The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

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The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF Page 10

by Mike Ashley


  That argument seemed to convince even the Traveller. Browne and Ellis began some urgent social projects. Meanwhile, all of us were helping to educate Winnie. And she made very rapid progress. By early November, she was able to go out shopping with Mrs Watchett, mostly to Richmond, but occasionally to the inner areas of London. Thus she learned the hard facts of the money economy, and saw poverty, ugliness, dirt and desperation. They shocked her profoundly; and dark basements and underground railways filled her with special horror. “You – you are half Morlocks!” she once whispered. Even the Richmond house had a basement kitchen, and she often lingered there, grieving, and trying to help Ellen with her drudgery. But her relations with Welles, and partly also with me, grew ever closer as she realised how much we too hated the existing situation. Under cover of our lessons, we preached socialism to her. But she was no simple disciple: she objected to our ideas of scale.

  “The whole of this land cannot be one House,” she said. “It must be a friendship of many Houses – some small, some big. This House of ours, now – it is not big, but it could hold twenty people. Ellen will have children, I may have some, and we could invite a few more women, and their lovers.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing, Winnie,” I said. “This house doesn’t belong to us – it belongs to Periu – as you call him.”

  “That is bad,” she said, frowning. “Bad, bad! A House must not belong to one person – especially not to a man. It should belong to the people who live in it – all of them.”

  “Don’t say anything like that to Periu,” said Welles. “Not yet, anyway.”

  The Traveller was continuing to treat her as a child, or a very young woman. But she was fast outgrowing him. I sensed some uneasiness between him and Welles. Perturbed, I consulted Ellis.

  “Rivalry?” he said. “Yes, there will be – of a kind. But don’t think our learned friend will ever propose marriage to her. He is not a very sexual being. Rather like Ruskin – or Dodgson the mathematical photographer. He likes girls to be young – very young. If it comes to a contest, Welles will win.”

  By Christmas, Winnie’s English was nearly perfect, and Welles was beginning to teach her German. That would come in handy later, he said. I was teaching her to read and write. Both came easy to her, especially as I began to teach her letters using Eloic words, one letter to one sound.

  At Christmas, also, she was introduced into society, as Miss Winifred Driver, the Traveller’s foreign-born cousin and ward. The Thursday dinner-parties were resumed. “Winifred” charmed everyone with her beauty, her delightful not-quite-perfect accent, and her semi-Socialist opinions. The Editor and Journalist suspected nothing, and Filby and the Mayor fell in love with her. But the Traveller became increasingly subdued. He did not really like House Socialism. And he was beginning to admit, even to himself, that this was not the first Weena he had loved and lost.

  In spring 1892 came the crisis. Winnie wanted to go out more, especially to political meetings, and unchaperoned. The Traveller forbade that.

  “Then I will go away,” she said calmly. “I love you, Periu, but no man tells me what I must or must not do. We did not live so in my country.”

  Welles came to her rescue. He got her to marry him. At first that idea also outraged her, but he explained that only the form was necessary to make her respectable. “I won’t in fact own you, Wini. Of course you may love whom you like.”

  “I should hope so!” she said.

  “But I hope,” he said softly, “that I may mean a little more to you than all the rest.”

  She kissed him fervently. “Abio – Bertie – you know you will always be my taleyeno and tapereno – best lover, best friend.”

  So, after a brief civil ceremony, and now with a gold ring on her finger, she moved in with him, in his Putney lodging. There, at last, those two consummated their love.

  It was in every sense a wonderful love; for both of them rich and strange. She found him gentle, but stronger and more serious than any Eloi man. She liked that. And he – he once confided: “Hillyer, she’s not quite human. But better!”

  She was faithful to him, in her own fashion. He was certainly always her best friend, as he was, in our world, her first lover.

  But not by any means the last . . . I, too, have held her lovely, perfect nakedness in my arms.

  Not much now remains for me to record, except the triumphs of Winnie-Wiyeni, and how they affected our world.

