Millennium (24 page)

Sherman told me, and here I was, getting onto an escalator in Oakland.

I reached into my purse just about the time Smith saw me. I smiled at him, and pressed a button in the purse, and the escalator ground to a stop.

“We do keep running into each other, don’t we?” I said.

*    *    *

I hadn’t counted on him being so shy. I had to drag a dinner invitation out of him. I was beginning to wonder if the fancy skinsuit I was wearing was really all it was cracked up to be.

Thinking it over, I suppose I’d been expecting him to know his lines as well as I did. I just assumed he was feeling the puppet
master’s strings pulling him as strongly as they were pulling me. But why should he? If anything, I was the one who’d seen the script—or at least the proposal—for the way the evening should proceed.

Since he didn’t suggest driving I assumed he didn’t have a car. So I steered him toward the parking lot, where we’d prepared a contingency plan. That’s when I almost got into trouble.

As I said, data-dumping can fill me with facts, but it’s not much help at pattern recognition. There were a million vehicles in the lot and I didn’t know much about any of them. Oh, I knew the brand names; other than that, I had to go by instinct in selecting “my” automobile.

Logically, I thought I should choose a small one to go with my presumed socioeconomic status. But sometimes logic doesn’t help. How was I to know that big cars don’t always cost more, nor small ones less.

The one I picked was low and uncomfortable-looking. As soon as I indicated it I knew I was wrong. Smith looked at me strangely. Well, it was too late to change my mind. I reached in my purse and all the door locks sprang open before he could get close enough to see it happening. Then we got in and I scanned the controls. They seemed simple and straightforward, though I thought radar might have been helpful. I inserted a key in the ignition. It felt out the proper combination, started the car for me, and I got it in motion.

It was even easier than I’d thought. The vehicle was much faster than anything else on the road. I used the reserve speed to hurry through the smaller autos, keeping the tachometer as close as possible to the red line. I followed the signs to Jack London Square.

*    *    *

I shouldn’t have admitted I spoke French. By the time I realized it was out of character to do so, I’d already been speaking it to the waiter.

The food was pretty bad. I’m sure everyone else enjoyed it, but to me, it was tasteless, like chewing cardboard. We require
quite different chemicals in our diets than 20ths, including a lot of things that would surely kill Bill Smith, or at least make him very sick. I’d come prepared. I had some capsules that contained all the poisons a self-respecting creature from the ninety-ninth century could ever need. I kept palming them all night and dropping them into my drinks. They had the added advantage of neutralizing the ethanol. I pecked at my food; it was the double scotches that sustained me.

He told me a lot of things I already knew; after all, Bill Smith had become the most extensively researched person in the twentieth century. We had scanned him from his birth (by caesarean section) to his death.

I’d entered the twentieth century with a good deal of contempt for Mister Smith. Looking at his life from the outside, you just had to wonder why a guy who had so much going for him had done so little with it. He struck me as a whiner, soon to be a wino. He had a responsible position and he was in the process of throwing it away. He’d been a failure at marriage.

He was living in the era that, from my perspective, was about as close to heaven on Earth as the human race had ever come, and in a nation that had more wealth—however you want to measure it—than any other nation ever achieved. From here on up it was going to be downhill all the way, until the human race reached its nadir: those good old days of the far future I called home.

It was only natural I’d find myself thinking
what the hell did he have to complain about?

Yet the twentieth century was bursting with complainers. They worried about meaningful relationships. They complained about the high cost of living. They had a whole battery of words to describe the things that afflicted them: words like
angst, ennui, malaise.
They took pills to cure something called depression. They went to classes to learn how to feel good about themselves. They aborted about one out of four of their children. They really felt they had problems.

And at the same time they were busy as beavers destroying
the world. They built—eventually—over three hundred gigatons of nuclear weapons and then pretended they’d never use them. They set in motion the processes that would eventually kill all animal species but themselves and a few insects and a million quick-mutating microbes, and that would leave their descendants—such as myself—catastrophically evolving toward oblivion. They were doing things right then that would change me so much that I could no longer breathe their air or eat their food for any length of time.

I guess it’s no wonder they invented existential despair.

*    *    *

Still, it’s one thing to see a man’s life in overview, and another to hear him tell it. I’d been prepared for the tale, had expected to do my best to smile all the way through it.

But when he started to talk, I found things shifting around.
The poor guy
, I’d think, and then catch myself thinking it.

He didn’t whine. He didn’t even really complain. I found myself wishing he would; it would be so much easier to feel a healthy contempt for him. But what he told me was the simple truth. He was lonely. He didn’t know what to do about it. He used to be able to lose himself in his job, but that didn’t work anymore. He knew it was silly, he couldn’t figure out why nothing seemed to mean anything. Working as his own physician, he had prescribed ethanol as a possible cure. It seemed to work some of the time, but the results weren’t all in yet. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that he’d reached for something, missed it, and was on his way down. It wouldn’t get any better.

So I vacillated between feeling sorry for him and wanting to jerk him up by the collar and slap him around until he came to his senses. I guess if I’d been born in the twentieth century, I’d have been a social worker. I couldn’t seem to deal with a goat as a
person
without getting all fouled up inside. I couldn’t stay out of his shoes.

Damn, it’s so much easier to knock the fuckers out and kick their asses through the Gate. Then all the crying is done far from my sight.

The man could hold his liquor. He probably thought the same thing about me.

He held it so well that, by the time the food came, he realized he’d been pouring out his life story in an uninterrupted monologue, and he had the grace to feel guilty about it. So he asked me about myself.

Not that I hadn’t come prepared. Sherman and I had worked up a life story. I just didn’t want to tell it. I was sick of lying. But I told it, and I thought I did a pretty good job. He nodded in the right places, asked sympathetic but not probing questions.

