Our April issue will also feature an unusual science-fictional mystery by Thomas R. Dulski, plus a wide variety of entertaining and thought-provoking stories from such writers as Jerry Oltion, Stephen L. Burns, Craig DeLancey, Donald Moffitt, and newcomer William Gleason—and, of course, the climax and finale of Joe Haldeman's novel Marsbound.
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Short Story: KNOT YOUR GRANDFATHER'S KNOT by Howard V. Hendrix
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Illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg
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Or, changing to a tangled story....
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Mike Sakler knew about chaos. In the 1950s his doctoral work in turbulent airflow dynamics eventually led to a job with a major aerospace contractor in Southern California. He'd dabbled in nonlinear dynamics throughout his career, then chaos and complexity theory in the 1980s and ‘90s. Since his retirement and his wife Ginny's death of lung cancer in 1989, he'd had lots of time for dabbling.
With the kids grown and gone, he sold the family house in Southern California and moved to the central Sierra Nevada near Alder Springs, an hour outside Fresno, among tall pines and old oaks and tree-sized manzanita. He spent his days working and playing on his twenty-acre spread and in his great barrackslike, twelve-thousand-square-foot retirement “party house.” Solar powered and off the grid, he built the house with his own hands, out of wood from his own land's trees.
Once the house was up, he found himself playing more than working: tossing horseshoes, bowing his fiddle, strumming his banjo, jamming with young friends, endlessly tinkering with his home sound-studio's electronics.
His fascination with the Cord 810 Beverly was much more than just play or dabbling, however. Mike considered the mothballed green 1936 Cord to be the strange attractor underlying his increasingly chaotic life.
Part of it was personal history. His own grandfather had owned a Cord exactly like the piece of automotive sculpture previously owned by Donald and Rita Batchelder: same make, model, and year. When Mike was twelve and his Grandfather Sakler about the same age as Mike himself now was, the old man took him in that very car to the 1939 World's Fair, for the first of a dozen visits.
The Batchelder Cord had a long and complex history of its own, going back to Rita's late husband Donald and his purchase of it at an estate sale in New York, years before. Time had pretty much blown the original paint job—a sort of silvery gray-green, like a spruce forest seen at high speed—but that was typical of Cords. Aside from that, the only further damage was the small scratch and dent made by Rita herself in 1955, for which crime Donald had forever after mothballed the car.
So it was that in all other respects the 810 looked the way it did the day it left the factory. The Cord emblem, with its art deco wings, still shining. The eyes of the hidden headlights blissfully sleeping away the years in the big pontoon fenders. The coffin-lid hood fronted by futuristic grillwork—still giving off an impression of blunt velocity, even though the car had been parked and motionless for more than forty years when Mike found it in Rita's garage and had to have it.
Unfortunately, Mike's relationship with Rita didn't continue very long once the sale of the Cord was consummated. What with her calling him a “mercenary, self-centered, heartless old bastard,” he couldn't say the affair had ended well.
Still, he reassured himself that, if he wasn't too busy, he could always find another girlfriend through either his martial arts or folk-dancing classes—"ai-ki-do, tae-kwon-do, and do-si-do,” as he liked to think of them. He'd been doing all of them for so many years that he'd have black belts in all three if they handed out black belts in folk dance.
Widow Batchelder may have called him heartless, but his heart was fine—or at least as fine as years of exercise, the latest heart meds, and the occasional angioplasty could make it. Oddly, though, he took the fiasco of his break-up with Rita worse than he would have thought. Funneling all his energy into restoring the Cord had the virtue of diverting his attention to what seemed to be more tractable problems, at least at first.
He started with the car's aesthetics—smoothing out the dent and scratch, lifting off all the chrome pieces, getting them and the bare steel bumpers all shined up again. He redid the paint job in its original green, and worked on all the detailing that would return the car to absolutely mint condition.
The bodywork went well. Rita claimed her husband had drained the gas and thoroughly changed the oil when he mothballed the car in 1955, so Mike felt his odds of restoring the engine should at least be even, too.
He removed all the plugs and mystery-oiled the holes. The car wouldn't start.
He removed and cleaned the fuel system. It wouldn't start.
He rebuilt the carburetor, did a leak-down test for the rings, and checked the valves. It wouldn't start.
He hooked pulleys to an external electric motor and cranked things around a bit to check the compression. It wouldn't start.
He adjusted what didn't need replacing, brought up the fuel, water, and electrical levels, put the key in the ignition, said a fervent prayer, and still—it wouldn't start.
He would have loved to give up, but he couldn't. When he neglected to work on it, he felt guilty, as if shirking some responsibility he didn't fully understand. He returned to it again and again, often reluctantly.
He put less effort into keeping up his own health. Where before he had been more than willing to “keep active,” now he avoided trips down to the valley for martial arts classes and dance performances.
He'd be damned if he'd let the sawbones put him on one of those bland rabbit food diets. He would eat the way he wanted to, thank you. If you couldn't enjoy life while trying to stay alive, you might as well already be dead.
