“You bet, Topsy girl,” I said. “Easy as pie.”
In my pocket I had one of the same things of what Topsy had, which they put there, and I took it out, and I looked at it, and I looked at what she did, and I did it. I punched the OUTPUT button, the blue one. Then I punched a red one and some other ones. Then I set the big thing to REDSHIFT: LOCAL SCALE FACTOR TIMES TWO, and then I fell down. Topsy helped me get up.
“You see, Elly?” she said. “We just changed the lay of the land.” The ground we were standing on looked like a mountain-side now. It was slanted real steep. Also, the dirigibles were way back behind us, almost out of sight.
“This is incredible,” I said to Siggy. I couldn’t see him—I had ice packs over my head and eyes, and even without them, I think I could only have seen the inside of the timeship. “They’ve got a machine that makes time look like a rock cliff in Utah. And then there’s another one that changes the scaling of the slope according to the redshift as you go back in time. It’s like different powers on a microscope, only…”
“Take it easy,” Siggy said. “Don’t talk, Eliot.”
“… Only, ‘YOU ARE THERE!’” I said.
“No,” he said, “you are there, Eliot. We’re trying to get you back.”
“What?” I said.
“We’re trying to get you back,” is what Mr. Duba said. I mean, I thought it was Mr. Duba, only Topsy says shush, that it isn’t Mr. Duba, because the dirigible people are trying to fool us so they can shoot us or stop us. They are Mr. Duba’s competitors, that bum Bull, see, who made all the extra helium so they could corner some markets, when Mr. Duba’s stock went sliding, and they did it by going back in their timeship to tinker near the ylem like what we’re gonna do, only ours is better.”
“Listen, Elly,” Topsy said, “we’ve got to hurry. Those helium boys are on our tails. Do what I do. Switch back to the old Doppler scaling. And make sure you don’t touch anything else unless I tell you. Then hold my hand and run like hell.”
We started in to do our buttons, but then Topsy said, “Wait! I have to show you this, Elly.” She showed me a round black ball, so black it almost looked like a hole in the palm of her hand. “If anything happens to me, Elly, and I don’t make it up the cliff, you take this off me, understand? You take it all the way up to where the redshift is ten billion, almost at the summit. That’s where the helium numbers got switched. Wedge it into a crack or lay it on a flake, then come back down. There’s no need for you to enter the ylem except for me.”
I said, “You’re not gonna die, Topsy.”
Then we did some more buttons, both of us the same. Everything flattened out, and I fell on my keester again, but I got up and reared up to run like hell. Topsy didn’t even have to tell me. What am I, stupid? Those big helium ships were all over the sky, and they were shooting hard things at us, like rivets or sixteen-penny nails. They made little cracks and explosions of salt all over the place like you wouldn’t want to step in or get in the way of, believe me. A guy could die like that.
* * *
“Take a memo,” Siggy said. The cigar smoke was making me dizzy again, and I thought I might have to run back to the bathroom to vomit.
“Don’t,” I said. “Please. Shh!” My eyes were covered with ice packed in washcloths, but I had the idea that they were a kind of visor that would give me a real image of the state of the universe to which some land feature corresponded in the hypostat Topsy and I were traversing via the timeship.
“Push that visor up and run, Elly,” Topsy was saying.
“I can’t,” I said. “My head hurts. I’m sick to my stomach.”
“Push it up,” she said. She was tugging at my hand. I had taken one stride before the visor had slid down and I had gotten mixed up on account of how I saw big lizards everywhere and the ground cracking and making oceans and stuff. “We’ve gone back a hundred and fifty million years, Elly. Just stay in the hypostat. Never mind the damned visor!”
“I don’t give a damn how you feel,” Siggy told me. “I want you to take a goddamn memo. Do you get it? Okay?”
“Sure, sure,” I said. Anything to calm that voice of his. It was pushing me over the edge; I didn’t want to throw up. “Sure, Mr. Duba.”
