Millennium

by John Varley

  Then we heard I was being summoned to the Council again, so the decision was postponed. Martin and Lawrence admitted they welcomed the delay, since they wanted to run tests on their temporal equipment. The goal was to create a statistical universe that had some things in common with the "real" universe, whatever that meant at this point. They knew they couldn't look into the past any more and be sure what they were seeing was reality or probability, but they hoped to at least be able to express things in percentages. I thought that might be nice, especially if they were going to send me back again. So far we'd had a quarter-

  mile miss in one spatial dimension, and a one-hour miss in the time dimension. Martin once told me that twelve dimensions were involved in operating the Gate. I didn't want to miss in any of the remaining ten.

  The Council meeting was more of the same. I offered my resignation twice, and I think the second time they almost took it. I told them once again that this mission was vital to the success of the Gate Project, but I suspect that was starting to wear a little thin.

  I couldn't follow a lot of it. Much of it was technical, way over my head. The rest seemed tied up in the internal politics of the Council. There were at least three factions -- actually, not too bad a split for a group as large as that -- and one of them kept swaying back and forth. In the end, I was authorized for another trip.

  Martin had conquered his distaste for the Council chamber and was with me during this second meeting. He told the members that nothing could be done for at least ten hours. I said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever gods there be. I hadn't had a rest in almost two days.

  And I needed to talk to Sherman.

  11 Behold the Man

  Sherman said, "Call me Jesus."

  I threw my cigarette at him, simply because I didn't have anything heavier close at hand.

  The butt never reached him. There's a little laser mounted in one corner of my room, equipped with a little radar and a little brain; it tracked the butt and zapped it to plasma before it had gone two feet. I know, I know, what will modern science think of next, but it beats hell out of ashtrays.

  "I'll call you an ambulance in a minute."

  "There are some things I honestly can't tell you, Louise," he said.

  "What can you tell me, then?"

  He seemed to think it over for a while.

  "Did your message really say you couldn't tell anybody what was in it?" I prompted.

  "Yes. With certain exceptions."

  "Like what?"

  "Like you. I am allowed to tell you certain things. At certain times."

  "To manipulate me."

  " Yes."

  I stared at him bleakly, and he stared back. To give him credit, he didn't look smug about it.

  "So many levels ... " I said.

  "Yes."

  "I mean, you telling me, admitting to me, that you can tell me certain things at certain times, for purposes of manipulation ... that's manipulation right there."

  "Yes."

  "It makes me feel so ... responsible! I know you're using me, and I have to assume it's for a good reason, so I ought to do what you want me to do ... but how do I know what that is?"

  "You simply must behave naturally. Do what you would normally have done."

  "But what you just told me alters the equation. Now that I know that you're guiding me -- however subtly -- the awareness of it will make me do things differently than ... " I sputtered to a stop. He was still regarding me innocently.

  "So I have to assume that these layers of confusion are just part of your plan, whatever it may be ... " That wasn't going anywhere, either.

  "Fuck you," I said.

  "Wonderful," he said, and clapped his hands together. "You're back on track."

  I had to smile at that.

  "I'm going to melt you down and use the scrap to make a tin can, then kick the can."

  "Great, great, get it all out."

  "Your mother was a vending machine and your father was a roto-rooter."

  "My, didn't that twentieth-century tape work well? Every little detail of daily life, at your fingertips."

  I gave him a few more half-hearted insults in modern idiom, but they were just as useless.

  You can't argue with Sherman. Even trying to is frustrating, and that's the last thing I needed.

  So I tried to clear it all out of my mind and start from scratch.

  "Okay. You're Jesus. Will you tell me what you mean by that?"

  "Yes. Jesus Christ was a prevalent myth-figure in the twentieth century, the Son of the Supreme Being, worshipped by a sect whose chief fetishes were a cross, a chalice or grail, and -- "

  "Crap, I know all that. Their big line was 'He died for our sins.'" I looked hopeful. "Is that what you had in mind?"

  "Not precisely. I had in mind his role as saviour of humankind."

  I looked at him. Remember, at this stage his face was a simple cartoon, so ineptly drawn that Walt Disney must have been spinning in his cryo-suspension fluid. Parts of his body were straight out of The Wizard of Oz. I won't say he clanked when he walked, but one look at him and you just knew he was the lineal descendant of a video arcade. This was the entity holding himself up to me as humanity's savior.

  "Call me dubious," I said.

  "Nevertheless, it's true. The message in my time capsule was quite lengthy. It delineated the events of the past few days in great detail, and went on to describe the events of the next .

  .. six days. Having read it, I immediately saw what I must do, and when, to effect the salvation of the human race. Musing on this, I was struck by the parallels with the biblical story of Jesus. Perhaps this is hubris on my part, and I don't intend to seriously stress it, but if you cast the Big Computer as God, it's not unreasonable to see me -- the only robot ever to receive a time-capsule message -- as its only begotten son."

  "And you were supposed to psychoanalyze me," I said. "Have you listened to yourself? You're no more unique than a Model-T. A savior with a serial number."

