by John Varley
"Not yet. Maybe later. I make you no promises; it's still possible we can salvage this fiasco with minimal damage. It's no longer possible to save the whole world, but I hope to preserve a piece of it." She shrugged. "It's what I've done all my life, fighting a delaying action. Now, you will talk."
And Mayer did.
"There was a plane crash in Arizona in 1955," he began.
"I know. I was on the plane."
That stopped Mayer for a moment.
"Then you admit it?"
"Admit what? Oh, you think I made the plane crash. No, Doctor, it was nothing as simple or straightforward as that. We were saving the lives of everyone aboard that plane."
Mayer looked stunned. I probably did, too. I was about to say something, but Louise went on.
"Yes, Doctor Mayer. Your daughter is alive and well."
I couldn't begin to report what was said in the next half hour. Much of it was shouted, in an atmosphere of disbelief and anger. I won't even pretend that I understood much of it. I'm far from sure I understand most of it even now. Time travel, paradoxes, the end of the universe ... it was a lot to digest in one lump.
But she said she had been saving people's lives. The mechanism she described for doing it was so complicated and bizarre that the only way I had of believing any of it was a kind of reverse logic: if she was going to lie, why tell such an improbable lie? But if she was telling the truth ... it meant the blood and gore and suffering that had come to dominate my entire life was no more real than a corpse in a Hollywood mad-dasher movie. It meant all those people were alive somewhere, in an incomprehensible future.
"No, not all of them, Bill," Louise had said gently, at one point. "Only the crashes in which there were no survivors. Any witnesses to what we were doing would have caused a paradox"
It seemed a quibble to me. I felt such a load lifting from my shoulders ...
"We didn't catch it for a long time," Louise told Mayer. The fact that your daughter was aboard the plane."
"She was only twenty-two," Mayer said. He was weeping. "She had just been married.
She was on her way to California, to Livermore, to introduce her new husband to me and ... and Naomi. I think it killed Naomi, too, indirectly. She was my wife, and she "
Yes, we know," Louise said, gently.
"You know everything, don't you?"
"If I did, I wouldn't be back here questioning you. We didn't know your daughter was on that Constellation because she was traveling under her new last name. We saw you at the crash site, but couldn't find out why you were there. We finally pieced it together, with a lot of time-tank observation. We had to look at indirect things. We were up against a lot of temporal censorship." She glanced at Sherman. "And it wasn't until a short time ago we knew you had come into possession of the other lost stunner."
Mayer had purchased the thing from an Indian, who said he had found it a long ways from the main impact site. The Indian had told him the stunner would produce a not-
unpleasant tingling sensation when the trigger was depressed. Sherman and Louise looked at each other when Mayer said that. I don't know; maybe the battery was failing. The one I found sure as hell kicked harder than that.
"What I must know," Louise finally said, "is what happened to the insides of the stunner? Do you know?"
Mayer was silent. I was surprised. I didn't know what he might have to gain by continuing to hold out. I should have known, but by then I was reeling from too much information, too fast.
"He knows," Sherman said. The robot was no longer holding Mayer's hand; I guess he didn't need to anymore, or maybe it had never been necessary. Maybe it was just a show to impress the savages.
"I do know where it is," Mayer said.
"I want you to tell me, Doctor." She looked at him, and he said nothing. She sighed -- I can't begin to describe how weary she seemed -- and stood up again.
"Doctor Mayer," she said. "Let's dispense with the threats. I think you've figured out that I have no intention of hurting you. I don't claim it's because I'm such a sweet person; if it would preserve the project, I'd slice you up thinner than baloney, and never blink an eye."
"We all realize how cold-blooded you are, Ms Baltimore," Mayer said.
"Okay. I can't hurt you. I admit it. It would make things worse than they already are. I'm down to pleading, and, I hope, to reasoning. Do you understand what I said about paradox?"
"I believe I do."
"And you're still ready to jeopardize everything?"
"I don't acknowledge that as proven. You said yourself the damage has already been done; you're striving now only to minimize it. By your own admission, you yourself will be erased from reality no matter what happens here tonight. Bill has already caused the paradox.
It's unstoppable. Isn't that right?"
Louise gave me a reluctant nod. Then she rallied again.
"But it's still possible to choose between two disasters. One of them is terrible, but the other is absolute."
Mayer shook his head.
"I don't believe you know that."
From the expression on Louise's face, I started to wonder if Mayer had his own built-in polygraph.
"Maybe I don't," she admitted. "But why won't you tell us where the rest of the stunner is?"
"Because it's all I have left," Mayer said, quietly. "I don't intend to spend my few remaining years wondering if you pulled some temporal con-game on me. You said my daughter is alive in your world. I demand that you prove it. Take me there. Then I'll tell what I know."
Do you believe a drowning man sees his entire life flash before his eyes? I didn't; I still don't. I've talked to too many people who thought they were about to die, and then survived, and while they recalled some scattered images and went through some experiences that might be called religious, there was no sequential review, no actual reliving of anything.
