Millennium

by John Varley

  "Were you?" I said, helpfully.

  "I was. What more honorable profession in the Last Age than that of historian?"

  And what more futile, t thought, but kept it to myself. Historians, as I understood, existed to pass down knowledge and lore to future generations. Without descendants, the compilation of history struck me as a fairly dry business. But he was way ahead of me.

  "I know I was born in the wrong age for it," he conceded, looking at me for the first time.

  "Still, this breaks my heart. What a memorial this could have made. What a testament to the human will to keep going. Look at that."

  He was pointing to what remained of a Viking longboat rd helped snatch no more than six months before. The thick fluid we are pleased to call air had eaten gaping holes in it already; out here, you might as well build something out of cheese as to build it of wood.

  "Can you imagine setting out to row across the Atlantic Ocean in that ... that ... "

  "Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean," I said. "But what you don't know is it was a real ship of fools. You didn't have to deal with a berserk Captain. Lars, Cleaver-of-Heads, he was called. He told me that Thor had called him to sail to Greenland. He hadn't messed with navigation, even though he knew more about it than you'd think, because it was a divine sailing. I picked up him and his crew becalmed in the horse latitudes, rowing to beat the band.

  They were about two days from starvation. Before long they would have been eating their shipmates who'd already crossed over to Valhalla. Let me tell you, the stink on that -- "

  "You don't have much romance in your soul, Louise."

  I thought it over.

  "I can't afford it," I said, finally. "There's still too much work to do."

  "That's my point. You've got a lot in common with Lars, whether you understand that or not."

  "I hope I don't smell like him."

  Some of my best comebacks just go right over people's heads; he went on like he hadn't heard me.

  "Your will to keep going is the strongest I have ever encountered. There are no new frontiers to push back. In fact, the best you can do is push back the date of the final blackout by a day or a week -- but you push!"

  He was making me uncomfortable. There's no doubt he'd read me right in one way: I don't have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in anion, and I can tell you, it stinks.

  "What's the consensus back there?" he said. "How are they taking my analysis of the situation?"

  "Nobody's very happy about it. You said it's hopeless; I guess they all agree with you.

  You're pretty much the voice of authority when it comes to the Gate and the timestream."

  "So no one has anything to suggest? No course of action?"

  "How could they? They're all looking to you to show them a way out. You said there wasn't any way out. If they had anybody to leave anything to, they'd all be writing their wills, I guess."

  He looked at me, and smiled.

  "Right. So what's your plan?"

  7 Guardians of Time

  There are nine people on the Council. I don't know why, though the BC might tell me if I asked, since it nominates and elects Council members. I've always fancied it's so, in case we ever screw up so totally that the universe does come apart at the seams and all eras coexist, we can field a team in the Never-neverland World Series.

  Technically it's called the Programmers' Council. That's a polite fiction. They don't do any programming. Computers long ago grew too complex and too accurate to allow a mere human to fuck around with their instructions.

  Yet there are qualities no one has ever succeeded in plating into the memory banks.

  Don't ask me what they are.

  Imagination might be one of them, empathy another. Or I could just be giving the human race credit for more than it deserves. Maybe the BC supports and maintains the Council to keep itself in check, to prevent it from actually becoming God. There is that hazard. Possibly the BC needs an element of foolhardiness and prejudice and meanness and ornery self-

  interest to give it perspective. Or maybe, like the rest of us, it just needs a giggle now and then.

  For whatever reason, the Council is the nearest thing we have to a government. To get on it you need to be incredibly ancient say thirty-six or thirty-seven; well beyond the median mortality age.

  That they are gnomes goes without saying. Most are little more than a brain and a central nervous system. Sometimes only the cerebrum is left, and in more than one case I've suspected even that is gone.

  There are requirements other than sheer age, but I've never been able to figure them out.

  Intelligence is a good one, and so is eccentricity. If you're a thirty-eight-year-old super-genius and a real pain in the ass, your chances of ending up on the Council are excellent.

  They are an odd lot. Most of them are not nearly as concerned with outward appearance as most gnomes. Several have elected to house their brains in full prosthetic bodies, but more often than not they don't look any more realistic than Sherman. Ali Teheran is like Larry: a torso fastened to a pedestal. Marybeth Brest is a talking head, a puss on a post, like from a cheap horror film. Nancy Yokohama is a brain in a tank, and The Nameless One is just a speaker sitting on a desk. Only the BC knows who, where, or what he is.

  Who knows how important they are? I doubt if even they could answer that. But the fact is, I'd never heard of a case where the B C overruled one of the Council's decisions. And the Gate Project, the last feeble hope of the human race, had originated in the Council Chamber, not in the BC's supercooled synapses.

  Understand then that I was a trifle twitchy to appear in their august presences. I'd known it was coming: the time capsule had said so. What I hadn't known was that I'd request the audience -- I had expected to be summoned. It didn't make me any happier to be there.

  I wished Martin Coventry had come with me, but he had refused. Looking at them, I thought I knew why. He hated them, hated with an unreasoning passion I knew only too well.

