Analog SFF, July-August 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Like a train on a track, he could will himself to roll back in time and relive any portion of his life. And with effort, he could live it all at once. It was as if all his past, his worldline, happened simultaneously—like photos from an album stacked and pressed together.

  He took refuge in physics. Maybe there was a second dimension of time—time as a function of time. Perhaps here in the tree, time was disconnected from space. His theory said it could happen. Maybe he was experiencing the multi-world formalism of quantum mechanics.

  Kip shook his head, struck with the thought that one version of the Christian heaven and the multi-world formalism might actually describe the same phenomenon. Maybe he'd been a trifle too uncompromising in his view of religion—his “fight” as Audrey called it; maybe religion was just a subset of physics.

  Methodically, in his mind, he moved the lever back—experiencing his life at an ever earlier period—sharing his mind with all those other Kips. He wondered about those others; did they too experience the mind-sharing? Did they think they were perhaps having psychotic episodes? He remembered that as late as age twelve, he talked to himself—another himself.

  Kip focused, pulling abruptly back from the brink. He'd felt his forty-year-old identity weaken and his eleven- or twelve-year-old self begin to assert control. He shuddered. It had been close. Yes, it might have been good to go back and relive his life, but he doubted he had the endurance to go through childhood again.

  Tentatively, experimentally, he let his mind return to the brink and as he did so, noticed his hands. They were a child's hands—and his clothes were those of a young boy: shorts, tee shirt, sneakers. He inhaled, sharply—and noticed the smells, delicious smells: the pleasantly acrid aroma of tree bark, the tang of the autumn leaves, the sweet fragrance of the grass.

  “Kippy,” came a voice from below, harmonizing with the ever present bells. “Come down, now. You're late for dinner."

  Kip started. One part of his mind experienced shock while another felt he was in trouble and would really catch it when his father got home from work. He looked down at his mom, wondering what to say. But then he noticed the bells.

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  They were ringing rounds! The peal had ended and that meant the detached time effect would soon end. He had to get back to his own time or be trapped here as an eleven-year-old.

  “Mom,” he called out, his voice a long-forgotten treble. “I love you."

  Her face, showing a puzzled expression, faded as he struggled forward in time. But now it felt as if he were running under water; already, the effect was diminishing. As he pushed ahead against an ever increasing drag, he took some comfort in the notion that if he didn't make it, he'd still be able to live at normal speed and eventually get back to where he was. But then, he shuddered with a horrible thought; if he didn't get back, he'd be in an endless time loop: reliving his life to the point of doing the experiment, then going back and living it again—and again and again. But maybe not! Maybe he'd manage to do just one different thing this time. That might be all he needed. Like bobs in a ringing method, it might change everything. He held firm to that hope as memories of the future faded to memories of memories and then to dreams.

  He fought his way forward and wondered how old he was. What a stupid thing to wonder. He was fourteen.

  “Hey, Kipper!"

  Kip looked down, then hooked his legs over the limb and swung over, letting his arms dangle. “One for all,” he said, hanging upside down, “and all for pickles."

  “Geez,” said Malvyn, astride his bicycle. “Last time I heard you say that, you were eleven."

  Kip chuckled, then grabbed a limb and vaulted to the ground like a gymnast.

  “Glad I found you,” said Malvyn. “In honor of your not winning your fiddle scholarship, we decided we'd treat you to some goodies at Beowulfie's."

  “Hey, that's really neat,” said Kip. “You and Nev?"

  “Yeah. His idea.” Malvyn pumped his hand brakes, a sign he was anxious to get moving. “He said he'll meet us there at two. And why I'm glad I found you is because if I hadn't, Neville said I'd have to treat him."

  Kip raised his bicycle upright from the grass and wheeled it next to Malvyn's. “I'm glad I didn't win it,” he said, quietly.

  “What?” Malvyn practically squeaked.

  “I've decided I don't really want to be a concert violinist."

  “Geez.” Malvyn shook his head. “You know, Kipper, I don't understand you."

  “Yes, I know.” Kip shrugged. “Sorry."

