by Anthology
He shuddered. “We find enough of it. We are repelled by it, but it’s sometimes necessary to consider it. We do not enjoy it; Stefan did enjoy it. He knew how we felt about it. He hid away his photographs, afraid we would destroy them. We would have if we’d found them.”
“You hunted for them,” I said.
“Everywhere. We never found their hiding place.”
“So there are some around?”
“I suppose there are. But if you think they can be found, forget it. You said psychopaths are tricky.”
“Yes, I guess I did,” I said. “In such a case, there can’t be any deal.”
“You mean you’ll keep the capsule?”
I nodded and tucked it underneath my arm.
“But why?” he shouted. ‘Why?”
“If it’s valuable to you,” I told him, “it should be valuable to us.” And I thought to myself, what in the name of Holy Christ am I doing here, hunkered down in a cave that was an olden mine, arguing with a man out of the human future about a silly cylinder out of the nonhuman past?
“You would have no way to come by the information that the capsule carries,” he said.
“How about yourself? How about your people?”
“They’d have a better chance. We can’t be entirely sure, of course, but we’d have a better chance.”
“I suppose,” I said, “that you expect to find some nonhuman knowledge, a cultural concept based on nonhuman values. You expect a lot of new ideas, a windfall of new concepts, some of which could be grafted on your culture, some of which could not.”
“That’s the whole point, Thornton. Even if you could extract the knowledge, how would your age put it to use? Don’t forget that some of it, perhaps much of it, might run counter to your present concepts. What if it said that human rights must take precedence, both in theory and in practice, over property rights? In practice as well as in theory-right now, of course, human rights do in certain aspects take precedence in theory, even in law, but how about in practice? What if you found something that condemned nationalism and gave a formula for its being done away with? What if it proved patriotism were so much utter hog-wash? Not that we can expect the contents of this capsule to deal with such things as human rights and nationalism. The information in this capsule, I would suspect, will include a lot of things we’ve never even thought of. How do you think the present day, your present day, would take to such divergence from what you consider as the norm? I can tell you. It would be disregarded, it would be swept beneath the rug, it would be laughed and sneered to nothing. You might as well smash this capsule into bits as give it to your people.”
“How about yourselves?” I asked. “How can you be sure you’ll put it to good use?”
“We have to,” he said. “If you saw Earth as it is up in my time, you would know we’d have to. Sure, we can travel out in space. We can travel into time. But with all these things, we still are hanging on by our fingernails. We’ll use it; we’ll use anything at all to keep the human race in business. We are the end product of thousands of years of mismanagement and bungling—your mismanagement and bungling. Why do you think we spend our lives in coming back to study history? For the fun of it? The adventure? No, I tell you, no. We do it to find where and how the human race went wrong, hoping to glean some insight into how it might have gone right, but didn’t. To find an old lost knowledge that might be put to better use than you ever put it to. We are the lost race digging through the garbage of men who lived before us.”
“You’re sniveling,” I said. “You are feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I suppose so,” he said. “I’m sorry. We no longer are the frozen-faced realists of this time, afraid of emotion, any more than you are the rough, tough barbarian you’d meet if you went back a couple of thousand years. The human race has changed. We are the ones who were stripped naked. We decided long ago we could no longer afford the luxury of violence, of cutthroat economic competition, of national pride. We are not the same people you know. I don’t say we are better, only different and with different viewpoints. If we want to weep, we weep; if we want to sing, we sing.”
I didn’t say anything; I just kept looking at him.
‘And if you keep the capsule,” he asked, “what will you do with it, you personally, not your culture? To whom would you give it, whom would you tell about it? Who would listen to your explanation? Could you survive the scarcely hidden disbelief and laughter? How could you, once you’d told your story, the story I have told you—how could you face your colleagues and your students?”
“I guess I couldn’t,” I said. “Here, take the goddamn thing.”
He reached out and took it. “I thank you very much,” he said. “You have earned our gratitude.”
I felt all cut up inside. I wasn’t sure of anything. To have something in one’s hand, I thought, that might change the world, then give it away, be forced to give it away because I knew that in my time it would not be used, that there could be no hope that it would be used—that was tough to take. I might have felt different about it, I knew, if I could have given the cylinder to someone else than this little twerp. I didn’t know why I disliked him; I had never even asked myself what there was to dislike about him. Then, suddenly, I knew; it all came to me. I disliked him because there were too many centuries between us. He was still a human, sure, but not the same kind of human as I was. Time had made a difference between us. I had no idea of how many years there might be between us—I hadn’t even asked him, and I wondered why I hadn’t. Times change and people change, and those cumulative changes had made us different kinds of humans.
“If you’ll come up to the house,” he said, “I could find a drink.”
“Go to hell,” I said.
He started to leave, then turned back to me. “I hate to leave like this,” he said. “I know how you must feel. You don’t like me, I am sure, and I can’t with all honesty say I care too much for you. But you have done a great, although unwitting, service for us, and I have a deep sense of gratitude. Aside from all of that, we are two human beings. Please don’t shame me, Thornton. Please accord me the luxury of being decent to you.”
