by Geoff Wolak
Jimmy shook the President’s hand. ‘Good to see you again,’ he offered, Pleb translating.
‘We are happy for your visit,’ the President replied, Henry and I now suspecting that our good President was after something.
Jimmy shook Henry’s hand. ‘Hello again, Henry.’
‘Welcome to Seether,’ Henry offered.
Jimmy turned to me and offered a hand to shake, a very odd move. As I clasped his hand, a frown taking hold, he said, ‘You are doing a good job, and I will look at all of the requests you have made for the Seethans.’
I hid a smile. ‘If you will allow us some of the … requested things … then we can help here more.’
‘I will do so. Let’s go inside.’
Jimmy shook hands with an excited Pleb, waved at the crowd again and gestured the President on, and we all made our way to Henry’s office, the largest - and cleanest - office. Jimmy took Henry’s chair, which was a bit rude I thought, but we were playing a game for the Seethan President – it seemed. Henry and myself sat off to one side, the President and his cronies opposite Jimmy, food and drink arranged.
Jimmy then faced me. ‘I have considered your request for more teachers, but Seethan teachers from another world.’
‘That … is good of you, Mister Silo,’ I replied, Pleb translating for the President.
‘From another world?’ the President queried.
‘Your people live on other worlds, with our help,’ Jimmy explained. ‘Many are very clever, clever like us, and they will help to teach you many things.’
‘Thank you, Great Maker,’ the President offered, the nicest I’d ever seen him being.
‘We shall send teachers for schools, for the best students,’ Jimmy told the President. ‘Your people will advance quickly.’
The President thanked Jimmy. We made small talk for ten minutes, the President then excusing himself.
With the Seethan Government gone, I faced Henry. ‘What was that fucker after?’
Jimmy cut in with, ‘There were TV cameras outside, and photographic cameras.’
‘Ah,’ both Henry and I said at the same time.
‘He wants to be seen rubbing shoulders with you,’ I added. ‘Anyway, what are you up to?’
‘I was thinking about your apprenticeship schemes, and … I had a few experts run some computer simulations. Seems that the future Seethan world that I visited could never have come into existence based on your current level of advancement; a hundred years is not enough when you consider how few of them there are.’
‘So … we’ll risk a paradox and speed things up?’ I queried.
‘How’d you know that … that’s not what you did last time around?’ Jimmy posed. ‘But there is another possibility, and that a series of further Seethan visits from the future jump start the technology at some point.’
Henry put in, ‘Such variables would be … impossible to calculate.’
‘Yes, they could do your head in,’ Jimmy agreed. ‘So, we’ll use teachers to nudge things towards a line on a graph that would put the Seethan at a level of technology that I witnessed when I visited. And … that will need to be a steep line; when I visited they had been using advanced portal technology for decades, and that technology was decades ahead of us.’
It was a stretching of the truth by Jimmy; he had a plan, a very cunning plan.
‘In a hundred years?’ Henry queried. ‘That could not have been down to us, it must have been interference.’
Jimmy held his hands wide. ‘Given the Zim landings here, and our interaction with them – and a ramp up of weapons, I’m not sure it wasn’t us that accelerated the Seether previously.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a paradox. And … whatever we do here is … what we did before I visited their future.’
After a long chat, and some lunch, Jimmy led Pleb outside, and spoke with many of the faithful as they stood lined up.
‘Are you really three hundred years old?’
‘You were shot many times?’
‘Your blood cures all?’
Jimmy was adding to his own legend amongst the Seether, and I puzzled why, and why now. Jimmy then asked me to pack a bag, since we were off to William Tucker the Ninth’s ranch. We flew off, arriving at sundown, the dinner already on; Bison steaks.
William Tucker IX met us at his house gate, shaking Jimmy’s hand, his family lined up behind him. ‘Good to see you again, Jimmy.’
‘Figured we’d go for a ride at dawn, if that’s OK with you,’ Jimmy responded.
‘Sure. C’mon inside and get some steak in you.’
We greeted the wives, sisters, daughters, sons and cousins, many of whom I remembered, and settled around a long table, soon many overlapping conversations going on as we sampled the cooking. When a polite and efficient Seethan man-helper brought out a few dishes, I queried him.
William explained, ‘We’re teaching a whole range of skills, including housekeeping and hotel work.’
‘Hotel work?’ I queried.
‘The buildings we built for the human survivors - we use them like a hotel for visitors, and the Seethans are being taught to run it like a hotel. They even use a data-pad to organise bookings and stock control.’
‘Good work,’ Jimmy commended. ‘The more skills they pick up the better. And we’ve just decided to bring a few of Sandra’s offspring over here to teach.’
‘Will that not corrupt the timeline?’ a lady asked. ‘Sandra’s children are all astronauts!’
‘They’ll be briefed on what to say and do,’ Jimmy began, ‘and they’ll not stay more than a decade at most.’
It was another lie, and part of a grand plan that I was not part of, not yet. It was typically Jimmy, always thinking ten steps ahead, and always planning ahead.
