by John Varley
"Fuck you. What a thing to ask. Where's Sherman?"
"He's at your apartment. He said to remind you that your second time capsule is ready to be opened in thirty minutes. After you read it, he said, you'll know what to do."
I looked at Lawrence. He didn't look back, just gazed over the deserted Operations floor.
"Are you really ready to shut yourself off?"
"There's no hurry. I can wait until you've seen Sherman."
"It's a hell of a thing for me to ask," I said, "but I'd appreciate it if you would. Just until I see if he has anything else in mind."
"You know where to find me."
I went to the ready-room to get some clothes. There were three of my girls in there, dead, holding hands.
"Wipe those smiles off your faces," I told them. "This is going to look terrible on your records."
They didn't seem to appreciate the humor. I went to my locker and poked. through it. Talk about time's closet. I had outfits in there ranging from poorly cured leopard hide to a spacesuit you could carry in your hip pocket. But my last pair of blue jeans had been ruined about a million years ago while being worn by a wimp who was also wearing my face.
What do you wear when you go to see the end of the world? What's the proper outfit for an extinction? I chose the dress I'd worn when we took the Titanic. Those had been the good old days.
There was shooting as I neared the tube station that would take me to the Federal Building. A lot of laughter punctuated the shots. It sounded like some drones were having a gay old massacre.
I hung back. The puny weapons the BC allows drones are big enough to blow out the back of your head if you put the barrel in your mouth, but they were no match for my firepower. I was in no mood to slaughter a bunch of drones, even suicidal ones.
The sounds moved away, and I entered the station. There were six or seven bodies. One of them moved, and I went to her. I turned her over. She'd taken four or five bullets, was very bloody, and a little surprised.
"It hurts," she said. I nodded.
"You may last another couple hours," I told her.
"Oh, I hope not."
I nodded again, and put my arms around her head. She looked up at me and smiled.
"I like your dress," she said.
I broke her neck.
This time there was no audience at the Fed. I went to the one chair in the room and sat down. My second time capsule was waiting for me on the table across the room.
"There you are, Louise," said the BC. "I see you made it."
"In a punctual manner of speaking."
"Would you like to open it now?"
"is it time?"
"Close enough."
So I went to the table and took the shiny metal rectangle from the remains of the metal brick. Once again, it was in my handwriting.
No jokes this time, Louise. There is a way; all is not lost. Sherman is telling the truth. Do exactly what he says, no matter who tells you different. I'll talk to you again on the last day.
The message hadn't said anything about hurrying. It's a good thing; I wasn't in the mood to hurry, and I'd resigned from the Gate Project. I hadn't told anybody, not that is mattered.
I went to a high place on the edge of the city and looked down at what was left.
It had been a hell of a city at one time. There were buildings out there dating back forty thousand years. The Fed was the biggest one.
Then there were the newer items. The Gate had been there for thousands of years, but the structures we'd built to house it were only six hundred years old. Next to it was the derelict field. Stretching off in the other direction were a hundred square miles of wimp vaults: low warehouses with a hundred million cubicles, one of which held my child.
On the third side of the Gate complex was the series of temporary geodesic domes -- they'd only been there two hundred years -- which we called the holding pens. What they held were about two hundred thousand sleeping human beings and ninetythree very confused Roman centurions who would soon be asleep themselves, if anybody was still there to handle the process.
They were held in suspended animation, a few degrees above freezing. Their hearts barely beat. They floated in a blue solution of fluorocarbons and if you put one next to a wimp, you'd have had a hard time telling the difference. But that difference was all-
important. They had minds, and memories, and past lives.
God, what a carnival it would have been to have set them all down on a virgin planet and awakened them!
Their birthdays ranged from 3000 B.C. to 3000 A.D. They were soldiers and civilians, infants and octogenarians, rich and poor, black, white, brown, yellow, and pale green. We had Nazis, Huguenots, Boers; Apaches, Methodists, Hindus, animists, and atheists. There were petty thieves and mass murderers and saints and geniuses and artists and pimps and doctors and shamen and witches. There were Jews from Dachau and Chinese from Tangshen and Bengalis from Bangladesh. Coal miners from Armenia and Silesia and West Virginia.
Astronauts from Alpha Centauri. We had Ambrose Bierce and Amelia Earhart.
Sleepless nights, I used to wonder what sort of society mey'd form when they all got to New Earth.
Leading away from the holding pens was a rail line to the spaceport, just visible in the distance. Sitting there were a few dozen surface-to-orbit craft that were seldom used these days ... and the Ship.
The Ship was almost finished. Another two or three years and we'd have made it.
Sherman was waiting with no signs of impatience. His legs weren't in lotus position, but he managed to resemble The Buddha. I regarded him, wondered if he wanted me to ring some bells or light incense or something. But I'd been coughing pretty bad since my return from the glorious twentieth, and I made a beeline to the revitalizer. I sat down heavily. As I plugged the feedline into my navel it began to take its samples.
"What are your orders?" I asked.
