by Tanith Lee
“There is a procedure you will experience during this time-stage.”
“What? You’re going to break my legs. Or something less subtle, with a drug?”
“Tortures of this nature are unrecognized under all United World conventions.”
“But this isn’t the world,” I said. I added, “Nor are we out of it.”
“Look from the window,” said the machine. It had no voice, merely a sound that formed coherent phrases.
I looked. The ebony land stretched softly around and through the razor wafers of crystal light. There are no particular features to the land. It rolls and sweeps, as if about to become a mountain, a valley, a sea — or perhaps invention supplies that fancy. Above, the Star gave off the glow of a tarnished coin, a museum coin from before the days of credit transfer Standardization. A sixpence, or a centime, or a yen, or a unidisc. But then a sudden blare of light exploded in thunderous silence all through the Star, and it pulsed and swelled, and abruptly a ball of screaming white filled a quarter of the sky, sending its knives of fire slicing across the room, dissecting all the dark country outside, so its very skeleton seemed to appear through the skin.
“We’re coming to a Shift,” I said. I had already witnessed the phenomenon some ten or eleven times before that I recalled, and experienced the Shift itself in the same ratio. Nevertheless, whenever I see what happens to the Star, I become afraid. Of course, it is unconscionable.
“Shift will occur,” supplied the machine, “in thirty time-stage-units.” (That would seem to us to be thirty minutes, if minutes were feasible.) “Please be ready to accompany the hoveror when it comes for you in fifteen time-stage-units. You are to move concurrent with the Shift, but in a different continuum. When you emerge you will find you have gone back in time, into a coded era.”
“What?” I said. New fear for old. Their jargon, at its most convoluted, generally meant something Significant. The same, often, with men. I even felt, foolishness, an instant of blind hope. But I crushed it. I altered my question to “Why?”
“It is a part of the program,” the machine answered in its unmusical sound.
“The object of the program is to unhinge the mind of each of us here. To disorientate us to the point of insecurity, to increase the sensation of insecurity to the point of insanity. You want to drive me, along with everyone else, mad. Very well, I can’t avoid it, probably. But I like to know the script.”
But the machine said, “Remember, please, that in past time you can in no manner participate, only observe. You are discorporate and invisible. You are reminded of this for your own convenience.”
“Since when is my convenience important to this government? And what do you mean? I can go back to any of my past here, and relive it, or live it differently. I know I’m doing so, whether that suits you or not.”
“This is a fallacy. There is no time, as such, in this place; only in the moments before sun-phase and Shift does time begin to evolve. You do not, here, return into the past. Past, present, and what is termed ‘future’ are continuous and inextricable, which you understand, having written of it.”
My heart was beating too loudly and too fast.
“Then you do mean past time in the sense of a return to Earth?”
“This is so.”
I sat very quietly and let my heart crash and race all it would.
I couldn’t control my heart. But my mind was another venture. They were letting me go back, then, that was to be the latest torture. Go back and see how it had been, but unable, naturally, to undo, to alter, to make worse my crimes against the state.
When the hoveror machine arrived, I went with it, up ramps and into a large room with a platform, and I stood where they told me under a canopy like half an egg-shell. The Shift happened. The momentary vertigo washed through me, the light went out, and for a split second I hung in nothingness, no dark, no light, no Star, no world at all. And then I was through, but no longer in the realm of darkness, this place. I was back in the real world. I had thought they would show me myself, frustrating me that way. But it was more sensitive. It might have hurt less, and sometimes I blame myself for (could it be?) falling into their assessment of me and tacitly agreeing to it by allowing myself to be more disturbed because it was Merah they showed me.
That commencing occasion, it was the Merah I had known for one and a half years before my exile. Everything about it startled me, not only the image of Earth, of Merah, but the tranquility. I saw her standing on a hillside. She had companions, and it was summer, and they were debating whether to pick the flowers or leave them in peace, and eventually the vote went in the flowers’ favor. I could smell the flowers, too, and the sun on the grass; even a faint perfume that I recollected she had sometimes used.
So then. I followed her all through one golden summer day, one azure summer evening. It must have been a month or so before we met — she was not quite my Merah that day. Young and straight, the look always of the dancer she had trained to be, and nearly been, fair skin that never tanned, black hair, cool eyes. There was something independent and uninvolved, that I had robbed her of, not meaning to. I, now the helpless voyeur, trailed her over the sun-amber of those hills and down the narrow chalky path to the restaurant. She laughed with her friends. She fed a little white dog with one bluish ear, she drank wine and ate a salad, she lay in the grass under the willows while someone played a guitar. In the dusk, roses and moths and the whiteness of girls’ cheap pretty dresses, things like these, lovely clichés under a dawning moon, and jasmine on the air — and then she and they were gone from me. The Earth with them.
Returned, here. The transition was not bad, not so uncomfortable even as Shift. I went back to my room and sat a long while. I did not recognize where I had come back to. I was still there, with her. The machines were silent. The white howl had vanished from the almost-black of the sky, only the smoky gem of the Star hanging there now.
