ever forgotten such a thing? She was eleven and she was combing her hair in front of her bedroom mirror. She screamed. When both her parents burst into the room and demanded to know what was wrong, she told them she’d seen a man on a bicycle. They nearly sent her to a child psychiatrist.
Damn that Alan, she thought. He’s screwed up again.
The same room, different decor, different time of day. Alan blinked several times; his eyes had difficulty adjusting to the darkness. He could barely make out the shape on the bed, but he could see all he needed to. The shape was alone, and it was adult size. He leaned close to her ear. “Cecily,” he whispered. “It’s me.” He touched her shoulder and shook her slightly. He felt for a pulse.
He switched on the bedside lamp. He gazed down at a withered face framed by silver hair, and sighed. “Sorry, love,” he said. He covered her head with a sheet, and sighed again.
He sat down on the bike and unfolded the printout. He’d get it right eventually.
BALSAMO'S MIRROR
L. Sprague de Camp
My friend in Providence took long walks, especially at night. He loved to end up at a graveyard, an abandoned church, or some such site. Since he earned a meager living by writing for Creepy Stories, he claimed that these walks inspired him with ideas. In any case, one such walk that he took with me gave him some ideas he had not foreseen.
When I was an undergraduate at M.I.T., my people lived too far away, in upstate New York, for frequent visits home. So on week ends, when up on my studies, I rattled over from Cambridge in my Model A to see my friend. We had become pen pals through the letters column of Creepy Stories. I had invited myself over, and we had found each other congenial in spite of differences of outlook, age, and temperament.
I used to love to argue. A thing I liked about my friend was that he could argue intelligently and always good-naturedly on more subjects than anyone I ever knew. Some of his ideas were brilliant; some I thought were crazy but later came to agree with; some I still think were crazy.
We found plenty to debate about. Politics was hot stuff, with the Depression still in full swing the year after Roosevelt had closed the banks. I was pretty conservative still, while my friend had just been converted from a Mesozoic conservative to an ardent New Dealer. Another young student, who sometimes dropped in, was a red-hot Communist sympathizer. So we went at it hot and heavy.
We also disputed religion. My friend was a scientific materialist and atheist; I was still a believing Christian. We argued esthetics. He defended art for art’s sake; I thought that philosophy a pretext for indolence and had no use for idlers, whether rich, arty, or plain lazy.
We wrangled over international affairs. He wanted America to rejoin the British Empire; I was for splendid isolation. We argued history. He was devoted to the eighteenth century; I thought that men wearing wigs over good heads of hair looked silly.
“Willy,” he said, “you are looking at the superficies only. The perukes are not significant. What is important is that this was the last period before the Industrial Revolution, with all its smoke and rattling machinery and hypertrophied cities and other horrors. Therefore, in a sense, this was the most gracious, elegant, civilized time we have ever seen or shall ever see.”
“What,” I said, “would you do with the surplus nine tenths of humanity, whom you’d have to get rid of if we went back to eighteenth-century technology? Starve them? Shoot them? Eat them?”
“I didn’t say we could or should go back to pre-industrial technology. The changes since then were inevitable and irreversible. I only said . . .”
We were still arguing when we set out on one of our nocturnal prowls. My friend could always find something to show the visitor. This, he would explain, was the house once owned by a famous Colonial pirate; that was the site of the tavern where he was seized before being hanged; and so on.
This balmy May evening, under a gibbous moon, my friend was on the track of a piece of Colonial architecture on Federal Hill. We hiked down the steep incline of Angell Street to the center of Providence. Thence we continued west up the gentler slope of Westminster Avenue, where the restaurants were called trattorias. Near Dexter Street, we turned off and trudged around little back streets until we found the Colonial house.
The doorway was still there, but the rest of the ground floor had been eviscerated to make room for a small machine shop. My friend clucked. “Damned Dagoes!” he muttered. “A pox on ‘em.” His ethnic prejudices, although weakening, were still pretty strong.
We examined the doorway with my pocket flashlight, my friend being too absent-minded to think of bringing his own. At last we started back. We had already walked two miles, and the climb back up Angell promised a rigorous workout. Since it was night, we could not use the elevators in the County Court
House, at the foot of the slope, to save ourselves some of the climb.
In this tangle of alleys, my friend took a wrong turn. He quickly realized his error, saying: “No, Willy, it’s this way. This should take us back to Westminster. I don’t think I know this street.”