“Okay. No copies, understand? This goes to Bull and nobody else. Burn your notes. The usual precautions.…”
I thought, do “the usual precautions” include having me killed once the deal with Bull is set? I shifted the washcloths to get more ice directly over my temples.
“Okay. Dearest P period comma Nice trick you pulled exclamation point I wake up and guess what question mark The helium numbers are changed going back to God’s early childhood and guess who was there to cash in from time ex minus one couple of exclamation points What a burner on me comma huh question mark I gotta hand it to you period Overnight Duba is down a couple of hundred and the sky is clogged with dirigibles period Underline Your dirigibles period So you got back to the Big Bang exclamation point—No, wait, make it a comma; I don’t want it to look like I’m too impressed—and you worked over the nucleosynthesis comma well I got news for you comma hot shot period I’m going back there too comma I’m gonna change everything back and good comma and I don’t care if the chrono-anomalies make your head wind up sprouting from your crotch period My boys have got it figured out failsafe and you are not even gonna be history comma Bull comma my man period So how about let’s make a deal before my people hit the ylem comma what do you say question mark Otherwise comma that’s okay by me comma only you better get used to having piss up your nose period Affectionately et cetera. And get that off to Mr. Bull the day before yesterday—no, make it last Thursday. Use the executive time shuttle if you have to.”
I said, “Yes, Mr. Duba,” and I stumbled to the toilet to throw up.
* * *
I couldn’t help it because the visor kept flipping down by accident, and then I would see some stuff and I would almost fall except I made myself stay up, and I was getting plenty of bloody scratches from them spikes and rivets, even a bad one on the back of my neck where something stuck in there. Once, my foot slid a little on a pebble, and I looked down and so the lousy visor clacked over my eyes again, and when I watched that pebble roll backward under my feet, well, it wasn’t a pebble, brother, it was a whole sea full of funny fish boiling and steaming and going back and forth and forth from eggs to skeletons and winding up back there with the big lizards near to where we come from. Then I pushed the visor back up and run. Don’t worry, Topsy. Here I come, and I’m fast!
Another time I got scared because the visor fell down and I got the feeling that Topsy was only somebody I read about in a book, because she was a jillion years ago, which she really was in a way, because she was so far ahead of me right then, because I stopped for a second to fix that visor.
Then, in maybe fifty yards, I stopped worrying about the stuff the dirigibles was throwing at us—big rocks was falling straight out of the sky and making holes, and Topsy said, “We’ve gone nearly four and a half billion years.” That’s what Topsy said. She was maybe fifty million years in front of me, which means behind me really, because of how the farther we went, the earlier it was; it looked like about two feet.
“We’ve lost time,” Topsy said. “Bull can’t follow us here except on foot. From here on, every step we take is a quarter of a billion years, Elly. Pretty soon there won’t be any planets any more; they won’t have formed yet. Not even any solid rock—I mean, in the real world. Here in the hypostat, we can still move all right.…”
“… but only on our own power,” I said. Siggy was falling asleep under the reading lamp.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“The hypostat, Siggy,” I told him. “Once you get back to this point, where the redshift is about to spring up by powers of powers, you can’t use any kind of vessel. You can hardly wear any clothes. The Doppler meter and the visor are a compromise. You see, you have to mix yourself with it, Siggy. You
have to struggle in the landscape of the hypostat, become one with it. That’s the only way to stay inside the timeship. Otherwise you blow out the hull to God knows where, synchronous to nothing in this world and nothing in the next.”
“Oh, I get it,” Siggy sighed. He smacked his lips and snuggled into the cushions on the sagging easy chair. In two breaths’ time, he was asleep.
I’m taking a minute to check my bod, now that I can afford it. I smart all over, but there are bruises and scratches in only a few places. The worst is my left ham, where one of Bull’s little projectiles has wedged itself. I can tug at it, but that hurts like hell, and whenever there’s bad pain, like it or not, I see where I am: about four point six billion B.C., with celestial rock heaps piling up around me, free-floating in space, dark snowmen rolling to planet size. I clench my eyes like little black fists, and I pull the spike out. I remember doing this before—I’ve learned that that’s a sure sign that it never happened.
