"We're here to save two people," she said. "One is Garry Carswell
. . . not that he died in the original fire. If he had, we wouldn't
have known his importance -- he wouldn't have had any importance. What
did happen was that he lived, horribly scarred and mutilated, with the
mind of a genius, but a traumatic genius who never really escaped the
Fire of Shuteley. We believe that by saving him, which we've done --
letting him die might have been another way -- we can avert . . . "
She stopped. "No, I won't tell you about our time, your future," she
said. "Nobody should ever want to know that, for certain. It's enough
to say that our world may be a better place if Garry Carswell never
grows up to be a brilliant diabolist. We've also saved his parents,
Gil and Barbara, to live in our world. They died in the original fire,
and that fact didn't help Garry . . . You won't see any of them again."
This didn't bother me: most people who had the choice of living in 2097
or dying in 1966 would find the choice easy. Many would even be glad to
make the change.
"And the other you came to save was Jota," I said. "Well, that shouldn't
cause you any trouble. Make one of your loops, as you call them, and
give him a third life, or a fourth or fifth, or whatever it is. I've
lost count."
"That might be possible, but for Greg."
"Yes, it all comes back to Greg, doesn't it?"
She shivered, probably partly at the thought of Greg and what he had done
and what he still might do, and partly because it was rather cool and airy
in the stasis, in comparison with the various kinds and degrees of heat
we had all been experiencing. Jumping up, she pulled at her two-piece and
with no trouble at all the scraps of material became a leotard, knitting
at her waist with no apparent join. It was only a trivial miracle, hardly
worth mentioning.
"The loops," she said,' "are legal. They're allowed. Only minimal apparatus
is required, and the effect is extremely local. A few people are affected;
the rest of the world is quite unaffected."
"Legal?" I said. "Allowed?"
"The moment time-molding became possible, there was immediate,
irresistible public pressure for loops."
Sitting down again, she snuggled close to me, quite impersonally, merely
for warmth. I had been nothing, then a lover; now I was a friend, if that.
"Think how the very possibility of loops instantly transfigures the
world. Most accidents can be averted up to five seconds before they
happen. A precious vase is dropped . . . turn back the clock, undrop
the vase, and it lasts another thousand years. More important . . . a
driver is careless for a fraction of a second, and a car plunges into a
river. Regain the last five seconds, and drowned people are undrowned -- "
"As Jota and Wesley were unkilled," I murmured.
"Exactly. The permitted technique works only over a short period, a few
minutes at most, and a tiny area. But it's saved thousands of lives,
a lot of valuable property and prevented many disasters. Now, you want
to know about Greg -- "
"Yes, Greg," I said. "Tell me about Greg. Explain the inexplicable."
"Why he's here? Well, he's got the Gift."
"The gift?"
"He's a witchdoctor. Only
his
magic works."
The introduction of further gobbledegook irritated me. I was just
beginning to figure out how this business made sense. And then she
introduced something fantastic which could never make sense.
Before I could speak, she said sharply: "Don't say it. Val, you haven't
been very bright. You could tell me far more about the Gift than I can
tell you. You know all about it. Or you would, if you'd ever opened
your eyes."
I could think of only one explanation. " I've got it?" I exclaimed.
"No, not you -- Jota."
Step by step she made me remember, and interpret. And I lived through
years of my life with her, prompted by her.
Chapter Ten
Although Jota was my cousin, I didn't know him until he was three. His
mother was my father's sister, but they had never been close and the
two people they married disliked each other.
When the Mulliners came to live next door to us, I was three too. Family
feeling had nothing to do with the move. The house was available and
convenient, that was all.
I never knew Mrs. Mulliner as Aunt Jean. There was no contact between
the two families, but Jota and I, being only children of the same age,
almost inevitably played together.
We used to be put out together in one back garden or the other,
and allowed to run wild in ours (because neither my father nor my
mother had any interest in gardens, and ours was a jungle), but had
to be very careful in Jota's, because Jota's father was an amateur
horticulturalist. He called himself that, and even at three Jota and
I were trying to say the word, without much success, and with no idea
what it meant except that because Jota's father was a horticulturalist
we had much more fun in my garden.