As we neared the avenue, we passed a row of little shops, including a Chinese laundry. Nearly all were closed, although ahead we could see the lights of restaurants, bars, and a movie house on Westminster. My friend put out a hand to stop me before one place, still lit, in the row of darkened shops.
“What’s this?” he said. “Damme, sirrah, it hath the look of a den of unholy mysteries!” He talked like that when in his eighteenth-century mood.
The dim-lit sign in the window said: MADAME FATIMA NOSI. FORTUNES TOLD. SPEAK WITH YOUR DEAR DEPARTED. OCCULT WISDOM SHARED. A crude painting beneath the legend showed a gypsylike woman bent over a crystal ball.
“I can just imagine,” said my friend. “This is the center of a secret, sinister cult. They’re a gang of illegal immigrants from Kaftristan, where the ancient paganism survives. They worship a chthonian deity, which is in fact a gelatinous being that oozes its way through solid rock . . .”
“Why not go in and see?” I said. “Madame Nosi seems open for business.”
“Oh, you’re so practical, Willy!” said my friend. “I had rather gaze upon this cryptic lair from afar and let my imagination soar. Inside, it is probably dirty, squalid, and altogether prosaic. Besides, our sibyl will expect remuneration, and I am badly straitened just now.”
“I’ve got enough dough for both,” I said. “Come on!”
It required urging, because my friend was a shy man and sensitive about his perennial poverty. This indigence was curious, considering his gifts and intellect. A few minutes later, however, we were in Madame Nosi’s oratory.
The place was as dingy as my friend had predicted. Fatima Nosi proved a tall, strongly built, bony woman of middle age, with a big hooked nose and graying black hair hanging down from under her head scarf.
“Well,” said she, “what can I do for you gentlemans?” She spoke with an accent, which did not sound Italian. She looked hard at me. “You are college student, no?”
“Yes.”
“At the-um-the Massachusett Institute of the Technology, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And you expect to graduation in-umm-two year, no?”
“That’s right,” I said, surprised at her prescience. “Name, please?”
“Wilson Newbury.”
She wrote in a little notebook. “And you!” she turned to my friend. When she had written his name, she said: “You are writer, no?”
“I,” said my friend, “am a gentleman who sometimes writes for his own amusement and that of his friends.” His face tensed with the effort of trying to speak a foreign language without stuttering. “P-parlate italiano?” He got it out slowly, with a pronounced down-east accent.
She looked puzzled; then her face cleared. “Cosi, cosi. But I am not Italian, me, even though I was born in Italy.”
“What are you, then, if I may be so bold?” asked my friend.
“I am Tosk.”
“Oh, Albanian!” he exclaimed. He said aside to me: “It fits. She’s a perfect example of the Dinaric racial type, and that name didn’t sound quite Italian.” He turned back. “I am honored; sono-sono onorato.”
“Tank you. Is many Albanians in Italy,” said Madame Nosi. “They went there two, tree hundred years ago to excape the Turks. And now, what can I do for you? Horoscope? Séance? Crystal ball? I tink, you smart gentlemans no care for simple occult manifestations. You tell me what you most want. You, please.” She indicated my friend.
He thought a long moment and said: “Madame, the thing whereof I am most desirous is to view the world as it was at the climax of Western civilization-that is to say, in the eighteenth century. No, permit me to amend that. It is to witness the most civilized part of that world-England-at that period.”
“Umm.” Madame Nosi looked doubtful. “Is difficult. But then, maybe I get chance to use the mirror of Balsamo. You got to come upstairs to inner sanctum.”
She led us up creaking steps to a shabby little sitting room. Stepping to the side of the room, she pulled a cloth cover off a mirror on the wall. This mirror, otherwise ordinary-looking, had an ornately carven frame whence most of the gilding had worn off.
My friend leaned towards me and murmured: “This should be interesting. Giuseppe Balsamo, alias Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, was the most egregious faker and charlatan of the eighteenth century. Wonder what she’ll do?”
“This,” said Madame Nosi, “will cost you ten dollars. Is a very powerful spell. It exhaust my weak heart. If your friend want to go along with you, it cost him ten buck, too.”
My friend looked stricken, as well he might. For ten dollars, one could then eat in a good restaurant for a week. Twenty sounded steep to me, also; but I had lately received a check from home and did not like to back out. Had I been older and bolder, I might have haggled-something I knew my friend could never bring himself to do. I pulled out my wallet.