I lift my black arms like wings, to scan along the length of them for other injuries. I survey my legs and my torso. Nothing serious. Elly is dying, but he doesn’t know it. The brass-colored dart embedded in the back of his neck is slow poison, Bull’s calling card. There’s nothing to be done except to hope he can make it to the summit with me before his nerve tissue starts to lose integrity.
Like the terrain of our journey back in time, shaped by the logarithmic rise of the redshift, the rate of recession of galaxies (exploding out of the ylem, lo, these billions of years), Elly’s illness will be slight at first, then sudden and catastrophic—Witness the sheer cliff some five hundred feet ahead, erupting toward all our origin, Amitabha Buddha, the Densely Packed, ylem—my home.
Grant, Oh Amitabha, that this pathetic
fool’s death will help to bring me back. Grant
that the bastard Duba be foiled in his
machinations, and Bull in his! Let me come home!
A quake rocked the entire landscape, throwing me into Elly’s arms. We struggled to remain erect while up and down went missing, and we found ourselves half-skidding, half-tumbling forward into the collapse of the protosolar nebula. The timeship itself was suffering an attack; our hull was being battered by volleys of HHC.
“HHC?” Siggy asked me. His voice sounded strange, but I couldn’t see why; the melting ice packs were pressed around my eyes, and I felt weighed down all over by something irresistibly heavy, like a lead sheet. The place smelled faintly of chlorine. Our voices echoed harshly, as if from foursquare plaster walls.
“HHC,” I said. Then, hearing the sound of my own voice, I realized it: I was Siggy. “Hypostatized Hubble Constants.”
“Mm hmm!”—the new voice.
“The Hubble constant gives you the recession rate of the galaxies, based on their distance,” I explained.
“Tell me about it,” the dark man said.
“Well, it isn’t really a constant…,” I said.
“… I see.…”
“… Because it changes as the universe ages. But it’s:
r = Hd.
Do the math…”
“… Uh huh…”
“… and you see that H, the Hubble constant, equals r over d. But d is just r times t.”
“… Distance is rate times time?…”
“Yes. So you get H equal to r over r times t.”
“The r’s would cancel out.”
“More or less. So you get:
H = 1/t
You see? That’s what they were throwing at us.”
“I don’t think I follow.”
“It’s time inverse!” I said. “The Hubble is time inverse! It kills regular time! It neutralizes it, cancels it out! You see what they were trying to do to us?”
“Take it easy. Sit back down, please. Just relax. Breathe. Sit down, please.”
“What do you mean, breathe? What do you think I’m doing?”
“Nurse…!”
* * *
I always get up early, even after a very late night; it’s just the way I am. When I hear that Sonoma Index Tribune whack the front door, my day is beginning, and never mind the clock, the hangover, or the dream sludge sticking my gears.
I was nibbling on a toasted bagel, sipping hot water—“zen tea”—and listening to the rain slashing against the wall. I’d had to settle for margarine, since Siggy had eaten all the cream cheese and the butter. He was just where I had left him, slumped in the easy chair under the reading lamp, which had been left on all night and was still on. Through my ursine yawns and lumberings about the fridge, Siggy snored. But when I unspindled the newspaper, popping off its red rubber band, he woke.
“Eliot!” he said, expanding from the cushions like a crushed sponge in water. “Jeez! I gotta get to work! What time is it? What Bull have you got to?”
“What?”
“I said, my Bulova stopped. What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know what time it is?”
“Uh uh. I don’t want to look yet. I’m not ready to leave infinity.”
“You got the paper, though,” he said.
“Guilty,” I said, scanning the headlines.
I heard Siggy open the window in the bathroom, close it again as rain poured in, flush the toilet, and then urinate. “So what’s the news?” he shouted. “Did Bull make that deal with Duba?”
“Yeah,” I shouted back. “It looks like they came to some kind of accommodation, the bastards.”
“They get you coming and going, don’t they? Those dirigibles were just too good a thing. Too cheap. Too accessible.”
“Too good for guys like us,” I said.