  Whereas I was destined to rot away until I was installed with the other gnomes in Operations, this is where Martin Coventry would come. He'd been a prime candidate for the Council since he was nine. I don't blame him for not wishing to see his future.

  A Hollywood set designer would have loved the Council Chamber. It was futuristic as shit. You couldn't find the walls unless you blundered into them; it was like standing in a vast, featureless plain, all white, with nine oddballs sitting behind -- or on -- a curved, black table.

  Well, if it made them happy, it was no skin off my suit.

  I assumed Peter Phoenix was the leader since he sat in the middle. He looked more human than the rest of them put together, if a trifle like an Old Testament God. He started the festivities.

  "I understand there has been a twonky, and that you have a plan for correcting it."

  "Two twonkies," I said, wondering if that was the correct plural.

  "And that you might have been responsible for one of them?" Phoenix lifted one massive eyebrow. I could almost hear the pulleys creaking.

  "It may be. I stand ready to accept your judgement on that matter, and your penalty."

  "Report, then."

  I filled them in on the disastrous day that had seen the deaths of Pinky, Ralph, and probably Lilly. I told the tale of the hijacker as straight as I knew how, relating every circumstance I thought might have a bearing on the case. It had been about forty-eight hours, straight-time, since Pinky died. I had spent the last twenty-four of those, after my conversation with Coventry, peering into a time-scan tank, getting to know Mr Bill Smith better than probably even his ex-wife had ever known him. He's the man I wanted to talk to the Council about, but I thought it best to lead up to it gradually.

  So I summarized Coventry's lecture of the previous day, telling them the tale of the first twonky, the one I had no responsibility for -- other than the transferred responsibility of b
eing in command of someone who makes a mistake. I told them we had found no trace of it, and that the probability was nearly one hundred percent that whoever found it in the last five hundred centuries had done nothing with it, that it had not altered his, her, or its life.

  "Some good news for a change," Nancy Yokohama opined.

  You want some more, O disgusting one? I just released a school of piranha in that fishtank your gray matter swims in ...

  I cut that thought short, I'm afraid. There are limits even to my irreverence.

  "Yes, it is isn't it?" I beamed. "Now for the classical rejoinder. The bad news is that we have located the other weapon. It's going to be a bitch to get it back. Can I have the tank, please?"

  A time-scan tank rose from the floor beside me. In rapid succession we watched the results of thirty hours of scanning by almost a thousand operatives.

  The first scene was the site of the DC-10 crash. The tank was almost black, punctuated by tiny, exquisitely lovely flames. The viewpoint zoomed in until most of the tank was filled by one worker looking dazed and dragging a plastic sack behind him. He stooped, picked up something, and started to put it in his bag. The picture froze and we zoomed in closer, to see the object in his hand. It was Ralph's stunner, much the worse for wear. Deep inside it a red light glowed.

  "This is the first human contact with the twonky. It's nothing serious, as you can see. The man has no idea what he's handling. His anions are not altered enough to produce change in the timestream.

  "The twonky is taken to this building, which has been set aside to collect the non-organic debris generated by the crash."

  I let them study the interior of the building as displayed in the tank. I surreptitiously wiped my palms on my hips. "Non-organic debris generated ... "

  This was all getting to me. I'd been around Martin Coventry too much, and, to make it worse, much of the time-windows we could look into in our study of Bill Smith had been consumed by endless meetings. And suddenly I was babbling fluent techspeak, that universal human gobbledegook patois designed by "experts" to overawe the unwashed. It probably got started about the time of the flint hand-axe and has been getting denser and Zore impenetrable ever since.

  I couldn't help it. For twenty-four hours I'd been observing masters of the tongue outdoing themselves at the subsequent meetings and hearings and press conferences generated by the crash.

  Still, I'd have to watch it. Before I knew it I'd be on speaking terms with bureaucrats and from there it's only one short step downward to the nadir of language, which, in the twentieth century, was known as The Law.

  "We can't trace it in here," I went on. "We're hampered by the fact that no less than four distinct blank spots exist between the time the Gate was turned off at the end of the snatch, and the critical time, forty-eight hours later, when the paradox situation becomes inherent.

  Naturally, we can't know for what purpose the Gate was used those four times. But we do know none of them are the result of operations conducted by us prior to this time."

  Ali Teheran spoke up. "Ergo, they will be caused by excursions into the past yet to be taken."

  For brilliant observations like this I hold the Council in Awe? Oh, well. I nodded, and went on.

  "Skipping over that for now ... when we again pick up the twonky it is only in terms of probabilities."

  That statement produced much the same reaction it had earlier when Martin Coventry made it; I even heard someone groan, though this time I was sure it wasn't me. I believe it was The Nameless One.

  "Right now everything seems to hinge on the actions of this man. William "Bill" Smith, forty-something years old, chief onsite investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board."

  In the tank, the image was of an unkempt, slightly rheumy, tall, brown-haired guy I'd come to know all too well in the last hours. I let him linger there while the Council studied the man who had suddenly become the pivot of history as we knew it. I couldn't help taking another look myself. He was not the guy I'd have ordered up from central casting to be the Man for All Seasons.

