Needle in a Timestack

by Robert Silverberg

  Lisa was calm, controlled, strait-laced. She was totally shocked when she found herself, between one eye-blink and the next, in the arms of a strange man. “Who are you?—where am I?—” she blurted, rolling away, pulling herself into a foetal ball.

  “I’m Judy’s friend,” Van said.

  She stared bleakly at him. “So she’s up to her tricks again. I should have figured it out faster.”

  He looked pained, embarrassed, terribly solicitous. She let him wonder for a moment or two whether he would have to take her back to her hotel right here in the middle of the night. And then she allowed a mischievous smile to cross Lisa’s face, allowed Lisa’s outraged modesty to subside, allowed Lisa to relent and relax, allowed Lisa to purr—

  “Well, as long as we’re here already—what did you say your name was?”

  He liked that. He liked Vixen, too—wild, sweaty, noisy, a moaner, a gasper, a kicker and thrasher who dragged him down on to the floor and went rolling over and over with him. She thought he liked Cleo, too, though that was harder to tell, because Cleo’s style was aloof, serious, baroque, inscrutable. She would switch quickly from one to another, sometimes running through all four in the course of an hour. Wine, she said, induced quick switching in her. She let him know that she had a few other identities, too, fragmentary and submerged, and hinted that they were troubled, deeply neurotic, almost self-destructive: they were under control, she said, and would not erupt to cause woe for him, but she left the possibility hovering over them, to add spice to the relationship and plausibility to her role.

  It seemed to be working. His pleasure in her company was evident, and the more they were together the stronger the bond between them became. She was beginning to indulge in pleasant little fantasies of moving down here permanently from Sacramento, renting an apartment somewhere near his, perhaps even moving in with him—though that would surely be a strange and challenging life, for she would be living with Paul and Ned and Chuck and all the rest of the crew too, but how wondrous, how electrifying—

  Then on the tenth day he seemed uncharacteristically tense and somber, and she asked him what was bothering him, and he evaded her, and she pressed, and finally he said, “Do you really want to know?”

  “Of course.”

  “It bothers me that you aren’t real, Judy.”

  She caught her breath. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said, quietly, sadly. “Don’t try to pretend any longer. There’s no point in it.”

  It was like a jolt in the ribs. She turned away and stared at the wall and was silent a long while, wondering what to say. Just when everything was going so well, just when she was beginning to believe she had carried off the masquerade successfully—

  “So you know?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Of course I know. I knew right away.”

  She was trembling. “How could you tell?”

  “A thousand ways. When we switch, we change. The voice. The eyes. The muscular tensions. The grammatical habits. The brain waves, even. An evoked-potential test shows it. Flash a light in my eyes and I’ll give off a certain brain-wave pattern, and Ned will give off another, and Chuck still another. You and Lisa and Cleo and Vixen would all be the same. Multiples aren’t actors, Judy. Multiples are separate minds within the same brain. That’s a matter of scientific fact. You were just acting. You were doing it very well, but you couldn’t possibly have fooled me.”

  “You let me make an idiot of myself, then.”

  “No.”

  “Why did you—how could you—”

  “I saw you walk in, that first night at the club, and you caught me right away. And then I watched you go out on the floor and fall apart, and I knew you couldn’t be multiple, and I wondered, what the hell’s she doing here, and then I went over to you, and I was hooked. I felt something I haven’t ever felt before. Does that sound like the standard old malarkey? But it’s true, Judy. You’re the first singleton woman that’s ever interested me.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Something about you—your intensity, your alertness, maybe even your eagerness to pretend you were a multiple—I don’t know. I was caught. I was caught hard. And it’s been a wonderful week and a half. I mean that. Wonderful.”

  “Until you got bored.”

  “I’m not bored with you, Judy.”

  “Cleo. That’s my real name, my singleton name. There is no Judy.”

  “Cleo,” he said, as if measuring the word with his lips.

  “So you aren’t bored with me even though there’s only one of me. That’s marvelous. That’s tremendously flattering. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. I guess I should go now, Van. It is Van, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “How do you want me to talk? I fascinated you, you fascinated me, we played our little games with each other, and now it’s over. I wasn’t real, but you did your best. We both did our bests. But I’m only a singleton woman, and you can’t be satisfied with that. Not for long. For a night, a week, two weeks, maybe. Sooner or later you’ll want the real thing, and I can’t be the real thing for you. So long, Van.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Don’t go.”

  “What’s the sense of staying?”

  “I want you to stay.”

  “I’m a singleton, Van.”

  “You don’t have to be,” he said.

  The therapist’s name was Burkhalter and his office was in one of the Embarcadero towers, and to the San Francisco multiples community he was very close to being a deity. His specialty was electrophysiological integration, with specific application to multiple-personality disorders. Those who carried within themselves dark and diabolical selves that threatened the stability of the group went to him to have those selves purged, or at least contained. Those who sought to have latent selves that were submerged beneath more outgoing personalities brought forward into healthy functional state went to him also. Those whose life as a multiple was a torment of schizoid confusions instead of a richly rewarding contrapuntal symphony gave themselves to Dr. Burkhalter to be healed, and in time they were. And in recent years he had begun to develop techniques for what he called personality augmentation. Van called it “driving the wedge.”

