“I see,” I said. “It’s not so bad if they all obey the rules of the road and the parking restrictions, and show a little patience when things get sticky—but when frustrations build up, it only takes one little bump to set them off.”
“Yes,” she said, blatantly ignoring my previous complaint. Some people let uniforms go to their heads, and become unreasonably officious while wearing them, but I don’t believe that she was that sort of person. Like me, she was doing her best.
“Not such a little bump, though, to bounce them two hundred million years,” I observed. “Or is two hundred million years just a blink of Brahma’s eye in the context of the great kalpa?”
“Yes,” she said, again—but again she relented, and added: “There is a logic to it, although it’s no more obvious to them than it is to you. There’s a reason for the traffic, just as there’s a reason for the rules. Dark matter holds the galaxies together, for now, and dark time protects the integrity of cause-and-effect, for now.”
“For now?” I echoed.
“Obviously, for now. That’s what now is.”
“But there won’t always be a now?”
“Of course there’ll always be a now—but it’s not as simple as that. There’ll always be a then, too, but there’ll also be an eternal if, just as there always has been. In the fullness of time....” She paused.
“Go on,” I said, “In the fullness of time...what?”
“That,” she said, as she turned back into a shadow, “is the question.”
I couldn’t resist saying: “I thought to be or not to be was the question,” even though I was talking to nothing. I don’t often get the chance to think of lines like that, and it was disappointing not to have been able to get it out on time. I had to imagine her reply— which was, of course, “Yes, of course.”
I told myself that I’d been dreaming, but I didn’t believe it. I also told myself to hang on tight to the dream I hadn’t been dreaming, just in case I could bring back a little of that other self, in spite of the pressure of time and the flesh, and welcome it into my soul forever. I tried...and if nothing else, I remembered.
I think I did a little more than that, and maybe just thinking that was enough, because I’ve hardly thrown up more than half a dozen times since then, and even though I’ve put on a little weight, I don’t feel bad about it. I don’t feel bad about being hungry, and I don’t feel bad about eating—not often, anyhow. I think I’m cured, or very nearly, and if I had to go a little bit crazy in order to get to that point in my life, I don’t mind, so long as it’s the kind of craziness that doesn’t hurt me, or anyone else.
I did what I could to check, by the way, and so far as I can tell from the surviving fossil evidence—which is extremely limited—I really was in the late Triassic, and it really was the way it looks in those overcrowded pictures in the books they sell to kids, with all the species the artist can depict crammed into every double-page spread. The place really was teeming with life, and the pace really was as hectic as I’ve tried to make it seem.
The world really was young then, and full of vigor. Life has mellowed since—all of life. It’s become more mature, more refined, more measured...not so much, I suspect, because we’ve all evolved, as because the atmosphere isn’t full of psychotropic perfumes any more. We can’t get high as easily nowadays; our nervous systems aren’t in such a state of perpetual jangling excitement.
Maybe, however implausible it seems, it was the time police’s drug squad that put the whole era off-limits to time-travelers. I’m not so sure that my estimates of possibility and plausibility can be trusted now, though, any more than they could when I was cleaner than clean. I could easily believe that the whole thing was a dream, and a dream that didn’t really make sense, if it weren’t for the fact that if it were a dream, I’d have to take responsibility for it, and try to figure out what my subconscious was trying to tell me—whereas, if it were real, as I assume it was, it was just something that happened to me, and by not killing me, made me stronger.
I hope that I can still hang on to that assumption, now that I’ve let the story out and exposed it to the cold light of public scrutiny, but I think I’m ready, at last, to take that chance. If it all evaporates, it evaporates, but I hope it won’t. I hope it will continue to be real, and true—and to help me, if I need that kind of help, to be me.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Using Twisted Logic
Milly’s bad mood was not lifted by the welcoming response that her story received. Sensing her need for additional support, the members tried even harder than usual to put her at her ease, but she seemed unable to respond.
As soon as they were alone in the car, Milly let out the mother of all sighs. Steve estimated that it must have beaten her previous personal best by several cubic centimeters of exhalation, but even that didn’t seem to bring her any relief.
“I’m sorry,” she said. It seemed more like an expression of bitterness than genuine apology, and it made Steve feel even more uncomfortable than he already was . He wanted to make her feel better, but had no idea how.
“It’s okay,” he said, tentatively, and he steered westwards. “I know it’s a bad time. I’m the one who should apologize. I should be able to offer you more comfort, more support.”
“Do you even know what I’m apologizing for?” Milly asked, scathingly.
“Probably not,” Steve admitted. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to apologize for anything. Not to me.”
“We’re not in the meeting any more,” she said. “You don’t have to follow the rules now that it’s just you and me. If I’d wanted that kind of support twenty-four seven, I’d have picked someone from the group for a boy-friend.”
