by Barnes, John
I got up and walked down the mountain to where the excursion planes were parked, showed my ticket, got aboard. The plane was weird looking, built with seats on top in a passenger compartment open to the air. Usually it transported hikers and climbers. The open rows of seats on top, where we sat, took up about as much room as the passenger area of an old Earth airliner, but this ship had eight times the wingspan. The wings themselves formed one big delta wing, extending almost as far behind us as out to the sides, and looked all the stranger because that giant wing was not a solid structure but a hydrogen-inflated balloon. With so little oxygen in the air, there was no fire hazard, and hydrogen lifted more and leaked less than helium.
The electrostatic pushers cut in, vectored downward, and we rose from the side of Olympus Mons, then glided silently away at a gentle angle, headed for a railhead a thousand kilometers off. We weren’t taking off from from the top, but we were three times higher than the peak of Everest, and Olympus Mons is steeper; it was like sliding into a night sky full of stars. The dark bulk of Mars hung below us, and the sky — now empty of anything but stars — was all around.
In a way this voyage into deep night was the best part of the excursion. I was glad I’d decided to do it. Probably just that I’d been thinking of Alice, especially the way she’d been when she was a kid, but I thought about how exciting she’d have thought it was when she was nine or ten.
She’d have made a good partner for an ecoprospector. She was always really into all the enviro-stuff, and wandering around finding places to help life take hold would have appealed to her. Ecoprospecting would have been a better job for both of us, really, than the ones we actually ended up with. We wouldn’t have talked much or anything. Just had company for the sunsets, and sunrises, and all the wild Martian landscape.
I had an expedition coming up, ecoprospecting for a place where I could plant a bomb and start a river. And maybe Alice looked at a map of Mars now and then. I thought maybe she’d get a kick out of it if she happened to see her name on a map, though of course she’d never know that it was me, or that I meant her.
I sat back and enjoyed the long, slow, silent crawl across the Martian sky, said hello to Phobos when it rose, drifted off to sleep a while before we touched down. One of the best naps I never took, I think.
7.
Sadi and I stopped yelling at each other, gradually, a while ago. I guess Sadi, as a woman, doesn’t like to yell. I don’t like to yell at women. Reminds me too much of my old man.
So we circle each other in that house, getting close to each other, avoiding, getting close, avoiding. We sulk, so the other one can see we’re sulking.
We don’t fuck much anymore.
I keep wondering about the memories of killing him, of him killing me, her killing me. I think about the memory problem a lot because now that it all links together, I notice that if I try to recite any long block of it to myself, I get — loops.
Loops, like continuous timelike curves, I find myself thinking.
A million years of time. And she’s been around the loop many times, had to have been to have changed the world so often.
And I finally ask myself the question that I should have asked before: am I that sure that this is my first trip? I try out the perfect memory: I think about my fortieth birthday, in 2008. I remember Alice and I went to a movie, I remember Alice had a bad cold so we didn’t go to the movie, I remember a little blonde girl, not Alice at all, I remember — It falls into place, right there and then, as I’m sitting with my arms folded trying to think of a way to carry the argument on. We’re having a big joint sulk-off. “Sadi,” I ask, “how many times have I been around the loop?”
She starts to cry, and won’t let me hold her or touch her. Finally she says, “I thought you were ready, I thought it was all going to work out. I thought this time we could be really together, that I wouldn’t have to hide the memories from you anymore, that I could let you have the revival treatment so you wouldn’t get old. That’s what I thought. I thought, you change the world, you change the person in it, and I thought I had changed the world enough.”
“So you have taken me around the loop before?”
“I wouldn’t have gone without you, Josh. I mean maybe I’m kind of crazy and I know you sometimes get bothered about things that I like, but you know, you’ve got to know, I have always loved you. I never felt any other way. You can’t say I didn’t love you.”
“I believe you.”
“Well, I tried, Josh, I really tried. And this time I thought yes, yes, he’s ready, let him have revival, it’s time to be really together, to stop picking you up and trying over every trip through. I really thought that.”
“But it didn’t work out,” I say. I am thinking about what is in my memory. Sometimes we killed each other. Sadi has killed Alice more times than I know. Sadi did get me to kill Alice, and I was remembering that on the night I killed Sadi. It’s the opposite of it all falling into place; suddenly it all falls apart, and I realize that “apart” is the only way it fits.
“It didn’t work out,” she agrees. “But you can come around the loop anyway, Josh, just take the ride on the CTC with me, and then we can work it out together through the rest of the century. We have lots of time. It can be good, we just have to use the time to work it out.”
“Let me think,” I say.
Then she won’t talk about it anymore, but that night she comes down to the small side bedroom I sleep in now. She’s naked. She hands me some short lengths of rope.
I’m not sure what she wants, and I stand there with those in my hands, till she says, “You’re angry with me.”
“Yeah.”
“Tie me up and hurt me. Do what you want. I worked so hard to get you here, like this, you, young, with all your memories. I love you so much. I’ll let you do whatever you want with me. You can hate me, you can kill me. Just don’t ignore me.”
I throw the rope aside, hold her, cry into her beautiful soft hair, let her cry on my shoulder. We cuddle for a long time, and then it turns into giggles and flirting, and finally into wild, screaming sex. It’s very late when we fall asleep.
When I wake up the gravity’s all wrong.
I get disoriented and dizzy when I stand up, the way it used to be confusing to walk in the Mushroom, the high-gravity area of the Flying Dutchman where they made us work out to keep us healthy during the voyage.
I don’t remember much. The prick of a needle? The shot of an airgun? Where is Sadi? (Where’s Alice? I think, and then I know how stupid that is).
