Authors: John Varley
That’s one theory. It’s the best one. The worst…
It could very well be that if a grandfather paradox really gets going and history from the point of the twonky forward starts to come unglued…
…we all softly and suddenly vanish away.
Not just you and me, but the Sun, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri, and the Andromeda Galaxy.
And so forth.
This is known as the Cosmic Disgust Theory. Or:
If you’re going to play games like that, I’ll take my marbles and go home. Signed, God.
* * *
Coventry went on with quite a bit more eyewash about the Herculean effort his department was carrying out, peering into the intimate moments in the lives of around six thousand people who had been dead for millennia. It seemed to me like a good time to get some sleep. I probably would have, too—let’s face it, in just ten hours Coventry and his team
had
done a remarkable job, and so far seemed to have ruled out the 1955 accident as a source of temporal disturbance. I was feeling much relieved.
Then he got to the second twonky.
“Here,” he said, “the situation seems hopeless.”
Did you ever have the short hairs on the back of your neck stand up? Mine did. I heard a roaring in my ears, a sound of thunder like an earthquake building up steam, or the winds of change blowing through the ruins of time. I could hear God clearing his throat:
Okay, folks, I warned you…
“Ralph’s stunner came down with the DC-10 in a pasture north of Interstate 580, not far from Livermore, California. There it was picked up by a recovery worker and taken with the rest of the wreckage to a hangar at Oakland International Airport, where it sat for about forty-eight hours. At the end of that time, it seems to have come into the possession of a Mister William Archibald “Bill” Smith, an employee of the National Transportation Safety Board. Of all the people who might have found the weapon, he is probably the worst possibility. He has technical training and an inquisitive mind.
“What he learned from his examination of the weapon is impossible for us to determine. All we know is that he entered the hangar where the weapon was being stored at eleven
P.M.
on the night of December 13. We can observe him inside the hangar for only a short time; then a temporal blank intervenes, a period of censorship lasting two hours. When he emerges from the hangar, we can describe his actions only in terms of probabilities.”
Somebody groaned—it might even have been me. There was excited talk, worried looks thrown back and forth, haunted eyes, the old smell of fear. You could hardly blame us. When we have to speak in terms of probabilities concerning events in the immutable past it means the shit has already hit the fan and the only reason we don’t smell it is it hasn’t hit
us
yet.
I won’t go on quoting Martin. It’s not really fair to him; he was as scared as the rest of us, and with him, fear shows up as pedantry. He got even more insufferably, prissily dry and didactic as he told us the story leading up to the casting of Bill Smith as the Most Important Man in the Universe, using the time tank as a visual aid.
My first thought when I finally saw Bill Smith there in the time scanner was
maybe I should go back and kill him.
Not the best way to begin a relationship. But if killing him would prevent him from upsetting the framework of fated events, I would have done it without batting an eye.
Naturally, that was the worst thing I possibly could have done.
According to Martin’s scanning, Smith had years to live. He was supposed to die in 1996, by drowning, and to kill him in Oakland could not fail to affect the timestream.
* * *
I sat and listened to the buzz of conversation after Coventry’s exit, but I didn’t join in. I was having an idea, and I didn’t want to force it.
Finally, still not sure what I was doing, I left the others and went to a terminal.
“Listen up…” I started, then decided I was in no mood for those sorts of games just now.
“BC, on-line, please,” I said.
“On-line,” it replied. “Am I addressing Louise Baltimore?”
“Yes, and don’t sound so damned shocked. I’d like a straight answer.”
“Very well. What is the question?”
“What do you know about Jack London Square?”
“Jack London Square is/was an area near the waterfront of Oakland, California. It was named for a famous writer. It came into being as an urban redevelopment project in the mid-twentieth century, and was something of a tourist attraction for those few people who visited Oakland for reasons of tourism. Do you want more?”
“No, I think that’s enough.”
* * *
I found Martin Coventry on the balcony outside the Gate building, looking over the derelict field. Or, as we snatchers sometimes call it, the Bermuda Triangle. In another age the place might have qualified as a museum. In our day, it was simply an historical junkyard. I joined Coventry and stood with him looking at the debris of five hundred years of Gate operations.