“Tank you,” said Madame Nosi. “Now, you sit here facing the mirror. You, too. I will light candles on this ting behind you. Look at reflections of the candles in glass.”
She lit a sconce on the opposite wall. In the dimness, the reflections of my friend and me were little more than shapes. I took my eyes off the image of my gaunt, lantern-jawed friend and raised them to that of the cluster of wavering lights.
Madame Nosi bustled about behind us. A sweetish smell told me that she had lit incense. She began to croon a song in a language I did not recognize.
I cannot tell exactly when her spell, or whatever it was, took effect, any more than one can tell exactly when one drops off to sleep and begins to dream. But I presently found myself trudging a dirt road, overgrown with foot-high grass between two deep, narrow ruts.
This experience, I soon discovered, was not a simple case of time travel, such as one reads about. In stories, the time traveler arrives in another time in propria persona, able to act and function as he would in his own time. I, however, found myself in someone’s else body, seeing and hearing with his organs and able to follow his thoughts but helpless to affect my host’s actions. I could not even crane his neck or roll his eyes to see anything that he did not wish to look at. Now his gaze was fixed on the ground before him to avoid a stumble.
This situation avoided the familiar time-travel paradox. While I partook of all my host’s experiences, mental and physical, I-could not do anything that would change an event that had already taken place. Whether this adventure should be explained as a return to a former time, or the vision of former events imposed upon my present-day mind, or sheer illusion, I cannot judge.
I could only sense the thoughts that ran through my host’s conscious mind; I could not plumb his store of memories. Hence I had no way of finding out who or where or when I was, until my host happened to think of such things or until someone or something else gave me a clue.
“Now remember, lad,” said a creaky voice in my ear, “no gangling after the trollops, to the peril of thy immortal soul. And if we meet the squire and his Macaroni zon, keep thy temper no matter what they zay.”
At least, this is what I think he said. So strong was his unfamiliar dialect that, until I got used to it, I caught only half his words.
My host did me the favor of turning his head to look at his companion. He said: “Oh, hold thy water, Vayther. P faith, I’m a grown man, can take care o’ meself.”
“Childhood and youth are vanity. Ecclesiastes eleven,” said the other. “Thy loose tongue’ll get us hanged yet.”
“Unless thy poaching doth it virst,” replied my host.
“I do but take that dominion over the vowls of the air and the beasts of the vield, which God hath given me. Zee Genesis one. ‘Tis wrong o’ Sir Roger to deny us poor volk the use of ‘em . . .”
&n
bsp; My companion, evidently my host’s father, continued grumbling before relapsing into silence. He was a man of mature years, with the gnarled brown hands and deeply creased brown neck of a lifelong outdoor worker. He wore the knee breeches and full-skirted coat of the eighteenth century, but these were of coarse, self-colored homespun, patched and darned. His calves were clad in a pair of baggy, soiled cotton stockings, and his big, shapeless shoes did not differ as to right and left.
On his head rode a large, full-bottomed, mouse-colored wig, which hung to his shoulders but from which half the hair had fallen out. On top of the wig was a stained, battered, wide-brimmed felt hat, turned up in back but otherwise allowed to droop in scallops.
Besides the wig, he also flaunted a full if straggly gray beard. I had thought that all men in this era were shaven.
I wondered if my friend was imprisoned in the body of the father, as I was in that of the son. If so, the beard was a good joke on him. As a devotee of the eighteenth century, my friend detested all hair on the face. He had long nagged me about my harmless little mustache. If indeed my friend was there, though, there was no way for me to communicate with him.
Then I thought: was I, too, wearing a wig? I could not tell. It would be an equally good joke on me, who despised wigs.
The pair subsided into silence, save for an occasional muttered remark. They were not great talkers. I could follow the thoughts of the son, but these did little to orient me. The jumble of names, faces, and scenes flickered past me too quickly to analyze.
I did learn that my host’s name was William, that his father was a yeoman farmer, and that they were the only surviving members of their family. I also learned that the father had a feud with the local squire, and that they were on their way to a fair. From an allusion to Bristol, I gathered that we were somewhere in the Southwest of England. From the look of the vegetation, I surmised that it was springtime.
The open fields and woodlots gave way to a straggle of small houses, and these thickened into a village. From the height of the dim, ruddy orb that passes for sun in England, I judged that the time was about midday.