She looked up at him and said with warm satisfaction, “I wasn’t married.”
“No, you weren’t. But was that Dick Reinhardt you were going around with?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t planning to marry him, were you, Livvy?”
“Jealous, Norman?”
Norman looked confused. “Of that? Of a slab of glass? Of course not.”
“I don’t think I would have married him.”
Norman said, “You know, I wish it hadn’t ended when it did. There was something that was about to happen, I think.” He stopped, then added slowly, “It was as though I would rather have done it to anybody else in the room.”
“Even to Georgette.”
“I wasn’t giving two thoughts about Georgette. You don’t believe me, I suppose.”
“Maybe I do.” She looked up at him. “I’ve been silly, Norman. Let’s – let’s live our real life. Let’s not play with all the things that just might have been.”
But he caught her hands. “No, Livvy. One last time. Let’s see what we would have been doing right now, Livvy! This very minute! If I had married Georgette.”
Livvy was a little frightened. “Let’s not, Norman.” She was thinking of his eyes, smiling hungrily at her as he held the shaker, while Georgette stood beside her, and regarded. She didn’t want to know what happened afterward. She just wanted this life now, this good life.
New Haven came and went.
Norman said again, “I want to try, Livvy.”
She said, “If you want to, Norman.” She decided fiercely that it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would matter. Her hands reached out and encircled his arm. She held it tightly, and while she held it she thought: “Nothing in make-believe can take him from me.”
Norman said to the little man, “Set ’em up again.”
In the yellow light the process seemed to be slower. Gently the frosted slab cleared, like clouds being torn apart and dispersed by an unfelt wind.
Norman was saying, “There’s something wrong. That’s just the two of us, exactly as we are now.”
He was right. Two little figures were sitting in a train on the seats which were the farthest toward the front. The field was enlarging now – they were merging into it. Norman’s voice was distant and fading.
“It’s the same train,” he was saying. “The window in back is cracked just as—”
*
Livvy was blindingly happy. She said, “I wish we were in New York.”
He said, “It will be less than an hour, darling.” Then he said, “I’m going to kiss you.” He made a movement, as though he were about to begin.
“Not here! Oh, Norman, people are looking.”
Norman drew back. He said, “We should have taken a taxi.”
“From Boston to New York?”
“Sure. The privacy would have been worth it.”
She laughed. “You’re funny when you try to act ardent.”
“It isn’t an act.” His voice was suddenly a little somber. “It’s not just an hour, you know. I feel as though I’ve been waiting five years.”
“I do, too.”
“Why couldn’t I have met you first. It was such a waste.”
“Poor Georgette,” Livvy sighed.
Norman moved impatiently. “Don’t be sorry for her, Livvy. We never really made a go of it. She was glad to get rid of me.”
“I know that. That’s why I say ‘Poor Georgette’. I’m just sorry for her for not being able to appreciate what she had.”
“Well, see to it that you do,” he said. “See to it that you’re immensely appreciative, infinitely appreciative – or more than that, see that you’re at least half as appreciative as I am of what I’ve got.”
“Or else you’ll divorce me, too?”
“Over my dead body,” said Norman.
Livvy said, “It’s all so strange. I keep thinking, What if you hadn’t spilt the cocktails on me that time at the party? You wouldn’t have followed me out; you wouldn’t have told me; I wouldn’t have known. It would have been so different... everything.”
“Nonsense. It would have been just the same. It would have all happened another time.”
“I wonder,” said Livvy softly.
*
Train noises merged into train noises. City lights flickered outside, and the atmosphere of New York was about them. The coach was astir with travelers dividing the baggage among themselves.
Livvy was an island in the turmoil until Norman shook her.
She looked at him and said, “The jigsaw pieces fit after all.”
He said, “Yes.”
She put a hand on his. “But it wasn’t good, just the same. I was very wrong. I thought that because we had each other, we should have all the possible each others. But all of the possibilities are none of our business. The real is enough. Do you know what I mean?”
He nodded.