How would you go about snatching a one-seat fighter plane? What about a plane that gets into trouble over the ocean and vanishes without a trace? Or a Spanish galleon going down in a hurricane? Or a space capsule that falls into the sun, killing all aboard?
The best way to handle those types of disasters is to take the entire vehicle through the Gate. If it’s a jet fighter, we field it in the retarder rings. The plane slows to a stop, we take the pilot off—usually quite confused—and then, depending on where he was going to crash, either catapult his wimp-piloted plane back a thousandth of a second later than we took it, or just dump it in the derelict field. Any vehicle that will never be found ends up out there on the field. Why send it back? It takes a lot of energy to send an ocean liner back through the Gate. There’s a very good reason why nobody’s ever found the wreck of the
Titanic
: it’s sitting out there rusting away.
Right next to the pride of Cunard is a starship from the twenty-eighth century.
The derelict field is roughly triangular, five miles on a side, and is chock-a-block with every land, sea, air, and space vehicle imaginable. Right in front of me were four propeller-driven aircraft that, if memory serves, actually
did
come from the Bermuda Triangle.
They were in pretty bad shape. We’d taken them about fifty years ago and, like everything else on the field, the chemicals in the air had not done them any good. A rain shower in the Glorious Future I call home is not something to take lightly.
“I was born to be an historian,” Coventry said, unexpectedly. I looked at him. I couldn’t have been more befuddled if he’d told me what he wanted Santa Claus to bring him for Christmas.
“Were you?” I said, helpfully.
“I was. What more honorable profession in the Last Age than that of historian?”
And what more futile, I thought, but kept it to myself. Historians, as I understood, existed to pass down knowledge and lore to future generations. Without descendants, the compilation of history struck me as a fairly dry business. But he was way ahead of me.
“I know I was born in the wrong age for it,” he conceded, looking at me for the first time. “Still, this breaks my heart.
What a memorial this could have made. What a testament to the human will to keep going. Look at that.”
He was pointing to what remained of a Viking longboat I’d helped snatch no more than six months before. The thick fluid we are pleased to call air had eaten gaping holes in it already; out here, you might as well build something out of cheese as to build it of wood.
“Can you imagine setting out to row across the Atlantic Ocean in that…that…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “But what you don’t know is it was a real ship of fools. You didn’t have to deal with a berserk Captain. Lars, Cleaver-of-Heads, he was called. He told me that Thor had called him to sail to Greenland. He hadn’t messed with navigation, even though he knew more about it than you’d think, because it was a divine sailing. I picked up him and his crew becalmed in the horse latitudes, rowing to beat the band. They were about two days from starvation. Before long they would have been eating their shipmates who’d already crossed over to Valhalla. Let me tell you, the
stink
on that—”
“You don’t have much romance in your soul, Louise.”
I thought it over.
“I can’t afford it,” I said, finally. “There’s still too much work to do.”
“That’s my point. You’ve got a lot in common with Lars, whether you understand that or not.”
“I hope I don’t smell like him.”
Some of my best comebacks just go right over people’s heads; he went on like he hadn’t heard me.
“Your will to keep going is the strongest I have ever encountered. There are no new frontiers to push back. In fact, the best you can do is push back the date of the final blackout by a day or a week—but you push!”
He was making me uncomfortable. There’s no doubt he’d read me right in one way: I don’t have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or gods, or good guys winning out
in the end. I have seen destiny in action, and I can tell you, it stinks.
“What’s the consensus back there?” he said. “How are they taking my analysis of the situation?”
“Nobody’s very happy about it. You said it’s hopeless; I guess they all agree with you. You’re pretty much the voice of authority when it comes to the Gate and the timestream.”
“So no one has anything to suggest? No course of action?”
“How could they? They’re all looking to you to show them a way out. You said there wasn’t any way out. If they had anybody to leave anything to, they’d all be writing their wills, I guess.”
He looked at me, and smiled.
“Right. So what’s your plan?”
