The Time Traveler's Almanac (127 page)

By the time he gets to Vidyanath’s shop, it is late afternoon, and the little square is filling with long shadows. At the bus stop where he disembarks there is a young woman sitting, reading something. She looks vaguely familiar; she glances quickly at him but he notices her only peripherally.

He bursts into the room. Om Prakash is reading a magazine, which he sets down in surprise. A bee crawls out of his ear and flies up in a wide circle to the hive on the window. Aseem hardly notices.

“Where’s that fellow, Vidyanath?”

Om Prakash looks mildly alarmed.

“My employer is not here, sir.”

“Look, Om Prakash, something has happened, something serious. I met the girl of the printout. But she’s from the future. I need to go back and find her. You must get Vidyanath for me. If his computer made the image of the girl, he must know how I can reach her.”

Om Prakash shakes his head sadly.

“Panditji speaks only through the computer.” He looks at the beehive, then at Aseem. “Panditji cannot control the future, you know that. He can only tell you your purpose. Why you are important.”

“But I made a mistake! I didn’t realize she was from another time. I told her something and she disappeared before I could do anything. She could be in danger! It is a terrible future, Om Prakash. There is a city below the city where the poor live. And above the ground there is clean air and tall minars and udan khatolas that fly between worlds. No dirt or beggars or poor people. Like when the foreign VIPs come to town and the policemen chase people like me out of the main roads. But Neechi Dilli is like a prison, I’m sure of it. They can’t see the sun.”

Om Prakash waves his long hands.

“What can I say, Sahib?”

Aseem goes around the table and takes Om Prakash by the shoulders.

“Tell me, Om Prakash, am I nothing but a strand in a web? Do I have a choice in what I do, or am I simply repeating lines written by someone else?”

“You can choose to break my bones, sir, and nobody can stop you. You can choose to jump into the Yamuna. Whatever you do affects the world in some small way. Sometimes the effect remains small, sometimes it grows and grows like a pipal tree. Causality as we call it is only a first-order effect. Second-order causal loops jump from time to time, as in your visions, sir. The future, Panditji says, is neither determined nor undetermined.”

Aseem releases the fellow. His head hurts and he is very tired, and Om Prakash makes no more sense than usual. He feels emptied of hope. As he leaves he turns to ask Om Prakash one more question.

“Tell me, Om Prakash, this Pandit Vidyanath, if he exists – what is his agenda? What is he trying to accomplish? Who is he working for?”

“Pandit Vidyanath works for the city, as you know. Otherwise he works only for himself.”

He goes out into the warm evening. He walks toward the bus stop. Over the chatter of people and the car horns on the street and the barking of pariah dogs, he can hear the distant buzzing of bees.

At the bus stop the half-familiar young woman is still sitting, studying a computer printout in the inadequate light of the streetlamp. She looks at him quickly, as though she wants to talk, but thinks better of it. He sits on the cement bench in a daze. Three years of anticipation, all for nothing. He should write down the last story and throw away his notebook.

Mechanically, he takes the notebook out and begins to write.

She clears her throat. Evidently she is not used to speaking to strange men. Her clothes and manner tell him she’s from a respectable middle-class family. And then he remembers the girl he pushed away from a bus near Nai Sarak.

She’s holding the page out to him.

“Can you make any sense of that?”

The printout is even more indistinct than his. He turns the paper around, frowns at it and hands it back to her.

“Sorry, I don’t see anything.”

She says: “You could interpret the image as a crystal of unusual structure, or a city skyline with tall towers. Who knows? Considering that I’m studying biochemistry and my father really wants me to be an architect with his firm, it isn’t surprising that I see those things in it. Amusing, really.”

She laughs. He makes what he hopes is a polite noise.

“I don’t know. I think the charming and foolish Om Prakash is a bit of a fraud. And you were wrong about me, by the way. I wasn’t trying to … to kill myself that day.”

She’s sounding defensive now. He knows he was not mistaken about what he saw in her eyes. If it wasn’t then, it would have been some other time – and she knows this.

“Still, I came here on an impulse,” she says in a rush, “and I’ve been staring at this thing and thinking about my life. I’ve already made a few decisions about my future.”