She said, “There are millions of other what ifs. I don’t want to know what happened in any of them. I’ll never say, ‘What if’, again.”
Norman said, “Relax, dear. Here’s your coat.” And he reached for the suitcases.
Livvy said with sudden sharpness, “Where’s Mr. If?”
Norman turned slowly to the empty seat that faced them. Together they scanned the rest of the coach.
“Maybe,” Norman said, “he went into the next coach.”
“But why? Besides, he wouldn’t leave his hat.” And she bent to pick it up.
Norman said, “What hat?”
And Livvy stopped her fingers hovering over nothingness. She said, “It was here – I almost touched it.” She straightened and said, “Oh, Norman, what if—”
Norman put a finger on her mouth. “Darling...”
She said, “I’m sorry. Here, let me help you with the suitcases.”
The train dived into the tunnel beneath Park Avenue, and the noise of the wheels rose to a roar.
AS TIME GOES BY
Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee is a highly respected English writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, with over seventy novels and hundreds of short stories to her credit. She has been a regular contributor over many years to Weird Tales magazine. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Nebula Award multiple times. This story was first published in Chrysalis 10 in 1983.
We had half a crew in here two twenties ago, swore they passed the Napoleon, coming up into the Parameter. But you know what spacers are, particularly when they’re in a Static Zone. Two-thousand-plus time streams colliding in space, and a white ironex wheel, fragile as a leaf, spinning round at the center of it all. You’re bound to get time-ghosts, and superstitions of all sorts.
The wheel here at Tempi was the first way station ever created, in the first Parameter they ever hit when they finally figured how Time operates out in deep space. You’ll know most, if not all of it, of course. How every star system functions in a different time sphere, everything out of kilter with everything else, and that the universe is composed of a million strands of time, of which only two thousand have as yet been definitely charted and made navigable. And you know too that Tempi, and her sister Zones – what they jokingly call the white holes in space – are the safe houses where time is, forever and always, itself at a stop. And that, though wheelers reckon in twenty-hour units, and though, like anywhere else, we have a jargon of past, present and future – yestertwenty, today, tomorrow – temporal stasis actually obtains all around a wheel. We move all right, but over the face of a frozen clock, over the face of a clock without any hands at all. Which means that whatever ship blows in, out of whichever of those two-thousand-odd time continuums, can realign here, or in another of the white holes, docked against a white ironex wheel, having come back, as it were, to square one. It’s here they wipe the slate clean before flying out again into chaos. A tract of firm ground in the boiling seas. In scientific terms: a Parameter, one constant sphere in a differential Infinity. In common parlance,
just another way of keeping sane.
But sanity, like time, is relative. As I say, Tempi has its share of “ghosts”; like the Lyran wildflowers that are sometimes supposed to manifest on the Sixth Level. Not that I ever saw those. I did see the Napoleon, once.
It was back in the twenties when they still had that bar here on the Third Level–Rouelle Etoile, Star Alley. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It owed quite a lot to early-twentieth-century celluloid, you know those old movies, like thin acidulous slices of lemon. The Rouelle had that square-shouldered furniture, and the glass chunk ashtrays. The walls had rose and black satin poured down them. And some of the women would get out of their coveralls, and come into the Rouelle with satin poured down them too, and those long, dark scarlet nails and those long earrings like chandeliers. There was also a chandelier in the roof. You should have seen it. Like ice on fire. And under the chandelier there was a real piano, and a real pianist, a Sirtian, blue as coal, with the face of a prince, and hands like sea waves. The sounds that came out of the piano were the shape and color of the blades of light snowing off the chandelier. You should have seen that chandelier.
But I was telling you about the time I saw the Napoleon.
I was up on the Fourth Walk, one level over the Rouelle Etoile, where you can watch the ship explode in out of nothing, leaving the Warp Lanes at zero 50. Space was blind-clear as a pool of ink, without stars obviously, since you never see stars inside a Parameter. Incoming traffic was listed as over for that twenty. When I saw this great bottlenose dolphin surging up out of nowhere, I started to run for the Alert panel. Then something made me look back when I was two thirds along the gantry. And the ship just wasn’t there anymore.