The same was true of his drinking—which, after long hiatus, he took up again in a big way. His young party-people friends kept visiting for a while, some even helping him with his automotive restoration work, but gradually his “drinkering and tinkering” drove them away.
A year and a half into the Cord project, after the endless big failures and small successes, Mike Sakler finally hit bottom.
He drank heavily the first part of the night, then fell asleep. Toward morning, Mike knew he was starting to wake up again when he dreamed he was drunk—and had tied a noose to hang himself.
He had hoped for months and months the drinking would crank up the stage machinery that made the fog in his brain, until it filled the theater of his consciousness, obscuring his memory uniformly. It hadn't worked out that way.
Instead, as the months had passed, his memory had become more and more like the Tule fog that came up out of the ground in the valley below—fog thick yet low, so that it was easier to look straight up through it and see a star shining down out of all those long lost light-years than see the streetlamp just passed a block and a moment before.
The star that shone down on him in his foggiest darkness now was a perfect image of the Perisphere and Trylon, with the Helicline ramping down around them: the “Egg, Spike, and Ramp,” the prime symbols of the 1939 World's Fair and its “World of Tomorrow” theme.
That was the future that was—yet never was yet. His childhood attempts with the Build-Your-Own New York World's Fair kits never got much beyond building scale models of the 610-foot-tall Trylon obelisk, its 188-foot-tall Perisphere globe companion, and the Helicline ramp linking them, but that had been all right with him. Those three were what really mattered.
How much Grandpa had loved that fair was a surprise to everyone in the family. Patriarch of a large New York Jewish clan, all the relations thought him old-fashioned, with his banjo and fiddle playing, the same instruments he'd taught Mike to play before Mike was ten.
Mike knew his grandfather wasn't old fashioned, though. The old man had been picking up Amazing This and Popular That at the newsstand for years and sharing them with his precocious, frenetic, problem-child of a grandson.
After that first trip to the Fair, Grandpa was a q
uiet visionary no more—a result of the same run-in with Yorkville street toughs that had altered the old man's physiognomy, or so some in the family theorized. From whatever cause, in his last two years of life Grandfather Sakler experienced a personal Indian summer, a blaze of fierce, bright, quirky creativity in his closing days. He began keeping a journal and corresponding with world leaders and thinkers, especially Albert Einstein, with whom he met once (by accident) at the Fair and, later, by appointment at Princeton—twice.
Now, amid his deepest fog, Mike remembered the trunkload of Fair memorabilia he inherited from the old man. Rummaging with sudden furious energy through closets and drawers in the eight empty bedrooms and the enormous party room on the top floor of his cavernous house, he found he couldn't remember where he'd stored the trunk.
He staggered down his house's great spiral staircase to the main floor and pillaged more storage spaces. Fear and frustration gnawing at him, he stumbled down one last circuit of the turning stairway. In a spare basement room he finally found it: the musty sealed steamer trunk that was his legacy from an old man dead more than fifty years.
Inside, he found journals and correspondence and other writings, an intriguing but inexplicable device apparently handcrafted by the old man, even a full suit of what appeared to be his grandfather's clothes, smelling slightly of smoke, with fine shoes and shirts and underwear, too, wrapped in a garment bag that had grown brittle with age.
All the Fair memorabilia was still there. The Trylon and Perisphere-adorned orange and blue high-modern Official Souvenir Book. Democracity clocks. Fair plates and puzzles and radios. Heinz pickle pins and a crop of GM-Futurama “I Have Seen The Future” buttons—of which the old man had been particularly fond.
Mike hadn't looked at any of this stuff since the early ‘50s and had looked at none of it thoroughly at any time. What he remembered, from his previous glances through it, was embarrassment—and fear that, in his final years, his grandfather had become a slightly crazed technobabbler, his notebooks full of inexplicable terms, diagrams, and equations.
What caught his eye now were the photos. In the shots taken before May 1939, the family resemblance that was always there was never so striking as it was in those images taken after that first trip to the World's Fair.
He stared at a fading color picture of himself as a boy. Beside him stood a thin, mostly bald man whose remaining hair and beard were a mix of white and gray and yellow—his grandfather, on one of their later trips to the World's Fair, with the Trylon and Perisphere in the distance behind them.
Mike knew his own visage well enough to see how close the resemblance was between the way the old man looked then and the way he himself looked now. It was almost as if the boy had grown up to become his own grandfather.
Grabbing the trunk by both handles, he hauled it upstairs. Its weight forced him to pause and lean against the railings or wall of the stairwell every few feet. When he reached his office, he set the trunk down beside his eight-by-twenty-foot worktable.
Clearing his Cord-related stuff from the workspace, he removed the trunk's contents and spread them out over the table's broad top. Up came the suit of clothes and other garments. The sharp leather shoes, too.
Next came all the memorabilia, the flyers, the brochures, the programs. The oxymoronic prose of the captions describing GM's Futurama, “a vast miniature cross section of America as it may conceivably appear two decades hence...."
