Launch Pad

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Diana asked me a question then, something about the deeper manifestations of this ailment, and I prattled on about how easy it was to recognize the problem, but no one was getting it cured because it was chronolous to declare the inside of your head sacrosanct—if you were of high enough status to make it stick. I’m not sure of what I said, as most of my attention was on three sets of approaching footsteps I was attempting to analyze without alarming Diana. In step, but not in the rhythm of soldiers—a slightly slower, swaggering step. Three young dandies out for an evening’s entertainment, no doubt.

  They rounded the corner and appeared under the light. They were well dressed, indeed foppishly dressed, and carrying swords—so they were gentlemen of this time. Or at least they were sons of gentlemen.

  “What say?” the first one said, seeing us. “Say what?” the second demanded.

  “What?” asked the third. “What ho!” he amended, strutting toward us. “What have we here? A lissome lass, begad! And unescorted.”

  “Madam,” the first said, “my lady, ma’am. Chivalry is not dead! We shall prove this.”

  Diana looked puzzled, but completely unafraid. I don’t know how I looked—I felt weak. “Get behind me,” I instructed her.

  “Yes, indeed,” the third amplified, “we shall chivalrously rescue you from that old man there, who’s clearly attempting to have his way with you.”

  “We shall,” the second added, “expect a suitable reward.”

  “Is this some game?” Diana asked me.

  “No,” I told her. “These lads are going to try to kill me. If they succeed they’ll kill you, too—eventually.”

  The first drew his sword. I twisted the handle of my stick until I felt it click. We were now about even—three swords against one sword-stick with a narcospray tip. Anyone within one meter of the front of the tip would fall inanimate ten seconds after he was hit—and I should be able to keep even three of them away for ten seconds.

  “These are truly enemies?” Diana asked me, staring up into my eyes. There was an undercurrent of excitement in her expression.

  “Yes,” I said briefly. “But don’t worry. Just stay—”

  “I trust you,” she said, nodding as though she had just made a prime decision. “Enemies!” Then she was in motion.

  She dived forward onto her shoulder and pushed off as she rolled, catching the first one on the chin with the heel of her boot. He flew backward and came to a skidding stop on his back across the street. The second was just starting to react when she slammed him across the side of his head with her forearm. He slid slowly to the ground, folding in the middle as he dropped.

  The third was aware of his danger, although he had no clear idea of what this whirlwind was. His sword was up and he was facing her. I managed one step toward them when, with a small cry of joy, she was past his guard and had fastened both of her hands around his throat. She must have known just where to press with her small fingers, because he didn’t struggle, didn’t even gasp—he just crumpled. She went down with him, keeping her grip. Her eyes were alive with excitement and she was grinning. She had, somehow, not the look of a person who has vanquished a foe, but more that of a terrier who has cornered a rat.

  “All right,” I said, going over and pulling her off. “It’s all right, it’s all over.”

  She looked up, small and sweet and innocent, except for a rip in the right sleeve of her dress. “He’s still alive, this one.”

  “No!” I yelled, when I saw her hands tighten around his throat.

  She stared at me. “The other two, they are dead.”

  “Leave him,” I instructed.

  “Yes.” She stood up, sounding disappointed.

  I took her hand and led her away. I began to tremble slightly—a touch of aftershock. Diana was calm and gentle. I had no empathy for the three ruffians—they had danced to their own tune—but I worried about Diana. No—I think rather she frightened me. I was not concerned with the ease with which she dispatched—body combat ballet is not new to me. I worried rather about the joy with which she destroyed.

  I remembered to disarm the stick, so as not to shoot myself in the foot. “Diana,” I said, picking my words not to offend, “I admire the way you handled those men. It shows great skill and training. But when a man is down—more particularly when he is unconscious—you don’t have to kill him.”

  “But he was an enemy. You said so.”

  Semantic problem—or something more?

  “Christopher?” We stopped at the innyard and she stared up at me, her eyes wide.

  “Yes?” Tears were forming in the corners of her eyes and she was shaking. Delayed reaction? I held her and stroked her long hair.

  “Those men wanted to hurt us. It wasn’t a secondary thing, like wanting to take our money and hurting us if we resisted. They just wanted to hurt us.”

  “True.”

  “Why would anyone behave like that?”

  It wasn’t the fight that had her upset, but the morals of her opponents. “You killed two of them and were working on the third,” I reminded her.

  “But that was their doing. You said they were enemies. They declared status, not I. They attacked unprovoked. And I had your word.”

  “Right,” I said, deciding to watch my words around this girl who took my definitions so literally and acted on them with such finality. “Well, they behaved that way because they’ve been taught to think it’s fun.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” I agreed.

  We retired to our separate rooms and I spent some time studying the cracks in the ceiling in an effort to think before I fell asleep.

  Diana and I spent the next ten days together in Shakespere’s London. Diana was delighted by everything and I was delighted by her. We grew closer together in that indefinable way men and women grow closer together, with neither of us mentioning it but both of us quite aware. She questioned me incessantly about everything, but gave little detail in return. I learned she had no family and grew up in a special school run by Earth government. I learned how beautiful she was, inside and out, in motion and in stillness.

