"Good morning,” he said as she drew near. “It's a lovely morning, a lovely time of day."
An Englishman? Canadian? Possibly even an American. He had no trace of an accent. She nodded at him and sat down.
The light was changing from the soft pearliness of predawn to a more luminous, sharper light, the mist was dissipating and the world was taking on distinct edges, defined shapes where there had been suggestions of shapes.
She blinked. Before her was an expanse as black and smooth as polished ebony. Then there was a ripple, another, and with astonishing swiftness a golden aura spread over the surface, to be shattered by a roiling eruption, a crashing turbulence that cast golden waters into the air like glittering beads of gold, showers of gold, geysers of gold, fountains of gold. Arising in the waves were horses, snorting, neighing, tossing their heads, scattering more gold. Their riders were maidens bent low over streaming manes, and in their midst stood a powerful man who commanded the waves to cease, and there was calm.
She didn't know when she had risen, if she had cried out, but the stranger was at her side, his hand steadying her, and the Fountain of Neptune was a fountain.
"Are you all right?” he asked.
She moistened her lips, nodded. “A dizzy spell,” she said weakly. “It's over."
"Perhaps a coffee?” he said. “You're very pale. You're trembling."
She groped for the bench and sat down. “I just need a moment,” she said. Her heart was thumping wildly, her breathing ragged.
He sat on the same bench, and they both gazed at the fountain.
"They call this the Eternal City,” he said in a reflective manner. “People link the phrase to the Catholic Church, of course, but it was an eternal city long before the church was founded. Eternity stretches both ways, to forever. Some say the old gods are still alive in the real eternal city. Perhaps they do yet live. Perhaps, like the city, they are eternal."
He was talking to calm her, she thought. Maybe he had been afraid she would faint, fall down, and now he was waiting to make certain she was all right. She glanced at him. “You're not Italian, are you?” she said, not for information, but in order to let him know he could leave now, she had recovered. Just a momentary dizzy spell.
"No. I'm a Roman. Antonio Mercurio. Are you certain you don't want a coffee?"
"Thank you, but no. I'll be on my way in a minute or two."
"You saw them, didn't you?” he said in that same reflective tone he had been using.
She stood up quickly, adjusted her shoulder bag, and started to walk away fast, without speaking.
"Don't be afraid, Julia,” he said. “I'll be here for you when you return."
She stopped moving and for a time she did not even breathe. Dear God, she thought then, he was part of it, part of her hallucination, no more real than the golden water of the sea, no more real than the snorting, neighing horses. He knew her name. Of course he did. He was her creation and knew whatever she knew. Suddenly she wanted a cup of coffee, hot and black and very strong coffee, but she did not move. Her vision had become too blurred to dare take a step. Shapes that minutes before had hard distinct edges had become shadow figures.
"Now we will have coffee,” he said at her side, his hand firm on her arm. She did not resist, but let him lead her through a world of shadows, around a corner, to a chair.
"It passes quickly,” she said. “Please do not concern yourself with me."
It was already passing. An awning overhead, tables with place mats, an elderly gentleman reading a newspaper with an espresso before him. He lowered the paper, smiled broadly at her companion, and spoke in rapid-fire Italian, too fast for her to follow.
The man across the table from her returned the smile and replied briefly. She bit her lip. Stock phrases she had memorized? Something she had learned and consciously had forgotten?
"Why would the Roman gods alone be eternal?” she asked, and felt that the question had come almost out of desperation for something to say, something that was not the something that needed to be said. Was the table, the other customer, all of it one big hallucinatory experience? Where was the start and end of it?
"Not just the Roman gods,” he said, smiling slightly at her. “Perhaps all of them. These are the gods you heard and responded to. Few hear, fewer respond, and even fewer admit the evidence of their senses."
"If I had responded to Vishnu, I would be in Calcutta sipping tea,” she murmured. “Is that your meaning?"
He laughed.
She looked away from him, at the street where shopkeepers were starting to open awnings, to put out signs advertising their wares, arrange pastries in windows, open freezer cases with gelato.... Although it all looked real, concrete, she no longer felt any trust in the evidence of her senses. The evidence of her senses was being warped by a growth in her head.
"Perhaps it is granting you freedom to see for the first time what has always been there,” he said.
Resolutely she kept her gaze averted. A waiter came and greeted her companion as an old friend, volubly, effusively, including her in his obvious welcome.
When a fast-paced dialog ensued, she felt her hands trembling again. The waiter laughed, spread his hands, and bowed to her before he withdrew, shaking with laughter.
"Who are you?” she whispered.
"I told you. Antonio Mercurio."
She resisted the temptation to look at his feet clad in sandals, and he laughed again. “No, no wings on my heels."
"I'm going mad,” she said in the same low voice, hardly above a whisper. “I see illusions, hallucinations. I don't know what's real, what isn't."
"Reality has many faces,” he said. “You have completed the first two parts. There is one remaining. You must admit the evidence of your senses."
She shook her head. The waiter returned with coffee and they spoke words she could not understand. She gripped her coffee cup, welcoming the heat.
"What did you see in your pictures?” Mercurio asked when the waiter left once more.
