The Time Traveler's Almanac (26 page)

A man in a different age had breakfast in a house on a hill.

Agent Harrh had acquired a sense about disruptions, a kind of extrasensory queasiness about a just-completed timewarp. He was not alone in this. But the time-menders (Harrh knew three others of his own age) never reported such experiences outside their own special group. Such reports would have been meaningless to his own time, involving a past which (as a result of the warp) was neither real nor valid nor perceptible to those in Time Present. Some time-menders would reach the verge of insanity because of this. This was future fact. Harrh knew this.

He had been there.

And he refused to go again to Now, that Now to which time had advanced since the discovery of the Gate – let alone to the End of Time, which was the farthest that anyone imagined. He was one of a few, a very few, licensed to do so, but he refused.

He lived scattered lives in ages to come, and remembered the future with increasing melancholy.

He had visited the End of Time, and left it in the most profound despair. He had seen what was there, and when he had contemplated going beyond, that most natural step out the Gate which stood and beckoned—

He fled. He had never run from anything but that. It remained, a recollection of shame at his fear.

A sense of a limit which he had never had before.

And this in itself was terrible, to a man who had thought time infinite and himself immortal.

In his own present of 1003 since the First Gate, Harrh had breakfast, a quiet meal. The children were off to the beach. His wife shared tea with him and thought it would be a fine morning.

“Yes,” he said. “Shall we take the boat out? We can fish a little, take the sun.”

“Marvelous,” she said. Her gray eyes shone. He loved her – for herself, for her patience. He caught her hand on the crystal table, held slender fingers, not speaking his thoughts, which were far too somber for the morning.

They spent their mornings and their days together. He came back to her, time after shifting time. He might be gone a month; and home a week; and gone two months next time. He never dared cut it too close. They lost a great deal of each other’s lives, and so much – so much he could not share with her.

“The island,” he said. “Mhreihrrinn, I’d like to see it again.”

“I’ll pack,” she said.

And went away.

He came back to her never aged; and she bore their two sons; and reared them; and managed the accounts: and explained his absences to relatives and the world.
He travels,
she would say, with that right amount of secrecy that protected secrets.

And even to her he could never confide what he knew.

“I trust you,” she would say – knowing what he was, but never what he did.

He let her go. She went off to the hall and out the door – He imagined happy faces, holiday, the boys making haste to run the boat out and put on the bright colored sail. She would keep them busy carrying this and that, fetching food and clothes – things happened in shortest order when Mhreihrrinn set her hand to them.

He wanted that, wanted the familiar, the orderly, the homely. He was, if he let his mind dwell on things – afraid. He had the notion never to leave again.

He had been to the Now most recently – 5045, and his flesh crawled at the memory. There was recklessness there. There was disquiet. The Now had traveled two decades and more since he had first begun, and he felt it more and more. The whole decade of the 5040’s had a queasiness about it, ripples of instability as if the whole fabric of the Now were shifting like a kaleidoscope.

And it headed for the End of Time. It had become more and more like that age, confirming it by its very collapse.

People had illusions in the Now. They perceived what had not been true.

And yet it
was
when he came home.

It had grown to be so – while he was gone.

A university stood in Morurir, which he did not remember.

A hedge of trees grew where a building had been in Morurir.

A man was in the Council who had died.

He would not go back to Now. He had resolved that this morning. He had children, begotten before his first time-traveling. He had so very much to keep him – this place, this home, this stability – He was very well to do. He had invested well – his own small tampering. He had no lack, no need. He was mad to go on and on. He was done.

But a light distracted him, an opal shimmering beyond his breakfast nook, arrival in that receptor which his fine home afforded, linked to the master gate at Pyvrrhn.

A young man materialized there, opal and light and then solidity, a distraught young man.

“Harrh,” the youth said, disregarding the decencies of meeting, and strode forward unasked. “Harrh, is everything all right here?”