  During the summer of 1892 she began to be famous. She remained friends with the Traveller, and often visited him at Richmond; but she also gladdened the hearts of many other people – including William Morris, whose last years she cheered considerably. He liked to call her “Jane Welles”. But Jane Welles argued with him that Marxist Communism was a dreadfully bad idea. She was utterly opposed to class hatred, and she thought socialism could only work with very small-scale communes. “The workers must all be friends and lovers,” she insisted.

  In late 1893, in circumstances I shall describe later, she did in fact set up a small commune, and it flourished. When I married, a year later, my wife and I moved in to the same establishment, and lived there very happily. People came to call it “The Welles-Hillyer Place”. Many years later, we also bought an estate in Essex, which became our main headquarters. Within our House, and the Houses other people founded in imitation, sex was a matter of free choice. Winnie sometimes persuaded men to join by making love with them; but she never went to bed with a man she really disliked. By now, she realized that men and women of our time were much more possessive and jealous than the Eloi. She shrugged her little shoulders, and made allowances and adaptations. “A House can be as small as one woman and one man,” she said, “so long as it is friend to the other Houses.”

  In 1895, of course, I published The Time Machine, which made me famous – especially, I think, the illustrated edition, which used the Traveller’s photographs. That book brought in plenty of money, and really launched our brand of socialism. Some people called us “the anti-Morlock movement”. The Marxists hated us, but many of the Fabians came over, and Chesterton was also very friendly.

  The rest is history. “Winnie Welles” became a world figure – long before her husband won his Nobel prize for atomic physics. She charmed most of the influential men in Europe and America; and also went to bed with many of them. Among her conquests, reputedly, were the German Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas. The Kaiser launched a famous saying: “When is socialism not socialism? When it’s in bed with Winnie Welles!”

  She was also very active in the feminist movement and the Federal Peace Movement. When the Pan-European Alliance was signed in Brussels, August 4, 1914, she was present as the guest of both the Kaiser and the Tsar. That was the same year that the Liberal government in Britain gave votes to women, and Home Rule to Ireland, and passed the second round of bills establishing the welfare state. At Christmas that year, Winnie said: “Bertie, George – I think we’ve done it. There won’t be any Morlocks in our future!” I am sure she will be proved right.

  By then she was one of the most beloved women in the world – and not only by her lovers. Of course it helped that she remained so amazingly young and amazingly beautiful. Hollywood made her huge offers, the British government offered her a peerage in her own right – but she turned all such things down. We had enough money, partly from my writings and Welles’s scientific work, to be comfortable in Richmond and Essex – and Winnie preferred before any other title to be known as the house-mother of Easton Glebe.

  After X-rays came in, Doctor Browne gave her a really searching internal examination. He found that she had no appendix, and there were one or two other things which made him pronounce: “Really, she should be classified as a different species – not Homo (so-called) sapiens, but Homo amabilis.”

  We had suspected that before, especially as the years went by with no child. But in 1900 she did bear her single child – easily, with hardly any labour – a daughter whom she called Amber. Well
es was certainly the father. Amber is beautiful, too, with her mother’s blue-green eyes, and gold-brown hair. She is now a fine biologist, and with her special knowledge she declares that she is a sterile hybrid: she will never have children. Instead, she has adopted two, a boy Anthony and a girl Amy. Amber Welles is now thirty-four, but looks not a day over twenty.

  We do not know if she will die in the same manner as her mother. Yes, that sad event happened four years ago now. There was hardly any visible change in Winnie, but one day she told us all that she was going. “Do not grieve too much, Abio,” she said. “We have had a good life, thanks to you. I was a slave of the Morlocks, and you set me free to work in this world. And Amber will comfort you.” Then, one fine summer’s evening, she lay down in that garden in Essex, quietly closed her eyes, and did not open them again.