There are nine people on the Council. I don’t know why, though the BC might tell me if I asked, since it nominates and elects Council members. I’ve always fancied it’s so in case we ever screw up so totally that the universe does come apart at the seams and all eras coexist, we can field a team in the Never-neverland World Series.
Technically it’s called the Programmers’ Council. That’s a polite fiction. They don’t do any programming. Computers long ago grew too complex and too accurate to allow a mere human to fuck around with their instructions.
Yet there are qualities no one has ever succeeded in placing into the memory banks.
Don’t ask me what they are.
Imagination might be one of them, empathy another. Or I could just be giving the human race credit for more than it deserves. Maybe the BC supports and maintains the Council to keep itself in check, to prevent it from actually becoming God. There
is
that hazard. Possibly the BC needs an element of fool-hardiness and prejudice and meanness and ornery self-interest to give it perspective. Or maybe, like the rest of us, it just needs a giggle now and then.
For whatever reason, the Council is the nearest thing we have to a government. To get on it you need to be incredibly ancient—say thirty-six or thirty-seven; well beyond the median mortality age.
That they are gnomes goes without saying. Most are little more than a brain and a central nervous system. Sometimes only the cerebrum is left, and in more than one case I’ve suspected even that is gone.
There are requirements other than sheer age, but I’ve never been able to figure them out. Intelligence is a good one, and so is eccentricity. If you’re a thirty-eight-year-old super-genius and a real pain in the ass, your chances of ending up on the Council are excellent.
They are an odd lot. Most of them are not nearly as concerned with outward appearance as most gnomes. Several have elected to house their brains in full prosthetic bodies, but more often than not they don’t look any more realistic than Sherman. Ali Teheran is like Larry: a torso fastened to a pedestal. Marybeth Brest is a talking head, a puss on a post, like from a cheap horror film. Nancy Yokohama is a brain in a tank, and The Nameless One is just a speaker sitting on a desk. Only the BC knows who, where, or what he is.
Who knows how important they are? I doubt if even they could answer that. But the fact is, I’d never heard of a case where the BC overruled one of the Council’s decisions. And the Gate Project, the last feeble hope of the human race, had originated in the Council Chamber, not in the BC’s supercooled synapses.
Understand then that I was a trifle twitchy to appear in their august presences. I’d known it was coming: the time capsule had said so. What I hadn’t known was that I’d request the audience—I had expected to be summoned. It didn’t make me any happier to be there.
I wished Martin Coventry had come with me, but he had refused. Looking at them, I thought I knew why. He hated them, hated with an unreasoning passion I knew only too well. Whereas I was destined to rot away until I was installed with
the other gnomes in Operations, this is where Martin Coventry would come. He’d been a prime candidate for the Council since he was nine. I don’t blame him for not wishing to see his future.
A Hollywood set designer would have loved the Council Chamber. It was futuristic as shit. You couldn’t find the walls unless you blundered into them; it was like standing in a vast, featureless plain, all white, with nine oddballs sitting behind—or on—a curved, black table.
Well, if it made them happy, it was no skin off my suit.
I assumed Peter Phoenix was the leader since he sat in the middle. He looked more human than the rest of them put together, if a trifle like an Old Testament God. He started the festivities.
“I understand there has been a twonky, and that you have a plan for correcting it.”
“Two twonkies,” I said, wondering if that was the correct plural.
“And that you might have been responsible for one of them?” Phoenix lifted one massive eyebrow. I could almost hear the pulleys creaking.
“It may be. I stand ready to accept your judgement on that matter, and your penalty.”
“Report, then.”
I filled them in on the disastrous day that had seen the deaths of Pinky, Ralph, and probably Lilly. I told the tale of the hijacker as straight as I knew how, relating every circumstance I thought might have a bearing on the case. It had been about forty-eight hours, straight-time, since Pinky died. I had spent the last twenty-four of those, after my conversation with Coventry, peering into a time-scan tank, getting to know Mr. Bill Smith better than probably even his ex-wife had ever known him. He’s the man I wanted to talk to the Council about, but I thought it best to lead up to it gradually.