  After the first week we shared the same room. Luckily Seventeen was a time that allowed of such a change. The innkeeper persisted in winking at me whenever he could until I felt I had earned that dinner, but we suffered no other hardship for our affection.

  Then one day over breakfast we decided to abandon the Seventeenth century. I voted for the Twentieth, and Diana ayed, although she knew little of it. “Those are the breakthrough years, aren’t they?” she asked. “First flights to the nearer planets!”

  I munched on a bacon stick. “Out of the cradle and into the nursery,” I said. “And the babes yelling, `No, no, I don’t want to walk—haven’t learned to crawl properly yet.’ As though that skill were going to be of value to them in the future. Interesting times. As in the ancient curse.”

  “Curse?” Diana asked, wide-eyed as a child.

  I nodded. “May your children live in interesting times,” I said. “Chinese.”

  “Not much of a curse,” Diana insisted. “Where are the mummies’ hearts and the vampires and such?”

  “Now that would be interesting,” I said. After breakfast I pushed the call for Anno Domini and they removed us in a coach. They declothed us and reclothed us and backgrounded us and thrust us into an aeroplane.

  III

  This dubious contrivance, all shiny and silver and with two whole piston engines—to keep us going forward so we wouldn’t fall down—flew us to LaGuardia Field outside New York City. The field, like the aeroplane, was sleek and shiny and new and modern. Everything was modern—it was in the air. The modern taxi drove us to the modern city with its modern skyscrapers muraled with the most modern art. The year was 1938 and nothing could go wrong.

  We checked into the Plaza and took a tenth-floor suite overlooking Central Park. It was evening and the park lights, glowing over the paths, roads, field
s, rocks, ponds, streams, lakes and other structured wildnesses, turned it into a rectangular fairyland. The skyline surrounding the park was civilization surrounding and oppressing imagination, keeping it behind high walls and ordering its ways. This is known as interpretive sightseeing.

  Diana had a lot of things she wanted to do. She wanted to see a play and a movie and a zoo and an ocean liner and a war and a soap opera and a rocket leaving for the moon.

  “Everything but the rocket,” I told her. “Your timing’s off by about thirty years. They haven’t even designed the machines to build the machines to build the rocket yet.”

  We compromised on a visit to the top of the Empire State Building, the closest thing to a trip to the moon that 1938 New York could provide.

  “This is all real, isn’t it?” Diana asked as we wandered around the guard rail, peering at Bronx tenements and Jersey slums.

  “In a sense,” I said.

  “I mean the buildings are buildings, not sets, and the streets are streets and the river is a river and the ships are ships.”

  “And the people are people,” I agreed. “The original had ten million, I believe. One of the three largest cities of the time. That’s a lot of people to stuff into a small area and move around by automobile and subway.”

  She nodded. “How many people are here now—residents, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I doubt if they have the full original millions.”

  “Still,” she said seriously, “it would be fair to say that there are a great many.”

  “That would be fair,” I agreed.

  “Why are they here?”

  “It’s getting chilly,” I said, buttoning the two top buttons on my coat. “Let’s go eat dinner.”

  “How can we justify bilking so many people out of their lives—out of whatever value their lives might have—by making them live in an artificial past?”

  “How do their lives have any less value here than in realtime?” I asked in my best Socratic manner.

  “Suppose you were an inventor,” Diana hypothesized. “How would you feel to discover that you had reinvented the wheel, or the typer, or the bloaterjet?”

  “I’d never know it was a reinvention,” I said.

  “But it would be. And you would have been cheated out of whatever good and new and beautiful you could have invented in realtime.”

  “I doubt Anno Domini encourages invention,” I said.

  “Worse! Where shall we eat dinner?”

  We took a Domino cab uptown to the Central Park Casino, to where Glenn Miller and his band were providing the dinner music. The music must have soothed Diana, since we got through the rib roast and into the crepes suzette before the sociology seminar continued.

  “What about people like Glenn Miller here—or Shakespere—who were real people in history? Are they actors?”

  “No, they’re mindplants. Each of them has the personality and ability of the character he becomes, to the best of our ability to re-create it.”

  Diana sat silent for a minute, considering, her mouth puckered into a tight line and her eyebrows pulled down in concentration. She stared at her spoon. Then she picked it up and waved it at me. “That’s disgusting. You don’t merely cheat them out of the future—you cheat them out of their very lives.”

  It was my turn to be silent. I was silent through String of Pearls and Goldberg’s Blues. Diana watched me as though expecting momently to see wisdom fall from my lips, or possibly smoke rise from my ears. I found myself uncomfortably defending policies I had never really thought about before. I tried to think it out, but was distracted by Diana’s stare. I felt that I had to look as if I were thinking and it’s very hard to work at looking the part and think at the same time.

  “I would say it’s more productive rather than less,” I said when I had the idea sorted out. “You know our Shakespere has added several plays to the list that the original never got around to writing. Saint Joan and Loves Labours Won, and Elizabeth the First and, I think, Timon of Athens—those are his. We haven’t cheated him. Both he and humanity have benefited from this arrangement.”

