“That’s it,” whispered Kate. “That’s what I heard. Just a few moments ago when I turned this thing. Only it wasn’t exactly like that.” She gazed at the device. “I think...”
“What?”
“I think it shows the future. Or some representation of the future.”
Mark put down his cup and picked up the sphere. He rolled it from one hand to the other, smoothed his palms across its strange surface. “Well that would kind of explain things. There were slight differences between what I saw and what actually happened, but a lot of it was accurate. Bloody hell. What do you think we should do?”
“Take it to the police and hand it in.”
He looked at her. “And say what? Some aliens came down and left this bauble lying around. If it’s not claimed within six weeks can we keep it?”
“Well what do you think we should do?”
Mark looked at the sphere for several moments, then tossed the object into the air and caught it. “Think about it, Kate. If we really can see the future with this thing, we could be made. We could win the lottery. Invest on the stock market while all the shares are low. Make a sodding fortune.”
“I don’t know, Mark. That all sounds a bit...”
“What’s the matter? Do you want to be a secretary all your life?”
“Thanks very much. And I’m a PA as it happens.”
“You know what I mean. This thing could change our lives. We could go and live on an island in the Maldives, get an apartment in New York, do anything we wanted.”
Kate rubbed her eyes with her fingertips as immense fatigue caught up with her. She shook her head. “I’m scared, Mark.”
“Of what? The people who left it behind aren’t likely to come looking. They’re probably back on Alpha Centauri by now.”
Kate rubbed her hands across her face “I really can’t think straight I’m so tired. I’ve got to go to bed. Can we leave it until the morning?”
Mark shrugged. “Sure. I suppose. If that’s what you want.”
She nodded. “Please. I’m exhausted.”
“Are you all right? Are you ill? You look terrible.”
“Thanks a lot. No, I’m fine. Just tired.”
Kate pushed herself up and walked towards the bathroom, her cup of tea untouched. As she closed the door Mark looked at the sphere for a few moments longer, then set it on the table in front of him and went to bed.
K
ATE WOKE EARLY
after a night of fitful sleep. Mark was lying on his side facing away from her, but she could tell from the movement of his shoulders that he was still asleep. Slowly, careful not to wake him, she slipped out of bed, put on her dressing gown and quietly went into the living room.
She walked over to the table, picked up the device and sat on the armchair next to the window with her feet tucked beneath her.
She studied the object. She wondered where it had come from, what it was made of, what strange powers it held. But more than that, if the device really did show the future, she wondered whether there was something else she should attempt to view. It did not involve lottery numbers, stocks and shares or islands in the Maldives.
She stared through the window. Weighed up the pros and the cons. After several minutes of consideration, Kate gripped the sphere in her hands and twisted. The device clicked twice.
She felt as though the ground had dropped from beneath her. There were shimmering lights, a discordant howl, a torrent of images that skewed and distorted like a weak transmission.
She saw children: a good-looking boy with Mark’s eyes; a pretty, fresh-faced girl. Kate was rocked by the intensity of the love she felt – an emotion so powerful it took her breath. She tried to focus on them but there was another surge, a headlong rush. She glimpsed riots and demonstrations. Felt the fear of millions. Sunlight weakened by a veil of ash and dust, starving children, a decaying world. The images slewed and shuffled. Sunlight through trees. The girl. Older now. A beautiful young woman with a striking young man. Kate was struck by the intensity of their love. A fast-flowing stream. A golden beach. Children. A house somewhere. Another shift. The boy, his face flickering and morphing on a bizarre time-lapse loop. Laughter, tears, a relationship broken. Another shift. Multiple overlays of the two young people living through a multitude of events and combinations in an exhausting cycle of joy, pain, love, anxiety and fear.
When she could stand the onslaught no longer Kate deactivated the device and was dumped back into their flat.
The room spun. She placed a hand to her chest and gasped for breath.
Within the few seconds that had passed under the device’s power she had careered from elation to heartbreak and back again, experienced a multitude of lives and possibilities.