A bus comes lurching to a stop. She looks at it, and then at him, hesitates. He knows she wants to talk, but he keeps scratching away in his notebook. At the last moment before the bus pulls away she swings her bag over her shoulder, waves at him and climbs aboard. The look he had first noticed in her eyes has gone, for the moment. Today she’s a different person.

He finishes writing in his notebook, and with a sense of inevitability that feels strangely right, he catches a bus that will take him across one of the bridges that span the Yamuna.

*   *   *

At the bridge he leans against the concrete wall looking into the dark water. This is one of his familiar haunts; how many people has he saved on this bridge? The pipal tree sapling is still growing in a crack in the cement – the municipality keeps uprooting it but it is buried too deep to die completely. Behind him there are cars and lights and the sound of horns, the jangle of bicycle bells. He sets his notebook down on top of the wall, wishing he had given it to someone, like that girl at the bus stop. He can’t make himself throw it away. A peculiar lassitude, a detachment, has taken hold of him and he can think and act only in slow motion.

He’s preparing to climb on to the wall of the bridge, his hands clammy and slipping on the concrete, when he hears somebody behind him say “wait!” He turns. It is like looking into a distorting mirror. The man is hollow-cheeked, with a few days’ stubble on his chin, and the untidy thatch of hair has thinned and is streaked with silver. He’s holding a bunch of cards in his hand. A welt mars one cheek, and the left sleeve is torn and stained with something rust-colored. The eyes are leopard’s eyes, burning with a dreadful urgency. “Aseem,” says the stranger who is not a stranger, panting as though he has been running, his voice breaking a little. “Don’t…” He is already starting to fade. Aseem reaches out a hand and meets nothing but air. A million questions rise in his head but before he can speak the image is gone.

Aseem’s first impulse is a defiant one. What if he were to jump into the river now – what would that do to the future, to causality? It would be his way of bowing out of the game that the city’s been playing with him, of saying: I’ve had enough of your tricks. But the impulse dies. He thinks, instead, about Om Prakash’s second-order causal loops, of sunset over the Red Fort, and the twisting alleyways of the old city, and death sleeping under the eyelids of the citizenry. He sits down slowly on the dusty sidewalk. He covers his face with his hands; his shoulders shake.

After a long while he stands up. The road before him can take him anywhere, to the faded colonnades and bright bustle of Connaught Place, to the hush of public parks, with their abandoned cricket balls and silent swings, to old government housing settlements where, amid sleeping bungalows, ancient trees hold court before somnolent congresses of cows. The dusty by-lanes and broad avenues and crumbling monuments of Delhi lie before him, the noisy, lurid marketplaces, the high-tech glass towers, the glitzy enclaves with their citadels of the rich, the boot-boys and beggars at street corners … He has just to take a step and the city will swallow him up, receive him the way a river receives the dead. He is a corpuscle in its veins, blessed or cursed to live and die within it, seeing his purpose now and then, but never fully.

Staring unseeingly into the bright clamor of the highway, he has a wild idea that, he realizes, has been bubbling under the surface of his consciousness for a while. He recalls a picture he saw once in a book when he was a boy: a satellite image of Asia at night. On the dark bulge of the globe there were knots of light; like luminous fungi, he had thought at the time, stretching tentacles into the dark. He wonders whether complexity and vastness are sufficient conditions for a slow awakening, a coming-to-consciousness. He thinks about Om Prakash, his foolish grin and waggling head, and his strange intimacy with the bees. Will Om Prakash tell him who Pandit Vidyanath really is, and what it means to “work for the city?” He thinks not. What he must do, he sees at last, is what he has been doing all along: looking out for his own kind, the poor and the desperate, and those who walk with death in their eyes. The city’s needs are alien, unfathomable. It is an entity in its own right, expanding every day, swallowing the surrounding countryside, crossing the Yamuna which was once its boundary, spawning satellite children, infant towns that it will ultimately devour. Now it is burrowing into the earth, and even later it will reach long fingers towards the stars.