I was going right along, feeling pleased with myself, when I realized he didn’t believe a word I was saying.

There was a funny look in his eyes. Maybe it was just liquor. I told myself it was, but I didn’t believe it.

No, he just thought there was something I didn’t want to talk about, and he was perfectly right.

*    *    *

I dropped him off at his hotel, drove a few blocks away, parked, and then just sat there and shook.

When I stopped shaking, I looked at my watch. It was a little after midnight. I knew what I had to do. Sherman and I had worked out the approach and I thought it would work. I just couldn’t seem to get moving.

It’s not that I was afraid to go to bed with him. Sherman and I had talked that out, and I felt a lot better about the sex question. Why be afraid of having a baby when you only have a couple days to live? And it wasn’t that I was too uppity to go to bed with a man for the sake of the Gate Project. There was a long list of unsavory things I’d do to save the project, and fucking somebody I didn’t like was a long ways from the bottom.

It’s not even that I didn’t like him. It was a job to do and I don’t turn away from my job any more than any good soldier should…but all that aside, I
did
like him. And the time capsule had been easy about that part, anyway. I didn’t have to unless I wanted to.

She’s only a wimp.

*    *    *

There was a liquor store not far from where I was parked. I got out of my car, walked down the sidewalk, went in, and bought a bottle of scotch.

On my way back somebody stepped out of a dark doorway and started to follow me. I turned around. He was a dark man, possibly a Negro, though to my eyes races are as hard to distinguish as fashions. He pushed a gun toward me.

“Let’s have the purse, cunt,” he said.

“Are you a mugger or a rapist?” I asked him. Then I took his gun, threw him on the ground, and stood on his neck. He tried to throw me off, so I kicked his face and stood on his neck again. He gurgled. I let up the pressure.

“I think you broke my wrist,” he said.

“No, it was either the radius or the ulna. You’d better have a doctor set it.” I looked at his bare arm. “You’re a junkie, aren’t you?”

He didn’t say anything.

Well, you don’t get a lot of choice in your ancestors, but he was one, so I couldn’t kill him. There was the possibility I’d already done a lot of damage to the timestream…but I didn’t care.

It was a feeling of relief. I was going to do what I wanted to do, if I could just discover what that was.

I took the bullets out of his gun and gave it back to him. Then I reached in my purse and handed him a wad of American currency—twenty thousand dollars, minus the $15.86 I’d spent for the scotch.

“Have a good time,” I said.

*    *    *

Free will was an odd feeling. If that’s what it was.

I let my hands do the driving. They brought me back to Bill’s hotel, and they parked the car.

My feet seemed to have similar ideas, though they didn’t do as neat a job. In the hall outside Bill’s room I stumbled over a room-service tray that had two empty highball glasses on it. I
picked them up, and my feet took me to his door and parked me there. I was about to scratch on the door, remembered that was a different time and place, so I hit it with my fist instead.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Your good fortune.

What’s fortune?

Just stick out your palm, Mister Smith. Louise tells all.

Testimony of Bill Smith

I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in nine years. But when she got up off the bed and went to the bathroom, I grabbed the pack she’d left on the nightstand and lit one up. They were Virginia Slims. I started coughing on the second puff, and by the fourth I was feeling light-headed, so I stubbed it out.

What a night.

I glanced at the clock. It was one in the morning. She was going to turn into a pumpkin at ten. It was one of many things she’d said, and it made about as much sense as any of the other things.

I listened to the water running behind the closed door. It sounded like she was taking a shower.

All I knew for sure was she’d had a daughter, and the kid had died. The rest of it didn’t add up.

“Can I tell you something?” she had said, after she managed to stop crying. We were sitting on the edge of the bed and I had my arms around her. She was as beautiful an armful as I had ever had, but sex was very far from my mind.

“Sure. Anything.”

“It’s a long story,” she warned me.

“I figured.”

She laughed. It was a shaky laugh and it threatened to become something else, but she controlled herself.

“Where I come from, everybody dies,” she said.

And I swear, it got crazier from there.

*    *    *

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

“We don’t name our babies until their second birthday,” I told him.

“Why is that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I wondered again how much of this he was believing. About one percent, I decided. Still, if I was going to tell
this
story I couldn’t put it into safe, 1980s terms.

“We don’t name them because the chances are less than one percent they’ll live to their second birthday. After that you can take a chance. Maybe they’ll make it.”

“What was it this child had?”

“Nothing. At least, that’s how it looked. I was twelve, you understand, I’d had my first period and it looked like I was fertile. Genalysis hadn’t turned up any major problems.”

I looked at him. Sometimes the truth just won’t do.

“I have a fertility problem,” I said. “The doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to have children. And then I got pregnant anyway.”

“At twelve?” he said.

“Forget twelve. I’m drunk, okay? I had…what’s the word? Amniocentesis. Everybody thought if I
did
get pregnant, the kid would be…mongoloid.”

“They call it Down’s syndrome these days.”

“Right. Right. Forgot the local jargon. So then the baby was born, and she was perfect. The sweetest, prettiest thing ever. The most perfect baby born in a hundred years.”

I was swigging right from the bottle. No pills, no nothing. It
turned out ethanol ain’t such a bad prescription for despair, after all.

“She was my life. She was everything I ever wanted. Oh, they tried to take her away, they tried to put her in a hospital where they could keep a close eye on her all the time.

“And smart? The kid was a genius. She was walking at six months, talking at nine. She was the earth, moon, and stars.”

“What did you say her name was?” he asked.

I looked at him again. Okay, so he didn’t even believe one percent.

And why should he? And why should I?

I started to cry again.

*    *    *

Testimony of Bill Smith

The lady was a lot more disturbed than I’d figured. I did my best to piece it together, almost like I’d handle an airplane crash.