Kate replayed the images in her head. The future seemed so confused, such a struggle. How far ahead the device had transported her Kate was unsure, but the gravity of the commitment she was on the verge of undertaking was clear. The responsibility for the life growing inside her was overwhelming. There seemed to be potential for so much suffering to come. Could she bring children into a world like that? Were Liz and the others right? There was still plenty of time.
Kate heard Mark moving around in the bedroom; she quickly put the device back on the table, stood and walked over to the window.
“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t hear you get up.”
Kate glanced back at him, smiled, looked outside once more. Mark crossed the room, wrapped his arms around her waist and nuzzled against her neck. “It’s still early,” he whispered. “Why don’t you come back to bed for a while?”
Kate twisted herself from his arms, said nothing.
“What’s the matter?”
Kate continued to gaze through the window, biting her thumbnail. “I used it again,” she said. “That thing.”
Mark glanced at the sphere.
“What did you see this time?”
She hesitated. “I’m not sure. You can twist it more than once. I think the more times you twist it, the further forward you see.” She stopped, bit her thumbnail again.
“And?”
She simply shook her head.
Mark took the object from the table.
“No, Mark. Please.”
But he had already twisted the sphere.
T
HERE WAS A
long pause after Mark deactivated the device. He slumped down on to the sofa, exhausted. After a minute or so he looked at Kate, who continued to stare out of the window.
“Who is it?” said Mark.
“Who?”
“The man. I saw you with someone. You loved him. Or you will love him.” He looked down at the sphere, rolled it from one hand to the other. “Is there someone else?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mark.”
“I’m not being ridiculous. I saw you with someone. I felt your love for him.” He looked away.
Kate closed her eyes, rested her forehead in her hands and sighed. She took a breath, hesitated. But there was no alternative. “I’m pregnant,” she said. It seemed such a flat statement. This was not the way she had rehearsed the announcement in her head.
Mark sat motionless, absorbed Kate’s words. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s very early days. I only did the test yesterday.”
“So that man I saw you with...”
Kate shrugged, looked weary, rubbed her eyes. “Our son? I don’t know. Maybe.”
“There was a girl,” he said. “She had your eyes. I thought you and he...”
“Well he had your eyes. Will have your eyes. Oh, God, I don’t know, Mark. I’m not sure I can cope with this. Did you see the other stuff? It felt like a war. So much struggle and suffering and pain. How can we have kids knowing they’ll go through something like that?” She was on the verge of tears.
“It might not be that straightforward. If it’s showing us different scenarios then events can’t be fixed. It’s the choices we make that will dictate what happens. And if all the decent people just throw their hands in the air and give up, what hope is there?”
“But what if we get it wrong? Think we’re doing the right thing but take the wrong path?”
“We just have to be there for them, give them all the support and help they need. Follow the right course for
us
.”
“I don’t know, Mark. It’s so... daunting.”
He pulled her close to him. “It’ll be okay,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“We’ve just got to do our best. Roll with the punches when they come and bring our kids up as best we can.”
Kate sighed. Mark wrapped his arms around her waist. She rested her head against his chest.
“At some point we’re going to have a son,” he said. “And a daughter. And she’s going to be beautiful. Just like you.” He kissed the top of Kate’s head.
She squeezed his arms gently. “Did you see others? I think they might have been grandchildren.”
“Grandchildren? Blimey. Let’s take it one step at a time, eh?”
“Sure. One step at a time.”
They were quiet for a few moments, looking out into the street.
“You know, that thing could still help us,” he said. “If we could learn how to use it, learn how to channel the things we see we could...”
“No, Mark. We’ve got to get rid of it. For good. Somewhere no one else will find it. Better not to know what might happen.”
Mark rested his chin on the top of her head. “You know your trouble?” he said. “You’re far too wise.”
Kate shrugged. “Maybe it’s just the maternal instinct in me.”
M
ARK AND
K
ATE
leaned on the handrail and looked down at the surging sea.
“Not quite as exciting as the time we went to Paris is it?” he said.
“Not quite. But at least we’ll get to buy some cheap booze.”
