“Any bets?” I asked.
“Loser buys at T-Bell? I say they'll come.”
Suddenly the air by a late-model Honda began to crackle and fluoresce. A middle-aged duo clicked into focus, promptly waving at the newlyweds. A collectively held breath exhaled in unison. The couple waved back, and everyone cheered. From across the street, we joined in. Let's hear it for lasting martial bliss.
And then, just as suddenly, the old pair's thirty seconds were up, they clicked out—and here came more travelers. The cheery offspring. Five of them, ranging in age from near-teen to must-have-been-pregnant-on-the-big-day. The crowd went wild.
“Hot damn,” I said. More life-affirming than an entire week of Nick at Nite.
“So, will you?”
“On Halloween I was a vampire in black velvet and red satin.”
“Works for me,” said Gar.
So we shook on it, and headed to T-Bell.
“You know how the lights go weird right before the dumdums show?”
When time travelers first started showing up they were called phantoms. When scientists figured out what they were, the media called them time tourists, or nostalginauts. We stuck with phantom, pronounced phan-dumb, and finally just dumdums.
I mean, what a phenomenally stupid invention. Time travel that only takes you twenty-five years into the past, lasts half a minute, and you're insubstantial too. It makes a quest for rubber beverage containers look intelligent. Eyelash massagers. Trampoline deodorizers. Computer ventriloquists.
“But it is important,” Gar kept saying. “It means Time is quantized. So what if the first level is trivial…. Maybe you can visit longer levels.”
“Then we'd have boring visitors from the far future, not just people with anniversaries and reunions.”
“Maybe guys from further out dress so they won't scare us or give anything away. Or the future scientists could be viewing, oh, australopithecines or trilobites or the big asteroid crash. But it means We Understand Time. Unified Theory of Everything.”
I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling. Gar has a lot of emotion invested in time travel. He's convinced he's going to invent it. That's okay with me. He'll need something to keep him busy next fall when he's at MIT and doesn't have his geeky pals from the Chess Club to keep him real. (And no, we don't play chess. We call it that to scare away stupid people. It works.)
A couple of classmates of the Neanderthal persuasion stopped by our table. “Hey dorks, drowning your sorrows' cause you don't have prom dates?”
“No,” I said. “We're drowning our sorrows because it's lonely being the only ones in town with active synaptic potentials.”
“Oooh, big words. I'm sooo scared!”
The bigger one tore open a couple of hot sauce packets and smeared them on my softaco. Ha ha.
I caught the moron's eye, grinned, grabbed half a dozen more packets, added them on, and took a nice happy bite.
The Neanderthals turned pale and left.
“I can't believe it,” Gar said. “They're scared of spicy food!”
Good thing I hang on the weird Cuisine SIG. And it's why I have to leave town. I want to find out if Thai restau-rants really do exist in nature. But I went back to the problem at hand.
“So why are you set on the senior prom, Gar? It's not like you've ever been to a game or bought a yearbook or anything.”
“Last week, something weird happened. I was in my room thinking about Time, and how the lights before the dumdums come are kind of like when I put my metal-rimmed Pinky and the Brain mug in the microwave, and my jaw was hanging open really stupid…and I realized there was someone else in my room. A dumdum.”
“Wrong address?”
He shook his head. “He was looking at me, and smiling.” He shuddered. Our crowd wasn't used to real smiles.
He was right. If true, it was most definitely weird.
“Maybe you were about to be murdered?”
“Yeah, of course, that's it. And now I'm dead.”
Because that's the only non-nostalgia use for time travel so far—checking out unsolved crimes. Deterrent value is zero. Face it. If a dumdum shows up while you're busy ventilating a little old lady with an icepick, you don't say, Whoa, I'm caught. You say Cool, I got away with it for twenty-five years! Which to your average criminal and your average teenager is like forever.
“Okay, let's go with this as your grand moment of revelation. Kekule and the snake. Newton and the fig.”