  “He can turn a singleton into a multiple?” Cleo asked in amazement.

  “If the potential is there. You know that it’s partly genetic: the structure of a multiple’s brain is fundamentally different from a singleton’s. The hardware just isn’t the same, the cerebral wiring. And then, if the right stimulus comes along, usually in childhood, usually but not necessarily traumatic, the splitting takes place, the separate identities begin to establish their territories. But much of the time multiplicity is never generated, and you walk around with the capacity to be a whole horde of selves and never know it.”

  “Is there reason to think I’m like that?”

  He shrugged. “It’s worth finding out. If he detects the predisposition, he has effective ways of inducing separation. Driving the wedge, you see? You do want to be a multiple, don’t you, Cleo?”

  “Oh, yes, Van. Yes!”

  Burkhalter wasn’t sure about her. He taped electrodes to her head, flashed bright lights in her eyes, gave her verbal association tests, ran four or five different kinds of electroencephalograph studies, and still he was uncertain. “It is not a black-and-white matter,” he said several times, frowning, scowling. He was a multiple himself, but three of his selves were psychiatrists, so there was never any real problem about his office hours. Cleo wondered if he ever went to himself for a second opinion. After a week of testing she was sure that she must he a hopeless case, an intractable singleton, but Burkhalter surprised her by concluding that it was worth the attempt. “At the very worst,” he said, “we will experience spo
ntaneous fusing within a few days, and you will be no worse off than you are now. But if we succeed—ah, if we succeed—!”

  His clinic was across the bay in a town called Moraga. She checked in on a Friday afternoon, spent two days undergoing further neurological and psychological tests, then three days taking medication, “Simply an anti-convulsant,” the nurse explained cheerily. “To build up your tolerance.”

  “Tolerance for what?” Cleo asked.

  “The birth trauma,” she said, “New selves will be coming forth, and it can be uncomfortable for a little while.”

  The treatment began on Thursday. Electroshock drugs, electroshock again. She was heavily sedated. It felt like a long dream, but there was no pain. Van visited her every day. Chuck came too, bringing her two potted orchids in bloom, and Paul sang to her, and even Ned paid her a call. But it was hard for her to maintain a conversation with any of them. She heard voices much of the time. She felt feverish and dislocated, and at times she was sure she was floating eight or ten inches above the bed. Gradually that sensation subsided, but there were others nearly as odd. The voices remained. She learned how to hold conversations with them.

  In the second week she was not allowed to have visitors. That didn’t matter. She had plenty of company even when she was alone.

  Then Van came for her. “They’re going to let you go home today,” he said. “How are you doing, Cleo?”

  “I’m Noreen,” she said.

  There were five of her, apparently. That was what Van said. She had no way of knowing, because when they were dominant she was gone—not merely asleep, but gone, perceiving nothing. But he showed her notes that they wrote, in handwritings that she did not recognize and indeed could barely read, and he played tapes of her other voices, Noreen a deep contralto, Nanette high and breathy, Katya hard and rough New York, and the last one, who had not yet announced her name, a stagy voluptuous campy siren-voice.

  She did not leave his apartment the first few days, and then began going out for short trips, always with Van or one of his alters close beside. She felt convalescent. A kind of hangover from the various drugs had dulled her reflexes and made it difficult for her to cope with the traffic, and also there was the fear that she would undergo a switching while she was out. Whenever that happened it came without warning, and when she returned to awareness afterwards she felt a sharp bewildering discontinuity of memory, not knowing how it was that she suddenly found herself in Ghiradelli Square or Golden Gate Park or wherever it was that the other self had taken their body.

  But she was happy. And Van was happy with her. As they strolled hand in hand through the cool evenings she turned to him now and again and saw the warmth of his smile, the glow of his eyes. One night in the second week when they were out together he switched to Chuck—Cleo saw him change, and knew it was Chuck coming on, for now she always knew right away which identity had taken over—and he said, “You’ve had a marvelous effect on him, Cleo. None of us has ever seen him like this before—so contented, so fulfilled—”

  “I hope it lasts, Chuck.”

  “Of course it’ll last! Why on earth shouldn’t it last?”

  It didn’t. Towards the end of the third week Cleo noticed that there hadn’t been any entries in her memo book from Noreen for several days. That in itself was nothing alarming: an alter might choose to submerge for days, weeks, even months at a time. But was it likely that Noreen, so new to the world, would remain out of sight so long? Lin-lin, the little Chinese girl who had evolved in the second week and was Cleo’s memory trace, reported that Noreen had gone away. A few days later an identity named Mattie came and went within three hours, like something bubbling up out of a troubled sea. Then Nanette disappeared, leaving Cleo with no one but her nameless breathy-voiced alter and Lin-lin. She knew she was fusing again. The wedges that Dr. Burkhalter had driven into her soul were not holding; her mind insisted on oneness, and was integrating itself; she was reverting to the singleton state.

