Millennium

by John Varley

  She told the whole story very glibly, and finished up before the dessert came. Every time I asked for a detail she had it ready. It was fascinating, really, because about halfway through the story I realized I didn't believe a word of it.

  You know what? I didn't give a shit. By then I had a pleasant glow that was a long way from being drunk but felt very nice indeed. She'd matched me drink for drink and, as far as I could see, was completely sober.

  "Can you fly?" I asked her.

  She looked startled, then suspicious.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know. I just thought you could."

  "I've flown small planes.

  "I thought so."

  She'd hardly touched her dessert. Come to think of it, she'd hardly touched anything, though the food was excellent. And she'd smoked all the time. She'd gone through one pack and put a dent in another.

  I started to think about riding back to the airport with her in that rolling bomb. And I wondered why she'd lied to me. Don't ask me how I knew she had been lying; I knew.

  "Can you take me home?" I said.

  "I don't know if anyone can do that, Bill. I'll try."

  She did all right. Maybe she'd realized my terror on the way to the restaurant, because she slowed down considerably.

  Then I was dropped off in front of the hotel, like a coed at the dorm. I felt, a little funny about it, but I figured I shouldn't come on too heavy. I expected to see her in the morning, anyway.

  I found my room in a warm glow that lasted until I had the door shut behind me. Then I was once again in a strange hotel room, far from home, alone. I wished I had a drink, knew it was the worst possible thing for me, and wished for it again. I dialed room service and then, in a rare display of will power, hung up before they answered. I opened the drapes and looked out at the lights. I sat by the window.

  I'm sure I would have gone to sleep there in that chair, but about twenty minutes later there was a knock on my door. I almost didn't answer; it had to be Tom or somebody from the investigation with a problem I wasn't up to solving.

  But I did go to the door and when I opened it Louise was standing there with a paper sack and two glasses, trying to look cheerful and not doing a very good job of it.

  "I thought you might like a nightcap," she said, and started to cry.

  14 "Poor Little Warrior!"

  Testimony of Louise Baltimore

  "Sherman, set the dial on the Wayback Machine for the evening of December twelfth, nineteen eighty-something-or-other."

  "You got it, Mr Peabody," Sherman piped up: Sherman. The bastard.

  Our story thus far ...

  If you'll recall, when we left our heroine she was heroically passed out at the mere mention of an historically insignificant miscarriage. That the miscarriage occurred a couple years after the baby was born was not worthy of special remark; it happened all the time, these days. In fact, now it was happening every time. I'd had my baby for two years. I suppose that could be seen as good fortune.

  What's Fortune? A magazine. What does it cost? Ten cents. But I've only got a nickel.

  That's your good fortune.

  If I get any heavier I'll drop through the floor. Historical allusions, ten cents per kilobyte, courtesy of your local datadumper. Nineteen-eighties our specialty.

  My head was crammed with so much data about the era that I could hardly clear my throat without coming up with an advertising jingle, movie synopsis, television show, or hoary joke.

  "Sherman, what I am is a jokey whore."

  "Don't fuck him unless you want to, Louise."

  "I don't want to!"

  The Gate opened up, and I ... stepped through.

  I sat through most of his news conference. It was fully as boring as I'd expected it to be, though of course we'd not been able to observe it since I was sitting there exerting temporal censorship.

  There was only one bad moment. At the end of the press conference Mayer started asking the damndest questions. Looking for unusual data, he said. t don't know what it is, but I'll know it when I see it. And by the way, Mister Smith, have you found anything unusual having to do with time? I nearly swallowed my cigarette.

  What did that bastard know?

  I spotted Smith across the crowded airport lobby. I didn't have much trouble reaching him as he stepped on the escalator, though a couple people who hadn't gotten out of my way didn't like my methods. I didn't care. They were all my ancestors, but I'd had it with ancestors. I'd spent my life trying to make a future for them, and look where it had got me.

  We had worked hard on this moment, Sherman and I.

  (This was after, long after, he threw water on my face or pinched my earlobe or slapped me or whatever he did to bring me around. My memories of that period are rather vague and I'd just as soon not discuss them, thank you. My memories of the hours following that, when Sherman and I had discussed the kid, are clear as can be, and I'd just as soon not discuss them either. I'm supposed to tell everything, but there are limits.) "Meet cute," Sherman had said.

  "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "It's a term popular in various eras of twentieth-century Hollywood, describing devices whose purpose is to effect the first plot element of the favorite story of the time, which began 'boy meets girl.'"

  "'Boy loses girl, boy gets girl,' right?"

  "Right. We needn't concern ourselves too much with the second part. He'll lose you without our help, in the natural order of things, and of course he can't get you in the end."

  "Whatever happened to happy endings?" I asked "Don't answer. They died out about the time I was born. So give me an example of meeting cute."

  "Veronica Lake as a disillusioned woman on her way out of Hollywood, who spends her last dollar on ham and eggs for Joel McRae, who turns out to be a famous director dressed as a bum to gather material for a movie he plans to make. Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges, 1942."

