FSF, April 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  "Observing all the observers,” said the sleep-disorder expert with a quick smile.

  "As you can see,” the captain said to Amy, “there is a good deal more to this expedition than simply a bunch of paleontologists collecting trilobites and primitive plants. There are soil scientists here, and an astronomy team."

  Probably inevitably, the first question directed to the author was, “What have you written?” and clearly he had been expecting it, or at least hoping for it. He was a large man whose heavy egg-shaped head surmounted a heavy egg-shaped body. He patted his red lips with his napkin and favored his questioner, the chaplain, with a warm smile. “Fiction, for the most part,” he said. “Perhaps you've read something of mine."

  Everyone else at the table appeared more or less to doubt it, but the chaplain, being the sort of man he was, asked, “Please, what are some titles?"

  "Anomalous Al had just been published and Planet Janet was still on the bestseller list back home when I left to come here."

  "Ah,” said the chaplain. “Science fiction."

  The author grinned. “What other kind is there?"

  "Space travel,” the captain put in helpfully, “alien life-forms,” and Amy herself contributed, “Spacetime anomalies,” drawing a darting look from Cutsinger.

  "My light reading matter of choice,” the chaplain said apologetically, “is mythology."

  "All I read,” said the volcanologist, not in the least apologetically, “are murder mysteries."

  "I'm afraid,” Amy said, “about all I read are the scientific journals."

  The captain offered the crestfallen author a regretful look, and the volcanologist asked, “Do you use Ediot to write your stories?"

  The author fixed him with a suddenly cold eye and answered frostily, “I do all my own writing. All my own."

  "No offense. I just—you know what they say. ‘Ediot, the salvation of many a writing-challenged author.’ Not to imply that you're writing-challenged. But I do a fair amount of writing myself. Technical stuff, reports, still, I find it's hard work. I use any help I can get."

  "A creative, idiosyncratic writer is on his own. Ediot is for formal memoranda and other business correspondence. It was conceived with those ends in mind. It's purposely devoid of personality. So it doesn't do idiosyncrasy well."

  The volcanologist grinned. “Still, I understand it's been used by some uncreative, unidiosyncratic writers to turn out a commercially viable work or two."

  The author said, “I don't deny that,” but looked as though he wished that he could.

  "Still—"

  To avert an outbreak of hostilities, the chaplain said, “Are you here to research a new time-travel story?"

  "Time travel is part of my stock in trade, of course. But I have to confess I much prefer space-travel stories. Some people go somewhere in a starship and find something peculiar. This junket is something my agent sold my publisher on. If memory serves, their exact words were, ‘The Paleozoic expedition has produced a lot of scientific papers, but it hasn't inspired a thing in the way of literature or art.’”

  "Oh, I dunno,” said the volcanologist. “I read a mystery once about this detective who investigates a—something to do with smuggling trilobite larvae, exotic pets, exotic plants, back to the twenty-first century. Was that something of yours?"

  "No, but in Anomalous Al there's—"

  "The smuggling,” the unheeding volcanologist went on, “was just to set everything else in motion, of course, and get you to all the good stuff you expect to find in a detective story. Dead bodies turning up everywhere, beatings, a beautiful nymphomaniac volcanologist! The main bad guy—"

  "Please,” said the chaplain, “don't tell us. We might find ourselves watching that show one of these days. At least up to the point where the beautiful nymphomaniac comes into the plot."

  "You might not last that long, Chaplain. I didn't say it was any good."

  The author avoided looking at the volcanologist and said evenly, “As my agent and publisher were saying, about literature. ‘The old whaling industry begot Moby-Dick, the Civil War begot The Red Badge of Courage, World War One begot—"

  "World War Two!” The volcanologist laughed. “And then World War Two begat rockets and atomic bombs, which misbegat a lot of wretched pulp fiction!"

  The author leaned away from the volcanologist, for whom his dislike was becoming palpable, and the latter, who patently did not care, said to the chaplain, “So, you came all this way to tend the local flock?"