He sat down slowly in the chair at the worktable. Looking more carefully through the correspondence and the writings again after all these years, Mike thought that the notes now seemed less demented than eerily prescient. Here, paper-clipped to a page of typed notes in a binder, was a letter apparently sent from Einstein himself:
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Matter can be made to “degrade” into energy more readily than energy can be made to “upgrade” into matter. I do not, however, believe matter and energy are just types of information, as you have suggested, or that there is a spectrum linking them such that consciousness is just a more complex form of information than matter or energy. Nor do I believe that consciousness can be made to “degrade” more readily into matter and energy than matter and energy can be made to “upgrade” into consciousness. Although the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, the distinction between energy, matter, and consciousness is not.
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Indeed the notes from that page on were most curious. “Planck energy for opening gap in spacetime fabric = 1019 billion electron volts,” read one, but then that was crossed out with a large X as the writer of the notes took a different tack.
"At each bifurcation point,” read the next, “flux occurs in which many potential futures are present. Iteration and amplification mean one future is chosen and others disappear. In bifurcations the past is continually recycled, held timeless in eddies or closed timelike curves, stabilized through feedback. Time is turbulently recurrent, expressing self-similarity across different scales."
After a flurry of equations came an underlined conclusion: “Human nervous system both classical and quantum, exploits quantum scale processes to accomplish macroscale ends—solution lies in phase-locking feedback!"
Mike picked up a page with a meticulously hand-plotted diagram, hauntingly beautiful in its elegant simplicity. When he looked at it more closely, he found the diagram was labeled with questions: “Closed Timelike Rossler Attractor? Temporal Mobius in Phase Space?” Below the question was the note, “Always incompleteness and missing information at the center. The shape of uncertainty shapes certainty."
What pushed Mike back in his chair, however, was how much the “Temporal Mobius in Phase Space” resembled an idealized, abstract image of Perisphere, Trylon, and Helicline. Looking away from the image, he realized that the sun was up, that his head hurt with hangover, and—something else. Bifurcations? Self-similarity? Phase-locking feedback? Phase space? That was the language of chaos theory!
His hand trembled as he flipped through more and more pages of detailed notes, until he reached the inside back cover of the notebook-binder. Taped to it was an ancient envelope, with the words MICHAEL SAKLER written on it. With a shaky hand he pulled the envelope loose from the notebook and opened it.
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LETTER TO MYSELF:
If Professor Einstein is right about what he calls a “Temporal Mobius” and I am right about the role consciousness plays on the information spectrum, then reading this letter is about to stop you from drinking yourself to slow suicide. Perhaps you have by now realized that these notes are memories of the future, not only mine in 1939, but also yours. In 1997 you have not written these notes yet, but you will—in 1939.
As a boy, we first traveled with Grandfather Sakler to the Fair on May 28, 1939, to witness the opening of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. Albert Einstein speaks there, and that day you—I—meet him for the first time. The old man whom the boy returns home with is not his grandfather. It is himself from sixty years into that boy's future.
Why must “we” go through such temporal acrobatics? I'm glad I asked. If we don't, our grandfather will be brutally murdered after running out of gas in Yorkville on the night of May 28. The very fact that this temporal Mobius exists proves that possibility.
On one timeline, embittered by our grandfather's death, one of the many possible “us” devotes his life to inventing a time-travel device and uses it to return to 1939 to save our already severely injured Grandfather by sending him into the future. He—we—I—remain in 1939, taking over the role of that grandfather. The boy is spared the suffering and grief of seeing his grandfather die from his injuries.
In creating the device and using it to alter his own timeline, however, our other self on that line creates a temporal paradox. On that timeline, Grandfather Sakler is killed and as a result one of us grows up to create the device that will allow him to travel back to 1939 to prevent Grandfather Sakler's murder. Preventing Grandpa's murder, however, means
none of us ever grows up to become the man who invents the device to prevent Grandpa's murder. Therefore Grandfather Sakler is killed and one of us grows up to create the device that will allow him to ... et cetera, et cetera.
Professor Einstein tells me the structure of the universe will not tolerate such an endless conundrum. Instead it conserves its own integrity by melding the two timelines together into “the temporal equivalent of a Mobius strip"—something both and neither loop and intersection. On such a dimension- collapsing Mobius, “either/or” (either Grandpa is saved or the device is created) becomes “not only/but also” (not only is Grandpa saved but the device is also created).
We have, in some sense, been “grandfathered into” this temporal loophole, but at a cost. The price of this shift to “not only/but also” is the energy of our eternal vigilance. If we want his murder to never again recur, we must ever again prevent its recurrence.
I know this is difficult for you to understand at first, but if you choose to perpetuate this recurrence, you will learn that time travel is less like running a particle accelerator and more like experiencing a lucid dream or particularly vivid memory.
Utilizing the chaotic effects always present in consciousness, we can exploit time's turbulent and strange-attractive properties to burst the surface tension of spacetime at far, far less than Planck energy. I know we can, because we already have.
For us, it's not only the dream of the doing that's grandfather to the memory of the accomplishment, but also the reverse: The memory of the accomplishment is grandfather to the dream of the doing.
Analog SFF, March 2008 Page 16