Harry Turtledove

by The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

  “That’s Kraut,” says Bob, having grown up on jingoistic comic books. “Don’t tell me you’re a—”

  Three-phasing analyzes the first five words and knows that Bob is an American from the period 1935–1955. “Yes, yes—and no, no—to wit, how very very clever of you to have identified this phrase as having come from the language of Prussia, Germany as you say; but I am, no, not a German person; at least, I no more belong to the German nationality than I do to any other, but I suppose that is not too clear and perhaps I should fully elucidate the particulars of your own situation at this, as you say, ‘time,’ and ‘place.’ ”

  The last English-language author Three-phasing studied was Henry James.

  “Huh?” Bob says again.

  “Ah, I should simplify.” He thinks for a half-second, and drops his voice down another third. “Yeah, simple. Listen, Mac. First thing I gotta know’s whatcher name. Whatcher broad’s name.”

  “Well . . . I’m Bob Graham. This is my wife, Sarah Graham.”

  “Pleasta meetcha, Bob. Likewise, Sarah. Call me, uh . . .” The only twentieth-century language in which Three-phasing’s name makes sense is propositional calculus. “George. George Boole.

  “I ’poligize for bumpin’ into ya, Sarah. That broad in the corner, she don’t know what a tit is, so I was just usin’ one of yours. Uh, lack of immediate cultural perspective, I shoulda knowed better.”

  Sarah feels a little dizzy, shakes her head slowly. “That’s all right. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “I’m dreaming,” Bob says. “Shouldn’t have—”

  “No you aren’t,” says Three-phasing, adjusting his diction again. “You’re in the future. Almost a million years. Pardon me.” He scurries to the mover-transom, is gone for a second, reappears with a bedsheet, which he hands to Bob. “I’m sorry, we don’t wear clothing. This is the best I can do, for now.” The bedsheet is too small for Bob to wear the way Sarah is using the blanket. He folds it over and tucks it around his waist, in a kilt. “Why us?” he asks.

  “You were taken at random. We’ve been time casting”—he checks with Nine-hover—“for twenty-two years, and have never before caught a human being. Let alone two. You must have been in close contact with one another when you intersected the time-caster beam. I assume you were copulating.”

  “What-ing?” Bob says.

  “No, we weren’t!” Sarah says indignantly.

  “Ah, quite so.” Three-phasing doesn’t pursue the topic. He knows the humans of this culture were reticent about their sexual activity. But from their literature he knows they spent most of their “time” thinking about, arranging for, enjoying, and recovering from a variety of sexual contacts.

  “Then that must be a time machine over there,” Bob says, indicating the fake console.

  “In a sense, yes.” Three-phasing decides to be partly honest. “But the actual machine no longer exists. People did a lot of time-traveling about a quarter of a million years ago. Shuffled history around. Changed it back. The fact that the machine once existed, well, that enables us to use it, if you see what I mean.”

  “Uh, no. I don’t.” Not with synapses limited to three degrees of freedom.

  “Well, never mind. It’s not really important.” He senses the next question. “You will be going back . . . I don’t know exactly when. It depends on a lot of things. You see, time is like a rubber band.” No, it isn’t. “Or a spring.” No, it isn’t. “At any rate, within a few days, weeks at most, you will leave this present and return to the moment you were experiencing when the time-caster beam picked you up.”

  “I’ve read stories like that,” Sarah says. “Will we remember the future, after we go back?”

  “Probably not,” he says charitably. Not until your brains evolve. “But you can do us a great service.”

  Bob shrugs. “Sure, long as we’re here. Anyhow, you did us a favor.” He puts his arm around Sarah. “I’ve gotta leave Sarah in a couple of days; don’t know for how long. So you’re giving us more time together.”

  “Whether we remember it or not,” Sarah says.

  “Good, fine. Come with me.” They follow Three-phasing to the mover-transom, where he takes their hands and transports them to his home. It is as unadorned as the time-caster room, except for bookshelves along one wall, and a low podium upon which the volume of Faust rests. All of the books are bound identically, in shiny metal with flat black letters along the spines.