  The chaplain was a wiry fortyish man with alert eyes and laugh lines around his mouth, and Amy had already decided that she liked his looks. To his further credit, she thought, he received the question as though it were not entirely inane. “Part of it,” he said. “The Protestant portion of it.” He smiled at the author, turned his head to flash it at Amy as well. “We have a priest and a rabbi on board, too."

  "Ah, of course,” said the volcanologist. “Even Navy men of the cloth are specialists. And I imagine there'd be a mullah, too, if there were any Muslims attached to the expedition."

  "There are some Muslims. Some Buddhists and Hindus, too."

  "Do they just fend for themselves?"

  "The Navy,” the captain put in from his end of the table, “is only as good as its efforts to maintain its personnel at a peak of physical, mental, and spiritual health."

  "How good of the Navy,” the volcanologist said, “to see to everyone's needs! And lead them not into temptation, either. The Navy doesn't provide grog and brothels for its people, does it, Captain?"

  The captain looked as though he had bitten into something rancid on the end of his fork. “Certainly not!"

  "But,” the chaplain said, as easily as before, “there are still plenty of temptations, even here. Most of the enlisted personnel are men and women in their twenties. All volunteers, of course, and many of them with families back home. They're young, nevertheless, and a long way from home."

  "Then I'm sure it's a good thing that experience has taught the Navy to prefer liberal men of the cloth to reactionary ones."

  "Well—"

  "After all, what could be more hellish than to be trapped with some raging Calvinist on a ship on the open sea, and a prehistoric sea at that? Seasick, four hundred million years from home, and predestined to eternal damnation! Under such conditions, anyone's morale would collapse! To say nothing of his morals.” The volcanologist winked at Amy. “Or hers."

  In spite of herself, or in spite of Cutsinger, she smiled.

  "It sounds pretty hellish, all right,” the chaplain agreed. “The great radicalizing experience of my life—apart from when I felt the call to God's service, that's as radicalizing as it gets—I felt pure revulsion at the ideas embodied in Jonathan Edwards's famous sermon, ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’ I find the doctrine of predestination irreconcilable with the concept of a just and loving deity."

  "Well,” said the volcanologist, “even a depraved old secular humanist like me knows that."

  Amy saw Cutsinger glance from the author to the chaplain. “It seems,” he rumbled, “that I'm the raging Calvinist present.” Every face turned toward him, except Amy's. She busied herself with her water glass. “Or,” Cutsinger went on after a second, “the steel-trap determinist, anyhow. You're talking about free will."

  The volcanologist was not easily cowed. He grinned at Cutsinger and said, “Or the next best thing to it."

  "For free will to exist means that in a universe that works on the principle of cause and effect, human beings would have to be exempt from rules that apply to energy and matter in all their other forms."

  "Doctor Cutsinger,” the chaplain said, “that's the basic tenet of Christianity, of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of all religion. An omniscient, omnipotent deity makes the rules but, being also just, merciful, and loving, makes exceptions as well."

  "I don't believe in deities, either. I stopped believing in invisible friends when I was still a child."


  "Perhaps,” the chaplain said good-naturedly, “if you had sought an invisible friend who offered salvation—"

  "I believe in the either-or of quantum physics. Down at the micro level, everything's either-or. Either a particle does this or it does that. The universe replicates itself, each replica accommodates one of the possible outcomes. And every either-or begets still more either-or. Whence, endlessly geometrically multiplying universes. On the macro level, each of us makes choices all the time. Sometimes, afterward, we decide they were the wrong choices. We think, If only I'd done that instead of this, or, If only the other thing had happened and not this thing that has in fact happened. In other universes, we did do the other thing, and something else did happen. In one universe, I do the things that get me into Heaven. In another, I do the things that send me straight to Hell."

  Amy sipped her water and found herself thinking an astonishing thought: Would that it were so.

  The author's grin broadened. “You physicists make me fidget. Always arguing over the significance of fractions of a second."

  "In terms of practical significance,” Cutsinger said, “the argument pertains to nothing less important than fixing this expedition in spacetime."