Harrh arose from the crystal table even before the shimmer died, beset by that old queasiness of things out of joint. This was Alhir from 390 Since the Gate, an experienced man in the force: he had used a Master Key to come here – had such access, being what he was.

“Alhir,” Harrh said, perplexed. “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t know.” Alhir came as far as the door.

“A cup of tea?” Harrh said. Alhir had been here before. They were friends. There were oases along the course of suns, friendly years, places where houses served as rest-stops. In this too Mhreihrrinn was patient. “I’ve got to tell you—No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’m through. I’ve made up my mind. You can carry that where you’re going. – But if you want the breakfast—”

“There’s been an accident.”

“I don’t want to hear.”

“He got past us.”

“I don’t want to know.” He walked over to the cupboard, took another cup. “Mhreihrrinn’s with the boys down at the beach. You just caught us.” He set the cup down and poured the tea, where Mhreihrrinn had sat. “Won’t you? You’re always welcome here. Mhreihrrinn has no idea what you are. My young friend, she calls you. She doesn’t know. Or she suspects. She’d never say. – Sit
down.
”

Alhir had strayed aside, where a display case sat along the wall, a lighted case of mementoes, of treasures, of crystal. “Harrh, there was a potsherd here.”

“No,” Harrh said, less and less comfortable. “Just the glasses. I’m quite sure.”

“Harrh, it was very old.”

“No,” he said. “I promised Mhreihrrinn and the boys – I mean it. I’m through. I don’t want to know.”

“It came from Silen. From the digs at the First Gate, Harrh. It was a very valuable piece. You valued it very highly. – You don’t remember.”

“No,” Harrh said, feeling fear thick about him, like a change in atmosphere. “I don’t know of such a piece. I never had such a thing. Check your memory, Alhir.”

“It was from the ruins by the
First Gate,
don’t you understand?”

And then Alhir did not exist.

Harrh blinked, remembered pouring a cup of tea. But he was sitting in the chair, his breakfast before him.

He poured the tea and drank.

He was sitting on rock, amid the grasses blowing gently in the wind, on a clifftop by the sea.

He was standing there. “Mhreihrrinn,” he said, in the first chill touch of fear.

But that memory faded. He had never had a wife, nor children. He forgot the house as well.

Trees grew and faded.

Rocks moved at random.

The time-menders were in most instances the only ones who survived even a little while.

Wrenched loose from time and with lives rooted in many parts of it, they felt it first and lived it longest, and not a few were trapped in back-time and did not die, but survived the horror of it and begot children who further confounded the time-line.

Time, stretched thin in possibilities, adjusted itself.

He was Harrh.

But he was many possibilities and many names.

*   *   *

In time none of them mattered.

*   *   *

He was many names; he lived. He had many bodies; and the souls stained his own.

In the end he remembered nothing at all, except the drive to live.

And the dreams.

And none of the dreams were true.

TRICERATOPS SUMMER

Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick is an American writer of novels and stories who has received the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards for his work. His stories have appeared in
Omni, Penthouse, Amazing, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, High Times, New Dimensions, Starlight, Universe, Full Spectrum, TriQuarterly,
and elsewhere. Many have been reprinted in year’s best anthologies, and translated into several foreign languages. His books include
In the Drift,
an Ace Special;
Vacuum Flowers; Griffin’s Egg; Stations of the Tide; The Iron Dragon’s Daughter,
a
New York Times
Notable Book; and
Jack Faust.
This story was first published by
Amazon Shorts
in 2005.

The dinosaurs looked all wobbly in the summer heat shimmering up from the pavement. There were about thirty of them, a small herd of what appeared to be
Triceratops.
They were crossing the road – don’t ask me why – so I downshifted and brought the truck to a halt, and waited.

Waited and watched.

They were interesting creatures, and surprisingly graceful for all their bulk. They picked their way delicately across the road, looking neither to the right nor the left. I was pretty sure I’d correctly identified them by now – they had those three horns on their faces. I used to be a kid. I’d owned the plastic models.