  Her funeral was attended by an enormous number of celebrities – including the old Kaiser and the famous German painter Adolph Hitler. Hitler was a great man in the world peace movement; he was visibly in tears all through the ceremony. “She was followed to her grave,” said one newspaper, “by a procession of her lovers: an exceedingly long procession.”

  What would the world have been like today without Winnie-Wiyeni? Impossible to say – but surely a much worse place. Over the last forty years, through our mixture of socialism, capitalism and distributism, the gap between rich and poor has narrowed wonderfully. And now with the World Federation strongly established, and no major war possible, I think it is safe to tell the world the truth about Time Travel. But even so, perhaps it is better that the actual invention is lost – forever, unless a genius comes on the scene again the equal of Peregrine Driver.

  For that was the Traveller’s name. We lost him, and his Machine, one day in October 1892. He vanished from his laboratory, one Thursday morning, leaving a note to say that he had gone in quest of “the real, the one and only Weena”.

  He also left a will which stipulated that, if he had not returned by the same date in 1893, he was to be presumed dead, and all his property was to be made over to Winifred Jane Welles. That was how, in October 1893, we acquired our first commune in Richmond.

  One cannot choose but wonder: where did he go? To yet another version of the year 802,701 – to meet, perhaps, his end at the hands of some super-Morlocks? Or did he go back into the past, as a preliminary – to establish a time-line in which Welles would not be a possible rival for the affections of Weena?

  Welles once suggested to me: “He may have messed us up thoroughly – so that in that world, Bertie Welles is the writer, and George Hillyer – I don’t know what.” I once wrote a story somewhat like that. In my tale, Professor Driver returned first to the second Thursday morning, October 8 about 10 a.m. There he picked up one version of himself and other Time Machine; then the two of them went back to the first Thursday dinner, October 1 – the dinner at which Welles was not present. In that time-line, the second dinner-party on October 8 never took place at all, Welles was therefore eliminated, and the raid on the far future was made by three Travellers on three Machines . . . That was fiction; but I do suspect that something like that may well have happened. If so, of course the Traveller disappeared completely from our own time stream.

  For in our world, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.

  THE WIND OVER THE WORLD

  Steven Utley

  One of the more popular plots associated with time travel is the possibility of returning to the age of the dinosaurs. Ray Bradbury wrote what many believe to be the definitive short story involving dinosaurs in “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), which showed how one small mistake by travellers to the past resulted in a diversity of changes in the present.

  Steven Utley chose to go back even further in time, well before the age of the dinosaurs, to the Silurian Period, a geological age which lasted for over 30 million years some 400 million years ago. Life on land was comparatively minimal at that time. Utley, who sadly died while this volume was being compiled, has been writing his Silurian Tales since “There and Then” appeared in 1993 but it was not until the publication of The 400-Million-Year Itch (2012) and Invisible Kingdoms (2013) that the stories were collected in book form. The following is one of the more poignant episodes.

  The attendant barely looked up from the clipboard cradled in the crook of his arm when Leveritt came in. The room was devoid of personality, but just as she entered through one door, a second man dressed in a lab coat went out through a door directly opposite, and in the instant before it swung shut, she glimpsed the room beyond – brightly lit, full of gleaming surfaces – and heard or thought that she heard a low sound like a faint pop of static or the breaking of waves against a shore. She shuddered as an electric thrill of excitement passed through her.

  “Please stretch out on the gurney there.” The man with the clipboard continued writing as he spoke. “You can stow your seabag on the rack underneath.”

  Leveritt did as he said. She said, “I feel like I’m being prepped for surgery.”

  “We don’t want you to black out and fall and hurt yourself.” He finished writing, came around the end of the gurney to her, and turned the clipboard to show her the printed form. “This,” he said, offering her his pen, “is where you log out of the present. Please sign on the line at the bottom there.”

  Leveritt’s hand trembled as she reached for the pen. She curled her fingers into a fist and clenched it tightly for a second. She gave the attendant an apologetic smile. “I’m just a little nervous.” She tried to show him that she really was just a little nervous by expanding the smile into a grin; it felt brittle and hideous on her face. “I did volunteer for this,” she told him. I am more excited than scared to be doing this, she told herself.