  "You've been watching a lot of movies," I said.

  "About as many as you. Of course, my data-dumping capacity is larger, and I have better access to it."

  "You were thinking along these lines when you told me to dump the coffee in his lap."

  "Yes. Now he knows you. We must give him an opportunity to know you better."

  "So what's your idea?"

  Sherman told me, and here I was, getting onto an escalator in Oakland.

  I reached into my purse just about the time Smith saw me. smiled at him, and pressed a button in the purse, and the escalator ground to a stop.

  "We do keep running into each other, don't we?" I said.

  I hadn't counted on him being so shy. I had to drag a dinner invitation out of him. I was beginning to wonder if the fancy skinsuit I was wearing was really all it was cracked up to be.

  Thinking it over, I suppose I'd been expecting him to know his lines as well as I did. I just assumed he was feeling the puppet master's strings pulling him as strongly as they were pulling me. But why should he? If anything, I was his puppet master, and he had no way of knowing that. I was the one who'd seen the scriptor at least the proposal for the way the evening should proceed.

  Since he didn't suggest driving I assumed he didn't have a car. So I steered him toward the parking lot, where we'd prepared a contingency plan. That's when I almost got into trouble.

  As I said, data-dumping can fill me with facts, but it's not much help at pattern recognition. There were a million vehicles in the lot and I didn't know much about any of them. Oh, I knew the brand names; other than that, I had to go by instinct in selecting "my" automobile.

  Logically, I thought I should choose a small one to go with my presumed socio-economic status. But sometimes logic doesn't help. How was I to know that big cars don't always cost more, nor small ones less.

  The one I picked was low and uncomfortable looking. As soon as I indicated it I knew I was wrong. Smith looked at me strangely. Well, it was too late to change my mind. I reached in my purse and all the door lock
s sprang open before he could get dose enough to see it happening. Then we got in and I scanned the controls. They seemed simple and straightforward, though I thought radar might have been helpful. I inserted a key in the ignition. It felt out the proper combination, started the car for me, and I got it in motion.

  It was even easier than I'd thought. The vehicle was much faster than anything else on the road. I used the reserve speed to hurry through the smaller autos, keeping the tachometer as close as possible to the red line. I followed the signs to Jack London Square.

  I shouldn't have admitted I spoke French. By the time I realized it was out of character to do so, I'd already been speaking it to the waiter.

  The food was pretty bad. I'm sure everyone else enjoyed it, but to me, it was tasteless, like chewing cardboard. We require quite different chemicals in our diets than 20ths, including a lot of things that would surely kill Bill Smith, or at least make him very sick. I'd come prepared. I had some capsules that contained all the poisons a self-respecting creature from the ninety-ninth century could ever need. I kept palming them all night and dropping them into my drinks. They had the added advantage of neutralizing the ethanol. I pecked at my food; it was the double scotches that sustained me.

  He told me a lot of things I already knew; after all, Bill Smith had become the most extensively researched person in the twentieth century. We had scanned him from his birth (by Caesarean section) to his death.

  I'd entered the twentieth century with a good deal of contempt for Mister Smith. Looking at his life from the outside, you just had to wonder why a guy who had so much going for him had done so little with it. He struck me as a whiner, soon to be a wino. He had a responsible position and he was in the process of throwing it away. He'd been a failure at marriage.

  He was living in the era that, from my perspective, was about as dose to heaven on Earth as the human race had ever come, and in a nation that had more wealth -- however you want to measure it -- than any other nation ever achieved. From here on up it was going to be down hill all the way, until the human race reached its nadir: those good old days of the far future I called home.

  It was only natural I'd find myself thinking what the hell did he have to complain about? Yet the twentieth century was bursting with complainers. They worried about meaningful relationships. They complained about the high cost of living. They had a whole battery of words to describe the things that afflicted them: words like angst, ennui, malaise. They took pills to cure something called depression. They went to classes to learn how to feel good about themselves. They aborted about one out of four of their children. They really felt they had problems.

  And at the same time they were busy as beavers destroying the world. They built eventually over three hundred gigatons of nuclear weapons and then pretended they'd never use them. They set in motion the processes that would eventually kill all animal species but themselves and a few insects and a million quickmutating microbes, and that would leave their descendants such as myself catastrophically evolving toward oblivion. They were doing things right then that would change me so much that I could no longer breathe their air or eat their food for any length of time.

  I guess it's no wonder they invented existential despair.

  Still, it's one thing to see a man's life in overview, and another to hear him tell it. I'd been prepared for the tale, had expected to do my best to smile all the way through it.

  But when he started to talk, I found things shifting around. The poor guy, I'd think, and then catch myself thinking it.

  He didn't whine. He didn't even really complain. I found myself wishing he would; it would be so much easier to feel a healthy contempt for him. But what he told me was the simple truth. He was lonely. He didn't know what to do about it. He used to be able to lose himself in his job, but that didn't work anymore. He knew it was silly, he couldn't figure out why nothing seemed to mean anything. Working as his own physician, he had prescribed ethanol as a possible cure. It seemed to work some of the time, but the results weren't all in yet. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that he'd reached for something, missed it, and was on his way down. It wouldn't get any better.