Had she ever told me of that day, that particular, unimportant day? What did it matter. She was in my mind again. Sometimes, as I travelled weightlessly beside them, she had seemed to catch a glimpse of me. She had cast a flirting look over her shoulder at me. She had yearned towards me in the tent of willow — why are you standing apart? Come closer. One imagines these things. It is a form of unavoidable idiocy.
She had let go her uninvolvement to aid my commitment and to comfort me. She had told me I was right, and come to believe so. It was Merah who said that victory, though impossible, must be striven for.
I thought of many things in our relationship, both good and bad. I continued to sit still through what is considered a night here, and to think of Merah.
Since it had had the desired effect on me — since it had damaged me in some intense yet elusive way — they then let me go back again, and again, to see her often. Sometimes it was the pre-me Merah — at her university, doing her nation-service in some little red factory. A Merah painting a landscape, lightheartedly amateur; a Merah dancing, no trace of the amateur there. Her twenty-first birthday party. Her years at the academy. Then, later, I saw scenes that had come during our time together, though I never saw her with me — never saw myself. Though, in these vignettes, she was often speaking of me, or of the political lessons she learned as I was learning them — all on record. I could not say to her — Hush! They hear you — too late.
What I did not know was if all this was a punishment of me, or one more means to snap the threads of reason, or just an experiment, random. Who knows.
The transfer into the time-frame always took place during a Shift, though the return out of the frame was managed when the Shift had passed. I assumed the power expelled in performing the Shift was also harnessed to facilitate entry into the frame. But this meant little to me, I’m no mechanic. It simply became a habit, the rush of adrenalin, whenever the Star engorged. I would hurry to my room and wait for the conducting hoveror. Which did not, of course, always arrive. Then there would be disappointment, and relief.
It was after I saw her as a child that the wound sank in too deep to heal, and then, at once, the time-traveling ended. And so it became a treat withheld, and one day I asked them to let me see her again. This only happened once. The request was not granted.
She was a blonde child, very fair. I suppose she had had some reason for re-molecularizing the color of her hair, and leaving it so, and never mentioning it. I’d never learned, till now. The blonde child danced on the edge of a beach of yellow sand, practicing her dancer’s exercises, with only the wide sea behind her. I forgot, and called aloud to her. She seemed almost to turn at my voice, as if she caught some echo of it. I recalled she had said to me, the first night we were together, that she seemed to know me, and asked if we had met before, but that was the common theme of a girl in love, and she was in love with me. At the end of our first and only full year as a couple, on the eve of the Lion Square March, when they brought in the soldiers and three thousand people were shot down around the memorial, along the boulevard, and in the parks, Merah had believed she might be pregnant. She was very concerned. We had no legal tie, and it would, given our unhelpful political stance, be unlikely a marriage license might be granted us. This would mean a compulsory termination. She wept that night. Next day, early, we heard the sound of machine guns and ice-cannon. We had meant to be part of that march. But it had been pre-emptive, all of it, and by eight o’clock it was over. We forgot about the phantom child. A week later, when the last of the casualties were still dying, she told me she had made a mistake. With the memory of those corpses thick as snow on the streets, it hadn’t seemed to be so important any more, one problematical butchered fetus. Perhaps it had been real but died in her, hearing the noises of murder from the city through her ears. No, romance has no place in this statement.
But the child who was Merah was also like this unborn and perhaps never physically-conceived child. It was fair, as I am, but it was Merah’s image, as her daughter must have been.
I didn’t ask them to let me look at her again in order to see the child she was, or any specific portion of her life, before or during the time she was with me. It wasn’t even love, though I did love her, perhaps, and now I do love her because she is the cypher for the sweet agony of exile, and the theft of the Earth. Oh God, I suppose she was my numbered page. A–record. The anchor. A sign I had once lived.
My request was not granted, who could ever have thought it would be? (I note, too, that I am almost sure I’ve never relived any of those times during which I was placed in the frame, never relived any of those seeings of Merah. Which confirms my idea that the machines have some control of our wanderings, though we ourselves have none.) They knew, from my asking, that they had succeeded. I had been broken open. One little piece of my mind had joined my mindless racing heart, and was lost to me, out of my jurisdiction. Therefore theirs, to be used against me as they wished.
There is no surprise to you, that I saw Merah, or anything, in their past. Many millions of you have seen the transmitted stills and moving videos, the Historicals that have absorbed your TV screens for years. Time, as a manifesto, has been open to the authorities most of my life. As for the masses — opium? The great extravaganzas of past events, replayed, for educational purposes, but basically for entertainment. And the initial disappointment was long forgotten, that time might be viewed, even experienced with certain senses additional to that of sight — but not sentiently journeyed through, not lived in. For the past has happened and is over. It leaves only its multi-dimensional print upon the molecular structure of everything that persists. We can receive and develop the print, and gaze on every aspect and facet of the human condition since first we crawled out from the primeval seas. But we can never mingle with the crowd, touch it, talk to it — we can never change a thing.