I wasn't going to let Gar's ego get any bigger. So his IQ was bigger than the gross national product of Chechnya. He was still a dateless nerd. A laughingstock. A loser whose best friends were so socially inept they could really only talk to him via modem. And of course me, the rebel without a Santa Claus. The girl for whom the guidance counselors had made up a stamp that said bad attitude.
“You going to remember your old friends when you've got a Nobel prize in every room?”
And then something happened. The air fluoresced and a dumdum appeared at the next table. And stared at us, staring back, for the longest thirty seconds of my life, before disappearing again.
“Wow,” I said. “Maybe I should save the hot sauce wrappers. They may be worth something someday.”
Mom was in the kitchen doing her June Cleaver thing. “Hey Mom!” I yelled, plopping down in front of the TV and going right to Home Shopping so I could make fun of the boomer collectibles. Eighty bucks for a model of a bicycle. “Hey Mom, can I go to the prom tomorrow night?”
I was sort of permanently grounded since I called the principal a neototalitarian babbitoid. I would have been expelled too, but someone finally explained it to him and it just wasn't bad enough.
A fossilized survivor of the Partridge Family was shilling vinyl souvenirs. Makes you proud to be American.
“The prom?”
I jumped. Mom was right behind me. She'd run out from the kitchen, hands still covered in flour, and was wide-eyed like she was going to cry.
“The prom,” I said. “It's not like Lassie just came home.”
She started nervously wiping her hands on her apron. “We'll run out right now and get your hair done and a dress and…”
“Hey, it's just Gar, and I'll wear my black dress.”
Her face fell. I almost felt bad. I hadn't realized the way the word prom would hit her. Stimulus response. For one microsecond I was a normal daughter, wanting the normal world of dresses and boys and family, not a changeling who wanted to go to film school and raise tattoos.
They really did get my blood tested once. They were that convinced I'd been switched in the nursery.
“So can I go?”
She sighed. “Go. Do what you want. Remember, there are only seventy-two Family Shaming Days before you go away to college.”
“Thanks, Mom. When you make a joke like that, I almost believe we're related.”
She flinched, started back to the kitchen, then turned.
“You know what I hope?” she said. “I hope you show up at the prom—your future self, I mean—and I hope you tell yourself what a mess you're going to make of your life. I hope to God you straighten out.”
And then I shuddered. Because I thought of all those old farts at their twenty-fifth reunion, coming back en masse to look at the glory days of the prom—anyone who wasn't dead or broke or a total reject—and I didn't want it. I didn't want to be one of the jerks smiling and waving and holding snapshots of big families and big families and big cars and big houses.
“I wouldn't do that,” I muttered. “I wouldn't do anything so—so ordinary.”
On the other hand, if I did feel like I had to revisit my prom, maybe I'd be cool enough to do it dressed entirely in vinyl Partridge Family souvenirs.
No corsage, but he brought me a red carnation that went with my color scheme. We started out at the Chess Club alternate prom party. Eight people, seven computers, a lot of Doritos, and two bottles of Annie Green Springs.
“God, you both look great,” said
Net Girl. “I love the tux. You two could be Fred and Ginger.”
“Yeah, the Transylvanian dance team,” said Jean-Luc. “Make it so.” Poor guy had three strikes against him: he was brilliant, he was going bald at seventeen, and he liked to write philosophical essays in Klingon. But there was something in his eyes I wasn't accustomed to…
Great. I was now the sex goddess of the pathetic loser crowd.
“We'll be back after the dance,” said Gar. “Assuming we're not hospitalized or murdered or anything.”
Then we gritted our collective dentition and drove to the school gym. “I couldn't believe it when I heard you were coming,” said Mrs. Trout, my homeroom teacher. She hated my guts. It was mutual. “I should have known you'd pull something like this.”
“It's my best dress, ma'am,” I said.
We didn't dance. I don't know how, and Gar looked dangerous to my podiatric integrity. So we stood by the wall, occasionally shouted something sarcastic at each other over the din, and were bored to tears.