(Miranda led me through memory quite fairly, not explaining although she
did direct. She reminded me of very little, and never forced her sometimes
more accurate information on me. All she did, really, was direct my
attention to facts which I had never considered particularly significant,
because if I had, I'd have had to believe the unbelievable. The
unbelievable
then
. Anyway, sometimes, quite often, indeed, my memory
contained important things of which she knew nothing whatever.)
We must have been about four and nearly ready to go to school when we had
contact for the first time with the nastiness of the outside world. What
happened in my own house I naturally took for granted, and anyway it was
never nasty, merely baffling at times. I loved my mother and depended
on her like any child, and ninety-five percent of the time she was like
anybody else's mother. It was only occasionally that the world turned
upside-down, that there was screaming and rushing about and slammed
doors and sobbing, and I knew then to keep quiet and pretend not to exist.
The garden behind ours belonged to Mr. Sylvester, who was a fat red-faced
man whom I used to like quite well. He used to give us aniseed bails,
always throwing them and laughing all over his fat body when we failed
to catch them, as we always did.
Later, however, Mr. Sylvester changed. Jota (who was Clarence then --
the name didn't seem strange to either of us until we went to school)
and I didn't understand why he had changed. Until Miranda made me think
about it, I didn't realize that he was simply a gardener jealous of
Jota's father's achievements. He didn't throw aniseed balls to us any
more. Over the fence, he asked at times why we didn't run about in Jota's
garden the way we did in mine.
Then he started complaining about our garden, saying the weeds were
coming through the fence. To Jota and me this was manifest nonsense,
because we had never seen a plant walk.
Anyway, there was constant trouble between Mr. Sylvester and Jota's
father, and between Mr. Sylvester and my father, and even between my
father and Jota's father, because Jota's father said weeds
did
go
through fences and it was time my father did something about the jungle.
Jota and I never understood the situation, but what we did know was that
we could never play in either garden any more without being shouted at
by Jota's father or my father or Mr. Sylvester. And we both managed
to work out, without the slightest trouble, that the whole thing was
Mr. Sylvester's fault.
Really, it was quite a crisis in the life of a couple of four-year-olds.
We were not allowed to wander about the town, to play in the streets,
to disappear for hours. In the back gardens, until Mr. Sylvester spoiled
everything, we'd spent whole days of childish delight every time it didn't
rain. We
needed
our sanctuary, because although I didn't think about
it at the time, Jota's home too, where there was a perpetual tug-of-war
for power, was also a place he was instinctively glad to escape from,
and nobody had ever bothered us in my garden at least until Mr. Sylvester
started making a nuisance of himself.
One day Mr. Sylvester ceased bothering us. He was dead. Neither Jota nor I
had any clear idea what that meant, except that we were free again to play
in my garden as we liked, and in Jota's garden with circumspection. We were
honestly delighted that Mr. Sylvester was gone, and there was no shadow on
either of our lives until we went to school.
It was the day we went to school that Jota and I fell out for the first
time. Of course we had argued and sulked, but until then we had both
been too dependent upon each other ever to cut off our nose to spite
our face. My parents and Jota's parents both accepted our friendship
as something that caused them less trouble than any other acquaintance,
and if we fought we suffered for it, and we knew it. Other kids either of
us brought home were not welcome. Neither Jota's parents nor mine wanted
outsiders poking their noses in, even children -- behind children were
adults, usually.
So Jota and I, fairly intelligent kids, had realized long since that
fighting with each other didn't pay.
At school, a maelstrom of noise, high laughter, peculiar smells,
unaccustomed regimentation, girls (neither Jota nor I had ever had
anything to do with girls and had quite made up our minds we never would),
harsh-voiced adults pretending to be on our side, huge windows, endless
corridors, electric light in the daytime, stairs, frightening large boys
and girls, even more frightening people in black coats and square hats,
one thing stood out in my memory -- the howl of laughter when Jota said
his name was Clarence.