  "Big Computer, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless, not what I will, but what thou wilt."

  That time I wished I had an ashtray; nevertheless, I didn't throw my cigarette at him; it was only half-smoked, and it's a sin to waste good tobacco.

  "I didn't ask for the time capsule, Louise," he said, "any more than you asked for yours.

  You play the cards as they are dealt. I must do likewise."

  I smoked in silence for a while, trying my best to read something in that travesty he was using for a face. And I swear, after a while he began to seem almost human. I began to feel sorry for him. If even half of what he was saying was true, he'd been given a much heavier load than I had.

  "Can you prove any of this?" I asked.

  "Easily. Though I don't guarantee to prove it all. You'll remain too dubious for that. I can tell you what was in your time capsule."

  And he did, word for word. I let him go right through it, even the part about the kid, and the business about not fucking him unless I wanted to.

  "Will I ... "

  "That's one of the things I can't tell you."

  "But you know."

  "Yes. l know."

  I studied him some more. It would be pointless to mention the mazes of probabilities, lies, and deceptions my mind navigated while I watched him, because in the end I arrived right back where I started.

  "The Big Computer could have told you what was in my time capsule."

  "You think it would do that? With strict instructions from the Council not to?"

  "I know it could do it, so it's possible it did do it."

  "Wonderful," Sherman said, and he really seemed pleased. "Your suspicious mind will serve you well in the coming days, just as it has in the past.

  "Meaning it won't do me any good, but it'll keep me on my toes."

  "Exactly." He leaned forward, and regarded me with a reasonable approximation of an earnest expression. "Louise, I don't ask you to like
the situation. I don't like it myself."

  "You? Or the Big Computer?"

  "Sometimes it's pointless to speak of a distinction. But I do have feelings. I don't have to like what I have to do, and at the same time, I know it is my only course. There are bad times ahead. We are headed for a disaster that is inevitable, impossible to avoid. And yet, at the same time, there is a way out. We can't reach it until the whole sorry spectacle has been performed, but in the end, I will deliver humanity to the promised land."

  "Humanity. That's a nice broad term. I've been working all my life to save humanity." l stubbed out my cigarette. "But what about me?" I wasn't sure I really wanted to hear that, but I had to ask it.

  "For you, Louise, there are some bad times ahead. l can't be more specific. Ultimately, there is a happy ending."

  "For me?" I was incredulous. The last thing I anticipated was a happy ending.

  "Happier than you have ever expected. Is that enough?"

  For a long-time, rock-ribbed, true-blue pessimist, I guess it was. At least I found myself feeling unaccountably better, though I never for a moment thought that my own ending would be any better than bittersweet. But the nice thing about being a pessimist is that bittersweet is an improvement.

  "Okay," I said. "But you got your biblical allusions wrong. You said you were going to lead us to the promised land. Jesus didn't do that."

  Sherman looked surprised as an infallible Pope holding a losing ticket at the racetrack. It pleased the perverse side of me; I mean, maybe his history of the future hadn't contained that line of dialogue.

  "Call me Moses," he said.

  So it was Window B. That decision got made the way so many are made in our rather informal organization: by consensus.

  There was a nation in the twentieth century that styled itself the People's Republic of China. It was a dictatorship of the proletariat -- a phrase which struck me as the worst of both worlds and decisions were made through processes like criticism/self criticism, dialectic analysis, and similar buzzwords. In theory, the answer that emerged expressed the will of the masses. In fact, the Politically Correct answer always turned out to be the Chairman's answer, whatever that happened to be at the moment.

  Early in my career with the Gate Project I noticed that, informal or not, things got done in a certain manner. I made a study of it. Putting that together with my data-dumped knowledge of the PRC in the twentieth century, I learned a few things about how to arrive at a consensus: you kick ass until everybody decides to do things the way you want to do them.

  Some asses were kicked. I never had to tell anyone that I had absolutely ruled out a trip back to Window C. It just happened that, when all the dust had settled, the obvious course was to go back to Window B.

  I'll admit that it helped when Sherman made no objection to B. And I could see that might be a problem down the road if this trip didn't work out and we were left with only one alternative, but as we say in the Time Travel Business, tomorrow can take care of itself.

  Monday, December 12, Oakland International Airport.

  I had been to this day before, from eight to nine in the morning, but for me it had been almost two days ago. I had to bear in mind that for Bill Smith it had been only five hours. He was likely to recognize me if he had any memory for faces. I was assuming he would, as my face and body are quite memorable.

  The Gate dropped me at a little-used location inside the terminal building. I had argued about that some, wondering if they had really recalibrated the Gate as finely as they claimed.

  But in the end I let Lawrence have his way, since he was the expert At some point you have to rely on expert opinion. I didn't figure this was an important enough point to force for a "consensus."

  He turned out to be right. I was within six inches of the spot he had been aiming for. And the Gate had arrived quietly, as Lawrence had guaranteed. I looked around quickly to be sure I hadn't been observed, and headed down the hallway toward the room the National Transportation Safety Board had been given for their private meetings.