I grunted boorishly at him, but I got up, picked up the tools and followed after him.
When we came into the Lodge, Angela was slumped in a chair. A whiskey bottle stood on the table beside her. She struggled to her feet and waved a half-filled glass at me, spilling liquor on the rug.
“You must not mind her,” Charles said to me. “She is compensating.”
“And who the hell wouldn’t compensate?” she asked. “After months of tracking down and keeping up with Villon in the stews of fifteenth-century Paris . . .”
“Villon,” I said, not quite making it a question.
“Yes, Francis Villon. You have heard of him?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have heard of him. But why . . .”
She gestured at Charles. “Ask the mastermind,” she said. “He’s the one who figures it all out. A man out of his time, he said. Find this Villon, a man out of his time. A genius when there were few geniuses. Pluck wisdom from him. Find out who he really was. And so I found him and he was just a filthy poet, a burglar, a chaser after women, a brawler, a jailbird.” She said to me, “The past human race was a bunch of slimy bastards, and the people of your time are no better than the others that have come before you. You’re all a bunch of slimy bastards.”
“Angela,” Charles said, sharply, “Mr. Thornton is our guest.”
She swung on him. “And you,” she said, “while I’m wading through the stench and depravity and obscenity of medieval Paris, where are you? In a little monastery library somewhere in the Balkans, feeling sanctimonious and holy, and no doubt somewhat supercilious, pawing through parchments, searching on slimmest rumor for evidence of something that you damn well know never did exist.”
“But, my dear,” he said, “it does exist.”
He put the cylinder on the table beside the whisk
ey bottle.
She stared at it, swaying a little. “So you finally found it, you little son of a bitch,” she said. “Now you can go home and lord it over everyone. You can live out your life as the little creep who finally found a capsule. There’s one good thing about it—the team will be rid of you.”
“Shut up,” said Charles. “I didn’t find it. Mr. Thornton found it.” She looked at me. “How come you knew about it?” she asked.
“I told him about it,” said Charles.
Oh, great,” she said. “So now he knows about us.”
He did, anyhow,” said Charles. “So, I suspect, does Mr. Piper. They found one of Stefan’s cubes, and when the plane hit Stefan’s parked saddle, it fell in Mr. Thornton’s yard. These men aren’t stupid, dear.” I told him, “It is good of you to say so.”
“And the sheriff, too,” she said. “The two of them and the sheriff came snooping yesterday.”
“I don’t think the sheriff knows,” I said. “The sheriff doesn’t know about the saddle or the cube. All he saw was that contraption over there. He thought it might be a game of some sort.”
“But you know it’s not a game.”
“I don’t know what it is,” I said.
“It’s a map,” said Charles. “It shows when and where we are.”
“All the others can look at it,” said Angela, “or another like it and know where all the others are.”
She pointed. “That is us down there,” she said.
It made no sense to me. I could see why they’d need a map like that, but not how it could work.
She moved closer to me and took me by the hand. “Look down,” she said. “Look down into the center of it. Let’s move closer to it and look down into the center of it”
“Angela,” warned Charles, “you know that’s not allowed.”
“For the love of Christ,” she said, “he has something coming to him. He found that stinking cylinder and gave it to you.”
“Look,” I said, “whatever is going on, leave me out of it.” I tried to pull my hand away, but she hung on to it, her nails cutting into my flesh.
“You’re drunk,” said Charles. “You are drunk again. You don’t know what you’re doing.” There was something in his voice that told me he was afraid of her.
“Sure, I’m drunk,” she said, “but not all that drunk. Just drunk enough to be a little human. Just drunk enough to be a little decent.
“Down,” she said to me. “Look down into the center of it.” And I did, God help me, look down into the center of that weird contraption. I guess I must have thought that looking down into it might humor her and end the situation. That’s just a guess, however; I don’t honestly remember for what reason, if I had a reason, I looked down into it. Later on—but the point is that it was later on and not at that particular moment—I did some wondering if she might have been a witch, then asked myself what a witch might be, and got so tangled up in trying to figure out a definition that it all came to nothing.
But, anyhow, I looked down and there was nothing I could see except a lot of swirling mist—the mist was dark instead of white. There was something about it that I didn’t like, a certain frightfulness to it, and I went to step away, but before I could take the step the dark mist inside the cubicle seemed to expand rapidly and engulf me.
The world went away from me and I was a consciousness inside a blackness that seemed to hold neither time nor space, a medium that was suspended in a nothingness in which there was no room for anything or anyone but the consciousness—not the body, but the consciousness—of myself and Angela.
For she still was with me in that black nothingness and I still could feel her hand in mine, although even as I felt the pressure of her hand I told myself it could not be her hand, for in this place neither of us had hands; there was no place or room for hands. Once I had said that to myself, I realized that it was not her hand that I seemed to feel so much as the presence of her, the essence of her being, which seemed to be coalescing with my being as if we had ceased to be two personalities, but had in some strange way become a single personality, although not so much a part of one another as to have lost our identities.
