Slippage

by Harlan Ellison

  Greater than the Prado, more magnificent than the Louvre, dwarfing the Victoria and Albert, more puissant than the Hermitage, enfeebling the image of Rotterdam's Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, it rose above us till the arching ceilings faded into misty oblivion. I could see room after room after channel after salon after gallery stretching away in a hundred different directions from the central atrium where we stood, mah mouth open and my wits havin' fled.

  Because the Museum that my Agnes tended, the Sepulcher that my Agnes oversaw, the Gallery my Agnes captained...it was filled with the dead and mounted bodies of every creature I'd read about in the tomes of universal mythology.

  In niches and on pedestals, in crystal cases and suspended by invisible wires from the invisible ceilings, ranked in shallow conversation-pit-like depressions in the floor and mounted to the walls, in showcases and freestanding in the passageways:

  The Kurma tortoise that supported Mt. Mandara on its back during the churning of the ocean by the Devas and Asuras. A matched set of unicorns, male and female, one with silver horn, the other with golden spike. The bone-eater from the Ani papyrus. Behemoth and Leviathan. Hanuman the five-headed of the Kalighat. A Griffin. And a Gryphon. Hippogryph and Hippocamp. The Kinnara bird of Indian mythology, and the thousand-headed snake Kalināga. Jinn and Harpy and Hydra; yeti and centaur and minotaur; the holy feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and a winged horse and a Ryu dragon. Hundreds and thousands of beasts of all worlds and all nations, of all beliefs and all ages, of all peoples and of all dreams and nightmares. There, in the stunning Sepulcher on the Verg Cyklop, was amassed and arrayed and ranked all the impossible creatures that had never made it onto Noah's leaky tub. I wandered gallery to gallery, astounded, impossible sights choking my throat and making me weep with amazement that it was all, all, all of it absolutely true. There was even a Boogeyman and his mate. They looked as if they had lived their lives under beds and in dark closets.

  "But how...?" I could barely find words, at long last.

  "They are here, assembled all. And I am the one who caught them."

  Of all I had seen, of all she might say, that was the most astonishin'. She had brought these beasts to heel. I could not believe it. But no, she insisted, she trekked out, and she stalked them, and she caught them, and killed them, and brought them back here for display. "For whom?" I asked. "Who comes to this place?" And she smiled the sweetest smile, but did not reply. Who, I wondered, assaying the size of the rooms, the height of the ceilings, who did the tour of this repository of miracles?

  Hours later, she took me away, and we went back to the Royal Viking, and I was too aswirl in magic and impossibilities to drench mahself in her scented skin. I could not fathom or contain what I had seen. Her naked body was muscular but more feminine than Aphrodite and Helen of Troy and the Eternal Nymph all combined. She was gorgeous, but she was the hunter of them all. Of course she had had a strong grip. From holding machete, and crossbow, and Sharps rifle, and bolas, and gas-gun. She told me of the hunts, the kills, the scent of the track, the pursuits in far lands: Petra and Angkor, Teotihuacan and Tibet, Djinnistan and Meszria, Skull Island and Malta and Knossos.

  And then she said to me, "I am very much drawn to you, Gordon, but I know you're going to ask me to come away with you, to live in America and be your wife. And I truly, deeply, am mad about even the thought of making love to you endlessly... but..."

  The next day, I went looking for Cyclops Avenue. I have a skunk-sniffin' dog's sense of direction, you know that, Henry; and I actual found the street again. I recognized all the twisty turns we'd made, even lookin' different in the daylight. But I got there. And, of course, the street signs had changed. Cyclops Avenue was now Österlånggatan. The Museum was not there. Oh, it likely was there, but I didn't have either the proper guide or a key taken from the pocket of a summery dress to help me find it. So I went away, and I came back here, and that's my story. Except for a couple of loose ends...