  So I vacillated between feeling sorry for him and wanting to jerk him up by the collar and slap him around until he came to his senses. I guess if I'd been born in the twentieth century, I'd have been a social worker. I couldn't seem to deal with a goat as a person without getting all fouled up inside. I couldn't stay out of his shoes.

  Damn, it's so much easier to knock the fuckers out and kick their asses through the Gate.

  Then all the crying is done far from my sight.

  The man could hold his liquor. He probably thought the same thing about me.

  He held it so well that, by the time the food came, he realized he'd been pouring out his life story in an uninterrupted monologue, and he had the grace to feel guilty about it. So he asked me about myself.

  Not that I hadn't come prepared. Sherman and I had worked up a life story. I just didn't want to tell it. I was sick of lying. But I told it, and I thought I did a pretty good job. He nodded in the right. places, asked sympathetic but not probing questions.

  I was going right along, feeling pleased with myself, when I realized he didn't believe a word I was saying.

  There was a funny look in his eyes. Maybe it was just liquor. I told myself it was, but I didn't believe it.

  No, he just thought there was something I didn't want to talk about, and he was perfectly right.

  I dropped him off at his hotel, drove a few blocks away, parked, and then just sat there and shook.

  When I stopped shaking, I looked at my watch. It was a little after midnight. I knew what I had to do. Sherman and I had worked out the approach and I thought it would work. I just couldn't seam to get moving.

  It's not that I was afraid to go to bed with him. Sherman and I had talked that out, and I felt a lot better about the sex question. Why be afraid of having a baby when you only have a couple days to live? And it wasn't that I was too uppity to go to bed with a man for the sake of the Gate Project. There was a long list of unsavory things I'd do to save the project, and fucking somebody I didn't like was a long ways from the bottom.

  It's not even that I didn't like him. It was a job to do and I don't turn away from my job any more than any good soldier should ... but all that aside, I did like him. And the time capsule had been easy about that part, anyway. I didn't have to unless I wanted to.

  She's only a wimp.

  There was a liquor store not far from where I was parked. I got out of my car, walked down the sidewalk, went in, and bought a bottle of scotch.

  On my way back somebody stepped out of a dark doorway and started to follow me. I turned around. He was a dark man, possibly a negro, though to my eyes races are as hard to distinguish as fashions. He pushed a gun toward me.

  "Let's have the purse, cunt," he said.

  "Are you a mugger or a rapist?" I asked him. Then I took his gun, threw him on the ground, and stood on his neck He tried to throw me off, so I kicked his face and stood on his neck again. He gurgled. I let up the pressure.

  "I think you broke my wrist," he said.

  "No, it was either the radius or the ulna. You'd better have a doctor set it." I looked at his bare arm. "You're a junkie, aren't you?"

  He didn't say anything.

  Well, you don't get a lot of choice in your ancestors, but he was one, so I couldn't kill him. There was the possibility I'd already done a lot of damage to the timestream ... but I didn't care.

  It was a feeling of relief. I was going to do what I wanted to do, if I could just discover what that was.

  I took the bullets out of his gun and gave it back to him. Then I reached in my purse and handed him a wad of American currency -- twenty thousand dollars, minus the $15.86 I'd spent for the scotch.

  "Have a good time," I said.

  Free will was an odd feeling. If that's what it was.

  I let my hands do the drivi
ng. They brought me back to Bill's hotel, and they parked the car.

  My feet seemed to have similar ideas, though they didn't do as neat a job. In the hall outside Bill's room I stumbled over a room-service tray that had two empty highball glasses on it. I picked them up, and my feet took me to his door and parked me there. I was about to scratch on the door, remembered that was a different time and place, so I hit it with my fist instead.

  Knock, knock.

  Who's there? Your good fortune.

  What's fortune? Just stick out your palm, Mister Smith. Louise tells all.

  15 "Compounded Interest"

  Testimony of Bill Smith

  I hadn't smoked a cigarette in nine years. But when she got up off the bed and went to the bathroom, I grabbed the pack she'd left on the nightstand and lit one up. They were Virginia Slims. I started coughing on the second puff, and by the fourth I was feeling light-headed, so I stubbed it out.

  What a night.

  I glanced at the clock. It was one in the morning. She was going to turn into a pumpkin at ten. It was one of many things she'd said, and it made about as much sense as any of the other things.

  I listened to the water running behind the closed door. It sounded like she was taking a shower.

  All I knew for sure was she'd had a daughter, and the kid had died. The rest of it didn't add up.

  "Can I tell you something?" she had said, after she managed to stop crying. We were sitting tin the edge of the bed and I had my arms around her. She was as beautiful an armful as I had ever had, but sex was very far from my mind.

  "Sure. Anything."

  "It's a long story," she warned me.

  "I figured."

  She laughed. It was a shaky laugh and it threatened to become something else, but she controlled herself.

  "Where I come from, everybody dies," she said.