  It took me through the main part of the terminal, which was jammed. It would get worse in the coming days. We were in the middle of a festival known as Christmas, which seemed to take up the whole month of December. There was a big tree decorated with lights, and various other decorations hung around the buildings. Christmas was a time for spending money, traveling, and getting drunk. It had originally been a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, but by the 1980s that had been largely forgotten, replaced by a new totem in a red suit and a false beard.

  Everyone around me looked quite grim, in keeping with the season. The grimmest of all were gathered around a booth that sold flight insurance. There could be few people in the terminal who were not thinking about the recent mid-air collision. Many had decided to buy an insurance policy -- which actually insured nothing, and was in fact a bet made with a large company concerning your survival. To win the bet, you had to die. Maybe that would make more sense to me if I expected to have descendants.

  It wasn't hard getting to the meeting. I had to go through several doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  , and at one point I had to deal with a guard posted to keep out the press and other busybodies. But I was liberally armed with identification, I was wearing the right clothes, and I knew all the right names to drop. We had researched the investigation thoroughly, and knew who pulled enough weight to break the rules. So I simply flashed an I.D. badge and about eighteen perfect teeth at the guard and told him Mister Smith was waiting to see me, and I was in.

  Not too long after that, I was out.

  My pretty little dress was soaked with coffee, but I was feeling pretty good about myself.

  Laurel and Hardy couldn't have handled it better. It had been one of the all-time great pratfalls. The tray had gone just where I'd aimed it. Nobody would be listening to that tape for a while.

  The good feeling didn't last long, though.

  This had been the craziest damn trip of them all. Both rimes before, I'd been hoping to come up with the twonky and get the whole paradox resolved. This time all I'd tried to do was a diversion, and probably a fairly useless one. There were things on that tape we didn't want Mr Smith to brood about. We had figured the later in the day he heard them, the less alert he'd be, and the less likely to attach any importance to them.

  It sounded damn thin, even to me. There was even a dunce that my outrageous behavior would draw his attention to DeLisle's words, rather than away.

  Once more, my only consolation was that it was all we had. The only thing left was Window C.

  And there was something I didn't like about that, too.

  I'd felt those strings very strongly there in that room: the strings held by the temporal puppet master, Mister Pre-Destination, Professor Fate, Karma, the Black Magic Woman, or whatever the hell you wanted to call him/her/it. Whoever or whatever it was, I felt like I was being jerked around.

  There had been that one moment ...

  Squatting there on the floor beside him while he looked down at me in his befuddled way ...

  What the hell am I doing here? I had wondered. And why do his eyes look like that? I was being set up. There was no way around it. There was no way to look at this trip except as a preparation for a trip to Window C. Don't fuck him unless you want to. And tell him about the kid. She's just a wimp.

  The puppet master was pulling very hard. And his name was Sherman. "

  It no longer surprised me to see that Sherman had changed. I came through the Gate and he was waiting for me. His face wasn't cartoon-like any more, though it was still far from human. Pd half-expected he'd look like Bill Smith -- I'd caught the ghost of him in Sherman's earlier incarnation -- but he didn't. He was just an android, but now he looked like one to be taken seriously.

  Everybody was treating him as such. They kept out of his way as he led me to a room where we could talk in private.

  "How did it go?" he asked.

  "Why don't you
tell me?"

  "Very well. You succeeded in distracting him the first time DeLisle's words came up on the tape. He saw you up dose, and he recognized you. Your face is now firmly fixed in his mind. He is still going to think what DeLisle had to say when he returned to the cockpit was odd, but then it was never very important. It will be easy for him to dismiss it, because everyone else will be helping him out. Tom Stanley will hold out the longest, but eventually he will decide, with the rest, that DeLisle simply went crazy."

  "I'm not going to do it, Sherman."

  He went on as if I hadn't spoken.

  "The new Board Member, Mister Petcher -- or Gordy, as he prefers to be called -- will not make it to California on the night of the twelfth. Much as Bill Smith hates it, he will have to hold a press conference that evening. It will be the usual fruitless exercise: Smith has nothing he can tell them, and they will harry him with speculations. He will spend the evening saying 'No comment.'"

  "I won't do it, Sherman."

  "At this press conference Smith will get his first glimpse of Mister Arnold Mayer, the mystic physicist, the well-known crackpot. Mayer's questions will seem idiotic to Smith, but his name and face will stick in his mind. It wouldn't hurt if he had another name and another face that impressed him even more that night. We're doing better, Louise, but we're far from out of the woods."

  "I won't do it."

  He looked at me for a long time, in silence. At last he steepled his fingers in a very human-like gesture, put them to his chin, and rocked back and forth. He sighed, if you can believe that.

  "Tell him about the kid, Louise," he said. "She's only a wimp."

  I stood up, intending to go over and dismantle him, but I guess standing up was a mistake.

  I passed out.

  12 The Productions of Time

  Testimony of Bill Smith

  It came out like this: " ... dead! They're all dead, every one of them! They're burnt, Gil, they're dead and burned up and torn to pieces, all dead -- "