The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  We’re going to have to decide whether we stay on the Ship, or put into port and take our chances in this new world. And if we stay, then we can no longer be the spoon-fed idle rich any more. We’re going to have to sustain ourselves, somehow. We managed in Singapore by bartering – the crew exchanged luxury items like cutlery, along with basic medical supplies, for food. But the Ship isn’t a limitless resource. The crew are talking about converting one of the garden decks into a place where we could grow food, and they’ve been fishing. So maybe we won’t starve, but it won’t be as comfortable as it used to be. I talked to a lot of people after the meeting, and they seem to want to stay. I think they’re too scared of what might lie beyond the Ship. I know I am.

  Diary entry, 3 January

  The blisters on my hands hurt. I’m not used to gardening. We didn’t have one in Rome, and at the villas there was always someone to plant seeds and prune flowers. But now I spend hours on the garden deck, patiently slipping seeds into soil.

  After the last storm, we could see that the sky had changed again – a deeper, darker blue. The Ship put in at what used to be Manila, but there wasn’t anything there, just green, wild islands. We’ve crossed the Pacific now, and are sailing down the coast of California. The sea level’s risen. San Francisco is a ruin. We’ve seen no people. The Ship stopped and some of the crew took the helicopter up. They have to be careful with fuel, but they said they got as far as Salt Lake City. There’s no sign of anyone, just desert and scrub and forest. As though no one had ever been here.

  Diary entry

  Up near what was once Vancouver, we finally found someone – an old woman, living alone on an island. The Captain spoke to her, but he couldn’t understand a word she said, and she couldn’t understand him, either. But she showed him a news-sheet – just a slip of what looked like homemade paper. The language had changed, but they figured some of it out. It was very old. It said that most people in America were dead.

  We left some people there, including the Seckers. They said they knew the area, having lived in Seattle once, and they might as well stay. But some of us – a couple of hundred people – are remaining on the Ship. We told them we’d come back in a month or two, to see how they were getting on. No one mentioned the storms. I was tempted to stay with them, but Julio wants to stay on the boat. It’s strange – he seems happier these days, and his ulcer’s gone. The old woman gave me a lot of seeds: zucchini, peppers, tomato. I keep going down to the garden deck and looking at them, to see if they’ve come up yet.

  I’ve given up trying to record the date. It doesn’t seem important any more, and I’ve been too busy with the gardens to keep track, or even write very much. When we were up near Alaska, we hit another storm, and afterwards, we sailed back down the coast. Even the old woman’s island was gone. There was no sign of anyone else, and the forests looked different – plants I didn’t recognize, with odd lobes and spines. The sky has changed again, too, and that evening I looked up at the clear sky and I’ve never been very good with stars, but they seemed different, somehow.

  Julio and I went ashore in the morning, and when we walked back to the Ship we could see what a wreck it looks. Its white sides are scored and scratched, and my vines have spilled over the edge of the deck. We’re wondering how much longer we’ll actually stay afloat.

  The crew have been thinking the same thing. Tonight, they’re calling together those of us who are still here, to decide whether we’re to head back to California, and try to settle, or whether we go on.

  I don’t know how I feel, and I thought I would. It’ll be a relief in a way, not to keep travelling. When we started our voyage, I thought it would be such fun, but I never dreamed we’d sail so far. But I looked up into the unfamiliar sky last night and I wondered how it would be if we just kept on, running the time storms, until we sailed right out of the world’s time and off the edge. And I wondered, too, if we were perhaps the last people living on Earth; destroyers and regenerators, like my gardens that grow and green, and fade again into the dark.

  WALK TO THE FULL MOON

  Sean McMullen

  Almost as old as the concept of time dislocation is the idea of a time-slip where somehow an individual may suddenly slip from the present into the past or the future. Edgar Allan Poe suggested this might be achieved by hypnotism, or mesmerism as it was known in his day, in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844). More recently Octavia Butler used a psychic link to establish a connection between her heroine and a distant ancestor in Kindred (1979). The following story also considers how the power of the mind might create the ability to shift through time.