My next-door neighbor, Gretta, who was sitting in the cab next to me with her eyes closed, said, “Why aren’t we moving?”

“Dinosaurs in the road,” I said.

She opened her eyes.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.

Then, before I could stop her, she leaned over and honked the horn, three times. Loud.

As one, every
Triceratops
in the herd froze in its tracks, and swung its head around to face the truck.

I practically fell over laughing.

“What’s so goddamn funny?” Gretta wanted to know. But I could only point and shake my head helplessly, tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks.

It was the frills. They were beyond garish. They were as bright as any circus poster, with red whorls and yellow slashes and electric orange diamonds – too many shapes and colors to catalog, and each one different. They looked like Chinese kites! Like butterflies with six-foot wingspans! Like Las Vegas on acid! And then, under those carnival-bright displays, the most stupid faces imaginable, blinking and gaping like brain-damaged cows. Oh, they were funny, all right, but if you couldn’t see that at a glance, you never were going to.

Gretta was getting fairly steamed. She climbed down out of the cab and slammed the door behind her. At the sound, a couple of the
Triceratops
pissed themselves with excitement, and the lot shied away a step or two. Then they began huddling a little closer, to see what would happen next.

Gretta hastily climbed back into the cab. “What are those bastards up to now?” she demanded irritably. She seemed to blame me for their behavior. Not that she could say so, considering she was in my truck and her BMW was still in the garage in South Burlington.

“They’re curious,” I said. “Just stand still. Don’t move or make any noise, and after a bit they’ll lose interest and wander off.”

“How do you know? You ever see anything like them before?”

“No,” I admitted. “But I worked on a dairy farm when I was a young fella, thirty, forty years ago, and the behavior seems similar.”

In fact, the
Triceratops
were already getting bored and starting to wander off again when a battered old Hyundai pulled wildly up beside us, and a skinny young man with the worst-combed hair I’d seen in a long time jumped out. They decided to stay and watch.

The young man came running over to us, arms waving. I leaned out the window. “What’s the problem, son?”

He was pretty bad upset. “There’s been an accident – an
incident,
I mean. At the Institute.” He was talking about the Institute for Advanced Physics, which was not all that far from here. It was government-funded and affiliated in some way I’d never been able to get straight with the University of Vermont. “The verge stabilizers failed and the meson-field inverted and vectorized. The congruence factors went to infinity and…” He seized control of himself. “You’re not supposed to see
any
of this.”

“These things are yours, then?” I said. “So you’d know. They’re
Triceratops,
right?”

“Triceratops horridus,
” he said distractedly. I felt unreasonably pleased with myself. “For the most part. There might be a couple other species of
Triceratops
mixed in there as well. They’re like ducks in that regard. They’re not fussy about what company they keep.”

Gretta shot out her wrist and glanced meaningfully at her watch. Like everything else she owned, it was expensive. She worked for a firm in Essex Junction that did systems analysis for companies that were considering downsizing. Her job was to find out exactly what everybody did and then tell the CEO who could be safely cut. “I’m losing money,” she grumbled.

I ignored her.

“Listen,” the kid said. “You’ve got to keep quiet about this. We can’t afford to have it get out. It has to be kept a secret.”

“A secret?” On the far side of the herd, three cars had drawn up and stopped. Their passengers were standing in the road, gawking. A Ford Taurus pulled up behind us, and its driver rolled down his window for a better look. “You’re planning to keep a herd of dinosaurs secret? There must be dozens of these things.”

“Hundreds,” he said despairingly. “They were migrating. The herd broke up after it came through. This is only a fragment of it.”

“Then I don’t see how you’re going to keep this a secret. I mean, just look at them. They’re practically the size of tanks. People are bound to notice.”

“My God, my God.”

Somebody on the other side had a camera out and was taking pictures. I didn’t point this out to the young man.