  One: what of the peculiar Dr. Fuchs? Well, Agnes never said it in so many words, but I got the impression that she had taken pity on the poor little man, that he had been someone who had loved her and followed her, and whose existence meant nothing without her in it, and so she had allowed him to assist her. She said he was her "spotter." I didn't ask what that meant, nor what it was he spotted. (Before I left Stockholm, John-Henri called to say goodbye, and he told me he had found a pair of gloves, apparently the property of Fuchs, half-filled with foul-smelling water or sweat or some fishy - liquid, but that Dr. Fuchs, himself, had vanished, leaving an enormous hotel bill for John-Henri and the Conference to pay.)

  And two: I'll bet you haven't forgotten, have you?

  That's right, Henry, the feather.

  I plucked it from the flank of an enormous roc that she had stalked and bagged and killed and stuffed. It hung from the ceiling in the Museum of Unimaginable Creatures, hung low enough so I could pluck one memento. I think, I guess, I well I suppose I knew somewhere in my head or my heart, certainly not in my pants, that I was never going to get this prize, this treasure, this woman of all women. And so, in some part of my sense, I stole a token to keep my memory warm. It's all I have, one flame-red feather from the flank of the roc that tried to carry off Sinbad the Sailor.

  And do you know why she renounced me, gave me a pass, shined me on, old Henry? I guess I begged a little, told her how good we were together and, yes, she admitted, that was so; but it was never gonna work. Because, Henry, she said...

  I was too easy a catch. I didn't nearly put up the fight it would take to keep her hunter's interest pinned.

  What's that? Do I think I'll ever see her again?

  Henry, I see her all the time. This world of you and the University and houses and streets and mailboxes and a drink in my hand...it's all like a transparent membrane on which a movie pictchuh is bein' cast. And behind it, I see her. My Agnes, so fabulous. She's in a rough-bark coracle, with a canvas sail ripped by terrible winds caused by the beating of a devil roc's great feathered wings, as its spiked tail thrashes the emerald water into tidal spires. She holds a scimitar, and her jade-green eyes are wild; and I know the flame-feathered monster that seeks to devour her, capsize her, drag her down and feast on her delicious flesh—I know that poor dumb ravening behemoth hasn't got the chance of a snowball in a cyclotron. In her path, in the fury of her flesh, no poor dumb beast has a chance. Not even—pardon the pun—the Roc of Agnes.

  Do I see her? Oh my, yes. I see her clearly, Henry. I may never see my world clearly again after walking the halls and galleries of the Cyclops Avenue Museum...but I'll always see her.

  For a poor dumb beast, that vision and a goddam red feather is almost enough to get by on. Wouldja kindly, that Jack Daniels beside you. And then maybe I will go upstairs and try to catch a little sleep. Thank ya kindly, Henry.

  _____

  Author’s Note: I have always written my stories on Olympia office standard or portable typewriters. Bob Bloch also wrote on Olympias. When Bob died, he passed on to me two of his machines. This story was written on one of those typewriters, completed on 5 July 1995. The work goes on.

  Go Toward the Light

  It was a time of miracles. Time, itself, was the first miracle. That we had learned how to drift backward through it, that we had been able to achieve it at all: another miracle. And the most remarkably miraculous miracle of all: that of the one hundred and sixty-five physicists, linguists, philologists, archaeologists, engineers, technicians, programmers of large-scale numerical simulations, and historians who worked on the Timedrift Project, only two were Jews. Me, myself, Matty Simon, a timedrifter, what is technically referred to on my monthly paycheck as an authentic "chronocircumnavigator"— euphemistically called a "fugitive" by the one hundred and sixty-three Gentile techno-freaks and computer jockeys—short-speak for Tempus Fugit— "Time Flies"—broken-backed Latin, just a "fugitive." That's me, young Matty, and the other Jew is Barry Levin. Not Levine and not Leveen, but Levin, as if to rhyme with
"let me in." Mr. Barry R. Levin, Fields Medal nominee, post-adolescent genius and wiseguy, the young man who Stephen Hawking (yeah, courtesy of the over-the-counter anti-agathic drugs, still alive, and breaking a hundred on the links) says has made the greatest contributions to quantum gravity, the guy who, if you ask him a simple question you get a pageant, endless lectures on chrono-string theory, complexity theory, algebraic number theory, how many pepperonis can dance on the point of a pizza. Also, Barry Levin, orthodox Jew. Did I say orthodox? Beyond, galactically beyond orthodox. So damned orthodox that, by comparison, Moses was a fresser of barbequed pork sandwiches with Texas hot links. Levin, who was frum, Chassid, a reader and quoter of the Talmud, and also the biggest pain in the...I am a scientist, I am not allowed to use that kind of language. A pain in the nadir, the fundament, the buttocks, the tuchis!