  Sean McMullen is an Australian writer and IT specialist who has been selling science fiction and fantasy since 1986. He is probably best known for his eccentric post-apocalyptic Greatwinter series which revels in the imagery of steampunk. The first two novels were revised and reissued as one book, Souls in the Great Machine (1999). Time travel features in several of McMullen’s short stories, some of which have been collected in Call to the Edge (1992) and Walking to the Moon (2007).

  Meat was bought at a high price by the Middle Pleistocene hominids of the Iberian Peninsula. Large prey meant more meat, yet large prey was very dangerous. The pressure to hunt was unrelenting, for the hominids were almost entirely carnivorous, but they lived well because their technology was the most advanced in the world.

  It is unusual for a linguist to be called for in a murder investigation, especially an undergraduate linguist. Had my uncle Arturo not been in charge, and had I not been staying at his house at the time, I would not have become involved at all. He told me little as he escorted me into the Puerto Real clinic and took me to a meeting room.

  On a monitor screen was a girl in a walled garden. Crouching in a corner, she had a fearful, hunted look about her. I could see that she wore a blanket, that her skin was olive-brown, and that her features were bold and heavy. Oddly enough, it took a while for me to notice the most remarkable about her: she had no forehead!

  “Who – I mean what is she?” I exclaimed.

  “That’s what a lot of people want to know,” replied my uncle. “I think she is a feral girl with a deformed head. She was found this morning, on a farm a few kilometers north of here.”

  “Has she said anything?” I asked, then added, “Can she talk?”

  “Carlos, why do you think I called you? This is in a clinic where the staff are quite good at dealing with foreign tourists who don’t speak Spanish, but his girl’s language stopped them cold.”

  “So she does speak?”

  “She seems to use words; that is why you are here. Before you ask, she is locked in the walled garden at the centre of the clinic because she can’t stand being indoors. We need to communicate with her, but we also need discretion. Someone senior in the government is involved. DNA tests are being done.”

  I was about to commence my third year at university, studying linguistics. Being continually short of money, I would drive my wreck of a motor scooter down to Cadiz every summer, stay with my uncle, hire a board and go windsurfing. By now I owed Uncle Arturo for three such holidays, and this was the first favour he had asked in return. My mind worked quickly: love child of government minister, hit on the head, abandoned in the mountains, DNA tests being done to establish the parents’ identity.

  “There are better linguists than me,” I said.

  “But I know I can trust you. For now we need total discretion.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, what do I do?”

  “She must be hungry. When a blackbird landed in the garden she caught it and ate it. Raw.”

  I swallowed. She sounded dangerous.

  “Maybe you could help her build a fire, roast a joint of meat,” my uncle suggested.

  “Me?” I exclaimed. “Cook a roast? I’ve never even boiled an egg.”

  “Well then, time to learn,” he laughed, without much mirth.

  It turned out that I had three advantages over the clinic’s staff
and my uncle’s police: long hair, a beard and a calf-length coat. It made me look somehow reassuring to the girl, but it was days before I realized why.

  I entered the garden with a bundle of wood and a leg of lamb. The girl’s eyes followed me warily. I stopped five metres from her and sat down. I put a hand on my chest and said, “Carlos.” She did not reply. I shrugged, then began to pile twigs together in front of me. The girl watched. I reached into a pocket and took out a cigarette lighter, then flicked it alight. The girl gasped and shrank back against the wall. To her it probably looked as if the flame was coming out of my fist. I calmly lit the twigs, slipped the lighter back into my pocket, and piled larger sticks on to the fire.

  My original plan had been to roast the meat, then gain the girl’s trust by offering her some. I placed the leg in the flames – but almost immediately she scampered forward and snatched it out.

  “Butt!” she snapped, leaving no doubt that the word meant something like fool.