We tackled the monstrous Bison steaks, and sat around chatting for hours. At dawn I was up with the others, but not usually one for horse riding in the rain, and Jimmy set off with William and a few of his men, six bodyguards hanging back on their own horses. And I noticed one of our orbital craft lurking just under the cloud level, no stealth mode employed.
After breakfast I checked out the mini-hotel, which now offered rooms for both humans and Seethan visitors, the Seethan rooms communal. To have put a Seethan bachelor in a room by himself would have worried the guy at the probable expense, and he would have probably felt a little lonely. Across this world, Seethan bachelors slept in groups of six or more, and had grown up with that practice.
I happened across a small woodwork college, bachelors being checked on their dovetail joints and wood gluing techniques. Apparently, all of the furniture here had been made by them, and I tested a few items, glad that Pleb was not in the class. Next door I found the classroom for metal work, a large barn full of kit, a few welding sets creating blue flashes. I sat on a metal-tube chair with a wooden seat, so I guessed that these lads were cooperating with their wood-working chums next door.
Sat atop their horses in green and brown oilskins, a light rain leaving a grey haze across the vista, William and Jimmy peered down a misty valley.
‘You know,’ Jimmy began. ‘Most of the time, when I returned to Canada, I passed through here, spent time on horses, or spent time on a ranch or farm – as the films about me suggest. It was the last thing I did before I stepped back, and I like to think that it grounded me properly, and gave me a focus.
‘The land here, and the simple way of life, I like to think that it … re-set my mistrust of mankind – and of human politics. Running a farm is lot like running a country, only farmers make a better job of it; farmers don’t bet the ranch on a financial gamble. They bring new life into the world, they nurture it, and their lives are interwoven – so they respect the crops and their livestock.
‘It takes a city-dweller to develop the kind of anger needed to want to make war on each other, and when politicians sit in the hot seat they half do what they want to do, and half do what they think is expected of them. If only all politicians could retire, sit at home f
or a year or two and then go back into office, I think they would appreciate it more, and get more done. And all politicians watch the opinion polls, when they should be ignoring them. They should be doing what’s best for the nation, not what’s popular.
‘Back in the old days, a president would have to struggle with Congress, with The Senate, with the Pentagon, with the lobbyists, and with his own party apparatus, all pulling in different directions. Few presidents ever got anything done because they were always fire-fighting, not sat thinking or planning. They meant well, at least they did when they took office, but the system changed them; they inherited a minefield, waking up on the second day to find that they were in the middle of that minefield, and that enacting useful new polices meant getting out of the minefield first.
‘America needed a thirty year plan for its economy, but every four years the direction changed, the tempo, and nothing ever got done till it was a crisis. A rigid two-party system is a perversion of democracy, Will, and once a nation gets into that rut it’s very hard to get out of it. It’s as if eight people are all trying to fix a motorbike, and they all have different ideas, none prepared to cooperate with the others. So the bike never gets fixed, which is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. But your constitution is a perversion of the original document, a bit like the bible; it’s been interpreted and changed over the years.’
‘The original constitution said that there should be two senators for each state, for a year only, and elected by the local party – or something like that,’ William put in.
‘The US political system was a long way from what was originally conceived. It evolved to serve the interests of big business, not the people in small towns,’ Jimmy added. ‘The original idea was that Congress, Senate, the courts and White House acted as counter-balances to prevent excesses. Instead, they produced paralysis.
‘But I’d like to think that somewhere out there in the cosmos is a race of people who smile at each other when they pass in the street, say ‘good morning’, and have a system of democracy - not a perverted two-party system. Somewhere out there must be a model of how it should be. And to tell you the truth, I have always tolerated strong dictators, because they cut through the crap and get things done. Of course, their egos get the better of them eventually, and they believe their own press coverage.
‘Before the Second World War, Hitler was on his way to creating an efficient country with good roads, low crime, good education standards and jobs, but then went off at an angle and lost sight of what he should have been doing. All dictators have a period of building, followed by a period of self-destruction. Most of our early leaders - in Rome and Persia - were monarchs or brutal dictators, and they achieved a great deal. If Rome had been run by a two party system they would have never have gotten anywhere, and those famous straight Roman roads would have been curved and incomplete – when each new elected leader undid what the other guy had started.’
William nodded. ‘If the Romans had operated a two party system, then their healthcare costs and insurance would have slowed up the slaves in the galleys, their local unions insisting on a two hour day. Those galley ships would have gone nowhere fast.’
Smiling, Jimmy led William down the valley.
The last barn I poked my head into was a school for earnest plumbing students, a few U-bend examples clipped to wooden boards on walls, a few metal radiators being worked on, boilers being stoked.
When Jimmy’s party returned, muddied and wet, I cornered William Tucker IX. ‘As the de-facto human president of this world, I have some orders for you.’
‘Yes?’ William puzzled.
‘I like what you’re teaching here; woodwork, plumbing, metal work. So, I want you to oversee the same set-up in the local towns, say a dozen of them. Ask for human volunteers, whatever you need.’