  "Exactly,” said the chaplain. “Are we in Silurian time, or Devonian?"

  "That,” the volcanologist answered, “is the question most often asked by people who least understand that geologic time operates on quite an inhuman scale. It rarely coincides with human time, and then only catastrophically. The Silurian does not end at midnight on a Wednesday and the Devonian begin at twelve-oh-one on Thursday. There's no catastrophic event such as marks the K-T boundary. The significant revolution that does mark the S-D boundary occurs over a period of millions of years as Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia close on one another like scissor blades. They swing together as if on hinges, incidentally consuming the Iapetus seaway and raising mountain chains we can trace from Spitzbergen to Venezuela. But slowly. Very, very slowly."

  "Yes, of course,” the author said, “I understand. Slowly."

  "Well,” said the chaplain, “I don't mind saying I'm proud to be a member of this expedition. I find it all tremendously exciting. You scientists go forth and come back with the most wonderful lots of specimens, plant, animal, mineral."

  "Don't forget indeterminate.” The marine biologist at the far end of the table had surprised everybody by speaking up. He looked surprised by his own temerity. Then he said, in a slightly nasal tone, “I like things to be organized, yet I know that taxonomy at some level breaks down as surely as quantum mechanics. At whatever points organisms begin to differentiate into the proto-animal, the proto-fungi, and so forth, gross taxonomy becomes subject to its own uncertainty principle."

  * * * *

  She went to her bunk and lay listening to the ship's sounds. She tried lying on her side. She tried lying on her other side, her stomach, her back. She lay with her fists clenched and stared into the darkness, and then she squeezed her eyes shut until her nose stopped up and she had to relax to breathe. What's in the medicine kit for sleepy-time tonight? she wondered. She did not really want to drug herself to sleep, however; she had a hard enough time during the day without a hangover.

  Maybe, she thought, I should just reach through the hatch and grab the first Navy boy who comes by and screw his brains out. Screw myself into a coma. I dimly recall that one often falls asleep after sex.

  Well, she decided, it just might have to be rape or the next-worst thing. To the best of her knowledge the Navy men aboard, officers and ratings alike, simply did not look upon her as anything more than an appendage of Cutsinger's—though the dirtier-minded ones might, perhaps, imagine she was his lover. In truth, while she had suffered a protracted infatuation with the great man, he had not reciprocated, and their relationship had never moved any further beyond the platonic than occasional mild flirting.

  Yes, of course, Amy had told people on occasions beyond counting, it is indeed a privilege and an honor to work with Cutsinger. At one time she had truly believed it, too. Even now, when she had long since decided otherwise, she comported herself as though she still believed it. She never qualified her statement within anyone's hearing by adding “even in the limited and limiting capacity he permits,” let alone hinted that it was not that great a pleasure to work with him. The phrase “work with” was beginning to catch in her throat like a sob; she worked for Cutsinger, always had. At most, at best, she functioned as a glorified technical assistant, amanuensis, spokesperson—she bit hard on the word: flunky—to A Great Man, without the energy any more to counter, reflexively, this humiliating realization with the argument that the menial services she performed were necessitated by the nature of Cutsinger's affliction.

  Maybe, she thought, I should just throw myself overboard. Or throw Cutsinger overboard. Oh, the questions that would be asked then. “How could you drown the great Cutsinger? What drove you to do such a terrible thing?” I was fed up, I'd say. Fed up to here with the great Cutsinger.

  On her bunk, she finally slipped into unconsciousness, and the ship's mechanical pulse became Cutsinger's voice. The walls of his world surrounded her, closed in on her, crushed her flat. She slept, but not well, through that night and the many that followed.