  I shrugged and sat back, then touched my chest again and said, “Carlos.” This time she returned the gesture and said, “Els.”

  Els stoked the fire until a bed of coals was established. Only now did she put the joint between two stones, just above the coals. Fat began to trickle down and feed the flames. We shared a meal of roast lamb around sunset and by then I had collected about two dozen words on the Dictaphone in my pocket, mostly about fire, meat, and sticks. Els began to look uneasy again. I had made a fire, I had provided meat, and it was fairly obvious what she expected next.

  I stood up, said “Carlos,” then gestured to the gate and walked away. The perplexity on Els’s face was almost comical as I watched the video replay a few minutes later.

  “What have you learned so far?” asked my uncle as the debriefing began.

  Two other people were present, and had been introduced as Dr Tormes and Marella. The woman was in her thirties and quite pretty, while Tormes was about ten years older.

  “Firstly, Els trusts me a little,” I pointed out.

  “I thought she was supposed to accept you as another prisoner,” said my uncle.

  “She doesn’t understand the idea of being a prisoner,” I replied. “She calls me Carr. Loss is her word for fire. For her ‘Carlos’ seems to be ‘Carr who makes fire’.”

  “So, you made a fire after introducing yourself as a firemaker,” said Tormes.

  “Yes. All her words are single syllable, and she has not spoken a sentence more than five words long. Intonation and context seem important in her language, though.”

  “You say language,” said Uncle Arturo. “Is it a genuine language?”

  “It depends what you mean by genuine. Any linguist could invent a primitive language, but Els has a fluency that would only come with years of use. Do we know anything about her?”

  My uncle glanced to Tormes and Marella.

  “Els is just a feral girl with a severely deformed skull,” said Tormes. “Perhaps she was abandoned in the mountains while very young, and animals reared her.”

  “Animals could never have taught her such a language,” I replied. “Animals don’t have fire, either.”

  They glanced uncomfortably at each other, but volunteered no more information.

  We let Els spend the night by herself, then at dawn the three orderlies were sent in to seize her. Moments later I entered the garden, loaded with more firewood and meat, and armed with a sharpened curtain rod. I made a show of driving off the orderlies after an extended bout of shouting, and fortunately Els did not seem to have any concept of acting. I was treated like a genuine hero as we settled down to another day together. While we talked Els began to make stone knives and scrapers out of the garden’s ornamental pebbles. She even charred the end of my curtain rod in the fire and scraped it into a lethal-looking, fire-hardened point. Again I left her at sunset and went through a long debriefing with my uncle, Marella and Tormes.

  “If Els was raised by wild sheep or rabbits, how did she learn to make stone tools and fire-hardened spear points?” I asked with undisguised sarcasm.

  “We are as puzzled as you,” replied Tormes calmly.

  On the morning of the third day I returned with a newly slaughtered sheep. Els skinned and butchered it with great skill, using her newly made stone knives and scrapers. It was only now that Els actually approached me. Coming around to my side of the fire, she rubbed mutton fat through my hair, then pinned it back with seagull feathers. By now I had learned to say “Di,” which seemed to cover both thanks and sorry. Over the next half hour, she made me understand that although I was skinny, she thought I was very brave to go hunting at night.

  At the debriefing on the fifth day I had an audience of a dozen people, two of whom I recognized from the Department of Anthropology in the university in Madrid. It took only a minute to walk the tens of thousands of years from the garden to the committee room.

  “I now have over a hundred words,” I reported. “I can communicate with Els fairly well, and she has answered a few questions. She talks about a tribe. They call themselves the Rhuun, and they have always lived here.”

  “What?” exclaimed Tormes. “Impossible.”

  “I’m only telling you what Els said. They have a detailed calendar, and a counting system based on the number twenty.”

  “Ten fingers and ten toes,” said Marella.

  “Did she do your hair?” asked one of the new observers.

