"Well, write the logic however you want. But that's the story I prefer. I think of the future, and Yvonne's head is waiting for me. And likewise, it probably helps that my receptor seems just as fascinated in the past as I am in the future."
I sat quietly, thinking to myself.
"By any chance is your Merv a backward-looking individual?"
"He's a traditionalist,” I allowed.
A beer-swilling Neanderthal, I might have said.
I asked, “What about our benefactor?"
"Hector is his döppelganger,” she offered. “A middle-management gentleman inside the future insurance industry."
"I didn't mean that,” I said. “What else does he do?"
"How does our angel serve this secretive and very peculiar operation?” She winked. “He has earned a fortune by helping young visionaries become professional writers. It's one of the best ways to keep us happy. Or did you guess that trick already? The wise, worldly author coaches us, allowing us to make those one or two early sales. And because of her tiny career, an aging dyke can attend these conventions as a professional, even though she long ago gave up all pretense of a career in fiction."
"How many of us are there?"
"There's just a handful of full-time writers,” she said. “And that includes you and our benefactor. Which is why, according to my usually reliable sources, the higher-ups are looking at you to take the helm when the old gentleman finally retires. They want a younger writer to serve as their face and voice, and when necessary, to act as their bullwhip."
I tried not to feel flattered, but I was. Then I tried to embrace this possibility of success, and revulsion swept over me.
"All right,” I said. “What about people like you?"
"The occasional writers?” She tossed her head to one side. “Well, there's quite a few more of us. I don't know hard numbers, but from what I've been told, six or maybe seven percent of the associate SFWA members are visionaries."
This was a lot to swallow, but I was doing my best.
"What happened to the original editor? Is he still alive?"
"I've heard he is, and I've heard that he isn't. Either way, he has no active role in today's operation."
"And who is in charge?"
"Nobody either of us will get to meet.” She looked around the gloomy bar, as if that would prevent the world from eavesdropping on us. Then she leaned close, her breasts spilling across the tabletop. “But what do names matter, just as long as the money's good?"
Studies show that the human eye sees almost nothing.
Walk into a strange room and your gaze flits back and forth, up and down, noticing a chaotic series of details that the brain rapidly and imprecisely organizes into an image that only seems to resemble a snapshot. Novelty, if recognized, might beg for a prolonged stare. The same is true for perceived threats and objects of love. But what the eye ignores is everything familiar, everything safe, and if you're limited to the perceptions of an ordinary man sitting in the future—thirty-two years from the present moment, in my case—then you have to work hard to ignore the tire commercials and the next sip of beer, concentrating on the tiny glimpses of what genuinely matters.
For some years now, Mary has lived with my Merv.
She is a voice off-stage and the sleepy face across the breakfast table, a consummate folder of laundry and the loyal delivery system of Budweiser. And while I have never seen a wedding ring riding her finger, I have the strong sense that she considers the two of them to be married, at least in some informal way.
She calls him, “Darling."
When he looks in her general direction, she smiles.
Merv and I are entirely different species. Maybe every other visionary latches onto a brain that mirrors his own, but not me. At least that's what I tell myself. But Merv and I do share one glorious commonality: Each in his own fashion, we are in love with Mary.
Three times, I have seen the young woman naked.
On two occasions she was dressing in a rush—for work, I presume—and my glimpses were little more than teases. But the golden incident was early in their relationship. Merv strode into the bedroom to find his lover stretched out on their sheets, on her belly, bare elbows holding up her fine shoulders and one moistened finger turning the page of a book that couldn't have mattered less to the two men ogling her.
She was pretty and trim, younger than her boyfriend by at least ten years, and blessed with the kind of delicate face that would remain girlish until old age set in. She had an easy smile and an infectious way of flipping her dark brown hair. And she thought enough of her man to have had his name tattooed in a private place, and I imagine that's why Merv was just then staring at her bare rump. He was reading his name, which wasn't Merv. Then with a single finger, he traced the artful letters, dimpling the smooth firm flesh beneath.
That sweet vision came early in their relationship.
By the time I shared coffee with my female colleague, Merv's common-law marriage had evolved past romance and then past comfortable, entering a realm of practiced indifference.
I often saw Mary's coat on a hook and her wet toothbrush on the glass shelf above the bathroom sink. And her voice came into Merv's ears on occasion, but he didn't act particularly eager to look in her direction.
Once when he was alone, he paused in the hallway, and for a few moments we studied some kind of holographic image, our girl standing at the entranceway to a public arboretum, flanked by twin beds of climbing blue roses.
My counterpart was thinking back to better days, I assumed.
But I have to warn you there is no way to reach inside the future skull. Merv picked up the picture, and because I'm a writer, I wrote a story. Merv was wishing they could start over again, or he was planning to do something special tonight, or maybe he was considering marrying the girl finally and starting a real family. With so few glimpses of their shared lives, it was possible to draw a multitude of unlikely, purely fictitious schemes
And because I'm a visionary, I dutifully recorded the company logo embossed on the holograph's silver frame.