I’m not given to hallucinations, and besides, I have a pretty good Recall. I remember sitting down on the gantry, and putting that ship together again on the blackboard of my mind, and taking a hard long look at her. And I realized, inside a second, she couldn’t be any crate left on the listings. The numerals and date-codings, you see, were Cycles out – about nineteen years or more, by Confederation reckoning. With the time-tangle out here, every code gets changed once every Cycle. Naturally, there’s the occasional tin can comes careening out of Warp, with its dating markers legally a few points overdue. But they’re little ships, freelance dippers nobody makes much fuss over. This was a big ship, a cool, pale giant. She had the old-fashioned diesel-pod at her stern too, burning like a ruby. But there was something else. My Recall was showing me enough to know her markings weren’t just out of date, they were wrong. And she had a device. Anyone who’s ever heard of the Trade War knows about the pirate ships, and the blazons they used to carry. Quite a few people know what the device of the Napoleon was: an eagle over a sunburst. And that’s precisely what this ship had on her bow.
I didn’t report anything. Just hinted around, you know the kind of thing. Then I began to get comparison sightings, and there were quite a lot. To my knowledge, nobody’s ever come face to face with Day Curtis himself. Except, there is one story.
Curtis had a reputation all his own, something of a legend going for him, even before Napoleon disappeared with almost all hands. The Trade War had broken the Confederation in three neat pieces, and there were plenty of captains running through the guns on all three sides, taking cargo to wherever it was meant, or not meant, to go, for a suitable fee, and not averse to accumulating extra merchandise if they came across it in the Warp Lanes. Curtis was unique in that he’d hire out to any side at any time, and simultaneously commit acts of piracy against the very side he was running for. The reason he still got paid was he could make Napoleon play games with the time streams and the Warp that are technically impossible, even today. If you could outbid everyone else and buy him, he’d get whatever it was that had to be got to wherever it was it had to go. No matter what was in the way: Sonic barriers, radiation strips, a flotilla of fully armed attack vessels. More than once he split a fleet in two, led one half away through the Warps, now visible and now not, eventually bringing them back by the hand straight into the cannon of the second half who were still waiting for him. He would slip between like a coin through a slot, while they, reacting to pre-primed targets, inadvertently blasted hell out of each other. But you’ll have heard the stories about Curtis and his ship, everyone has.
Tempi Parameter was a truce zone then, because it had to be. There were only two wheels spinning in those days, and everybody needed them, whichever part of the Confederation owned you. There was every kind of craft passing in and out: patrol runners, battle cruisers, destroyers, merchantmen, smugglers and privateers. And the crews knew better than not to keep quiet when they met each other in the corridors, the diners and the bars. With ships diving in and out of time like fish through water, and only a couple of safe places to go between, you bowed to the rule and you left your gun at the entry port. Some of the most notorious desperadoes that ever took to space came through here, time and time again, on their way to and from mayhem. But even in that kind of company, Day Curtis stood out.
A slight dark man, with the somber pallor most spacers get, a type of moon-tan, and those thick-fringed Roman-Byzantine eyes you find in frescoes on Earth. You may have seen news-video of him. There was some, the Cycle Napoleon towed that shelled liner, the Aurigos, through her enemy lines into harbor on Lyra – for the bounty, of course. Or the occasion the entire three segments of the split Confederation each put a price on his head, and most of his brother pirates went out to get him and never got him. He was even finer-made than he looks in those old videos, but the expression was the same. He never joked, he never even smiled. It wasn’t any act, anything he’d lost or become. Whatever it is that smooths the edges of human isolation, that was the item he’d come into life without. His crew treated him like a stone king. They knew he could run the show, and with something extra, a sort of cold genius, and they trusted him to do it. But they hated him in about the same measure as they respected him, which was plenty. He had a tongue like a razor blade. You got cut once, and that was enough. Since he was handsome, women liked him all right, until they learned they couldn’t get anywhere with him. The ones that kept trying were usually sorry. All that being the case, the story, this last story I ever heard about Day Curtis, is probably apocryphal. The man who told it to me didn’t claim it wasn’t.