That was why I had thought they would put me back into the time-frame — for that too is tenable, given the complex equipment only available to government — bitterly to enter, though not to co-exist, or in any way to influence my former self. I visualized rambling along beside this me, through my — his — last fatal months on earth before my (his) arrest. Watching him at the meetings, in the marches, seeing as a third person the contact made with the other, the package of documents, the reading of them, the final going to ground to complete my writing…with perhaps the knowledge of Merah asleep in the next room, with her black hair spread over the pillows. See myself making all my mistakes again, unable to step inside, to say — They’re after you. Throw down the pen and run.
But they chose the better way. There are no fools in their ranks.
Clever men and clever women, all.
But, to return to this overview of time. We accept, then, that the past has been, and has left its evidence. What of the future? A contradiction. There can be no excursion into the future. While the past has come and gone, the future has yet to be. And so, for the meddlers, no future has evolved for them to meddle with, it is not yet there — a blank page to be written on. All the time paradoxes are dismissed.
But, although there is no future as such, there is a place — a state, a dimension — a somewhere — that fills the void in front of us, just as the past fills up the gap at our backs.
And here, in that condition which is not, but will be the future of the Earth, here — are we. The prisoners. The dissidents. The revolutionaries. Trapped within the black crystal under that one dull Star.
The existence of this place was concealed, for sound political reasons, and naturally for the good of the people.
I found out.
As I’ve said, some documents were leaked — we learned that they had discovered such a place, explored its potential — a place ahead of time, in which, therefore, time did not exist. Where, therefore, time could be invented, and by means of the invention, become so tangled, so raveled, that they saw at once a use for it. And they were already using it. What better? Out of everybody’s way, these trouble-makers, safe on that futureless future plain…and something more.
For three-quarters of a century, the world conventions of human rights have held back the strong correcting arm of government. All known forms of coercion have been outlawed, and no one wishes, any more, to stand beyond the human pale forever. But here, in the new situation, a new solution. The future state which was not future but limbo, giving rise as it does to extraordinary anomalies of time and the fact of existence inside time, or un-time — take it as it is and harness it. Not as a torture — for who wishes to torture anyone, or to unhinge minds, or to wipe bare the surface of intellects? — but as a simple corrective. And the tables of rights, drawn up before this thing was happened on, have no proviso for it. While those in on the secret debate amendments and vote this in and that out, we stand in the dark, and they — they play with us. No, not in any savage animal way, but kindly and clinically, the clever men and the clever women.
We have every comfort, don’t we? The most lenient prison system of Earth is no match for our charming quarters with their pleasant colors, clean bathrooms and hygienic air, the firm beds and good food and wine, the foolproof medicine, the books and games, the gentle caring of the machines.
But time, which is straightforward elsewhere, is never so, here. Here, one may travel in the future — as much, or more, than twenty Earth years — Dorf told me once this had happened to him. He found himself there, up ahead, inside a self old and young at the same minute. Accordingly, he knows now he will be here that long, at least. Generally, the time movement seems to come after slumber, unconsciousness casting us free to drift — you fall asleep at point one, and wake at point twenty-one. Or vice versa. But Choski also told me once he moved backward, to the day he beat me three times in a row at chess, living it again, though the result slightly altering, and this took place after the lightest doze.
So we meander up and down the scale. Our future, and our past in this region, both equally accessible to us. Yesterday may come tomorrow, and tomorrow may be now, today. Today itself will come again,
very very likely. And for each of us in this near-black zone of random hell, flitting like winged insects to and fro, each has his own path, intercepting others, missing them, refinding them again. Only the machines keep track of us, by a complicated math no man will ever fathom, I am sure.
They keep it hidden, this place. Did you ever hear of it? Now you do, because I tell you. Here, locked in the thrust and weave of five hundred time-streams, waves breaking upon blank shores, bursting up and sinking down into the midnight ocean.
I can’t prove it to you; I am only here. With Edvey, who keeps his books of numbered pages where tomorrow he may write one again, and be incoherently aware of it. Or he may write seven thousand and go again, or for the first, to find the wires or the hanging line he spoke of. And with Wyld, who is already ceasing to be conscious of it, collapsing, reminding me of the senility of a very old man, this boy of twenty-three who led the Lion Square March with flames in his eyes. And with myself, holding like a sponge my thoughts of Merah. Two pasts, hers, and my own. And my future, into which, so far, I haven’t delved very deeply — just a year or so. I saw an Edvey there who had tried, unsuccessfully, to electrocute himself; he lay in the sick-bay, tenderly cared for. And I saw my own footprints on the black land outside, where I had walked for miles, six, six thousand, a million and six, trying always, like some dying dog, to get round full circle and come home. I, who have no home any longer.
I often walk out there, or will walk, or am walking. I pass my own shadows, unseen, in those almost hills and nearly valleys. Round and round. Unable to be lost. Every direction leads you back. The land not quite begun, waiting. Waiting to rise up in the geography of an Earth that has yet to mold it, the future. Beneath one star, which is — what else — the sun, the only light great enough to cast forward some visible show, yet dull and feeble and small. Until just before the Shift, when suddenly Earth’s present starts to catch up. The avalanche of light erupts in the sky, and the sun swells and begins to bloom like a fearsome flower. They are coming, coming to trample us down, all the ones we have betrayed by our capture and captivity. The present our actions have formed, those miles away in our past.
