Just North of Nowhere (46 page)

Bunch nodded. “A clock,” he said.

Clifford’s head vibrated negatively.

“Like a truck?” Bunch suggested.

“Like! Like, but not. I don’t know, it was a long time ago. Shhh!”

“Okay, okay. It’s your story.”

“A story it is. Yes! Smart. A story’s not true. Hasn’t happened!”

“So these guys built a time truck?”

“
Will
! Will build it. It will move in time. Or move time, I’m not sure. Both ways of looking at it have validity. Or will have. But see? There is a forward and a backward component. I mean: what’s the point of going one way if you can’t go the other, right? That’s my contribution!
Will
be. Going home from the past. I made that part possible.
WILL
make.”

“In the story?” Bunch asked.

“Don’t stop me!” Cliffy yelled. “It’s nearly my birth day. Are you getting the picture?! Do not stop me but, yes, I found the way back! Not the way some might want to, but I’m almost there.”

Cliffy’s giggle sent shivers up Bunch’s neck again. The stranger’s eyes flashed in the dying firelight and he shut them, hard and tight. “Fire moves,” he moaned. “See? I don’t want movement. Movement anticipates destination. Destination posits an endpoint. See? Don’t nod! Every movement is an idea that prefigures stasis. You go somewhere. The journey ends. That’s it! All she wrote!
Tout fini!
Period! End of story! That’s all folks...!” Clifford strung out a half dozen more like those. He suddenly froze. “A rocker?” he shouted. “You give me a rocking chair?” He jumped to his feet! “A death engine! Every backward, is a little stop, each forward, a little death! You see?”

Bunch was off the ground and into the rocker like/that! “Yep,” he said.

“Don’t! Don’t agree! Don’t disagree! Say nothing. And don’t rock!”

Bunch sat.

“The gadget – our machine –
will
be built. Even if we weren’t going to build it forty-two years from now, it’d get built anyway! You see? Once the
idea
of a machine is in the air, there it is! You get that? It exists except for the
thingness
of it! It’s the idea that makes it so. Building is just tinkering! So, there it is! Was. Will be.”

The guy sagged but didn’t collapse.

“Okay, okay, okay. The thing did not look like... God, I barely remember what it does. It didn’t look like what the man we’re talking about—that boy we’re going to imagine will be born tomorrow—the machine he’ll help build will not look like what he would have expected a time machine to look like when he was a boy a dozen years from now and thinking about numbers and the future. Fact was,” Clifford leaned closer to Bunch, “Fact is – or will be – the guy will have a suspicion that the thing doesn’t really exist...”

“Like for a while my bike didn’t?” Bunch shouted.

Clifford dashed ahead: “It didn’t exist. Not in a conventional sense. It was the elegant reality of a number, a solution, a balance! Can you imagine a number that
real
here in the world? Don’t answer, don’t even try. Okay, the gadget. It’s ready. They test it. They will. It goes into the future. Not far, couple of seconds. Disappeared.
Bling
. Not that it made a sound. Okay. Then it winked back to being because they caught up with it! The world, everything, caught up with it. Will catch up, see? Okay? So, okay. The machine’s okay. They send a clock—no, no, no, no, no, no! Not a clock, not like you know. A tick, tock, tick, tock, tick-tock clock, no. This clock had no hands or... Never mind: they sent a clock and it came back and it recorded...”

Clifford’s face twisted like a guy trying to remember where he left his keys. “It recorded odd things. I won’t tell you what it recor...what it will record. It would only make sense if you were one of those number people. Okay?”

Bunch opened his mouth but the guy hissed like a cornered raccoon. “Don’t!” He took a second. Stood stock still in the frozen mud. “So they’ll send an animal. And when the machine winks back, the animal... Well, there will be no animal. Animal will be gone.

“They’ll agonize, calculate, measure. Someone – maybe a janitor – will suggest, maybe the animal ran off! Simple. Elegant. Maybe the gadget arrived up there, the animal got loose and...”

The guy’s chuckle was a little nuttier.