“Now they’ll fix prices any way they want to. It’s always the little guy who gets the shaft, Eliot.”
“Don’t I know it!” I said. “Don’t I know it! Don’t I know it! Don’t I know it! Don’t I know it!”
The wind was blowing right through the window glass, tearing the paper out of my hand and nailing Siggy to the wall as he emerged from the bathroom, half-zipped. It drove back his hair, throwing his necktie back like a scarf and deforming his face—escape velocity. My head hit the table, and I couldn’t lift it against the wind.
The wind said, “I thought you’d see the light, Bull. There’s no sense us beating up on each other. This way, everybody wins.”
“I almost had you, you old coot!” I said. The floor was bucking in waves like a streamer on a fan. I held onto the table for dear life. “One of your guys was all right, I guess. But holy, holy, where’d you pick up the other one?”
“In the mail room!” the wind laughed. “You think I wanted to throw away my best people?”
“What about the good one, the black one?” I said. I had to scream just to hear my own voice. The window shattered and glass sprayed across the room. I heard Siggy cry out.
“That woman was your gift, big guy,” the wind said. “Some joke, huh? When your boys wiggled the equations back near ylem to squeeze more helium out of it, we got Topsy.”
“A chrono-anomaly! You son of a gun!”
“An orphan of time! Hey, if she lives, I’m gonna help her file a paternity suit against you, Bull! You gotta take some responsibility! Heh heh heh! I’ll get you, big guy, right down to the Zen Bulls tattooed on your fanny! Heh heh!”
That was a good one. I knew I could make some money with this guy. He was on the ball. He even knew about the Bulls. But you had to watch him, of course. I said, “So now that we’ve shaken hands and smiled upon each other’s countenance and squared off our attorneys, now that you’ve agreed to stay out of the ylem, friend Duba, and I’ve stopped strafing your chrononauts, tell me, what are you going to do with them?”
“With Topsy? Elly? The timeship?” the wind said. “Oh, you needn’t concern yourself. Measures are being taken.”
* * *
“They’ve broken through! It’s leaking,” I said. They were forcing cotton into my mouth and fastening me to the table. I could sm
ell methyl alcohol from the electrodes they attached to tiny, shaved sections of my scalp. I was too groggy to resist. I tried to explain. “It’s leaking time. Real time is streaming in through leaks in the stern.” The causal fissure which formed the spine of our timeship, guaranteeing controlled disjunction between what happened inside and what happened out, had been violated by an HHC.
Elly was lying on his back, kicking gravel.
“Don’t!” I shouted. “Every speck of dust you raise is somebody’s world out there exploding. Look!” I pushed down his visor; he froze at once.
“It’s all mixed up, Topsy,” he said. “The lizards and the stars and the lava and the fish and all the moons—Are they moons, Topsy, pocking up with holes?—they’re getting me dizzy.”
“We’ve got to make a run for it,” I said, “before it gets any worse.” Sequences inside the timeship were starting to be blown awry. My mind was squinting to see things in order. In representing them now, I’m just writing them out in the logical, causal order, with question preceding answer, and consequence following act, but the lived reality was quite different. It was only after I had helped Elly to his feet that I made the effort to do so, for example, and the entire sequence was repeated four times at the same o’clock.
Think of a child’s puzzle: a drawing divided into vertical bars. The drawing comprises two pictures spliced together in alternating bars. By covering every other bar, you can see one picture or the other. Multiply that a hundredfold and translate it into three dimensions in real time, and you have our fractured timeship world, riddled by eddies of time swirling together with multi-headed HHC’s, winking random moments out of existence.
“Come on!” I said. I took Elly’s hand. “Let’s go!”
I walked along the Susquehanna, thinking how nice it would be at the bottom, dead. When the big blackout hit New York, I thought it was me. Then came the news of a mechanical failure at the generating plant in Niagara Falls.
I had a headache like a mine cave-in. Phantasms and fireballs burned the sky all over Broome County. Again I was deafened as if by an avalanche, and I couldn’t shake the smell of rock dust—lime and sulfur.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 79