A year after my illuminating coffee, I woke from a brief nap, sat up in bed, and found Merv staring hard at a bruised bare arm. Mary's arm, I realized. It was one of those very brief, exceptionally useless visions that I never bothered to write down. It began with the bruise and ended with him touching the arm and squeezing, and I could feel the bone under the darkened skin, and I heard him asking how it felt and she turned and smiled, but with her eyes never quite looking at him. She was staring at a point several inches to one side of him, smiling with a little more urgency than usual, and using a voice that shook me back to the present, she said, “It's fine."
With a begging tone, she said, “I'm fine. Let me go, please."
* * * *
I hadn't seen my benefactor in years.
One morning, he called me at my house and said that he had flown into town last night, that he was on his way from one unspecified place to another, but of course I'd want to meet with him. “In two hours,” he instructed. “At the Holiday Inn bar."
At this point, I should remind you that the man at the beginning of my story was sharp and wise and by my youthful perspective, rather old. But of course he was only in his fifties then. Not quite twenty years had passed, and seventy is the new sixty, as they say. Yet the man that I saw was older and far more worn than I expected. And for the sake of honesty, I should mention that it wasn't quite ten in the morning, and he was drinking at least his second rum.
The writer in me looked for direction—some set of clues to tell me if this was going to be an ominous meeting, or merely uncomfortable.
"It's been too long,” said a remarkably steady voice.
I looked at the empty glass next to his fresh glass, making agreeable sounds.
"You're doing some very good work,” he mentioned.
"Which kind of work?” I asked.
The implications earned a grin. Then he sipped his rum, makin
g a point of not answering my question.
Quietly, he said, “She told me. About talking to you."
"Who did?"
"Yvonne's friend."
That's how he referred to the lady. And by the same token, I'm probably known at the home office as “Merv's friend."
"She shouldn't have done that,” he said.
I said nothing.
"That was a large breach of the rules,” he continued.
I said, “Sorry."
"Screw the rules,” he said, the voice meant to sound drunk. But nothing about him was sloppy or off-keel. Like many fine old writers, my benefactor could hold his booze.
"What's going on here?” I finally asked.
"Nothing."
"Okay. So why are you here?"
"I thought I owed it to you."
I waited.
"An explanation,” he said.
"For what?"
"She made a promise, and it won't be kept. I'm sorry."
I guessed where he was heading but still had to ask, “What promise?"
The poor fellow finished his drink and waved for another. Then after a deep sigh, he leaned close and said nothing.
"Are you retiring?” I prompted.
"I have retired.” He ached when he said those words. “Just short of four weeks ago, I was informed of my immediate change in status."
I nodded.
"You're not replacing me, son. That's why I'm paying you this visit. You deserve to hear the news from a familiar face, and that has to be me."
I never understood the job, certainly not well enough to know if I would ever want it, much less if I would be any good at it. But rejections always cut hard.
"You were my first candidate,” he continued. “My chosen successor and heir to the shepherd's calling. And I think you would have done a perfectly fine job of it too. Not quite up to my standards, maybe...."
He let his voice trail off, giving me a just-joking grin.
But he was being honest.
To the best of my ability, I absorbed the news. Then after his fresh drink arrived, I asked, “Who's going to be the next benefactor?"
His face reddened.
My guts tightened.
"There won't be anyone."
"But what about—?"
"They don't want us anymore,” he informed me, his own wounds deeper and bloodier than mine would ever be.
"They don't?"
"It's the Internet, son. Everybody's online, and computers are so damned easy. For the last decade, we've been developing software that does nothing but reach out across the world, on public sites and past most of the existing firewalls. I don't understand Boolean logic, but these are powerful tools, and they've been designed to hunt for key phrases and the odd notions attached to those phrases. Things that mean nothing to most observers, but of course not to us."
I hadn't expected this turn. So much for precognition.
"Writers have always been scarce,” he reminded me. “But if you can reach out and snatch up a thousand useful bits of information, and you can take the gems not just from here but from China and India and Russia, and every other place under the sun...."
He suddenly seemed quite drunk.
I was empty and a little cold.
"But how do you pay all those people?” I asked.
As dumb as any string of words that I have ever said.
"They don't have to pay anybody,” he snapped. “They take what they need. Didn't you know? Everything on the Internet is free, dammit!"
"And us?” I managed.
For some reason, that earned a little smile and a long, impenetrable stare. Was he feeling pity for me? For himself? Or maybe was he recalling a final battle that he'd won on our behalf? Whatever the reason, he whispered to me, “As long as we're alive, they have to pay us. If only to help keep us quiet."
* * * *
My next novel was due last month, and I was typing as if my hair was on fire. But in the midst of a deep-space fight, just as my charismatic hero was about to dispatch the brutal villain, Merv intruded.
Visions come for no good reason.