Nevertheless, something a lot like that happened to me then. It didn't take more than a second. I was clearheaded as I reviewed where I had been, where I was now, and what I might expect from the future.
Then I stood up, and as Mayer finished saying, Then I'll tell you what I know, I said, "I want to go, too."
Louise did not seem surprised. I suspected it was impossible to surprise her at that point; I supposed she had seen everything that would happen here this night, and was going through this conversation for reasons unfathomable to me. I was right-she could no longer be surprised -- but I was also wrong, as I found out later; she didn't know what was going to happen. She proved it by turning to Sherman with a helpless look.
"What do I do now?" she asked him.
I think Mayer was as startled by this as I was. Suddenly, things shifted around, and I don't know if any of us really knew who was in charge.
Unless it was Sherman. You don't know what inscrutable is until you've tried to figure out what a robot is thinking. Mayer seemed to have the same thought. At least, when he went on with his pitch, he aimed it at Sherman, not Louise.
"What's the difference?" he said, with a pleading note }n his voice. "You've got three alternatives. You go back with the insides of that stunner, and you leave me here. You go back without the stunner, and you leave me here. Or you go back, take me, I tell you where the stunner's insides are, you come back to get them-"
"We don't know if we can do that," Sherman reminded him. "There may not even be enough time for another trip."
"That's your problem," Mayer said. "l want you to tell me what happens. What are the results of my actions?"
"Immediately? Nothing at all. We will leave, and you and Mister Smith will go back to your lives. They have been disrupted, but you will never notice a thing. Life will continue to seem as it always has done; reality will not be altered for you. Eventually you both will die."
It's funny how one word will bring something home that you may have understood intellectually but haven't yet felt in your gut. Louise and Sherman came from a place where I had been dust for a thousand years.
"As a result of the changes introduced into your lives by the things you have seen and heard in the last month or so, you will each do things much differently than you would have done in what we like to think of as the "preordained" order of things. Those changes will affect the lives of others. The effects will spread over the years and centuries. It is probable, approaching certainty, that these events will wipe out our time machine. And, of course, Louise and myself and all our contemporaries, but that isn't important.
"The important thing for you, Doctor Mayer, is that if Louise didn't exist, then she never went back to 1955. She never boarded that airplane -- at considerable risk to her own life, I might add and never rescued your daughter. It would mean that your daughter did indeed die in the Arizona desert."
Mayer was shaking his head.
"And yet you said you have her, alive, right now."
"'Now' is a rather slippery concept in this context."
"I can see that. But you didn't tell me what difference it would make. If the paradox is already here, how can my telling you about the stunner change anything? And on the other hand, how can my disappearance from this time make things any worse? People disappear all the time."
"Yes, but we know why. It's because we've taken them. And we know ... " Sherman paused, and seemed to reassess "Very well. I'll be honest. We don't know whether it would be worse to take you or leave you here."
"I thought not. And in that case, I stand firm. You see- ... when you get right down to it, I don't believe you have my daughter. I won't until I see her. And having seen her, I won't believe I could lose her again."
Sherman looked at him for a long time.
"The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve."
"I know that, too. I've spent my life accepting the answers I've found in the universe.
Until I began to investigate and to really think about the nature of time. And then something changed. I don't believe ... I don't believe there is nothing behind it all. Maybe I'm saying I believe in God."
"And he's on your side. Is that it?"
Mayer looked abashed.
"I put it badly. I -- "
"No, don't apologize," Sherman said. "Oddly enough, I do too." He looked from Mayer, to Louise, to me. By then I was feeling like a relatively unimportant member of the peanut gallery, there to applaud when the sign flashed.
"Do you believe in a god, Mister Smith?"
"I don't know. I don't believe reality is as fragile as you're trying to say it is. And I still want to go."
He looked at Louise, who was shaking her head hopelessly.
"Very well," Sherman said. "Let's all go back."
20 The Night Land
Testimony of Louise Baltimore
Do whatever Sherman tells you, the time capsule message had said. The time capsule Sherman admitted he had cooked up in collusion with the Big Computer.
But what choice did I have? I had to feel as if I understood something first, and I'd stopped feeling that along about ... well, about the time I snapped the neck of that poor suffering drone. This is the nicest thing I'd done for anyone in a long time, I had thought then.
Sherman said we had to go back and interrupt the meeting between Smith and Mayer.
And we had to put on a hell of a show for them.
Well, P.T. Barnum could have learned a thing or two from us. The Gate often causes a lot of local weirdness when it arrives in the past. There are three dozen kinds of suppressors to cancel out these effects when we want to arrive in, say, the middle of a library. Sherman had Lawrence turn them all off, with the result that if we'd been planning to go to Times Square on New Year's eve we'd have been the noisiest show in town. Then we threw in a lot of extra razzle-dazzle to make them nervous.
I improvised from there. I think even Sherman might have been surprised when I cast him as a walking torture machine. But then, there were surprises all around that night. I, for instance, had pretty much believed it was important to get the whole stunner. But Sherman had other ideas.
"You didn't tell me the whole truth," I told him, as soon as we'd made it back through the Gate.