  Oddly, he looked a little like Robert Redford, my Hollywood heartthrob. If Redford had been a heavy drinker weighed down by fifteen years of quiet despair and burdened with an unfortunate way of holding his mouth and a pair of slightly misfocused eyes straddling a nose that leaned to the left ... if Redford had been a rummy and a loser, he'd have been Bill Smith.

  It was as if two people had built a model using identical parts, but one had followed the instructions and the other had just bashed it together and left glue oozing from the cracks.

  I resumed.

  "Smith's actions following the last of the blank spots are crucial. We have established that he entered the hangar containing the wrecked airplanes forty-eight hours after the crash itself.

  When he emerges, he has come unstuck from the time stream: I let that sequence unfold in the tank. I was weary of talking.

  We saw him come out, but he was no longer the sharp, perfect little model of a man he had been when he went in. He was fuzzy around the edges. He was like a badly focused film, a vidscreen tuned incorrectly, or, more to the point, a photographic quintuple-exposure.

  "We have identified five distinct main lines of action from this departure point -- or cusp, if you will. In two of them he emerges from the hangar with the weapon -- at least we think he does. He's very hard to see. In one of those two, the weapon is not sufficient as a disruptive force in his life. He eventually reenters his predestined lifeline. In the other, finding the weapon changes his life forever, with consequences for us I need not detail.

  "In three other scenarios he does not have the weapon when he comes out. In two of those, he once more reintegrates into the path of history. But again, in the fifth and last, he departs radically."

  Even though he does not have the stunner," Peter Phoenix said. "That's right. We don't know why."

  "Something happened to him in there," Yokohama said.

  "Yes. Naturally, we tried to find out what it was, but since the event happened during a period of temporal censorship we're unlikely to ever know." I was assuming they didn't need that phenomenon explained to them, but perhaps a few more words about it are in order, since I was now bracing to hit them with my plan, and it hinged on the laws of censorship.

  There is absolute temporal censorship, and there is the censorship of proximity. The presence of the Gate is the best example of the first; when it is in operation, when it has actually appeared at a particular time, we can neither see nor go anywhere in that time ever again.

  The Proximity Effect is a bit different. My recent trip back to 1983 New York is a good example. The Gate appeared, I zapped Mary Sondergard back through it, and it vanished. It didn't reenter 1983 until the next day. But for almost twenty-four hours I had been living in the past. l became a sort of twonky. If I tried to look into those twenty-four hours in New York, I'd see nothing but static; f was a disruptive factor in the timestream. An inanimate twonky did the same thing, but much less so.

  You can't meet yourself. As far as we know, that's an absolutely inflexible rule of time-

  traveling. It extends even to seeing yourself, and further, to someone else seeing you and giving you a report. Thus, Martin Coventry could not look into that motel room where I spent the night and see anything but static, nor could anyone from my time. That area was sealed to us.

  In fact, my presence in that room had created a zone of censorship that took in most of the Eastern Seaboard. We could still scan in California during that night; but we'd have no luck seeing what had been happening in Baltimore.

  For much the same reason, we could no longer follow Smith very accurately after he got to California to begin his investigation -- and that's what my argument to the Council would be based around. In addition to the windows of absolute censorship that told us when the Gate would be used -- might be used -- there was a great deal of proximity effect to be seen.

  This probably meant that one o
f us had been involved in the events in the hangar. It meant, to Coventry and me, anyway, that somebody from our time was going to be moving around in 1983, with the result that temporal censorship was preventing us from learning anything that could be useful in planning what we would do -- had done.

  If you don't understand that, take fifty aspirin and call me in the morning.

  "I take it you are in favor of a mission to repair this situation," Phoenix said, anticipating me.

  "Yes, I am. For two reasons. If we do nothing, the cumulative effects of this thing are going to work their way up the timeline. I believe I was told the rate of approach of this ... one of the engineers called it a "timequake" ... is on the order of two hundred years per hour.

  If you can make sense out of a figure like that. I -- "

  "We are familiar with the concept," Teheran chided me. "When the timequake arrives here where the disturbance originated, the readjustment in reality will take place all up and down the timeline."

  "And we'll all be edited out of it," I finished for him. "Us, and all the effects of our work.

  A hundred thousand rescued humans will reappear on falling airplanes, in sinking ships and exploding factories and on battlefields and in the bottom of mineshafts. The Gate Project will be over. I don't suppose it will matter to us since we won't be around to witness it. We'll be never-born."

  "There are other theories," The Nameless One said.

  "I'm aware of that. Yet in five hundred years of snatch operations no one has suggested we rely on any of them. A few hours ago I let a girl die because it has been so strongly impressed on me that we must treat this theory as if it were proven fact. Are you telling me we're changing theories now?" Do it, you impossible obscenity; tell me that, and I'll find you, and find a way to make you hurt.

  "No," it said. "Get on with it. You mentioned a second reason for undertaking this project."

  "Which, in my opinion," Teheran added, "might well produce the very temporal catastrophe we are trying to avoid."