I heard that last story two years after I saw the Napoleon from the Fourth Walk. I heard it on the twenty that they closed up the Rouelle Etoile. It was the ninth Cycle, and the day after the tempest smashed those fifteen ships to tinder between Sirtis and the Dagon Strip. I can remember it very well, even without Recall. The bar despoiled, naked and hollow, seeming to echo, the way a dying venue does, with all the voices, the music, the colors that have ever existed in it. A team of men were portioning up that huge glissade of a chandelier, lifting it on to dollies, and carrying it away. The piano was long gone, but there were the dim sheer notes of a girl quietly sobbing to herself, somewhere nearby. I never knew the reason; someone on one of those ships, maybe, had belonged to her... The man and I were finishing the last flask of Noira brandy, at the counter in the midst of the suspiring desolation. And we grew warm and sad, and he told me the story.
And outside the oval ports, innocent and terrible, the field of space and timelessness hung on the rim of the vignette, a starless winter night.
The Rouelle Etoile was almost deserted, that twenty. There was some big action out at zero 98, and the ships had lifted off like vultures, to join in or to scavenge. The tall marble clock against the wall said nineteen fifteen, but the blue pianist was still rolling the tide of his hands up and down the keys. About four or five customers were sitting around chewing trouble, or playing Shot over on the indigo baize. And in one of the corner booths was Day Curtis. Napoleon was in dock, had come in two twenties before with a hole in her flank, and the crew were going all out to patch her over well enough to take her out into 98 and see what was left worth mopping up. But it didn’t look as if the repairs were going to
make it in time, and at eighteen hundred Curtis had walked into the Rouelle with a look like dead lightning in the backs of his eyes. Curtis seldom showed when he was angry, but he could drink like dry sand, and that’s what he was doing, steadily and coldly draining the soul out of the bar, when the woman came in.
She looked late twenties, with hair black as the blackest thing you ever saw, which might be space, or an afterimage of some sun, cropped short across the crown, but growing out into one long free-slung black comma across her neck and shoulders. She had the spacer’s tawny paleness otherwise, and one of the poured dresses that went with the Rouelle, almost the same color as she was. She was off one of the ships that had stayed in dock, an artisan’s shuttle that had no quarrel with anyone in particular, but she walked in as if she’d come on a dare, ready to fight, or to run. She went straight to the bar counter and ordered one of the specialty cocktails, which she drank straight down, not looking at anyone or anything. Then she ordered another, and holding it poised in the long stems of her fingers, she turned and confronted the room. She moved like a dancer, and she had the unique magic which comes with a beauty that surpasses its name, a glamour that doesn’t fit in any niche or under any label. Four or five of the men in the bar were staring at her, but her gaze passed on over them with a raking indifference. She was obviously searching for something and, the impression was, hoping not to find it. Then her eyes reached the corner booth, and Curtis.
It’s possible he may have noticed her when she came in, or he may not. But implacable scrutiny, even in a truce zone, is frequently the prologue to trouble. After a second or so, he lifted his head slowly, and looked back at her. Her face didn’t change, but the glass dropped through her fingers and smashed on the polished floor.
For about a quarter of a minute she kept still, but there was a sort of electricity playing all around her, the invisible kind a wire exudes when there’s a storm working up in the stratosphere. Then, she kicked the broken glass lightly out of her way, and she walked very fast and direct, over to Curtis’ table. He’d kept on watching her, they all had, even the Sirtian pianist, though his hands never missed the up and down flow of the piano keys. The woman had the appearance of being capable of anything, up to and including the slinging of a fine-honed stiletto right across the bar into Curtis’ throat. Only a blind man would have ignored her. Maybe not even a blind man.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 112