“You did,” Steve pointed out.
She sighed again at that. “So I did,” she agreed. “What I was apologizing for, by the way—what I thought I ought to apologize for—is the lousiness of my story. I don’t know why it was so lousy, given that it’s the only one I’ve heard in months that had dinosaurs in it, and ray guns, and anything that a reasonable person might call action, but I have to admit that it was lousy. It was upside-down, for one thing. The conversation bit should have come before the action, not after. After is always bound to be an anticlimax. Nobody else’s subconscious makes that kind of mistake—I bet yours didn’t.”
“It wasn’t lousy,” Steve said, without responding to the final remark. “In fact, I found it extremely interesting, and tantalizingly puzzling, too.”
“Well,” she said, sourly, “I’m glad it provided fodder for your theories. Did I mention that I have to go back to Bath tomorrow?”
“Not specifically,” Steve said, “but I assumed it.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t have left—Mum certainly thought so. Dad doesn’t know anything about it, thank God, but Mum needs me, so she says. She doesn’t. She just disapproves of me deserting what she thinks of as my post. She doesn’t believe I came back for the meeting. She thinks I’m such a nymphomaniac that I couldn’t stand another night without getting shagged senseless. She has no idea— not that you can’t shag me to your heart’s content, mind, given that I don’t know when we’ll find another opportunity, but I hope you’ll forgive me if my brain’s not fully engaged.”
“We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to,” Steve said.
“If we don’t,” she said, ominously, “I’ll only worry about what you’ve been getting up to while I was away. Not that I have any unique claim on you, obviously. You’re free to make your own arrangements while the cat’s away.”
“Contrary to popular belief,” Steve said, nettled by her tone, “I’m not a sex addict. I haven’t done anything untoward while you’ve been away. I didn’t exchange two words with Janine at that stupid quiz night, and I didn’t make a pass at your friend Alison when she came looking for you.”
“Alison came looking for me?” Milly sounded astonished, but h
er tone didn’t freeze up the way it had when Steve had mentioned the Royal Oak.
“Yes. She want to make things right. She told me what really happened.”
“And you believed her?”
“Yes, I did. You really ought to talk to her, Milly. I know you don’t really think that she’s lying about letting the cat out of the bag accidentally. I think you’re just ashamed about the letter you wrote.”
“She told you about that too?” Milly said, carefully keeping her tone as neutral as possible.
“Yes.”
“You must have had quite a chat. Did you really turn her down when she ripped her clothes off and begged you to screw her?”
“She didn’t. She never even took her raincoat off. We just talked.”
“You liked her, didn’t you?” Milly said, accusingly. “She got round you. Did she cry? Did she tell you what a beast I’ve always been to her, and how Janine’s always lorded it over her because she’s so plain? Did she make you feel sorry for her?
“As it happens,” Steve admitted, “I did quite like her, although she didn’t go out of her way to play on my sympathies. I think you like her too, in spite of the fact that the jokey insults got way out of hand for a while. For what it’s worth, I think you should make up with her.”
“Well, I suppose you might as well fuck her too,” Milly said, after a pause, her voice recovering its bitter taint. “Then you’ll have the unholy hat-trick to your credit. Maybe we can all make up, and you can have us all in perpetuity. It’s every man’s dream, isn’t it, to have his own private harem? Secret of the universe: men are polygamous, women monogamous. Evolution’s little joke—no wonder we’re scheduled for early extinction. Does Janine know that Alison’s been crying on your shoulder.”
“Janine gave her my address,” Steve said.
“Of course she did,” Milly said, striking her forehead in a mock-melodramatic fashion. “She sent her round to pay me back, didn’t she? She wouldn’t lower herself to get her own knickers dirty, so she sent Ali the Slut. Perfect. You really should have gone along with it, you know. I’m not much good to you, for the time being, and you’ll need to get your end away somewhere, won’t you? Abstinence isn’t really your thing, is it? We don’t want you being driven to distraction by all that juicy jailbait up at the comp, do we?”
“Don’t be like that, Milly,” Steve said. “I thought we were past that stage. Walter Wainwright gave me a long lecture last Saturday on the benefits of friends supporting one another unquestioningly, refraining from judgment or skepticism. Actually, he talked a lot of sense. If you and Janine and Alison could fix things up between yourselves....”
“Oh, shut up, Steve! It’s easy enough for Walter Wainwright to talk sense, now that he’s way past the age of competition. I bet it wasn’t so easy when he, Amelia and Neville were locked in passionate complications, with or without their respective spouses. You do realize, I suppose, that if Janine, Alison and I were to repair our three-way friendship, the price of peace might be that none of us would ever have anything further to do with you, this side of the end of the world?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Steve admitted.
“And then you thought that maybe you’d be better off without us—good riddance to the whole unholy trinity?”