Until the dumdums started to appear. You can get a lot of mileage watching eighteen-year-olds confront their forty-three-year-old selves. Like they never realized they'd get that old. And the dumdums thinking they still looked buff or cool, not realizing they were just ancient. Embarrassing.
Most of them were holding little signs or pictures of all the detritus they'd accumulated. The pictures of families, mansions, and what we could only assume were expensive cars.
I made a gagging sound. I couldn't imagine anything worse than knowing where you were going to live, how many kids you'd have. It would be like trying to read an Agatha Christie when you've already snuck a look at the last chapter.
Gar kept looking around. I guess he thought he'd show up with his Nobel around his neck. Maybe a physics groupie on each arm. It could happen. Sooner or later he'd have to grow into his face.
The class president stood at the mike and tapped it until everyone quieted down. He'd just seen his own red-nosed future self holding pictures of a car dealership and what was either a second wife or a very inappropriately clad daughter. He was primed.
The pitiful country band quieted down. Fine with me. You ever heard redneck rap?
“Now it's time announce the Prom King and Queen…”
And he named us.
“Oh hell,” I said. I didn't like the sound of this.
We found ourselves being pushed up to the stage. The president and my homeroom teacher pulled us up. “Your future self hasn't appeared yet, has she?” she sneered. Obviously meaning: because you couldn't afford it, or you died of a drug overdose in a gutter, or you're embarrassed by your lack of success.
“Hell no,” I said. “Think I'd want to relive this boring and now humiliating piece of shit night?”
“Detention until the end of school for swearing, dear,” she hissed.
The class president stuck crowns on our heads, ducked back quickly, and then the pies started to fly. But I'd been alerted, and dove behind Miss Trout, pushing her into the line of fire. Detention, hell—now it would be suspension.
Poor Gar wiped banana cream from his glasses—the idiots didn't know you were supposed to use shaving cream—and staggered to the microphone.
“You are all…infantile,” he said. His voice was cracking, but it got stronger as he went. I stepped forward to put a hand on his shoulder. I felt kind of bad I hadn't had time to warn him.
“You're all unoriginal, boring, hopelessly conventional bourgeoisie.”
“Yeah!” a Neanderthal shouted, and the football team whooped. They weren't sure what it meant, but if the four-eyed technonerd was against it, they were for it.
“And it's really all just jealousy. Because I'm leaving this hick town and you'll all stay, just live and die here and no one will ever remember you. But I'm going to be important….”
“America's Most Wanted Dork!”
“Good one,” I shouted. “Who writes your jokes, Flipper?”
“I'm going to contribute to human knowledge, and you'll just contribute to…to your own IRAs.”
Gar never thought well on the fly. I should have anticipated the need for a retribution speech.
“And you'll only be remembered as the assholes who made fun of me, like the ones who laughed at Darwin and suppressed Galileo….”
And that's when it got weirder, as everyone realized that attendance in the room had doubled. There were future people everywhere, looking around, recording, remembering. And all the dumdums were focused on Gar, except when they were sneering at the other prom-goers.
It was too funny. I couldn't stop laughing. They'd been trying to make fun of us and now they would be famous as the Village of Short-sighted Idiots. Spending the rest of their lives as the laughingstocks of history, trying to live it down. And in the process, no doubt, becoming even more militantly shortsighted and closeminded.
I loved it. Even as I pitied the next generation in this crappy town.
And yeah, I even caught sight of Grownup Gar the Tenured Professor. He did grow into his face, and there are Nobel Groupies.
I stumbled away out of the crowd. My own cozy footnote in history assured, maybe, as Gar's vampira prom date. But he didn't need me now. He was basking in the attention of the future's intelligentsia, and the air that was thick with I Told You So.
I walked out into the parking lot, breathing in the relatively fresh air, and leaned against the wall. I'd probably have to bum a ride to the Chess Club party, or walk. I had a feeling Gar was about to go home and pound out a theory of time. Excuse me, Time.