"Changes, a sequence of changes. I hallucinated them to illustrate a story in my head. There weren't any real changes."
"Was the sequence finished?"
"I don't know."
"And at dawn, what did you see?"
She shook her head harder, risking blurred vision again.
"When we leave, you must choose. Turn left and I'll walk with you to your bus and wait for it with you. Turn right, and we return."
"Back to the Fountain of Neptune."
"Fontana di Netunne,” he said. “And you must then tell me what you saw at dawn."
Back to her apartment, probably a doctor, hospital. She pushed her coffee cup back and rose from her chair, and they took the few steps to the sidewalk where she paused, then turned right.
"I saw a golden sea, horses rising with maiden riders, I saw Neptune command the waves to stop roiling and crashing, and there was a calm golden sea."
They approached the fountain, and now the sequence was finished. Neptune had completed his gesture. His gaze was on her, his extended hand reached out to her, and with Mercury at her side she walked into the warm, golden water of Netunne's sea.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The 400-Million-Year Itch by Steven Utley
Steven Utley's most recent project is an anthology coedited with Michael Bishop, Passing for Human. For most of the past decade, he has been writing a series of linked stories about researchers who travel back in time to the Silurian Age. Since our Dec. 2000 issue, we've published seven of the stories, including “Invisible Kingdoms,” “Promised Land,” and “A Paleozoic Palimpsest.” (Check our Website to see if we've reprinted one of them this month.) You needn't have read any of the previous ones to enjoy this latest look at those who ventured back in time.
* * * *
"One gets a bad habit of being unhappy."
—George Eliot
* * * *
She had told the earnest young man repeatedly, “I have no
interesting stories to tell.” He was determined to interview her, however, and now they sat on opposite sides of the small glass-topped table in the garden room of her home in Riverside. The robutler had brought tea and tea things and retired discreetly. “I can't tell you anything that isn't already in the books. I can't tell you who said what to whom. I have a terrible memory for dates. I can't even remember most of the names."
The young man indicated the perfectly set table and smiled disarmingly and said, “Perhaps one of those might help."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I read somewhere that a crumb of madeleine soaked in tea can be a wonderful memory aid."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
He seemed nonplused by the utter collapse of his bon mot. He recovered quickly, though, and said, “What's missing from the books is you and your view of things. You were there through the early days. The exciting part."
"The exciting part. Well.” She laughed a shivery, silvery laugh. “It recedes in the memory even when I want to think about it. It's become as distant and unreal to me as the Paleozoic itself. There was hardly anything to the Paleozoic, nothing vivid or extreme, unless you count the monotony. It was just like any lonely and desolate place in the world today, without any particular—peculiar element of danger of its own."
"How do you mean?"
"Oh, you don't have to go through a spacetime anomaly to Laurentia to drown or die of dehydration. Any modern desert will do, or any hot day in a major city, for that matter. And you can drown in your own bath tub. And Gondwana, I understand, all Gondwana was, was just Antarctica on a much bigger scale. Four whole continents, including Antarctica itself, plus India, jammed together and sitting right on the South Pole. You can go freeze your tail off in Antarctica. That's if you want to go all the way to Antarctica to do what you could do in Wisconsin in the wintertime.”
He smiled, all calculated winsomeness. “I'm sorry, but I just find that very hard to believe. Spacetime anomalies, the primeval earth, prehistoric animals—"
"Small prehistoric animals."
"What about sea scorpions?"
"I think their reputation for ferocity must have been grossly inflated. I never heard of anybody being hurt by one."
"Then what about the so-called jump?"
"The jump doesn't count. That was just how you got there. It rattled my teeth some. It was extremely rough on a few people. Chalk that up to the vagaries of spacetime anomalies. But once you got there, the only extreme thing about it was the monotony. Unless you're the kind who oohed and aahed over trilobites, and even then I'm not sure you'd be distracted for very long. Alcoholism was rampant. So were—you see, when you jump, you go through with all your human baggage. You still have to face the day every morning and deal with other people and get things done. You still have to be who you are. Sometimes who you are isn't enough. Sometimes it's too much."
"Still—hardly humdrum stuff. Plus, you knew and worked intimately with one of the true titans of science."
She fixed a glittering eye upon him. “Yes."
"It must have been great, working with him."
"It,” she said, and considered her next words very carefully.
* * * *
"Amy, if I have to go,” Cutsinger had told her, “you have to go, too."
They were lingering over dinner, mildly drunk on wine, Cutsinger humorously self-mocking, but, still, serious in what he proposed they do.
"Well,” she said, “You know you don't have to go. Frankly, I'm surprised you'd consider it. We can work on the new book here. You wouldn't have to leave the house."
He nodded. “And yet I feel I do have to go. Much as the Wright brothers had to go up in their aeroplane, or Bell had to speak into his telephone."
"It's not like you invented the spacetime anomaly.”
He laughed softly. “Despite my protests, less rigorously accurate practitioners of the journalistic trade have created that impression in the public mind. I am the wizard of time."