  Bob looks around. “Don’t you people ever sit down?”

  “Oh,” Three-phasing says. “Thoughtless of me.” With his mind he shifts the room from utility mood to comfort mood. Intricate tapestries now hang on the walls; soft cushions that look like silk are strewn around in pleasant disorder. Chiming music, not quite discordant, hovers at the edge of audibility, and there is a faint odor of something like jasmine. The metal floor has become a kind of soft leather, and the room has somehow lost its corners.

  “How did that happen?” Sarah asks.

  “I don’t know.” Three-phasing tries to copy Bob’s shrug, but only manages a spasmodic jerk. “Can’t remember not being able to do it.”

  Bob drops into a cushion and experimentally pushes at the floor with a finger. “What is it you want us to do?”

  Trying to move slowly, Three-phasing lowers himself into a cushion and gestures at a nearby one, for Sarah. “It’s very simple, really. Your being here is most of it.

  “We’re celebrating the millionth anniversary of the written word.” How to phrase it? “Everyone is interested in this anniversary, but . . . nobody reads any more.”

  Bob nods sympathetically. “Never have time for it myself.”

  “Yes, uh . . . you do know how to read, though?”

  “He knows,” Sarah says. “He’s just lazy.”

  “Well, yeah.” Bob shifts uncomfortably in the cushion. “Sarah’s the one you want. I kind of, uh, prefer to listen to the radio.”

  “I read all the time,” Sarah says with a little pride. “Mostly mysteries. But sometimes I read good books, too.”

  “Good, good.” It was indeed fortunate to have found this pair, Three-phasing realizes. They had used the metal of the ancient books to “tune” the time-caster, so potential subjects were limited to those living some eighty years before and after 2012 A.D. Internal evidence in the books indicated that most of the Earth’s population was illiterate during this period.

  “Allow me to explain. Any one of us can learn how to read. But to us it is like a code; an unnatural way of communicating. Because we are all natural telepaths. We can reach each other’s minds from the age of one year.”

  “Golly!” Sarah says. “Read minds?” And Three-phasing sees in her mind a fuzzy kind of longing, much of which is love for Bob and frustration that she knows him only imperfectly. He dips into Bob’s mind and finds things she is better off not knowing.

  “That’s right. So what we want is for you to read some of these books, and allow us to go into your minds while you’re doing it. This way we will be able to recapture an experience that has been lost to the race for over a half-million years.”

  “I don’t know,” Bob says slowly. “Will we have time for anything else? I mean, the world must be pretty strange. Like to see some of it.”

  “Of course; sure. But the rest of the world is pretty much like my place here. Nobody goes outside any more. There isn’t any air.” He doesn’t want to tell them how the air was lost, which might disturb them, but they seem to accept that as part of the distant future.

  “Uh, George.” Sarah is blushing. “We’d also like, uh, some time to ourselves. Without anybody . . . inside our minds.”

  “Yes, I understand perfectly. You will have your own room, and plenty of time to yourselves.” Three-phasing neglects to say that there is no such thing as privacy in a telepathic society.

  But sex is another thing they don’t have any more. They’re almost as curious about that as they are about books.

 
; ———

  So the kindly men of the future gave Bob and Sarah Graham plenty of time to themselves: Bob and Sarah reciprocated. Through the Dawn couple’s eyes and brains, humanity shared again the visions of Fielding and Melville and Dickens and Shakespeare and almost a dozen others. And as for the 98% more, that they didn’t have time to read or that were in foreign languages—Three-phasing got the hang of it and would spend several millennia entertaining those who were amused by this central illusion of literature: that there could be order, that there could be beginnings and endings and logical workings-out in between; that you could count on the third act or the last chapter to tie things up. They knew how profound an illusion this was because each of them knew every other living human with an intimacy and accuracy far superior to that which even Shakespeare could bring to the study of even himself. And as for Sarah and as for Bob:

  Anxiety can throw a person’s ovaries ‘way off schedule. On that beach in California, Sarah was no more pregnant than Bob was. But up there in the future, some somatic tension finally built up to the breaking point, and an egg went sliding down the left Fallopian tube, to be met by a wiggling intruder approximately halfway; together they were the first manifestation of organism that nine months later, or a million years earlier, would be christened Douglas MacArthur Graham.