The teacher laughed too, though she tried to pretend she hadn't.
They laughed again, twice as loudly, when he added the second half,
Mulliner.
I wanted to jump up and hit the whole lot of them. They hadn't laughed
when, just before, I had said I was Val Mathers. My real Christian name
was Valentine, but I'd always been called Val, so that's what I said.
Now everybody was laughing at Clarence Mulliner, my pal.
I didn't jump up because . . . well, I didn't jump up.
The funny thing was that as we were going home, free for the rest of
the day -- the first day was a half day -- I giggled myself at the
recollection of the childish laughter when Clarence, all unwittingly,
gave his name. It was childlike -- when they laughed at Clarence, my
friend, I wanted to fight them all (though I didn't). But afterwards
. . . well, I laughed so much I could hardly walk.
Clarence -- I called him Clarence then, and went on doing so until
he became, for all time, Jota -- didn't lose his temper at once. He
waited for me to return to normal. But I couldn't. The more I laughed
the funnier it all became.
And then he hit me once, on the chest, and ran away.
My laughter slowly died, not because I'd been hurt, not really because I
was sorry I'd laughed, but mainly because I had, after all, been laughing
at Jota. So long as he stayed to be laughed at I went on doing it. But
there's no point in laughing at someone who doesn't hang around to be
laughed at.
I went home. I tried to see Jota, but nobody answered the door.
At tea-time I wasn't hungry. Later I was sick. My father, even my mother,
began to get concerned. I went to bed with a hot-water bottle.
Next morning I was no better and the doctor was sent for. He examined me
thoroughly, and then he and my father talked at the foot of the bed in low
tones. Later my father came and sat on the bed and talked quietly. to me.
At the time I didn't understand, didn't realize there was anything to
understand except that I was ill.
But many years later it was easy to guess what the doctor had said and
what my father thought about it, and what must have been in his mind
when he talked to me.
The doctor had been unable to find anything wrong with me, yet obviously I
was quite seriously ill. Being a young, up-to-date doctor, he immediately
thought of psychosomatic illness. It figured. I lived in a strange home
-- he knew that, being the doctor for the whole family. I had just gone
to school. He had found a case, a quite interesting case, of a child of
five, otherwise apparently normal, prostrated by psychosomatic illness.
Jota came to see me at lunch-time (the first school day had been a
morning only, but on the second there was a short period of afternoon
school too). He was quiet, puzzled, and very contrite. He seemed to think
he was responsible for my illness because he had punched me on the chest.
I told him that was silly, there wasn't even a mark, and I was sorry
I'd laughed at him.
I was ill for three weeks, and never fully recovered that first school
term.
There was a very small incident about two years later . . .
It was the next time Jota and I really quarreled. Miranda didn't seem
to know anything about this. I was quite unable to remember what the
quarrel was about, or any details, except that Jota finally grew cold,
stared at me, and said: "I'll fix you . . . " in a tone of menace quite
startling coming from a seven-year-old boy.
And that was all. Nothing happened . . .
Miranda was puzzled. She had been making me remember things, not as
I might have expected, by being in possession of all the facts and
prompting my flagging memory, but by directing my attention to certain
types of incident in my relations with Jota.
And this incident had her beat. She tried to make me remember that Jota
had not really been in a cold fury with me, or that he got over it at once.
In fact, Jota and I ceased to be friends for fully three months, and
during that time he made no secret of the fact that he hated me.
I was, after all, a much more normal boy than Jota, and I made other
friends. He stayed solitary, walking home alone, standing in the
playground alone.
And it was because of this that we finally became friends again.
One of my new friends was Gil Carswell, who was studious but not
always quiet. In those days he was a sort of juvenile Jekyll and Hyde,
usually the best boy in the school from the point of view of authority,
intelligent, polite, hard-working, good at games, a paragon of schoolboy
virtues. But now and then he'd kick over the traces . . .