  A man who drove everyone crazy on Project Timedrift by continuing to insist: while it is all well and good to be going back to record at first hand every aspect of the Greek Culture, the Hellenic World was enriched and enlightened by the Israelites and so, by rights, we ought to be making book on the parallel history of the Jews.

  With one hundred and sixty-three goyim on the Project, you can imagine with what admiration and glee this unending assertion was received. Gratefully, we were working out of the University of Chicago, and not Pinsk, so at least I didn't have to worry about pogroms.

  What I did worry about was Levin's characterization of me as a "pretend Jew."

  "You're not a Good Jew," he said to me yesterday. We were lying side by side in the REM sleep room, relaxing after a three-hour hypnosleep session learning the idiomatics of Ptolemaic Egyptian, all ninety-seven dialects. He in his sling, me in mine. "I beg your sanctimonious pardon," I said angrily. "And you, I suppose, are a Good Jew, by comparison to my being a Bad Jew!"

  "Res ipsa loquitur," he replied, not even opening his eyes. It was Latin, and it meant the thing speaks for itself; it was self-evident.

  "When I was fourteen years old," I said, propping myself on one elbow and looking across at him lying there with his eyes shut, "a kid named Jack Wheeldon, sitting behind me in an assembly at my junior high school, kicked my seat and called me a kike. I turned around and hit him in the head with my geography book. He was on the football team, and he broke my jaw. Don't tell me I'm a Bad Jew. I ate through a straw for three months."

  He turned his head and gave me that green-eyed lizard-on-a-rock stare. "This is a Good Jew, eh? Chanukah is in three days. You'll be lighting the candles, am I correct? You'll be reciting the prayers? You'll observe yontiff using nothing but virgin olive oil in your menorah, to celebrate the miracle?"

  Oh, how I wanted to pop him one. "I gotcher miracle," I said, rudely. I lay back in the sling and closed my eyes.

  I didn't believe in miracles. How Yehudah of the Maccabees had fielded a mere ten thousand Jews against Syrian King Antiochus's mercenary army of 60,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry; and how he had whipped them like a tub of butter. How the victors had then marched on Jerusalem and retaken the Second Temple; and how they found that in the three years of Hellenist and Syrian domination and looting the Temple had grown desolate and overgrown with vegetation, the gates burned, and the Altar desecrated. But worst of all, the sacred vessels, including the menorah, had been stolen. So the priests, the Kohanim, took seven iron spits, covered them with wood, and crafted them into a makeshift menorah. But where could they find uncontaminated oil required for the lighting of the candelabrum?

  It was a time of miracles. They found one flask of oil. A cruse of oil, whatever a cruse was. And when they lit it, a miracle transpired, or so I was told in Sunday School, which was a weird name for it because Friday sundown to Saturday sundown is the Sabbath for Jews, except we were Reform, and that meant Saturday afternoon was football and maybe a movie matinee, so I went on Sundays. And, miracle of miracles, I forgot most of those football games, but I remembered what I'd been taught about the "miracle" of the oil, if you believe that sort of mythology they tell to kids. The oil, just barely enough for one day, burned for eight days, giving the Kohanim sufficient time to prepare and receive fresh uncontaminated oil that was fit for the menorah.