“’Janitor!” he laughed. “There won’t be janitors. I just said that. It was some solder gun tech but anyway, our guy, the one we’re talking about, remember? He gets the short end or he wins second place. Anyway, he’s the second human to ride the thing. The first guy, he went forward. They expected him to show up where and when they sent it. He didn’t. It didn’t. They won’t. No one will know why. I think I do. Now. I think he was tossed. Never mind where, okay?”

Bunch didn’t answer.

“Okay. The guy we’re talking about, the second place winner – me – he’ll go
back
. A few minutes, a bump, a nothing. One hundred and twenty-two point yada, yada, yada seconds. Don’t ask why a hundred and twenty-two point whatever...it had to be, it’s the numbers. Forget it. You wouldn’t understand!” His face froze. “Something’ll happen,” he said finally. “He’ll start the trip, this guy, me, he’ll go a hundred and twenty-two point whatever seconds into the past and the machine stops. He keeps going. Like he...” Cliffy was stuck.

“Like falling off his bike and the bike keeps going?” Bunch offered?

“NO,” Clifford screamed, “Like the bike’s going a billion miles a second and, BANG, stops like/that and he... He keeps going! See, here’s the problem – I’ve had a
long
time to work this out – the numbers suggest that an animal, a person can’t go into a time in which they already exist. People, animals, the machine itself, couldn’t stop and interact with themselves. That would set a paradox. ‘Paradox! A paradox! A most ingenious paradox!’ – I wrote that line, did you know that? You didn’t. I did. Ask Sir William! Oh, okay, he’s dead, too bad, never mind.

“But, you know what it is? A paradox? Never mind. I think – and I should know – I believe that any movement in time faster or slower than time itself sets up so many implicit paradoxes that inertia sets in. Look!” Clifford eyes burned. “Okay? You’re in a hallway. There are mirrors on both sides. You see an endless succession of
you
going farther and farther away, deeper and deeper into the walls.” He held out his arms. “As they recede, the images grow darker and darker.” He looked at Bunch. “Mirrors aren’t a hundred percent reflective, see? Each image looses something and you get darker and darker until...poof...the Big Black! Okay? Okay, never mind. See?

“The machine knows this, that elegant machine of numbers compensates for this inertia, this inefficiency, recognizes the drag, the machine realizes things are slowing and compensates for it, it pumps more energy into the subject. Tries to keep it moving.”

Clifford slowed, came to a rolling stop. Stood their idling.

“You could turn on a couple lights?” Bunch suggested as Clifford vibrated.

“Yes!” Clifford shouted, “more light! The machine makes the subject brighter! Ah, but where’s the energy from, you ask? The world. The sky. Stars. Space. Everywhere around. From heaven! Problem is, the proximate world gets darker and darker because of it. And the machine keeps turning up the light, it pours more and more energy into the traveler, him, it...” Clifford’s hands, explaining, had become a flickering blur. “Me,” he said.

“Like spinning your wheels on an icy patch?” Bunch shouted.

Clifford’s eyes widened. “Yes!” he shouted, “then the machine stops and...”

“...and you grab road!”

“Yes!” Clifford shouted. “and the traveler’s got so much energy pumped into him overcoming paradox inertia, he’s just squirted...will be squirted...I was squirted BANG straight down the road!” Clifford spit words so fast Bunch could barely grab them. “All that energy shoots the traveler – shot me – right past my time here on earth and slung me into forever...forever ago!”

Vibrating, Clifford had become a blur against the fog.

“See? I try to go my simple hundred and twenty-two point something, something, seconds back. But the machine can’t, you see? It can’t stop there. Why? Because I exist there, it exists there. It can’t stop where either of us exists. So it keeps going. Back and back, shoving more and more and more energy into me, us, and somewhere back right around, well,
now
, when I was born, the machine pops into reality and stops, like/
that
, but, me? Ah. All that energy in me, I’m through the windshield! Wham! I fly. Where? Don’t remember. When? Can’t say. I am moving at trans-rational velocity, you get it? Relativistic figures! And finally, I stop. And I am stuck. How far? Don’t know. Way far. Alive
way
before my time.”

Clifford looked at Bunch.

Bunch said nothing.