"Don't take it like that, Louise," he said. "I didn't ask for this."
"Neither did I. But one takes what one gets, doesn't one?"
"One does."
"Henceforth, I shall regard you as The All-Seeing Eye. I shall presume you know everything about everything. I'll presume you know my thoughts before I think them. And you know what?"
"You don't give a shit."
I shrugged. "Okay, you talk to an infallible prophet, you never get to deliver your best lines. It must make it dull, knowing exactly what's coming."
"I wouldn't call it dull."
I thought about that, and managed to laugh.
"I guess not. You know that I've resigned?"
"I do. And that you broke security and told Bill Smith who and what you actually are, as best you could, and that he didn't believe it."
"Why did you want me to tell him I'd see him that night? I'd already been back, in the hangar. I couldn't go back to his hotel room."
"I wanted to insure he'd be in the hangar to meet you, as we knee, he had already done."
That one stumped me for a minute. The answer was obvious, but l didn't see it because all my training had forced me to look at the situation in a particular way. Then I saw.
"You were forcing the paradox."
"Correct."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Would you have done it?"
I couldn't answer that. Probably not.
"The Council would not have authorized the trip, either," he went on, "if I had told them its purpose was to be sure you and Smith did meet. Your meeting him was what caused the paradox situation to get out of-hand in the first place."
"Then what's the point? Why did I go back?"
He steepled his fingertips and was silent for quite a while. For a moment he looked startlingly human.
"All of us in the Gate Project are saddled with a certain perspective," he began, at last.
"We think of this moment as the, quote, present, unquote. When we move downtime, we think of it as going into the past, and of coming back as returning to the present. But when we a
rrive in the past, it is the present. It is the present to those who live there. To them, we have come from the future."
"This is pretty elementary."
"Yes. But I'm speaking of perspective. Running the Gate, as we do, we are unaccustomed to Bill Smith's perspective. We aren't used to the idea that there is a concrete future that is someone else's present."
I sat up straighter.
"Sure we are. I got a message from the future no more than an hour ago. It told me to trust you."
"I know. But who was it from?"
"From me, you know that. At least ... "
"From a future version of you. But you haven't written it yet."
"For that matter, I haven't written the first one yet, either. And I'm not sure I will."
"You don't have to. Look at these." He handed me two metal plaques. I knew what they had to be, but I looked anyway. I tossed them on the floor.
"Handwriting is easy to copy, Louise. The BC turned these out with very little effort.
They will be sent back in a few hours."
I sighed. "Okay, you've got me coming and going, I'll admit it You still haven't told me why one paradox is preferable to another."
"There are several reasons. In one paradox -- the one we would have caused had you not gone back and spent the night with Bill Smith -- you would have vanished the instant the appointed time arrived and you failed to step through the Gate. Because, seen from the future, you already had stepped through. It was part of the structure of events, as surely as the loss of the stunner was part of that structure."
"But it wasn't. That's what this has all been about."
"It was. I'm saying the paradox is built into the structure of time. That the events we have for so many years been observing is the illusion, and the new reality that is now working its way up the timeline is the real reality. And it doesn't include us."
He was making my head ache. Time theory had never been my strong point. I grasped that one word, and held on to it.
"I thought these were all theories. I thought we didn't really know what would happen in a paradox."
"They were. I've received new information that I have reason to believe is reliable." He spread his hands. "We're handicapped here by the language. We don't have a useful definition of "reality," for one thing. I believe that what is closer to the truth is that each series of possible events creates its own reality. There is the one we've been looking at, in which Smith never found the stunner, and it's tied up with the one where he couldn't have found it because it was never lost."
"But what we're dealing with here is the one in which it was lost and he did find it, and reality is rearranging itself. And it's going to leave us out."
"That's true, so far as it goes."
"I'm afraid it's as far as I can go. What you're saying is that it didn't ... doesn't matter whether or not I went back. If I didn't, I'd simply have vanished that much faster."
He looked at me with his much more expressive face, and I saw something that I couldn't identify.
"It may have little meaning in the long run," he said. "But I myself would prefer a universe where you were still here over one where you had already vanished."
I didn't know what to say about that. I ran it through the battered mechanism I was using for a brain, and came up with something. Two things.
"Thank you," was the first thing. "But did you really have a choice?"
"I don't know. If the information from my time capsule had told me I must eliminate you from the timestream, I'd prefer to think I would have resisted it. Luckily, my only course was to do what I did do, which was also what I wanted to do."
"Do we have free will, Sherman?"
"Yes." "
"You can say that, sitting there knowing what's about to happen, what I'm about to do?"
"Yes. I wouldn't be trying to convince you of what we must do if I didn't think we had free will."
I thought that one over.
"Don't try to shit me, Sherman. You know I've resigned, and yet you seem to be saying there's still something we can do. If we're going to do it, you're going to have to convince me to reenlist.
He grinned at me. I swear it.
"We do have free will, Louise. It's just that it's predestined."
