The Man Who Folded Himself (16 page)

My past has been excised, and I have no future.

Am I soon to die in this timeline?

Or do I just desert it?

Is that why I'm no longer here?

(Am I hiding from myself—why doesn't a Don come back to help me?)

If this timeline is a dead end, then where am I going?

I wish I had my Uncle Jim.

I wish I had my Don.

Or even my Dan. Sweet Dan. . . .

I've never been so scared.

Don, if you read this, please help me.

I must be logical about this.

One of two things has happened—is about to happen.

The me I am about to become has obviously found a new timeline. Either he doesn't want to come back to this one, or he is unable to. Perhaps he has made some change that he can't undo. Perhaps he doesn't even know what that change is.

Is it a change in the world timeline? Has he created a universe where Aristotle never existed? Or did he accidentally kill Pope Sixtus the Fifth? Maybe it was something subtle, like stepping on a spider . . . or fathering a child who shouldn't have been. Whatever it was, has the Daniel Eakins I am about to be lost himself in some strange and alien timeline?

I keep remembering the timeline where Jesus never lived—am I to be lost in a world like that?

Or is the change something else? Is it in me instead?

Am I about to make some drastic alteration in my personality? Something I can't excise? Something I won't want to excise?

Something I am unable to excise?

What if I turn myself into a paraplegic? Or a freaked-out vegetable, incapable of understanding?

Or—am I on the verge of killing myself? Or worse?

For the first time since I was given the timebelt, I am unable to see the future—my own personal future—and it scares me.

Now I know what those other people feel. The ones who aren't me.

Suppose—just suppose—that I wanted to meet another version of myself.

I travel through time and there I am, an earlier or later Dan. I can stay as long as I want and without any obligation to relive the time from the other side. After all, we're really two different people. Really.

The first time I used the timebelt I met Don. Then I had thought that there was only one of me and that the seeming existence of two of us was just an illusion. Now I know that was wrong.

There's an infinite number of me, and the existence of one is an illusion.

An illusion? Yes, but the illusion is as real to me and my subjective point of view as the illusion of travel through time. I still feel like me.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm real.

I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.

And so do all the others.

Now. How do I go about meeting one of them?

One of those other versions of myself, one of the separate versions?

Not one who is simply me at some other part of my subjective life—as so many of the Dons and Dans are—but a Daniel Eakins who has gone off in some entirely different direction. How would I meet him?

The problem is one of communication. How do I let him know that I want to meet him? How do I get a message across the timelines?

Well, let's see . . .

I could put something in the timebelt itself, a date and location perhaps, then substitute it into Uncle Jim's package....

No. That part of my past no longer exists in this world. I excised it—remember?

Well, then, how about if I left a message far in the past... ?

No, that wouldn't work. Look at the trouble the Coke bottle started. Where would I leave it where only I would discover it? How would I—how would he—know where to look for it? How could I even be sure of its enduring for the several thousand years it might have to? (Besides, I'm not sure it would exist in any of the timelines that branched off before I got myself into this dead end. Changes in the timestream are supposed to be cumulative, not retroactive.)

I guess the answer to my question about getting a message across the timelines is obvious: I don't. There simply isn't any working method of trans-temporal communication. At least none that I can think of that's foolproof.

But that doesn't mean I still can't meet another version of myself.

I meet different versions of myself all the time. The mild variants. The only reason I haven't run into a distant variant is that we haven't been tramping a common ground.

If I want to find such a variant, I have to go somewhere he's likely to be.

Suppose that somewhere there's another me—a distant me—who's thinking along the same lines: he wants to meet a Daniel Eakins who is widely variant from himself.

What memories do we have in common?

Hmm, only those that existed before we were given the timebelt. . . .

That's it of course!

Our birthday.

I was born at 2:17 in the morning, January 24, 1984, at the Sherman Oaks Medical Center, Sherman Oaks, California.

Of course, in this timeline, I hadn't been born—wouldn't be born. Something I had done had excised my birth; but I knew the date I would have been born and so did every other Dan.

It was the logical place to look.

I'd seen Los Angeles in its earlier incarnations, but the Los Angeles of 1930 had always seemed like another city, like a giant Disneyland put up for Danny the perpetual tourist. It wasn't real. But this—this I recognized. I could see the glimmerings of my own world here, its embryonic beginnings, the bones around which the flesh of the future would grow. The cars were different, the buildings too, the clothes and the hair styles—like the false fronts of the Universal Studios backlot redressed to represent different ages of history, the outlines remained the same, the details shifted. Cities not only sprawled horizontally, they sprawled across time as well, up the line and down—concrete and steel, liquidly rising and falling with the ebb and flow of desire and disaster.

I parked my '05 ‘Vette at the corner of Riverside Drive and Van Nuys Blvd., ignoring the stares of the curious. I'd forgotten what I was doing and brought it back with me. So what? Let them think it was some kind of racer. I couldn't care less. I was lost in thought.

I'd been living my whole life around the same three years. Sure, I'd gone traveling off to other eras, but those had been just trips. I'd always returned to 2005 because I'd always thought of it as home.

I'd folded and compressed my whole life into a span of just a few months.

Consequently, I lived in a world where the landscape never changed. Never.

They'd been building the new mall for as long as I could remember. They'd been double-decking the freeway forever. (Oh, I knew what the finished structures would look like. I'd even driven the new freeway; but the time that I knew as home was frozen. Static. Unchanging.)

I'd lived in the same year for over ten subjective years. I'd grown too used to the idea that home would endure forever. For me, the San Fernando Valley was a stable entity. I'd forgotten what a dynamically alive city it was because I'd lost the ability to see its growth—

—because I no longer traveled linearly through time.

Other people travel through time in a straight line. For them, growth is a constant process, perceived only when the changes are major ones, or when there is something to compare them against.

To me, growth is—

—it doesn't exist. Every time I jump, I expect the world to change. I never equate any era with any other.

Until now, that is.

I knew this city; I'd grown up here—but I'd forgotten that it existed. I'd forgotten what it was like to be a part of the moving timestream, to grow up with a city, to see it change as you change….

I'd forgotten so much.

There was no one at the hospital, of course.

That is, I wasn't there—there were no other versions of Daniel Jamieson Eakins waiting to meet me.

I should have known it, of course. My birthday fell within the range of changes I'd been making. I was the only me in this timeline. If I wanted to find another me, I'd have to go outside the scope of my temporal activity. I'd have to go into the past. Deep into the past.

The only way to escape the effects of any change is to jump back to a point before it happened.

I'd been making changes for the past two hundred years. If I was to meet a variant Dan, we'd both have to go back beyond that span.

But how far back?

I stood by the car, jingling my keys indecisively. The one location I was sure of was this hospital; the one date, my birthday.

Okay—

This spot. The middle of the San Fernando Valley.

The date: January 24. My birthday.

—one thousand years ago. Exactly.

I got in the car, set the timebelt to include it, and tapped twice—