“So, Okay. I figure, I’m stuck, I’ll live my life, then I’ll die. Simple. Right?

“The first fifty thousand years are kind of amorphous. Wasn’t until something came around to talk to that time sorted itself out. Went by quicker then.

Clifford shut his eyes.

“See? I don’t die. He doesn’t die. I couldn’t. Not before I was born. A paradox without even the machine to balance the equation. On his own, he lives and lives. Never ages. A hundred years, another, a thousand. Another. On and on. Never hurt, never ailing.” He went silent. He continued to shake but said nothing for a long time.

“You have to understand,” he said finally. He raised his eyes and looked at Bunch. “You can’t understand loneliness like that. No friends. No people. No...no
women
!

“There were animals. As I said. Animals that looked like men... You see? They worked for a while.”

He stopped again, his head dropped.

“Animals. So for centuries he wished, ‘I wish I could die. Get rid of it, life. Ah, the world was just beasts and beasts that wanted to look like men, but...”

“Animals?” Bunch said.

Clifford’s head stayed down.

Disgusted
, Bunch thought,
and he oughta be! Having to do with animals!

When Clifford finally raised his head, though, the look of disgust was mixed with something else.

“Horrible,” Clifford said after a moment, “I’ve done horrible things but a man can wait only so long. I was the same man...the same one who couldn’t get a date to save his life. Well, the creatures at the dawn of the mammalian age were less discriminate about partnerships. In a hundred thousand years, one becomes, well, accustomed to everything. Not almost. Every thing!”

He’s proud of it,
Bunch suddenly realized. The look in Clifford’s face was Karl Dorbler’s look when he figured he’d put a good one over on someone!
Sunnuvabitch is proud of his...

“So here’s a thing,” Clifford said, “at some point, somewhere between jumpstarting the human race with my seed and now, I found I didn’t want to die. Not for my sins, not out of boredom, not for anything. Came a point – five, ten thousand years ago – where life became...” he blinked twice, thinking, “precious,” he decided, “truly precious. Yes. Somewhere along the way our trusty traveler became able to sire offspring from those proto-human creatures. He’d seen his sons and daughters struggle, fail, watched them pick themselves up, learn.”

His face quivered. Bunch watched sadness, disappointment, fear, tears, joy, anger, triumph run through the quivers.

“There’s more, you see? He’d become addicted! To life. A drug, it was!

“Then, suddenly—really, like/
that!
—tens of thousands of years slipped by and, now, it’s almost time to be born. And he doesn’t know, our traveler.” He looked into Bunch’s eyes. “For the first time in forever, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe it’s Forever at last, the dark at the far end of the mirrors. Maybe not. Point is, I do not know.

“He has suspicions. Over the thousands of years he thought. About It, the monster. Time. Him. He that is to come in my place. I’ve come to some conclusions.”

Clifford was still standing where he had when he’d risen from the rocker. Bunch squished back and forth, then stopped dead in the freezing muck not wanting to upset his guest.

“You have no idea, do you? Who you’re talking to?”

“Ain’t you Cliffy?” Bunch ventured.

“Shh!” Clifford said. “Fathering children, finally, being absentee dad to a burgeoning species, and, well, it gets under your skin. First it’s about the tingle. Then, it’s about... Well, about responsibility, I suppose. Addicted to life and all. And knowing your kids are going to die and you? You’ll just keep going, well, you start thinking you should leave instructions. Something the kids can carry with them through their little lives. You write a bit and leave it scratched in rocks or pressed into clay or on papyrus, you hide and whisper it but that’s not enough. You feel you ought to leave it where it’ll stay.” He tapped his head. “Up here. In the kids’ minds...”

He let out that silly little chuckle again.

“Do you know who I’ve been? Do you know who the world thinks I am? Don’t answer. You do. Don’t say it! The animal who vanished. The guy who went ahead. I who went back. We’re all the same. There’s so much I have to say and now’s my last chance to sayitandi’mhereandcan’tgetitoutandyou’re...

Bunch had about as much as he could take. Polite or not, he was a working guy. He stretched, yawned. A touch of light showed through the fog.
Cripes
, he thought,
it’s morning?