Something crackled out of the corner of my eye, and I found myself looking into my own eyes. Crow's feet, middleaged spread, and it seemed I was apparently doomed to another quarter century of bad hair days and no fashion sense.
But I still had my patented sardonic grin, as my future self flashed up something white.
“Not pictures,” I moaned.
No. It was an index card. My handwriting didn't seem to have improved either. I'd scrawled, “IT HASN'T BEEN DULL.”
I shrugged at me and disappeared.
It hasn't been dull.
Cool. I can live with that.
Guest Law
JOHN C. WRIGHT
John C. Wright is a new writer with a future, judging by this story. He trained in law, but dropped out of the workforce to write, and has sold a few stories only to Asimov's, while working on novels not yet published. This story struck me as strong, individual, and unusual right away. It has some of the submerged just anger of Cordwainer Smith, and some of his poetics. It also has some of the feel of Donald M. Kingsbury's fiction, just a bit wonderfully inhuman in its future. It has a bit of the feel of cyberspace. But primarily it has the feel of traditional SF, of great issues raised by titanic beings in the distant future, against a backdrop of uncountable stars. All in all it is the work of a strong new talent.
The night of deep space is endless and empty and dark. There is nothing behind which to hide. But ships can be silent, if they are slow.
The noble ship Procrustes was silent as a ghost. She was black-hulled, and ran without beacons or lights. She was made of anti-radar alloys and smooth ceramics, shark-finned with panels meant to diffuse waste-heat slowly, and tigerstriped with electronic webs meant to guide certain frequencies around the hull without rebounding.
If she ever were seen, a glance would show that she was meant to be slow. Her drive was fitted with baffle upon baffle, cooling the exhaust before it was expelled, a dark drive, non-radioactive, silent as sprayed mist. Low energy in the drive implied low thrust. Further, she had no centrifuge section, nor did she spin. This meant that her crew were lightweights, their blood and bones degenerated or adapted to microgravity, not the sort who could tolerate high boosts.
This did not mean Procrustes was not a noble ship. Warships can be slow; only their missiles need speed.
And so it was silently, slowly, that Procrustes approached the stranger's cold vessel.
&nb
sp; “We are gathered, my gentleman, to debate whether this new ship here viewed is noble, or whether she is unarmed; and, if so, whether and how the guest law applies. It pleases us to hear you employ the second level of speech; for this is a semiinformal occasion, and briefer honorifics we permit.”
The captain, as beautiful and terrifying as something from a children's Earth-story, floated nude before the viewing well. The bridge was a cylinder of gloom, with only control-lights winking like constellations, the viewing well shining like a full moon.
The captain made a gesture with her fan toward Smith and spoke: “Engineer, you do filth-work…” (by which she meant manual labor) “…which makes you familiar with machines.” (She used the term “familiar” because it simply was not done to say a lowlife had “knowledge” or “expertise.”) “It would amuse us to hear your conclusions touching and concerning the stranger's ship.”
Smith was never allowed high and fore to the bridge, except when he was compelled to go, as he was now. His hands had been turned off at the wrists, since lowlifes should not touch controls.
Smith was in terror of the captain, but loved her too, since she was the only highlife who called smiths by their old title. The captain was always polite, even to tinkers or drifters or bondsman.
She had not even seemed to notice when Smith had hooked one elbow around one of the many guy-wires that webbed the dark long cylinder of the bridge. Some of the officers and knights who floated near the captain had turned away or snorted with disgust when he had clasped that rope. It was a foot-rope, meant for toes, not a hand rope. But Smith's toes were not well formed, not coordinated. He had not been born a lightweight.
Smith was as drab as a hairless monkey next to the captain's vavasors and carls, splendid in their head-to-toe tattoos which displayed heraldries and victory-emblems. These nobles all kept their heads pointed along the captain's axis (an old saying ran: “the captain's head is always up!”), whereas Smith was offset 90 degrees clockwise, legs straight, presenting a broad target. (This he did for the same reason a man under acceleration would bow or kneel; a posture where one could not move well to defend oneself showed submission.)
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