  He and she still dined at the captain's table, he still held forth at every opportunity on multiple universes, infinitely replicated Earths, and continually diverging timelines, and there was no chance of their being banished from officer's country, because, while he might be a bore, he was also a celebrity, and she, well, whoever she was, whatever she was, she was with him. Most of his listeners, however, signally failed to understand why the paradoxes implied by wave-function collapse could be avoided only by postulating geometrically multiplying universes, had given up trying to figure it out, and frankly admitted that they found it easier, somehow more comforting, simply to imagine that they had indeed traveled into the prehistoric past rather than to some parallel Earth where Paleozoic conditions still obtained. As far as they were concerned, Cutsinger's work was done: he had got them here and convinced them, finally, that they could dispose of those despised spacesuits, by which the integrity of Paleozoic ecosystems was to have been preserved. Cutsinger was gloweringly insistent upon the point or on any of a great many others, and Amy could only sit beside him, embarrassed, trapped by loyalty, until somebody found a way to change the subject. Then he sat mute but still glowering while the captain's other table guests held forth on a variety of less convoluted, certainly less controversial, topics. For her part, Amy had exhausted all conversational gambits and all plausible excuses to quit the table early and would now have foregone dinner altogether but for Cutsinger's insistence upon providing her with detailed summaries of conversation which he had found especially annoying and felt she ought not to have missed. Aboard the ship, there was no escape. Cutsinger had done no important work since his arrival, unless one counted as important his desultory progress on a book for general readers, a follow-up to his unexpectedly and immensely successful Events Leading to the Infinite Regress. Amy knew—because she was the person actually performing the work of editing his notebooks and lectures into approximate book form—that he had nothing new to say about the truly important work he had done early on. Cutsinger had no interest in the Paleozoic per se, only in the connection between the prehistoric and the modern worlds. He viewed the great majority of the scientists whom he had ushered into and out of the anomaly—a hundred different varieties of geo- and bio-specialist—as a bus driver might view bus passengers, caring neither whence they had come nor what they might do once delivered to their destinations; nor did he want to be bothered with what they might have to say while in his charge, either. They repaid his disinterest with passive contempt, regarding him as the doorman, the gatekeeper: The Wizard of Time had become a professional greeter. The only scientists with whom he felt an affinity and acknowledged kinship were the astronomers, but they were few in number compared with the earth scientists,
the turnover among them was generally quite rapid—they tended to stay only a few weeks, if that long, to make their observations, then returned home to spend months, perhaps years, analyzing the data they had collected.

  And Cutsinger was impatient with the Navy officers, found them intellectually unstimulating, their personalities rather drearily similar, their routines, regulations, and rituals, petty and childish.

  Yet, as he had got into the habit of remarking, most human interaction is talk, all the rest incidentals, and thus he depended on Amy for a great deal in the way not only of the definite services she performed for him, but also in the indefinite purpose she served by being almost constantly at his side, attending his every word. “You are my sounding board for ideas,” he sometimes reminded her, “my confidante,” but, any more, she could not help thinking, I am only your audience, as anonymous as any other audience. And he had no ideas any more, only beliefs.

  Amy had been with him since just before the series of events leading to the purely serendipitous discovery of the anomaly. Once—she recalled this rather vaguely now, like an old dream or something that she had read in an unmemorable book—she had been pursuing her own course, a career in physics quite independent of Cutsinger's; she had had friends, lovers, a sense of humor, all the accouterments of A Life. Now she had a career in Cutsinger, and increasingly, especially whenever she had retired to her cabin, she found herself wondering what it might be like to have anything in addition to him, anything at all that had nothing at all to do with him.

  * * * *

  Then, one evening, alone in her gray impersonal cabin deep within the ship, as she began to prepare herself for yet another evening's ordeal, she considered her reflection in the inadequate mirror over the tiny metal sink. She had always freckled excessively at the touch of sunlight, but sunlight had scarcely touched her fair skin in—how long had it been? Long enough, she thought, for her flesh to have become greenish white like a frog's belly. Charming, she thought. Good thing the batrachian complexion's in this year. There were lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth which she was certain she had never seen before. Undressed, she thought, I look fat and rumpled. She regarded her small wardrobe; its contents seemed as colorless as the cabin. Almost at random, she picked something and put it on, then tried to gauge the effect in the mirror. Dressed, she thought, smoothing the dress across her belly, in this ridiculous dress, I look rumpled and fat.