  “Boy,” said Malvyn. “For the last month, you've checked your mailbox ten times a day, and talked us to death about how you wanted that scholarship more than anything in the universe. And now you say you're glad.” Malvyn stretched his arms imploringly to the heavens. “Geez."

  “I've decided that science is more important to me than playing the violin.” Kip mounted his bicycle but kept one foot on the ground. “Anyway, I can play violin as a hobby. And I don't think you can be a scientist as a hobby.” He leaned over and glanced at Malvyn's wristwatch. “We're too early for Wulfie's."

  “Okay.” Malvyn leaned his weight on a pedal and set off. “Let's go over to the tower."

  Kip set off as well. “Yeah. Maybe we can sneak into the belfry and untie a bell rope or something."

  Malvyn looked back over his shoulder. “Not bloody likely!” He pedaled slowly, letting Kip roll up along side. “Last time, my dad caught me. He nearly tore my head off.” Malvin scrunched up his shoulders as if he were in pain. “And if he catches me again, I'm toast."

  “So you've sworn off belfry visits?"

  “Not exactly.” Malvyn laughed. “I've just got to be a little sneakier about it."

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  “Too late, anyway,” said Malvyn. “They've started ringing."

  “Only rounds."

  “You know,” said Malvyn as he pedaled steadily on the road into town. “I'm sort of glad you didn't get the scholarship. Keeps the Musketeers together. And Audrey would have missed you."

  “Really? How do you know?"

  “She told me."

  Kip pressed down on the handbrakes. “Malv,” he called out, “stop for a moment, will you?"

  Malvyn cycled in a graceful curve and pulled up next to Kip. “What's wrong?"

  “Did she really say she'd miss me?"

  “Audrey? Yes. She did."

  Kip looked down and worked the handbrakes a few times. “You ... You know something about girls."

  “Yeah, a little. Why?"

  Kip continued working the brakes, but didn't say anything.

  Malvyn laughed. “I know. You want to ask Audrey out, but you're too shy to ask.” He laughed again. “That's it, isn't it?"

  Kip felt himself blush. He still didn't say anything, but just listened to the bells.

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  “Look, it's not so hard,” said Malvyn, sounding now like a helpful older brother. “Just ask her. I bet she's wanted you to ask her for a long time."

  “You think so?"

  “Yes!"

  With a show of resolve, Kip looked up. “I will ask her,” he said. “I'll do it today."

  Malvyn placed a hand on Kip's shoulder. “Believe me, my boy,” he said, mimicking Mr. Caruthers’ voice and mannerisms, “it will change your life."

  “Change my life.” Kip laughed. “Yeah, right."

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  Copyright 2006 Carl Frederick

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDSHIP FOSSLE

  by IAN STEWART

  "The oldest crime in the book” may not mean quite what it sounds like....

  Illustration by Broeck Steadman

  * * * *

  It happened so fast that I nearly missed it.

  I'd seen the kid hanging about near Wang's stall, with a studied nonchalance o
n his face and a hardness in his eyes, but a lot of the street urchins do that and it's not illegal to look at tourist trash without buying any. And I can usually tell the thieves from the hopefuls—some kind of sixth sense, born of long practice.

  This time, my extra sense let me down.

  The kid was good, I have to admit. Wang Chin-Li was distracted by a potential customer, a willowy blonde just flown in from Amsterdam, still red around the eyes despite recent applications of eye-shadow and mascara. She was deciding whether to buy an expensive jade rabbit, and Wang, who has a bit of a thing for tall Western women and even more of a thing for their money, wasn't quite as alert as he would usually have been.

  I only caught the actual act of theft out of the corner of my eye, because at the time I was trying not to trip over the old man.

  I didn't know his name. You could usually find him, sitting in a small, none too clean alcove by the entrance to the butcher's shop across the road, dismembered ducks hanging from metal hooks, thick slabs of animals I couldn't identify, watching the world go by. He'd sat there almost every day for the last three and a half years, to my knowledge, and he looked old enough that for all I knew he might have sat there for the last fifty.