“Always a glass-half-full kind of girl.”
She shrugged. “Beats half empty every time.”
They said nothing for a few minutes.
Kate looked at him. “When are you going to do it?” she said.
Mark looked back towards the English coast, fading in the mist. “I’ll give it a couple of minutes.”
“You’d keep it, wouldn’t you?”
Mark half shrugged, squinted at another ship in the distance. “Maybe. There are so many possibilities.”
“That’s the problem.” She reached out and rested her hand on his arm. “It’s got to go, Mark.”
Mark took his left hand from his inside pocket and held the device out in front of him. They both looked at the blue sphere resting in his palm. Mark looked at Kate. She nodded once, and Mark allowed the sphere to roll from his hand. A moment later the device hit the water and was lost from sight as it sank into the foaming sea.
Mark turned and slipped one arm through Kate’s. “Come on,” he said. “It’s freezing out here. How about we go inside and get something to eat.”
“Sounds good to me,” she said. “Do you think they do coal-flavoured ice cream?”
Mark laughed. “I guess we won’t know until we get there,” he said. “Come on, let’s go and find out.”
They turned and walked arm in arm along the deck, and left the churning sea behind them.
FAR DISTANT SUNS
NORMAN SPINRAD
Norman Spinrad is the author of over twenty novels, including
Bug Jack Baron, The Iron Dream, Child of Fortune, Greenhouse Summer
, and
The Druid King
. He has also written some sixty published short stories collected in half a dozen volumes, and his work has appeared in about fifteen languages. His most recent novel in English is
He Walked Among Us
(Tor, April 2010). His teleplays include the classic Star Trek, “The Doomsday Machine”, and he has produced feature films
Druids
and
La Sirene
. He is a long time literary critic, sometime film critic, perpetual political analyst, and sometime songwriter. In addition, he has been a radio phone show host and a vocal artist on three albums. He occasionally performs live. He’s been a literary agent, and President of the Science Fiction Writers of America and World SF. Norman grew up in New York, has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Paris, and travelled widely in Europe and rather less so in Latin America, Asia, and Oceania.
O
F COURSE WE
knew
we came from one in the distant past. We knew that Homo sapiens evolved on the surface of a planet called Earth with a stable orbit around a star. And indeed we still calculate our base unit of absolute time, what we still call the ‘year,’ as the duration of its full orbit around that star, and all our units of time as fractions or multiples of that so-called ‘year.’
What other absolute unit of time could be possible for the diverse clade of civilizations that we have become, inhabiting hundreds, if not thousands, of everything from planetary-sized bodies to entirely manufactured habitats to archipelagos of bits and pieces, all tumbling and jumbling their merry ways through the sea of space between the few and distant stars as we slowly expand and exfoliate through it?
And of course we knew that the lights in our firmament were stars, and our instruments told us just what stars are – globes of largely hydrogen gases of a sufficient mass for their gravity to induce a stable fusion reaction akin to the miniature versions we use to power every human habit and enterprise.
My specialty is comparative xenological anthropology, the study of the alien civilizations we have never met and know only from their broadcasts and probes, isolated as we are, isolated as they are, by the absolute limit of the speed of light.
Some century in the far future, our slow but steady advance, expanding our sphere of habitation through the sea of ejected planets, planetoids, rocks and pebbles, and assorted other debris of birthing ‘solar systems’ that form the rich galactic soup upon which we feed and from which we build may intersect with one of theirs. But in this era, comparative xenological anthropology has remained a frustrating science, or, as some say, hardly a science at all.
Although, or perhaps because of that, I have at least gained a certain general notoriety and professional standing in the scientific sphere by extending comparative xenological anthropology to the study of the cultures of our own beginning species on the planet ‘Earth’. After all, the word ‘anthropology’ originally meant exactly that, since at the time it was coined our distant ancestors hardly had the concept that other intelligent species inhabited the galaxy at all. And it isn’t as if our ancestors, even before they began escaping the gravity well of their planetary surface, hadn’t created a complex information storage technology so that much has survived even the millennia between then and now.