‘Sure,’ he readily agreed. ‘And they’ve already altered their own hostels in the village. They get to take what they make home with them!’
We laughed.
Jimmy washed down his horse and dried it off, feeding the animal as well before we settled in for the evening meal. At that meal, Jimmy said, ‘Most every time I returned to Manson, on my original journeys, I passed through here.’ He motioned towards William. ‘Met this old reprobate several times, and I went back and found his alter-ego on two of those worlds, alive and well. They even remembered me.
‘And the young lad – I forget his name – he was killed on the border by bandits.’ Jimmy took a moment. ‘I was able to tell his people where to find his remains, and they did, a plaque left there.’ He took a moment. ‘But the house in Canada where I left Helen -’ He faced me. ‘- your Helen, was empty. No signs of them, and they’ve not be found alive on that world.’
‘Can’t spend forever going backwards,’ I commented. ‘Sometimes … we need to move forwards as well. My son, Toby, is forty six, and is now helping to save a world, and … sometimes the passing of the years weighs heavy with you.’
Jimmy stared at his plate. ‘When I stepped across to Britain in 1982 recently, a trick by the future Seether, I felt … isolated and lonely. It’s a very odd feeling, to be me – and knowing what I know – and to then be found alone on a new world where no one knows you. I didn’t feel part of that world, or connected to it, I was just passing through.’
The people at the table all listened intently; it was not every day you had Jimmy sat telling stories in your home.
Jimmy continued, ‘I’d like to think that … when other branches of mankind connect to our worlds, and see something beyond the usual human politics, that mankind moves beyond the desire to destroy itself. When I look at the worlds in 2048, I see people who worry about their own political sub-conscious as a pervert may worry about his own sexual subconscious. It’s become … a case that we all know we have the political animal inside, yearning to get out and to be destructive, and that we suppress it.
‘It may sound callous, but happening across the Zim and tangling with them has helped our worlds to re-focus, and not to take things for granted. It may be right that we need a conflict now and then to take a look in the mirror, and to look back at our roots. They said: war brings out the worst in man, and brings out the best in man – and they’re right. We can never move away from our primitive instincts, and we are flesh and blood – not computers. Every once in a while we need to get out of the air-conditioned offices and ride a horse in the rain, or go fight an enemy.
‘Dark Star is a wonderful piece of technology, but it doesn’t struggle day to day, and without struggle we don’t advance. This Zim threat has focused us as a species, and reminded us that the universe won’t just leave us alone to plod along.
‘I remember reading something, a long time ago, and it suggested that mankind would always be tested, and would always approach the horizon – but never get over the horizon. Early man built small boats to sail to neighbouring islands, then larger boats, then much large boats to sail around the world. Then came steam trains, then aircraft, and finally space travel – a horizon that has no end to it. We mastered portal technology, only to find out how little we really knew, and our complacency was soon gone.
‘Now we have an alien race on the horizon, and a fresh challenge. Seems that the universe will always give us a fresh horizon and a new set of problems, and the fact is … we’d go stale if we didn’t have the challenges.’
After a moment, William said, ‘A farm gives a man a good outlook, and roots you solidly; there’s no such thing as a farm that’s finished, and there’s always more to do the next day. You can trust country folk; they’re more in tune with Mother Nature.’
Jimmy lifted his glass. ‘To those … with mud under their nails.’
We all smiled and toasted each other.
Back at the embassy, late the next day, I scanned reports, and learnt that the President had been seen on national TV greeting the Great Maker and Ancestor. They even had a brief story about Jimmy’s life and travels, and his age, and I was sus
picious as to what the presidential arsehole was up to.
Back on 1938-world, I sent out requests for Seethan volunteer teachers, and since they were all linked to each other via websites the news spread quickly. About thirty volunteered straight away and I flew over to Britain, where I found Paul the Seethan back on a visit – and pinching kit for his farms. I sat down with him in London, meeting many of his siblings, and promoted him to ‘Chief Teacher’, as I described it.
‘What exactly are you trying to achieve by using Seethans?’ one of them asked me as we sat in a hotel function room. ‘Rather than using the humans already there?’
‘More of the same,’ I began, ‘but … with less of a dependency on the humans. The Seethans get used to us, and follow instructions well enough, but they relate to their own kind faster. And … I was kind of hoping to advance a few areas of the Seether that we don’t generally get access to. They keep their hatcheries secure, and their best colleges, and their best scientists. We need to be influencing that group more, and possibly with a political slant.
‘And, at the end of the day, we don’t want them dependent on us, we want them independent and proud – and we know that humans will leave that world in a few decades. So if we have a few of you in place, maybe we could get more done, but we must be sure that there’s no talk of their future or the building of rockets.’
‘We understand the dangers of releasing technology over there,’ Seethan Paul assured me.
‘Discuss it amongst yourselves, see who wants to do what, and … in a year or so, I’d like to introduce some of you to the Seethan President.’
‘And the Preethan President?’ they posed.