  This made a problem for time, or Time, which is neither like a rubber band nor like a spring; nor even like a river nor a carrier wave—but which, like all of these things, can be deformed by certain stresses. For instance, two people going into the future and three coming back on the same time-casting beam.

  In an earlier age, when time travel was more common, time-casters would have made sure that the baby, or at least its aborted embryo, would stay in the future when the mother returned to her present. Or they could arrange for the mother to stay in the future. But these subtleties had long been forgotten when Nine-hover relearned the dead art. So Sarah went back to her present with a hitch-hiker, an interloper, firmly imbedded in the lining of her womb. And its dim sense of life set up a kind of eddy in the flow of time, that Sarah had to share.

  The mathematical explanation is subtle, and can’t be comprehended by those of us who synapse with fewer than four degrees of freedom. But the end effect is clear: Sarah had to experience all of her own life backwards, all the way back to that embrace on the beach. Some highlights were:

  In 1992, slowly dying of cancer, in a mental hospital.

  In 1979, seeing Bob finally succeed at suicide on the American Plan, not quite finishing his 9,527th bottle of liquor.

  In 1970, having her only son returned in a sealed casket from a country she’d never heard of.

  In the 1960’s, helplessly watching her son become more and more neurotic because of something that no one could name.

  In 1953, Bob coming home with one foot, the other having been lost to frostbite; never having fired a shot in anger.

  In 1952, the agonizing breech presentation.

  Like her son, Sarah would remember no details of the backward voyage through her life. But the scars of it would haunt her forever.

  They were kissing on the beach.

  Sarah dropped the blanket and made a little noise. She started crying and slapped Bob as hard as she could, then ran on alone, up to the cabin.

  Bob watched her progress up the hill with mixed feelings. He took a healthy slug from the bourbon bottle, to give him an excuse to wipe his own eyes.

  He could go sit on the beach and finish the bottle; let her get over it by herself. Or he could go comfort her.

  He tossed the bottle away, the gesture immediately making him feel stupid, and followed her. Later that night she apologized, saying she didn’t know what had gotten into her.

  JACK DANN

  Jack Dann has written or edited over fifty books, many dealing with humanity’s own consciousness and its role in comprehending the universe. His novels include the international best-seller The Memory Cathedral, about the travels of Leonardo da Vinci outside his native Italy and the changes his fertile mind brings to other countries. Other works include The Man Who Melted, in which three Nebula-nominated novellas about a future society under assault by its citizens are woven into a story of an amnesiac man searching for his wife. Dann collaborated with Jack C. Haldeman II on the novel High Steel, which took ruthless American corporations into space and pitted them against a Native American protagonist trying to hold on to his history while working out in space. His short fiction was recently collected in the anthology Jubilee, which features the title story about the reality-altering effects of an alien consciousness attempting to contact Earth. Dann’s work has been compared to that of Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Carlos Castañeda, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Mark Twain. He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (twice), and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica award. He has also been honored by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight).

  Dann takes a metaphysical, existential look at time travel in “Timetipping,” mingling his Jewish heritage with a world where people and things slip in and out of different times every instant of the day, and a person can find himself in a new dimension in the blink of an eye. The hero of his story, an everyday sort just trying to get by, is stuck in this world, but unlike everyone else, he watches everything around him change, while never timetipping himself, and it is this singular point of view that the story is built on.

  TIMETIPPING

  JACK DANN

  SINCE TIMETIPPING, everything moved differently. Nothing was for certain, anything could change (depending on your point of view), and almost anything could happen, especially to forgetful old men who often found themselves in the wrong century rather than on the wrong street.