  He didn't beg, he didn't talk, he didn't look unhappy. He just sat. Overhead, the Shelley Street escalator bumped and ground its raucous way towards the middle levels and beyond, all the way up to Conduit Street where the middle classes hung out. It was late morning, so the direction was up. In the morning rush hour it was down. Sometimes, and they were getting more frequent as the machinery slowly fell to bits, it didn't go either way. Then the locals started walking and the tourists started fretting. But today a steady stream of people glided up the slope, like Jesus walking on diagonal water.

  The old man never acknowledged the escalator, the travelers, or me. He had sparse gray hair protruding in tufts from the edges of a flat denim cap that had seen better days. Rheumy eyes matched the faded blue of the cap. When he stood, you could see that his left ankle was frozen and his knees were none too sound either, but he didn't stand often, or for long. I noticed what the kid was doing when those eyes, suddenly imbued with life, flicked sideways. I tried to grab the little bastard's sleeve as he ran past, heading for one of the alleys down to Hollywood Road, but he avoided my clumsy lunge and darted away between the vendors’ stalls, agile as a monkey. There was a shout from the woman who sold bags of unidentifiable sea creatures, dried and dyed, as a pile of what looked like pink teabags tipped over and spilled across the uneven stone steps.

  Then he was gone.

  “Sorry,” I said to Wang. “I'm getting slow in my old age. It's the reflexes that suffer."

  The sea-creature lady started scooping up her teabags—swim-bladders from some unidentifiable fish, probably. Waste not, want not. Protein is protein.

  “No, I've seen that kid before,” said Wang, bowing apologetically to the sea-creature lady. He spat. “A cheap little ma jai who pretends he's a dai dai lo. Very quick on his feet, too quick for the likes of you and me. Even quicker with his thieving paws. He'll grow up to be a fine young pickpocket, if you want my opinion."

  Ma jai means “little horse,” and it's the lowest level in a street gang. At the top is the dai dai lo—big, big brother. Most gangs are affiliated to triads, Hong Kong mafias, with a shuk foo, uncle, as their triad liaison officer.

  Gangs are a nuisance. Triads are dangerous.

  Wang brushed his hands against his jacket, sewn in the sweatshops of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, a.k.a. Shenzhen Sweatshop or Counterfeit City, a few miles across the border with the People's Rep. “It was only an ivory pig, Mike. Sells to tourists for fifty dollars, costs about two to make."

  The Dutchwoman would have found this information fascinating, but she didn't speak Cantonese, so she carried on rummaging through the trays of carved wooden animals.

  “Ivory."

  It was a long moment before I realized that the old man had spoken. It was the first time he'd broken his silence since I'd been watching him.

  “Not real ivory, grandad,” I said. “Mammoth ivory—see the sign?” In the window behind the stall was a faded yellow card: ALL OUR IVORY IS ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDSHIP FOSSLE FROM REAL MAMOTH TUSK. There was a time when the signs had said one thing and the ivory was something else, but after the Sino-African Conservation Treaty of 2016, the flow of illicit elephant and rhino tusks into China had pretty much dried up, and Wang's funny little animals very probably had been carved from the fossilized bones of Pleistocene mammoths and mastodons melted out of the Siberian tundra with jets of superheated steam. I hoped so, because that way I wouldn't have to arrest him. The paleontologists were none too happy at this development, but at least no noble beasts were getting slaughtered to make tourist trinkets, and the economy of the Siberian Collective had improved enough to stop them slaughtering Russians, most of the time, so I figured there was a significant net gain.

  “Mammoth ivory,” the old man stated, as if it was a proposition put up for debate. “I have hunt mammoth."

  As a reminiscence, it was a lot more interesting than most old men's utterances, but no more plausible than tall tales of mermaids and dragons, or sexy blondes in bars, come to that. “I can see you're old, grandad,” I told him, “but not that old.” He probably meant “elephants.” “Did you hunt the mammoths in Africa?"

  “In Siberia,” he insisted. “When I was still able to move without pain.” His accent was strange, sounded vaguely ... Mongolian? Perhaps he had been to the Collective, long ago. But not long enough for there to have been mammoths to hunt.