  The attendant smiled quickly, professionally. “Even volunteers have the right to be nervous. Try to relax. We’ve done this hundreds of times now, and there’s nothing to it. Ah!”

  His exclamation was by way of greeting a second attendant, so like him that Leveritt felt she would be unable to tell them apart were she to glance away for a moment, who escorted a slight figure dressed in new-looking safari clothes and carrying, instead of the high-powered rifle that would have completed his ensemble, a seabag and a laptop. He stowed the bag and climbed on to the gurney next to Leveritt’s without being told, signed the log with a flourish, and lay back smiling. He turned his face toward Leveritt and said, “Looks like we’re traveling companions – time-traveling companions!” He talked fast, as though afraid he would run out of breath before he finished saying what he had to say. “Allow me to introduce myself – Ed Morris.”

  “I’m Bonnie Leveritt.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Miz Leveritt – or is it Doctor?”

  She wondered if he could utter sentences not punctuated with dashes. “Miz,” she said, “working on Doctor. I’m on my way to join a field team from Texas A and M.”

  One of the attendants consulted his wristwatch and nodded to the other, and each picked up a loaded syringe. The man looming over Leveritt gave her that quick, professional smile again. “This is to keep you from going into shock.”

  She had no particular horror of needles but turned away, nevertheless, to watch Morris, who lay squinting against the glare of the fluorescent lights. She heard him grunt softly as the needle went into his arm.

  “It’ll be another few minutes,” said Leveritt’s attendant. He and his twin left. Leveritt and Morris waited.

  After a minute or so, he asked her, “How you holding up?”

  “Fine.” Her voice sounded strange to her, thick, occluded, like a heavy smoker’s. She cleared her throat and spoke the word again; improvement was arguable. “Actually,” she confessed, “I’m nervous as hell. This is my first time. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to lie here waiting.”

  “Supplies go through first – we’re down on the priority list, below soap and toilet paper. My first time, I was nervous as hell, too. Nobody gives people in my line of work cred
it for much imagination. Except . . .” he made a breathless kind of chuckle “. . . when it comes to creative accounting. Yeah, I’m one of the bean-counters. But let me tell you – the night before my first time, I didn’t sleep a wink. Not a wink. I kept imagining all sorts of things that might go wrong – plus, it all seemed so unreal, it was all so thrilling – and it was going to happen to me. Man! Oh, sure, the concept’s more exciting than the reality. There’s not much to where we’re headed – a little moss and a lot of mud. Beats me why they couldn’t’ve made a hole into some more interesting time period.”

  “I suppose that depends on your definition of interesting. Besides, as I understand it, they didn’t make the hole, they sort of found it. We’re lucky it didn’t open up on somewhere we couldn’t go or wouldn’t want to.”

  “You mean, like my hometown – Dallas?”

  Leveritt smiled; she was from Fort Worth. “Worse. For all but the few most recent hundred millions of years, the Earth’s been pretty inhospitable – poisonous atmosphere, too much ultraviolet light, things like that.”

  “Spoken like a true scientist!”

  “Not quite a full-blown one yet,” she said, “but I guess I’ve got pedantry down.”

  “Ah. Well, anyway, as I was saying – I was nervous before my first time. Scared, in fact. You might not think it to look at me,” and he paused long enough for her to realize that she was now to take a good look at him, so she did, “but I am no shrinking violet. I have a real active lifestyle – mountain climbing, sky diving. I guess I like heights.”

  Leveritt was willing to give Morris the benefit of the doubt, but he was a balding little fortyish man whom she could not imagine working his way up a sheer rockface. Dressed in his great-white-hunter outfit, he lay clutching the laptop to his narrow chest, drumming his middle, ring, and little fingers on the case. He looked as calm as though he were waiting for an elevator, but he also looked like what he was, an accountant.

 

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