My werp’s there, and my space allocation box. When I open it, the napkin, the holo, and the old dogtag are gone. One thing has been added: a holo of Sadi, as a young woman, naked, positioned for doggie style so that her tits look huge from the front side and in the back you can see right up her vagina. A note clipped to it says Remember this is waiting for you.
The kind of funny sideways feel to the gravity can only mean one thing, I realize. I’m in a spaceship that’s using centrifugal gravity.
She’ll have left a message. If there is anything she can’t do, it’s not explain. I turn to the werp and say, “Play the message.”
Sadi’s face comes onto the screen. She hurried about her makeup, didn’t get the lips right.
“I really do love you,” she says. “By now you’ve figured it out, haven’t you? I would think you would. While you were still asleep from the drugs, the time shift was initiated. You’re on your way back to the singularity, Josh. You were never going to make up your mind, and you know it. But you have to do this. It’s taken me centuries — all the twenty-first” (she giggles at her own joke) “to get it to this point, where I could offer you a chance to really share the century together, where I could let you have a permanent revival and all your memories and know you would come back to me. You can’t just give up on it now.
“This is costing a third of the budget of the Organization, and it’s worth it.
“So you’re off
at near light speed, going out almost sixty light-years and coming back, 120 years that will pass like fourteen months. The ship you’re in is not under your control. Don’t try to hack the control systems — you could screw up life support. Besides you’re not an astrogater.
“When you pass through the singularity, after your return to the solar system, I’m sure you’ll be happy to find yourself in 1988. The ship will drop you off on a low hill in the New Mexico desert. Head west on the two-lane road at the base of the hill. Take everything you need from the ship, because as soon as you’re out of sight, it’s going to take off and go hide in a long orbit.
“You will be three miles from a small town with a Greyhound station. You will arrive there, at a normal walking speed, about an hour before dawn and three hours before any business opens. In the ship’s safe — which is keyed to your thumbprint — there are six ATM cards, each with a million dollar balance to draw upon. You’ve also got an apartment in San Francisco — keys and details also in the safe. Use them and enjoy them, bud.
“I finally realized how unfair I’d been. I’ve been around the loop thirty times with my memories, several years before I ever found you. Of course my mind’s made up, and of course you’ll need time to think. So I’m giving it to you. The ship will give you five years back there — right up to when the mutAIDS plague hits — to play around and think. After that there will be a message for you, mailed to that San Francisco address, so if you move be sure and leave a forwarding address. That message will be a letter from your ship’s AI, setting you up for pickup and return.
“If you’re ready then, fine. Come on back and we can talk about what it would be fun to do together. Or if you want to stay longer — why anyone would want to do mutAIDS or the Eurowar again is beyond me — go ahead. The ship can park in a long orbit, way away from anything that might detect it, for as long as you want to stay. After the first time it returns for you, in 1993, the ship will place itself under your command. You can even repeat all or part of a loop.
“Enjoy your trip, Josh. Take all the time you want, because you have it. I won’t be lonely. Whenever you get back, in your time frame, it’ll be just minutes for me. Sorry to pull a trick on you, bud, but you know, you’d never have done it otherwise, and we had to do it. For me it’s always been you.”
She blows me a kiss and waves. My werp clicks off. Alone, in this metal box, fourteen months to go.
I’m sure she has provided plenty of ways of amusing myself; I can probably dream most of the time away in virtual reality, and there’s probably a big library and a lot of movies and music and so on. Any kind of food I want. Some kind of gym. All that. I don’t bother to look just yet.
1988. I can go see Mama, Gwenny, Grandpa Couandeau. Ambush Daddy someplace and kill him if I want — I have all kinds of skills now. Be a serial killer, billionaire (I remember the brand names on about ten things that ought to make me rich if I want to pick up a quarter million in stock), politician, anything. Go to college and spend a hundred years reading to see if there’s any worthwhile shit in books — not that I need that long to find out there’s not.
Wonder if the information in my werp and my memory is adequate to find Alice’s mother? Get her out of Europe early enough, might make big differences.
Other thoughts hit, and I start to really smile. That little German housewife. All the places where there’s going to be no law at all. Or set up a pickup with the ship so I know when and where I’m getting out of Dodge, go do ten things for the hell of it, go catch the ship, presto, twenty years into the future or past. Never take me alive, coppers. Never even take me existing. I have total, complete, freedom to be me, to be as many kinds of me as I want. All kinds of chances.
Sadi was a fool. (Love does that.) She figured if she gave me this century to play with, I’d get bored and run back to her. Or maybe she thought I’d be so in love I wouldn’t give a damn for all the stuff that’s here.
I laugh and slap the steel wall of the ship. “Yes sir?” the AI asks, in Sadi’s voice.
“Steady as she goes and hold your course,” I say.
“I am not authorized to alter this flight plan on your commands, sir,” the AI says. “Would you like something to eat, or some entertainment?”
“Not just yet.” I lean back and consider falling back asleep. Lots of time. Worlds of time.
I can do good things for Mama, Gwenny, Alice, everyone, if I want. I can party for a hundred years. I can kill someone every month just for fun. And if it ever starts to look too hot for me, I can always get on this ship again.
Knowledge is power and I’ve got that. Power is being able to touch and not be touched, and I’ve got that.
Hell of a century coming up, I realize. Best one so far. I have to wait fourteen months to get started, but even that’s okay. More time to plan, think, dream. Then off the ship and all my dreams come true.
Yeah. It will be the best century so far. This time it will all be different. The next century is fucking mine.