As far as I can tell, the process is relentlessly random. Neither Merv's emotions nor mine have ever played any role in deciding when the two of us are linked. Which is why the humdrum moments are the norm: The most spectacular life is still built upon a lot of sitting and waiting, idle chatter and toilet time.
I was writing my book, and then I wasn't.
Before me was a set of descending stairs, wooden and steep. The air was dark and smelled of mold. Little cues told me that Merv was navigating his way down into the unfinished basement of his narrow townhouse. When he stopped at the midway point, I heard a sniff. A sob. Then a longer, wetter sniff that ended with a small voice coughing quietly.
Merv's eyes peered into the quarter-lit gloom.
I saw nothing.
He took another two steps, and the familiar face emerged—narrow and still pretty despite the rich stream of blood emerging from both nostrils.
She was lying on the concrete slab of the floor, on her back, one arm lifting up while the other lay beside her at a peculiar angle, and her mouth full of blood, making her cough once again, weakly, before the soft scared voice quietly said, “No."
Mary said, “I'm sorry."
She said, “Please,” and the working arm lifted higher, desperately trying to fend off whatever blow fell next.
* * * *
Last year, I was attending the Worldcon in California, and as usual, I spent long stretches of time in the writer's suite. Polite conversation and one-upsmanship are the normal state of affairs there. I found myself standing with four colleagues, sharing war stories that helped underscore the miserable state of publishing today. And in the midst of that measured pain, a kid joined us. He happened to be a name, one of those bright souls who did more than simply write stories. He had an honest career in science, and he blogged, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had a trust fund somewhere too. Nothing about him seemed hungry. But he had been blessed with a sharp wit and an IQ that had to be more impressive than mine, and he probably couldn't imagine ever being old, and he carried with him a sense of being perpetually bored with the ordinary world.
For maybe ten minutes, he shared our air, and with just a crisp dozen sentences, he managed to mention that his first novel was being made into a movie and his last one was going to be a computer game, and he had met Spielberg, and he was up for a couple fat awards, and then before he abandoned our disagreeable company, he looked straight at me, asking, “Don't we have a wonderful life, doing all this fun work and getting paid for it, too?"
Every other writer was pissed. One sour gal said, “See how long he stays the flavor of the month. In thirty years, see where he stands."
He will be standing in the SFWA suite, drinking the free booze. That's the future I predict for all of us.
The next morning, that same young writer and I happened to appear on the same panel.
The subject is not important. (Really, the topic for any panel is just a suggestion anyway.) But two incidents stand out: First, my cocky colleague made a point of sitting beside me before we began, shaking my hand and referring to me by my first name, fondly, as if we were very close friends.
Something about his attitude teased my intuitions.
On the spur of the moment, I mentioned my benefactor's name. I knew the old gentleman was still in business when the kid got his start. Did their paths happen to cross?
The reply was a conspiratorial wink, plus meaningful silence.
The second incident came in the middle of the panel. Without warning, my new best friend offered his theory about writing.
It wasn't the topic on hand, but this was a new power in our industry. Everybody listened intently as he explained, “Stories are lies. At their very best, they achieve quite a lot. Quite a lot indeed. But they can never describe more than a sliver of what's real, even in the simplest life. And I think it's fair to admit t
hat more than most people, writers will believe whichever lie happens to make them happiest and most secure."
And at that point, the young titan glanced at the grizzled veteran sitting beside him, and again, he offered a telltale wink.
* * * *
Here is a new, rather different version of the story:
What if there is an organization founded in the past and dedicated to the immediate future? Maybe a wise editor working a slush pile is the founder. Maybe some other individual or group is responsible, and everything that I think I know is just a useful cover story. Origins don't matter here as much as the goal. What if the point of this shadowy, secretive group is not simply to make a profit? What if there is a second, far more impressive agenda at work in our world?
Science fiction likes to think of time travel in the same way clerks think of objects resting on shelves. Everything needs to be in its place. Touch nothing too much, and history will unfold with a predictable series of events, noble and important and well worth preserving.
But I don't think much of that model of time and space.
Touch anything, even in the tiniest fashion, and everything will change. Chaos and the most minuscule motions of the atoms will bring consequences to anyone with the capacity to dabble in things that haven't come true yet. Yes, you might make a fat living off the stock market in another ten years. But isn't there a larger, grander goal waiting for those people who can push the objects on the high selves, influencing just enough to remake things that haven't yet been?
What I think is happening is this:
Someone—black-robed monks, maybe, or white-clad government scientists—have been collecting clues about the future, and with those clues they are trying to build the tools by which they can shape what isn't real yet.
I don't think things have progressed very far, no.
Whoever is in charge, I have to believe that he or they are taking a long, exceptionally patient view of this process.
And I suspect that the project will prove impossible. But really, if you had the future in your reach, how could you not wish to fiddle with those very tempting dials?
I shouldn't tell you any of this, of course.
FSF, October-November 2008 Page 16