What he needs most at this time is someone he can talk to about all this, someone who will take his crazy ideas seriously. There was the girl at the bus stop, the one he had rescued in Nai Sarak. Om Prakash will have her address. She wanted to talk; perhaps she will listen as well. He remembers the printout she had shown him and wonders if her future has something to do with the Delhi-to-come, the city that intrigues and terrifies him: the Delhi of udan-khatolas, the “ships that fly between worlds”, of starved and forgotten people in the catacombs underneath. He wishes he could have asked his future self more questions. He is afraid because it is likely (but not certain, it is never that simple) that some kind of violence awaits him, not just the violence of privation, but a struggle that looms indistinctly ahead, that will cut his cheek and injure his arm, and do untold things to his soul. But for now there is nothing he can do, caught as he is in his own time-stream. He picks up his notebook. It feels strangely heavy in his hands. Rubbing sticky tears out of his eyes, he staggers slowly into the night.

COME-FROM-AWAYS

Tony Pi

Tony Pi is a Canadian writer with a Ph.D. in linguistics. While pursuing his graduate studies, he had the chance to observe and spend time with two purported amnesiacs. Those incidents inspired this story. His work can be found in
Clarkesworld
magazine,
InterGalactic Medicine Show, On Spec Magazine,
and
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
among others. “Come-From-Aways” was originally published in
On Spec, the Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic
in 2009.

Madoc was a striking man in his thirties, his eyes bluer than the sea. I could well imagine him as an ancient prince.

I sat next to his hospital bed and smiled. “
Siw mae,
Madoc.”

He paused, the way I would whenever I heard a phrase in Newfoundland English to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then he sat up and spoke excitedly, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Contrary to what people believe, linguists don’t all speak twenty languages or pick up a new language instantly. Where we excel was figuring out linguistic patterns.

Doctor Liu smirked. “Did you call him
pork dumpling?
”

I understood the confusion.
Siw mae
sounded like
siu mai
in Cantonese, which meant
pork dumpling.
“It means
how are you
in modern Southern Welsh. Madoc would have been from Snowdon, Northern Wales, so I should have said
sut mae.
”

Two weeks ago, on December twenty-sixth, a strange ship had drifted into the Harbour of St. John’s. Found aboard the replica of the Viking longship were four dead men and one survivor. Will Monteith from the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary contacted me to help him pinpoint the man’s origin through his language. Analyzing the tapes of the man’s speech, I came to the strange conclusion that the man who called himself Madoc had been speaking two archaic languages: Middle English and Middle Welsh.

To be certain, I asked Will to arrange a face-to-face interview. Sometimes linguistic evidence was visual. For example, the
v
sound in Modern Welsh was produced like in Modern English, with the upper teeth against the lower lip, but the
v
in Middle Welsh was produced with both lips, like in Spanish.

I turned on the tape recorder and pointed to myself. “Kate.” I indicated Detective Monteith and Doctor Liu. “Will. Philip.
Meddic.
” Doctor, in Middle Welsh. The double
dd
sounded like the first sound in the English word,
they.

He repeated the names and grinned.

Madoc was a puzzle indeed. The theory that made most sense was that he and the other men were trying to recreate the Madoc voyage. Prince Madoc of Gwynedd was a Welsh legend, believed to have sailed west from Wales in 1170. He returned seven years later to tell of a new land of untouched bounty across the sea. Intending to settle the new land, he set out with a fleet of ten ships of settlers, and disappeared from history.

This man could be a Middle Ages scholar with damage to Wernicke’s area. Wernicke’s aphasics had no problems with articulation, but their utterances made little sense. For the most severe cases, sounds were randomly chosen, spliced together to sound real, but contained few actual words. ‘Madoc’ might be suffering from a similar
jargonaphasia.
However, the MRI and PET scans showed no such damage to his brain’s left hemisphere.

But how authentic was Madoc’s command of Middle Welsh? I had two tests in mind.

I gave Madoc two poems I had found, one by Gwalchmai ap Meilyr, another by Dafydd ap Gwilym, both printed in a font called Neue Hammer Unziale. The font seemed closest to Insular Majescule, the script a twelfth-century prince might have been familiar with.
“Darlle.”
I prompted him to read.