  A time of miracles. Like, for instance, you're on the Interstate, seventy-five miles from the nearest gas station, and your tank is empty. But you ride the fumes seventy-five miles to a fill-up. Sure. And one day's oil burns for eight. Not in this universe, it doesn't.

  "I don't believe in old wives' tales that there's a 'miracle' in one day's oil burning for eight," I said.

  And he said: "That wasn't the miracle."

  And I said: "Seems pretty miraculous to me. If you believe."

  And he said: "The miracle was that they knew the oil was uncontaminated. Otherwise they couldn't use it for the ceremony."

  "So how did they know?" I asked.

  "They found one cruse, buried in the dirt of the looted and defiled Temple of the Mount. One cruse that had been sealed with the seal of the high rabbi, the Kohane Gadol, the Great Priest."

  "Yeah, so what's the big deal? It had the rabbi's seal on it. What did they expect, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval?"

  "It was never done. It wasn't required that oil flasks be sealed. And rules were rigid in those days. No exceptions. No variations. Certainly the personal involvement of the Kohane Gadol in what was almost an act of housekeeping...well...it was unheard of. Unthinkable. Not that the High Priest would consider the task beneath him," he rushed to interject, "but it would never fall to his office. It would be considered unworthy of his attention."

  "Heaven forfend," I said, wishing he'd get to the punchline.

  Which he did. "Not only was the flask found, its seal was unbroken, indicating that the contents had not been tampered with. One miraculous cruse, clearly marked for use in defiance of all logic, tradition, random chance. And that was the miracle."

  I chuckled. "Mystery, maybe. Miracle? I don't think so."

  "Naturally you don't think so. You're a Bad Jew."

  And that, because he was an arrogant little creep, because his subjective world-view was the only world-view, because he fried my frijoles, ranked me, dissed me, ground my gears, and in general cheesed me off...I decided to go "fugitive" and solve his damned mystery, just to slap him in his snotty face with a dead fish! When they ask you why any great and momentous event in history took place, tell 'em that all the theories are stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. Tell 'em the only reason that makes any sense is this: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Launch the Spanish Armada? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Invent the wheel? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Drift back in time to 165 Before the Common Era and find out how one day's oil burns for eight? Seemed like a good idea at the time. Because Barry R. Levin was a smartass!

  It was all contained in the suit of lights.

  All of time, and the ability to drift backward, all of it built into the refined mechanism the academics called a driftsuit, but which we "fugitives" called our suit of lights. Like a toreador's elegant costume, it was a glittering, gleaming, shining second-skin. All the circuits were built in, printed deep in the ceramic metal garment. It was a specially-developed cermet, pliable ceramic metal, not like the armor worn by our astronauts mining the Asteroid Belt. Silver and reflective, crosstar flares at a million points of arm and torso and hooded skull.

  We had learned, in this time of miracles, that matter and energy are interchangeable; and that a person can be broken down into energy waves; and those waves can be fired off into the timestream, toward the light. Time did, indeed, sweep backward, and one could drift backward, going ever toward that ultimate light that we feared to enter. Not because of superstition, but because we all understood on a level we could not explain, that the light was the start of it all, perhaps the Big Bang itself.

  But we could go fugitive, drift back and back, even to the dawn of life on this planet. And we could return,
but only to the moment we had left. We could not go forward, which was just as well. Literally, the information that was us could be fired out backward through the timestream as wave data.

  And the miracle was that it was all contained in the suit of lights. Calibrate it on the wrist-cuff, thumb the "activate" readout that was coded to the DNA of only the three of us who were timedrifters, and no matter where we stood, we turned to smoke, turned to light, imploded into a scintillant point, and vanished, to be fired away, and to reassemble as ourselves at the shore of the Sea of Reeds as the Egyptians were drowned, in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of Jesus's betrayal, in the crowd as Chicago's Mayor Cermak was assassinated by a demented immigrant trying to get a shot at Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the right field bleachers as the '69 Mets won the World Series.