“No,” Steve said.
“Just me, then. You want me to make it up with Alison so that you and Janine can get back together?”
“No,” Steve said, a little less certainly than before. He expected more bile in response to his uncertainty, but Milly fell silent. She stared out of the window in the passenger door, although there was little enough to be seen. The stretch of road along which they were traveling had no street-lights.
After a three-minute pause, Milly pulled herself together again, and repeated: “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” Steve asked, cautiously
“For everything. Being such a cow. Taking it out on you. It wouldn’t be fair, even if you’d done something, but you haven’t. I let things get on top of me. Dad, leaving to come back here, the meeting...everything.”
“It’s not your fault,” Steve said. “The situation with your Dad’s about as bad as such situations get. It’s bound to take its toll.”
“No reason why it should take its toll on you too,” she said. “I’m not actually trying to drive you away, you know, whatever it looks like. You’re all I’ve got—the best thing I’ve got, at any rate. I’m sorry I wasn’t as pleased to see you as I should have been, and that I’m still spiky now. I can’t help it.”
“It’s okay,” he said, inadequately. Then, desperate to find something to say that might ease the situation, he said: “Your story really was interesting. You might not care any more about my theory than Walter or the rest of the group, but it’s important to me, and your story fit in very nicely. It raises some very pertinent questions, which I need to think about before I do my party piece in a fortnight’s time. God, it’ll be nearly Christmas then—it’s the day school breaks up. I haven’t given Christmas a single thought. I must tell Mum that I absolutely can’t go home this year, or she’ll be buying food in for me and including me in all her silly plans.”
“I can’t think about that yet,” Milly said, flatly. “I can’t make any plans at all, although I’ll try to be here for the meeting. Tell me about these pertinent questions that you’ll have to think about. I probably need the distraction.”
“Okay,” Steve said, hoping that his relief at being beckoned back to safer ground wasn’t too obvious. “I can’t help wondering why the time police wiped out everyone except you—why they felt it necessary to put you, and you alone, back where you belonged in the time-stream.”
“I wasn’t involved in the actual incident,” Milly reminded him. “I was just an innocent bystander, caught up in it by accident. I didn’t break any laws. That’s what the shadow-lady said.”
“That would be one possible explanation,” Steve conceded.
“Do you have a better one?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think there’s something wrong with hers—I mean mine?”
“Not necessarily,” Steve said. “But I’m not so sure that time police can afford to be as interested in matters of guilt and innocence as a dutiful traffic warden. If their job is to maintain the integrity of the time-stream, why weren’t they just as concerned to make sure that the lizards and the insects got safely back to where they belonged as they were to take care of you?”
Milly thought about that for a few moments, then said: “Maybe they did get safely home. I just saw them vanish—I don’t know for sure that they weren’t sent back, although the shadow-lady said they weren’t. Then again, maybe time-travelers don’t belong in the sense that abductees do, Maybe, once they’ve abstracted themselves from the time-stream in order to skip through some other dimension from one time to another, they’ve already broken the chains of true causation.”
“Both perfectly plausible hypotheses,” Steve conceded. “I wonder whether there’s something else at work, though—something your time-traveling traffic warden was trying to explain when she said that there’s an eternal if confusing the fact that there’ll always be a now and a then. Do you remember Jim’s deer? There may be forces at work deliberately disrupting the time-stream as well as forces repairing it. Maybe those were involved in what happened to you.”
“Except that in your theory, nothing actually happened to me at all,” Milly said, her tone changing again as she lost the ability to lose herself in what seemed to her to be an idle flight of fancy. “Or to Jim, or Megan, or anybody else. It’s all just dreaming.”
“Not just dreaming,” Steve said, trying to prolong the intermission in her suffering.
“Unjust dreaming, then,” she said, with a brief flash of her customary wit. “The collective unconscious trying to remake itself, and fucking us over while it does it, by feeding us all kinds of pseudoreality tripe. I’m sorry, Steve, I know y
ou’re only trying to help—to save me from thinking about Dad, or about Janine and Alison, for that matter—but it isn’t working.”
“It’s okay,” Steve said, again. “No need to apologize. Not your fault.” He gripped the steering-wheel a little harder, glad that the lights of the city center were now in view, as well as the reddish pall that always hung over the city on cloudy nights, like a hazy umbrella.
Milly sighed again. “There’s no soothing me tonight, I’m afraid,” she said. “Too tightly wound to unwind. Sometimes, I think I might never unwind again. You ought to be thankful, really, that I’m only here for the one night. I can do one night, I think—but I’d be a really lousy lay these days if we were together all the time, and that would be a really bad move, relationship-wise. I’ll do my level best not to go away again leaving you glad that I’ve gone, desperate to find a replacement before I come back. You must have had much easier girl-friends than me in your time.”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 32