I felt a scream rising in my throat, but I had no throat and I had no mouth and there was no way to scream. I wondered, in something close to terror, what had happened to my body and if I’d ever get it back. As I tried to scream I sensed Angela moving closer, as if she might be extending comfort. And there was comfort, certainly, in knowing she was there. I don’t think she spoke to me or actually did anything at all, but I seemed to realize somehow that there were just the two of us in this great nothingness and that there was no room for more than just the two of us; that here there was no place for fear or even for surprise.
Then the dark nothingness drained away, but the draining did not give us back our bodies. We still were disembodied beings, hanging for a moment over a nightmare landscape that was bleak and dark, a barren plain that swept away to jagged mountains notched against the sky. We hung there for a moment only, not really long enough to see where we were—as if a picture had been flashed upon a screen, then suddenly cut off. A glimpse was all I had.
Then we were back in the empty nothingness and Angela had her arms around me—all of her around me—and it was very strange, for she had no arms or body and neither did I, but it seemed to make no difference. The touch of her was comforting, as it had been before, but this time more than comforting, and in that nothingness my soul and mind and the memory of my body cried out to her as another human being and another life. Instinctively, I reached out for her—reached out within everything I had or had ever had until the semblance of what we once had been intertwined and meshed and we melted into one another. Our beings came together, our minds, our souls, our bodies. In that moment we knew one another in a way that would have been impossible under other circumstances. We crawled into one another until there were not two of us, but one. It was sexual, in part, but far more than sexual. It was the kind of experience that is sought in a sexual embrace but never quite achieved. It was complete fulfillment and it did not subside. It reached a high and stayed there. It was an ecstasy that kept on and on, and it could have gone on forever, I suppose, if it had not been for that one little dirty comer of my busy brain that somehow stood aside and wondered how it might have been with someone other than a bitch like Angela.
That did it. The magic went away. The nothingness went away. We were back in the Lodge, standing beside the strange contraption. We still were holding hands, and she dropped my hand and turned to face me. Her face was white with fury, her voice cold.
“Remember this,” she said. “No woman will ever be quite the same again.”
Charles, still standing where he had been before, picked up the nearly empty whiskey bottle. He laughed, a knowing and insulting laugh. “I promised you a drink,” he said. “You probably need one now.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. I started across the room toward him, and he picked up the glass that Angela had been using and began to pour the drink. “We are short of glasses,” he said. “Under the circumstances, I don’t imagine you will mind.”
I let him have it, squarely in the face. He was not expecting it, and when he saw the fist coming it was too late for him to duck I caught him in the mouth and he went back and down as if he had been sledged. The glass and bottle fell from his hands and rolled across the carpeting, both of them spewing whiskey.
I felt good about belting him. I had wanted to do it ever since I saw him for the first time that morning. Thinking that, I was aghast that so little time had passed.
He didn’t try to get up. Maybe he couldn’t; maybe he was out. For all I cared he might as well be dead.
I turned and walked toward the door. As I opened it, I looked back. Angela was standing where I’d left her, and she didn’t stir when I looked at her. I tried to think of something I should say to her, but nothing came to mind. I suspect it was just as well.
My car
was standing in the driveway and the sun was far down the western sky. I took a deep breath—I suppose, unconsciously, I was trying to wipe away any clinging odor of the fog of nothingness, although, to tell the truth, I had never noticed any odor.
When I got into the car and put my hands on the wheel, I noticed that the knuckles of my right hand were bleeding. When I wiped the blood off on my shirt, I could see the toothmarks.
Back at the cabin I parked the car and, climbing to the porch, sat down in a chair. I didn’t do a thing, just stayed sitting there. The Galloping Goose came over, heading south. Robins scratched in the leaves underneath the brush beyond our patch of lawn. A sparrow sang as the sun went down.
When it was dark and the lightning bugs came out, I went indoors and made myself some supper. After I had eaten I went out on the porch again, and now I found that I could think a bit, although the thinking made no sense.
The thing that stuck closest to my mind was that brief glimpse I’d gotten of the bleak, dark landscape. It had only been a glimpse, a flashing on and off, but it must have been impressed deeply on my brain. For I found that there were details I had not been aware of, that I would have sworn I had never seen. The plain had seemed level in its blackness, but now I could recall that it was not entirely level, that there were mounds upon it and here and there jagged spears extending upward that could be nothing else than the stumps of shattered masonry. And I knew as well, or seemed to know, that the blackness of the plain was the blackness of molten rock, frozen forever as a monument of that time when the soil and rock beneath had bubbled in a sudden fire.
It was the future, I was certain, that Angela had shown me, the future from which she and the other scavengers had come, probing back across unknown centuries to find not only what their far forebears had known, but as well those things they might have uncovered or discovered, but had not really known. Although I wondered, as I thought of it, what could possibly have been the so-far-unrecognized significance of a man like Villon? A poet, sure, an accomplished medieval poet who had a modem flair and flavor, but as well a thief and a vagabond who must at many times have felt the shadow of the hangman’s noose brush against his neck.