"I'm tired of the word games. You know I'm about ready to join the majority and jump through that window over there. You also know there's only one way you can stop me, which is to tell me what you know, and what you plan to do."
So he told me.
By then I was sure the universe could no longer surprise me, nor interest me. I was wrong. It managed to do both in no more than ten minutes.
And while he told me, the revitalizer -- which had been pumping me full of drugs and nutrients while at the same time examining my physical condition -- spoke up with the confirmation.
My apartment building never a lively place at the best of times -- was grim as Sherman and I embarked on the slidewalk. Word had gotten out that the end of the world was coming.
Not many of the drones wanted to watch it. Their bodies littered the atrium.
No, littered is too strong- a word. When you got right down to it, the Last Age couldn't even produce an impressive scene of carnage. We had maybe three hundred thousand drones in a city that was built for thirty million. The bodies were tastefully spaced. There was something almost Japanese about it: a long, Bauhaus corridor and one corpse slightly offset.
The art of bodyarrangement.
There was one couple who had made their suicide pact while in the act of coitus. I thought it was rather sweet, after all the bloody jumpers. Getting back to basics in one's last moments.
Suicide has always been our national pastime. By now, it was an epidemic. When we entered the Council Chamber we found they were down to five. No hope of making the World Series, I thought. Maybe we could play basketball.
The Nameless One was still there. I wondered if he/she/it would notice the end of the world. So was Nancy Yokohama, and Marybeth Brest, the talking head.
And of course Peter Phoenix. I figured he'd want to be there at the end to make sure everything got done properly.
The new member was Martin Coventry. He still seemed mobile. I guess the BC had called him in for lack of any really old players on the bench.
I was proud of Sherman. There is something to be said for putting on a show. He knew the outcome, yet he still played the moment for all it was worth. He went right up to their big curved table, lifted one leg, and sat down on it. Marybeth Brest scowled at him. He reached over and tousled her hair.
"You're probably wondering why I've called you together," he said.
The BC made an exception this one time, due to the infirmities of the Council. Having them come to the Fed would have involved a lot of logistical planning, since most of their bodily functions were performed by several tons of machinery. The five time capsules were sent over, and opened in their presence. I watched as they read the messages. They all said pretty much what my last time capsule had said: Do whatever he tells you.
Sherman gave them time to digest the messages. Then he stood up and faced them.
"Now. Here's what we're going to do."
18 "The Twonky"
Testimony of Bill Smith
So I rushed out of the hangar, alerted the FBI and the CIA and all the newspapers. The Governor called out the National Guard and the President called a special session of Congress. All the big think tanks put their best minds to work on the problem. I was debriefed endlessly, everyone wanting to know exactly what Louise Ball had said and what she had done every time I'd met her.
And if you believe any of that, you're a bigger fool than I am.
What I did was stop by a bar for a drink or four, and then call Tom Stanley. He was asleep, but said he'd listen to me. I drove to his hotel room, sat down with him, and told him the whole story. I hold him what Louise had told me, and I was amazed how different it sounded in the light of my experiences in the hangar. I t
old him what had happened to me, what I'd seen and heard, how I'd come around just as Louise had said I would, with a leg that hurt like hell and the beginnings of a bad cold from lying two hours on cold concrete.
"She told me she was from somewhere else Tom." I said. "Someplace where everybody dies. Somewhere a long ways from here, or a long time. I thought she was crazy. But she didn't know me! I'd just spent the night with her, and she said, "Smith, you don't know me," and I knew she wasn't kidding. She hadn't met me yet.
"And that thing ... that stunner. I didn't get to look into it very long, and they took it with them, but it didn't look like anything I'd ever seen before. And it knocked me out, but I could still breathe okay, but I couldn't even move my eyeballs. I just looked straight up. I thought they were Russians, or something. I thought they were going to kill me. But, see, they couldn't kill me, or Louise wouldn't let them ... I don't know."
I trailed off. I don't know how long I'd been going on about it. Tom had listened quietly.
"So who was she?" he finally said. "Where did she come from?"
"I don't know. But don't you see? We've got to find out."
There was a very long silence. He wouldn't look at me.
"Those watches, Tom. What about the watches? Something happened to them to make some of them go backwards, and the rest of them were forty-five minutes off. Forty-five minutes, Tom."
He looked up, then down again.
"And the tape. He said they were all dead and burned. Dead and burned. Why would he say a thing like that? Tom, are you going to ask me how much I've had to drink?"
He looked up- again.
"Something like that."
"What can I do to convince you?"
He spread his hands.
"Bill ... I want to believe you ... no, wait." He shook his head. "That's a lie. I don't want to believe you. Would you? I mean, it's a crazy story, Bill. It's crazy. But I'm willing to believe you if you show me something."
"What?"
He shrugged. "That's up to you, isn't it? Anything. Anything at all that's concrete. Put something in my hand. Otherwise, much as I hate to say this ... I think you've just flipped out about this girl. I don't know why. But why don't you go home and sleep on it? Maybe you'll think of something."