  “Yes. Grooming seems to be a bonding ritual for the Rhuun, and possibly a precursor to sexual activity as well,” I explained.

  “So she made a pass at you,” laughed my uncle. Nobody else laughed.

  “She has been removed from her tribe for the first time in her life,” I added.

  “Then you are her new provider,” said Tormes. “She may be feeling insecure because you are not mating with her.”

  This time a few snickers rippled around the table.

  “Look, this was not in the job description,” I said to my uncle, scowling.

  “Besides, she might be disappointed,” he replied, and this time everyone really did laugh.

  “From now on you will return to her after a couple of hours each night, and pretend you were lucky with your hunting,” Tormes hurriedly advised, seeing the expression on my face. “Just having you nearby at night should gain her trust.”

  “But seriously, stay on your own side of the fire,” advised my uncle. “Technically she’s is a ward of the state, and probably a minor.”

  When the meeting broke up Marella and Tormes invited me to join them for a coffee before I returned to Els. Wearing my long coat over jeans and a T-shirt, but with my hair still greased and pinned back with seagull feathers, I felt quite out of place. The café was over the road from the clinic, and was about as sterile. Most people think of Cadiz as a pretty little port with more history than some countries, but this was Puerto Real, the messy industrial fringe of the holiday city that visitors barely notice as they drive through. Whatever the setting, it was my first filtered coffee for many days and I was very grateful for it. I also ordered a large salad. A man named Garces joined us, but he said little at first.

  “There’s more to Els than you think,” said Tormes after I ordered another cup.

  “You underestimate me,” I replied.

  “What do you think?”

  “Had they not been extinct for thirty thousand years, I’d say she was neanderthal. Even her stone tools look very like what I’ve seen in museums.”

  “Not neanderthal,” said Marella.

  “Sorry?”

  “Els’s tools are relatively primitive, more like those of the neanderthals’ ancestor species, homo heidelbergensis,” Tormes explained.

  “I don’t know much about paleo-anthropology,” I said, although I knew that half a dozen species of hominids have lived in Spain over the past two million years.

  “The heidelbergensians were around for six hundred thousand years,” said Tormes, as if he was speaking for a television
documentary. “They were the first hominids to use advanced technology like clothing, artificial shelters and probably language. There is a cave in the north called the Pit of Bones where they even ritually disposed of their dead. They lived in an ice-age environment that would have killed any hominid that did not use clothing. They were once the brightest people ever, and they had the most advanced technology on Earth for longer than homo sapiens has existed. Their cranial capacity actually overlapped with the modern human average, but they were also phenomenally strong.”

  I had by now noticed that Els could break branches that were way beyond my strength. Perhaps there was more to this than a hoax.

  “You talk as if Els is a real cave girl,” I said casually.

  “She is,” said Garces.

  At this point a waiter arrived with my second coffee. I took a few sips while the waiter cleaned up and removed some cups and dishes. My mind was screaming that Garces was mad, yet he lacked the manic enthusiasm of genuine nutcases. He almost looked unhappy. The waiter left, skilfully balancing a pile of plates and cups on one arm.

  “The girl’s DNA is not human,” Garces continued. “True, it has more in common with human DNA than that of an ape, but there are not enough base pairs in common with human DNA for her to interbreed with, say, yourself.”

  “Take that back!” I snapped, already near my limit with this onslaught of weirdness.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said at once. “I have been rather unsettled by all this, and . . .” He scratched his head. “Look, what I have found is impossible, but I have done my tests in good faith. The base pair comparisons that I ran give Els’s DNA more in common with that of neanderthals than homo sapiens, but examination of DNA mutation sites and rates suggests that she could be from the neanderthals’ ancestral species.”

  “There was also semen found on a vaginal swab,” said Tormes.

  “Indeed!” said Garces. “Its DNA was of the same species. Els’s husband, lover or whatever is another heidelbergensian. He is also a blood relative, from perhaps three generations back, but this is not unknown in small and isolated tribes.”