  Take Moishe Hodel, who was too old and fat to be climbing ladders; yet he insisted on climbing to the roof of his suburban house so that he could sit on the top of a stone-tuff church in Goreme six hundred years in the past. Instead of praying, he would sit and watch monks. He claimed that since time and space were meshuggeneh (what’s crazy in any other language?), he would search for a quick and Godly way to travel to synagogue. Let the goyim take the trains.

  Of course, Paley Litwak, who was old enough to know something, knew from nothing when the world changed and everything went blip. His wife disappeared, and a new one returned in her place. A new Golde, one with fewer lines and dimples, one with starchy white hair and missing teeth.

  Upon arrival all she said was, “This is almost right. You’re almost the same, Paley. Still, you always go to shul?”

  “Shul?” Litwak asked, resolving not to jump and scream and ask God for help. With all the changing, Litwak would stand straight and wait for God. “What’s a shul?”

  “You mean you don’t know from shul, and yet you wear such a yarmulke on your head?” She pulled her babushka through her fingers. “A shul. A synagogue, a temple. Do you pray?”

  Litwak was not a holy man, but he could hold up his head and not be afraid to wink at God. Certainly he prayed. And in the following weeks Litwak found himself in shul more often than not—so she had an effect on him; after all, she was his wife. Where else was there to be? With God he had a one-way conversation—from Litwak’s mouth to God’s ears—but at home it was turned around. There, Litwak had no mouth, only ears. How can you talk with a woman who thinks fornicating with other men is holy?

  But Litwak was a survivor; with the rest of the world turned over and doing flip-flops, he remained the same. Not once did he trip into a different time, not even an hour did he lose or gain; and the only places he went were those he could walk to. He was the exception to the rule. The rest of the world was adrift; everyone was swimming by, blipping out of the past or future and into the present here or who-knows-where.

  It was a new world. Every street was filled with commerce, every night was carnival. Days were built out of strange faces, and nights went by so fast
that Litwak remained in the synagogue just to smooth out time. But there was no time for Litwak, just services, and prayers, and holy smells.

  Yet the world went on. Business almost as usual. There were still rabbis and chasids and grocers and cabalists; fat Hoffa, a congregant with a beard that would make a storybook Baal Shem jealous, even claimed that he knew a cabalist that had invented a new gemetria for foretelling everything concerning money.

  “So who needs gemetria?” Litwak asked. “Go trip tomorrow and find out what’s doing.”

  “Wrong,” said Hoffa as he draped his prayer shawl over his arm, waiting for a lull in the conversation to say the holy words before putting on the talis. “It does no good to go there if you can’t get back. And when you come back, everything is changed, anyway. Who do you know that’s really returned? Look at you, you didn’t have gray hair and earlocks yesterday.”

  “Then that wasn’t me you saw. Anyway, if everybody but me is tripping and tipping back and forth, in and out of the devil’s mouth, so to speak, then what time do you have to use this new gemetria?”

  Hoffa paused and said, “So the world must go on. You think it stops because heaven shakes it. . . .”

  “You’re so sure it’s heaven?”

  “ . . . but you can go see the cabalist; you’re stuck in the present, you sit on one line. Go talk to him; he speaks a passable Yiddish, and his wife walks around with a bare behind.”

  “So how do you know he’s there now?” asked Litwak. “They come and go. Perhaps a Neanderthal or a klezmer from the future will take his place.”

  “So? If he isn’t there, what matter? At least you know he’s somewhere else. No? Everything goes on. Nothing gets lost. Everything fits, somehow. That’s what’s important.”

  It took Litwak quite some time to learn the new logic of the times, but once learned, it became an advantage—especially when his pension checks didn’t arrive. Litwak became a fair second-story man, but he robbed only according to society’s logic and his own ethical system: one-half for the shul and the rest for Litwak.