  “They’re all gone,” she told Van disconsolately.

  “I know. I’ve been watching it happen.”

  “Is there anything we can do? Should I go back to Burkhalter?”

  She saw the pain in his eyes. “It won’t do any good,” he said. “He told me the chances were about three to one this would happen. A month, he figured—that was about the best we could hope for. And we’ve had our month.”

  “I’d better go, Van.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “No?”

  “I love you, Cleo.”

  “You won’t,” she said. “Not for much longer.”

  He tried to argue with her, to tell her that it didn’t matter to him that she was a singleton, that one Cleo was worth a whole raft of alters, that he would learn to adapt to life with a singleton woman. He could not bear the thought of her leaving now. So she stayed: a week, two weeks, three. They ate at their favorite restaurants. They strolled hand in hand through the cool evenings. They talked of Chomsky and Whorf and even of shopping centers. When he was gone and Paul or Chuck or Hal or Dave was there she went places with them, if they wanted her to. Once she went to a movie with Ned, and when towards the end he felt himself starting to switch she put her arm around him and held him until he regained control, so that he could see how the movie finished.

  But it was no good, really. She sensed the strain in him. He wanted something richer than she could offer him: the switching, the doubling, the complex undertones and overtones of other personalities resonating beyond the shores of consciousness. She could not give him that. And though he insisted he didn’t miss it, he was like one who has voluntarily blindfolded himself in order to keep a blind woman company. She knew she could not ask him to live like that for ever.

  And so one afternoon when Van was somewhere else she packed her things and said goodbye to Paul, who gave her a hug and wept a little with her, and she went back to Sacramento. “Tell him not to call,” she said. “A clean break’s the best.” She had been in San Francisco two months, and it was as though those two months were the only months of her life that had had any color in them, and all the rest had been lived in tones of grey.

  There had been a man in the real-estate office who had been telling her for a couple of years that they were meant for each other. Cleo had always been friendly enough to him—they had done a few skiing weekends in Tahoe the winter before, they had gone to Hawaii once, they had driven down to San Diego—but she had never felt anything particular when she was with him. A week after her return, she phoned him and suggested that they drive out up north to the redwood country for a few days together. When they came back, she moved into the handsome condominium he had just outside town.

  It was hard to find anything wrong with him. He was good-natured and attractive, he was successful, he read books and liked good movies, he enjoyed hiking and rafting and backpacking, he even talked of driving down into the city during the opera season to take in a performance or two. He was getting towards the age where he was thinking about marriage and a family. He seemed very fond of her.

  But he was flat, she thought. Flat as a cardboard cut-out: a singleton, a one-brain, a no-switch. There was only one of him, and there always would be. It was hardly his fault, she knew. But she couldn’t settle for someone who had only two dimensions. A terrible restlessness went roaring through her every evening, and she could not possibly tell him what was troubling her.

  On a drizzly afternoon in early November she packed a suitcase and drove down to San Francisco. She arrived about six-thirty, and checked into one of the Lombard Street motels, and showered and changed and walked over to Fillmore Street. Cautiously she explored the strip from Chestnut down to Union, from Union back to Chestnut. The thought of running into Van terrified her. Probably she would, sooner or later, she knew: but not tonight, she prayed. Not tonight. She went past Skits, did not go in, stopped outside a club called Big Mama
, shook her head, finally entered one called the Side Effect. Mostly women inside, as usual, but a few men at the bar, not too bad-looking. No sign of Van. She bought herself a drink and casually struck up a conversation with the man to her left, a short curly-haired artistic-looking type, about forty.

  “You come here often?” he asked.

  “First time. I’ve usually gone to Skits.”

  “I think I remember seeing you there. Or maybe not.”

  She smiled. “What’s your now-name?”

  “Sandy. Yours?”

  Cleo drew her breath down deep into her lungs. She felt a kind of lightheadedness beginning to swirl behind her eyes. Is this what you want? she asked herself. Yes. Yes. This is what you want.

  “Melinda,” she said.

  Many Mansions

  Here’s an example of mainstream contemporary literature modes carried over into science fiction, something I’ve done now and again throughout my entire career. (A very early story called “The Songs of Summer” owed a great deal to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I’ve channeled Joseph Conrad on a number of occasions. One passage in my novel Son of Man employs William Burroughs’s cut-up technique. And so forth.) This is another, and I think it was a successful transplantation.

  Somewhere in the mid-1960s Robert Coover wrote a funny, frantic story called “The Babysitter,” in which a narrative situation is dissected and refracted in an almost Cubist fashion into dozens of short scenes, some of which are deliberately contradictory of others. I read it and admired it and saw what Coover had done as a perfect way to approach the paradoxes of the time-travel story, in which a single act of transit through time can generate a host of parallel time-tracks. I had written plenty of time-travel stories before—the theme is a particular favorite of mine—but Coover had shown me a completely new way to do it.