  “It’s not an arrangement,” Diana stated positively. “It’s a manipulation. It takes two to make an arrangement. Let’s dance.”

  O O O

  There is something deeply satisfying about two bodies pressed together and moving together. The waltz and the foxtrot are more purely sexual than either the stately minuet before them or the frenzied hump after. We glided about the floor, letting our bodies work at becoming one.

  “Christopher,” Diana said.

  “Hm?”

  “I’m glad we’ve become friends.”

  “More than friends!”

  “That, too,” she said, squeezing against me. “But friends is something else. I think you’re my only friend.”

  “I hope you exaggerate,” I said. “That’s very sad.”

  We danced silently for a moment. Then Diana stopped and pulled me back to our table. We sat down. “This is a major thing, isn’t it?”

  “Friendship?”

  “No. Anno Domini and this whole re-creation. How many different historical times are there?”

  “You’re so beautiful and so serious and so young,” I said. “And so intent—and so knowledgeable in some fields and so ignorant in others. Whoever brought you up had strange educational values.”

  “I told you I don’t like talking about that,” she said. Her expression could best be described as petulant.

  “It requires no conversation,” I told her. “Fifty.”

  “Fifty historical periods?” she said, instantly picking up the thread. One of the things I admired, that ability. “But there aren’t that many centuries!”

  “Many are covered with more than one set. The really popular ones are started every twenty-five years. All have one, at least. There may be some centuries that appeal not at all to you, but someone has a need for them.”

  “What sort of need? Why that word?”

  “Ah! Now we speak of purpose: what you asked me before. The past is Earth’s only industry. Its function is to hold together the more than two hundred diverse human cultures, spread out on close to a thousand planets, circling as many suns. Tens of thousands of people from all these planets, all these new directions for humankind, are here at any one time, sharing the one thing they all have in common: the past.

  “This maintains Earth’s preeminence in the councils of man and presumably bolsters her prominence in the Parliament of Stars. But more important: it provides a living point of origin for the human race.

  “The psychologists decided over four hundred years ago, at the time of the Mabden Annihilation, that this was the best—perhaps the only—way to hold us together. Those of us who weren’t already too far out. There are external threats still, you know.”

  “I know,” Diana said dryly. “You mentioned the fear syndrome earlier in this connection.”

  “It should be taken seriously,” I insisted. “Here on Earth you feel secure, but it’s only because you’re so far away from the action. The Denzii—”

  “I take it very seriously,” Diana assured me. “So seriously that I’d prefer not to talk about it even now.”

  “Yes. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “Frighten?” Diana smiled gently. “No, you don’t do that. Tell me, what else is there to do in this year, in this town?”

  We took the subway to the Battery and walked quietly on the grass around the Aquarium, which was closed and shuttered for the night. Then we took the ferry over to Staten Island and stood in the open on the top deck, letting the cold brinewind flap our coats and sting our cheeks. We waved to the Statue of Liberty and she smiled at us—or perhaps it was a trick of the light. I had my coat wrapped around Diana and she huddled against my chest and I felt young and bold and ready to explore uncharted worlds. We talked of minor things and we shared a cup of coffee, black and four sugars, and I think, perhaps, realized fully
that we were in love. The next day we went to the Bronx Zoo in the morning, came back to Manhattan in early afternoon for a matinee of Our Town and then returned to the hotel to dress. A man was waiting in the sitting room of our suite. He was standing.

  “Why, Kroner,” Diana said, “how delightful to see you. And how silly you look in those clothes here.” Thus she effectively suppressed the Who are you and what are you doing in my room? that I had been about to contribute to the occasion. Kroner was a short man with too much hair on his head. He wore a onesuit that squeezed around his stocky, overly muscled body. The weightlifter is a physical type I have always disliked. I didn’t recognize the Identification and Position badge he wore, except that it was medium-high status and something to do with education.

  “Who is he?”

  “Kroner,” Diana said. “My professor—or one of. And this is Christopher Mar.” “Delighted.” clearly he lied.

  “Surprised,” I said. We touched hands. “To what do we owe this visit and what may we do for you? Any professor of Diana’s—” I waved a hand vaguely. The current trend toward the vague can be very useful in conversation.

  “I suppose you know what you’re doing?” Kroner asked coldly.

  “I have no idea of what that means,” I told him. “At which of us are you sneering?”

  “Both of you, I suppose,” Kroner said. He sighed and sat down on the sofa. “You’re right, I was being hostile. And there’s no reason. You’re a very important man, Senior Senator Mar—there’s no way I can threaten you. And Grecia knows I’m only interested in protecting and helping her. When she disappeared from Seventeen without notifying us—”

  “Who?” I interrupted.

  “Grecia. Your companion.”

  “Is that right?” I asked Diana (Grecia). She nodded.

  “Of course you have a perfect right—”

  “What does she call herself?” Kroner asked.

  “Diana Seven,” I said.

  Diana (Grecia) looked defiantly down at Kroner and remained silent.

  Kroner nodded thoughtfully. “Of course,” he said. “A clear choice. Then he doesn’t know? You haven’t told him?”