"I told you as much as I had," he said. "Now we go to my fall-back position. And in the meantime, our friends are suffering some disorientation."
He was right. Both Smith and Mayer were looking stunned. I thought Mayer was going to be sick.
There's not much you can do; they're either going to deal with the trip, or they're going to go crazy. It wasn't long until I was fairly sure they'd both be okay. When I thought Mayer would understand me, I knelt beside him and looked the bastard in the eye. "Okay. Do we have to bring your daughter in here, or will you tell me what I need to know? Let me remind you that I haven't go t much time to mount an operation, wherever or whenever you tell me to go to."
He looked dubious, but still slightly dazed.
"You wouldn't send me back?"
"What's the point? Sherman says he has something up his sleeve, anyway, but I want to go back and get the rest of that stunner."
"It's not necessary," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because I never had it. The man who sold it to me had already gutted the machine."
"What did he do with the guts?"
Mayer was looking nervous. I don't blame him. Most of what I'd done in his office had been an act, but I think he'd swallowed at least some of it, and damn if I didn't feel like a dangerous person just then.
"The man was an artisan," Mayer said. "He operated a roadside souvenir stand, selling silver and jewelry. He told m., that when the ... the stunner stopped producing the pleasant tingling sensations, he broke up the insides and incorporated the more interesting parts into belt buckles and rings."
He moved away from me slightly. I don't blame him. I knew I had to either knock his head off, or laugh.
"I only said I knew where it was," he said. "I do. It is scattered al l over the continent.
And it is utterly harmless."
I laughed.
"Doc," I told him, "you've just shut down the Operations division of the Gate Project. I'm out of a job."
It seemed like the proper time to die.
It wasn't, not quite yet, but I began planning it.
There was the matter of Mayer's daughter, and my promise to him. I pressed the emergency assembly alarm on Lawrence's console. For a while, nothing happened. Then I got a tired voice.
"Yeah, what the hell is it?"
"Mandy, is that you?"
"Who the hell else would it he? Who the hell else would sit end the ready-room with three corpses that are a hell of a lot happier than I am, just on the off chance that my fearless leader would need me, when I could have been on my way to dreamland hours ago? How many hours have we got, by the way?"
"Mandy, are you drunk on duty?"
"Drunk? Drunk? Does a bear shit in the woods? Does a-"
"Good for you, Mandy. We have about twenty-four hours before we softly and suddenly vanish away. Are you still on duty? Or have you resigned?"
I thought she might have gone to sleep. Then she spoke.
"What's it to you?"
"I've got a goat here who wants to see his daughter. She's in the holding pen. I'll have the BC warm her up, if you'll run him over there."
Mandy Djakarta, the toughest operative I'd ever known, began m cry.
"God, l love a happy ending," she sobbed.
Mandy showed up soon to take Mayer away. I was left with Smith, Lawrence, Sherman, and Martin Coventry, who came in with Mandy. Bill was eyeing Lawrence, the last surviving member of the gnomish control team. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, then I looked at it from Smith's twentieth-century eyes and knew that Bill was squeamish at Lawrence's appearance. Lawrence ignored Bill totally, did not deign to acknowledge his existence. For just a second I felt closer to Lawrence than I had since ... since he'd fallen apart and been tied down to his console. Who was this lousy 20th t
o judge us? At the same time, I identified with Bill. I felt the same way he did, had felt that way all my life. This is you in a couple years, Louise ...
At least I didn't have to face that anymore.
"Will you be needing me for anything else, Louise?" Lawrence asked. The implication was clear. I was about to tell him to go ahead and turn himself off.
"For a short time, Lawrence, if you please," Sherman said.
"Okay. But when the crunch is about ten minutes away, I'm signing out. I've given it a lot of thought, and I decided I'd rather die than ... whatever's going to happen. Better to live and die, than never to have lived at all. Does that make any sense, Sherman?"
"It does. I respect it. Please hang on for me."
Bill had been coughing a lot. The wonder was no blood was coming up. He'd been breathing our air for half an hour before Martin came up with a gas mask that would give him pure oxygen.
Sherman took the four of us out on the balcony overlooking the derelict field. Bill looked out at the detritus of our operations; it was easy to see he was impressed. "
"Lawrence's choice has been a popular one," Martin told me. "I believe I have had the shortest tenure on the Council, which is a notoriously transient body. They're all dead."
"Even Phoenix?"
"Even he. In a sense, I suppose I am the Council."
"That should simplify ... Hey, just how many people are left?"
Sherman looked thoughtful, which meant he was interfacing with the BC. The BC answered for him, from thin air, which startled Bill.
"Discounting the three hundred million wimps, which are technically alive, and the two hundred thousand goats in suspended animation ... the population of the Earth now stands at two hundred and nine. Correction: two-oh-sigh-correction, two-oh-seven."
"I get the picture," I said. "So Mandy was probably the last operative I had left."
"In a sense," the BC said. "She has taken a drug that is invariably fatal, but which will give her six hours of pure pleasure."