He was, she knew, not being falsely modest. He had not only understood what the anomaly was, how it could be exploited, and had been able to describe lucidly its least arcane aspects, so that a difficult concept could be comprehended, with a modicum of mental effort, by untrained minds—those of the general public and, more particularly, of people charged with overseeing allocation of funds. In short, he had fired everyone's imagination. Not that he possessed an especially winning manner or that, as the saying went, the television camera loved him. Time Travel Into The Past, inaccurate though the phrase was, had virtually sold itself.
"I am,” Cutsinger said, “popularly and inextricably associated with the phenomenon of the anomaly and the Paleozoic expedition. So of course I must go through the anomaly myself. The public, damn them, expect it.”
"Didn't you always use to tell your classes that quantum physics isn't a hands-on science? Anyway, it wouldn't be a pleasure trip. That first man who went through the anomaly said it's about as pleasurable as getting hit by lightning can be."
"Not to go,” he explained in a heavy self-mocking tone, “will demote The Wizard of Time from the magnitude of a Columbus, a Magellan, to that of a mere Henry the Navigator."
"Prince Henry did vital work without ever putting to sea."
"Yes. But everyone remembers Columbus."
So that had been that.
Yet from their first day after they had gone through the anomaly, there were signs of trouble. Having recovered from the effects of the transfer, she had acted upon a natural impulse to see the strange prehistoric world they now inhabited. Cutsinger had looked irritated and told her, “We have an awful lot of work to do, and we should get to it.” She could not always be put off, however, but asked directions and immediately headed topside. At the bottom of a ladder she looked up and saw blue sky and serene clouds. When she emerged onto a catwalk just under the overhang of the helicopter deck there was the calm black sea, and covering it like gelatin as far as she could see were the iridescent float-sacs of thousands upon thousands of graptolite colonies. She turned and saw two bluejackets nearby, laughed and pointed, and they laughed, too, waved, exchanged inaudible comments between themselves, then laughed even harder. Suddenly abashed, she returned below, to Cutsinger, nervous and sweating at the bottom of the ladder. Now that he had indulged her on this occasion, he testily declared that it was time to buckle down and get to work.
The work in question consisted in unpacking and pawing through and generally disarranging notes for Cutsinger's next book. After two hours, Cutsinger abruptly said something about wanting to look in on the jump station.
Amy sat on the edge of her bunk and looked deep into the future and recalled a line from H. G. Wells, to the effect that people were always amazed by the obvious results of their actions. She knew she could have predicted this. The great man suffered from agoraphobia. He could function perfectly well in a large room full of people—the consensus was that he had acquitted himself brilliantly in the early press conferences—for he said that he was fine as long as he had walls around him and a ceiling above. Enclosement equaled security. The big outdoors, however, the open sky, land, and sea, filled him with dread. Now he might risk nausea and glance through a porthole, to calculate the time of day—the familiar twenty-four-hour clock was useless here, maddeningly out of synch with the speeded-up days and nights—but remove him from the protection of a room, and he began to fidget and sweat, to tremble and stammer. And there were no skies, no lands, and no seas more open, more terrifying in the emptiness of the vistas they presented, than those of the Paleozoic.
I knew this, she thought, I knew this I knew this I knew this. He will never leave the ship. He will never go topside. Here we'll remain for month upon month, officially on an expenses-paid sabbatical but actually entombed in this ship. I knew this. She knew he was a theoretician who would have nothing to do with the running of the jump station, though he might spend inordinate amounts of time within its ozone-scented conf
ines. The technicians there knew their jobs and would have little interest in the theoretical end of things, and in due course they would regard Cutsinger as a pain in the butt. I knew all this, she said, and still I let it happen.
That evening, their first in Paleozoic time, they were to dine at the captain's table. The captain, they had been reliably informed, was Navy to the marrow, always dressed for dinner, and every civilian invited to dine with him—even paleontologists, a notoriously slovenly lot—was expected or in any event felt obliged to follow suit, to the exhaustion of sartorial resources. Amy had come prepared: she laid out the dinner gown. Cutsinger looked at it dubiously.
"That gown,” he said, “defies every physical law. What keeps it from falling off you?"
"Surface tension."
"Are you really intending to wear that thing?"
"You didn't complain at the Nobels. Anyway, the captain's a stickler for form. Besides, at the Nobels I was just another dame in a gown. Here, I expect to be the only dame in a gown."
She did not regret her choice. The table was immaculately set, the stewards seemed to gleam almost as brightly as the polished service. She found herself seated next to the captain himself and across from a newcomer, introduced as “the famous author” So And So, next to whom sat a volcanologist, also a newcomer. The volcanologist beamed at her and said, “I do Empedocles one better. I go down into the volcano like him, but then I come back out again."
"I'm sorry—who was Empedocles?"
"Ancient Greek fellow who jumped into the crater of Mount Etna to prove whether or not he was immortal. Turned out he wasn't."
"Ah. He must have been very disappointed."
"Well, briefly, yes, I'm sure."
The round of introductions continued. There was a Navy chaplain and, at the far end of the table from the captain, a marine biologist, and another man the captain said had been head of the sleep-disorder center at Cornell University's New York Hospital in Westchester County. “I'm not sure,” the captain admitted, “how to describe what you're doing in Paleozoic time, Doctor."
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