  “Ah, the famed Siberian elephant, the terror of the Steppes,” Wang joined in, giggling. Possibly with embarrassment.

  The old man waved his hand dismissively. “Young people got no respect for their elders no more,” he complained. He turned his back on us and returned to some inner contemplation—I wondered what he saw in his mind's eye.

  Mammoths, maybe.

  * * * *

  Salima was waiting for me at Speedy's, a tiny eatery with an even tinier kitchen, not quite hole-in-the-wall but that was mainly because there wasn't room for a wall. It had a bar, a row of wobbly tables on plinths, a couple of extra tables jammed into what counted as spare space, and a few stools lined up against the window, which was always wide open. You could get passable Mexican food at the Speedy Gonzales restaurant, and a pretty good margarita for the lowest price in Hong Kong. Great cuisine it wasn't, but it filled the gaps and beat the pants off the rather bland offerings that the Cantonese like to eat. My jaded palate needs something with a bit more zing.

  Salima had zing, and better still, she had a first-class brain. Her mother was Cantonese, her father Egyptian. Both had died when she was a teenager—train crash, maglev failure. It could have destroyed her, but it brought out her fighting instincts, made her tough and independent. She'd worked her way through college, and was currently doing a part-time Ph.D. under a certain Professor Zhao in the Paleontology Department of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her topic was mesolithic hunting and its contribution to extinctions, and she was paying her way by acting as one of Zhao's lab technicians. His department hadn't existed twenty years ago—Hong Kong does have a few fossil species, but nothing worth setting up a department for. But when control of Hong Kong reverted to the People's Rep, the University of Shenyang set up a satellite operation at HKPU to take up some of the workload generated by the Yixian sediments in Liaoning Province, and Zhao had been hired from Beijing. The list of important fossils that have come out of the Yixian deposits is as long as a Diplodocus's backbone, and considerably more significant for the history of life on Earth, I gather.

  Right now, Salima's income derives from cleaning up dinobird remains. Zhao had spent several years in northern Asia, which is where he'd first gotten interested in the effects of mesolithic hunting. But as soon as the Liaoning dinobird remains were discovered, he returned to Beijing and started working on the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.
His long-term aim was to document the precise sequence of events that killed off the dinosaurs. But he'd kept the Pleistocene research going, too.

  Over two burrito supremes (that meant they came with guacamole and sour cream) we caught up on each others’ days. She'd spent hers cleaning up one leg-bone of a fossil Confuciosaurus. Apparently an entire flock of them had dropped out of the sky one Late Jurassic afternoon, probably caught in a cloud of carbon monoxide from a nearby volcano. They'd splattered into the mud of a lake and ended up as strata.

  “But the really exciting news,” she said, breaking off in mid-flow, “is the new mammoth graveyard near Yerekhtenya-Tala. I should be able to get really good data if Zhao swings us access to some specimens."

  “I'm sure you'll pester him until he does. Graveyard?"

  “Well, it's not really a graveyard—I mean, the mammoths weren't buried deliberately. But there are so many frozen corpses that it looks like one."

  “Ah."

  “What's fantastic, aside from the sheer number of animals, is that they all date from the end of the Pleistocene."

  Clearly the timing was significant, but my ignorance must have registered on my face, for she quickly explained: “That's 9,000 BC, Mike. Soon after that, the mammoths went extinct. Well, some tusks from Wrangel Island seem to be younger, but Mammuthus primigenius was extinct by then over virtually the whole of its historical range—"

  I gave her a quizzical look and reached for a handful of tortilla chips.

  “Sorry. Woolly mammoth. The significant thing is, wherever woolly mammoths coexisted with humans, be it Siberia or North America, we find kill sites with lots of mammoth carcasses. The evidence that they are kill sites includes flint tools and mammoth bones with cut-marks. The animals were butchered. But we don't know what effect hunting had on the population dynamics. What I'm hoping to find is evidence of increased or more effective hunting at the end of the Pleistocene. Or not. Either way, we'll learn more about the mammoth extinction.