It was a spray of pulverized limestone and pebbles dislodged from a shelf just above us. Elly and I had gained the base of the cliff, and bits of rock rained down on us. The base curved up slowly for about a hundred fifty feet, from the collapse of our protogalaxy—resulting in the formation of the stars of the Milky Way—back to the final decoupling of matter and energy, less than half a billion years after the Big Bang, at redshift of ten thousand. (The present value was four!)
My brains felt like cold pabulum. I sensed that I was sitting up in a chair, but my mind was telling me that I was horizontal. I could see the dark man talking, but my mind told me that my eyes were closed. I knew that my mom and dad were coming to visit me any time now, and I wanted to get this over with, even if it wasn’t happening.
“I’m going to ask you a question, and I don’t want you to get excited or angry. I want you to sit still and to think about what I’m going to ask you.” So said the dark man. He leaned forward. I knew that if I gave the wrong answer and he told my parents about it, it would break their hearts. “If the New York power outage was caused, as you say, by a rock slide in a timeship billions of years ago, then what do you make of the mechanical failure at the generating plant in Niagara Falls? Was that just some kind of coincidence?”
I said, “Give me a cigarette.”
“They’re bad for you, Siggy,” he said.
I said, “I know it.” He handed me a cigarette from the box he kept in the wide drawer of his metal desk, and he lit it for me. I took a deep drag, and as I blew out the smoke in a big, blue billow, I said, “Causal recovery.”
“What’s that?”
“Causal recovery,” I said, watching my smoke swallow his shaggy head. When he left the hospital and went home to wifey and kiddies, he’d still have my smoke in his whiskers. “That’s how it always works. It has to do with the way the human mind is made. But it’s not just the human mind. After all, the human mind is a reflection of the laws and the forms it evolved from. All reality conspires together with the human mind to bring about causal recovery.… You’re getting impatient with me.”
“Not at all. I’m waiting to hear you explain to me what ‘causal recovery’ is.”
“There is a disruption of the causal order of things. It’s not really a disruption; there is never really a disruption. But the distance between the world of the cause and the world of the effect is so vast in space or time, or in conception, that it seems a perfect disruption. However, in causality as in pneumatics, Nature abhors a vacuum. So there comes into being, apparently, a new cause, local to the effect, not one many billions of years ago, or in another world, or in another Mind, but one right here, right next to the perceived effect: a Niagara Falls.”
“But nobody made up the failure at Niagara Falls. It really happened, Siggy. Do you doubt that?”
“No,” I said. I had to stop for a moment. I had to look at my fingertips. They were so yellow! I had not realized how stained they had become from the nicotine. I don’t think they were that bad before I entered the state hospital. “Niagara Falls happened, all right. Only, that wasn’t what caused the power outage. Both the power outage and the plant breakdown had the same cause.”
“So that we’d have to interrupt your electrotherapy and complete it the next day?”
“No, goddamnit, I’m not a madman! I don’t think the world revolves around me. That was just an accident. I’m talking about timeships. I’m talking about the evolution of the goddamn universe!”
“Take it easy. You don’t see your explanation as a little far-fetched? You don’t believe in Occam’s Razor?”
“Occam? The simplest explanation is the true one? That what you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Doctor, if we really believed in Occam’s Razor, we’d all be goddamn solipsists. Please…”
“What is it, Siggy?”
“Please don’t tell my mother and father that I said any of this.”
“We’ll see.”
The smoke eddied and swelled, sunlit, through the doctor’s room, filling it like a cloud of exhaust. It was a cloud of exhaust. It was the exhaust of Duba’s executive time shuttle retroing forward, mission accomplished, to the time of his completed deal with Bull Interplanetary. It was real pretty—that’s what I thought. I like it when there’s pretty smoke, if it doesn’t make you cough and stuff.
“You bastard!” When I heard Topsy say that, I felt bad, even though rocks was falling on us and before and after was getting mixed around and there was for sure plenty of other stuff I ought to be paying attention to if I knew what’s good for me, because I’m not stupid, you know. But I thought she meant me. But she didn’t. She meant Mr. Duba. She was looking up at a hole in the sky, and said it again and again: “You bastard! You bastard!” Then she says it backward: “Dratsab uoy! Dratsab uoy! Dratsab uoy!” like the sound was being pumped back into her, what come out before.
She sat down. “Don’t sit there, Tops,” I tell her, “because there is rocks falling on us.”
She says: “You are a dear little man, Elly, but I’m winded. I just feel winded. That wasn’t Bull attacking just now. This time it was Duba. See that smoke trail? That’s his shuttle, for sure, hypodyning the hell out of here now that it’s ruined us. Whatever he was using us for, it’s finished now. He’s just going to dump us.”
And she folded in just like an empty sack. She looked like she used to back in my apt when she would lay there inside a shadow, when she would listen to the static between the stations and think about home.
“Cheer up, old Tops,” I say. “We gotta get you to home. Don’t be so low, because we gotta climb up to the ylem now, girl. Then you’ll be okay.” I sat down next to her then, because my neck hurt and my arms was feeling numb. She laid her big, black hand on my head and smiled while there was lights like fishes and fires all in the sky, swarming into heaps way up behind my Topsy. She looked like an angel to me, boy!
“I just feel so lonely, Elly. I’m sorry. Tell me—Is there really such a thing as Mr. Duba?”
“Sure there is, Tops,” I said.
“And we’re in a timeship, right? That isn’t just some time-anomalous sense-image stuck in my mind?”
“Sure, Topsy,” I said.
“And we can get to ylem. We can climb up there. That’s the idea, right? That isn’t just in my time-orphaned brain?”
“That’s the idea, Topsy.”
“And Siggy is with us?”
I said, “Yeah, sure, Tops,” on account of how I didn’t want her to feel funny, but I sure didn’t follow her on that particular one.
“Siggy is with us?” Siggy said. “She said, ‘Siggy is with us?’” He laughed and threw some underwear down onto my head from the balcony of the A-frame. “You crazy jerk, Eliot,” he laughed. “I’m sure glad I don’t have your dreams.”
“Listen,” I said. “It gets better. Then this ash woman, the one that’s all black, Topsy, starts to climb up the cliff. She takes one, two steps, and—Whammo!—she’s climbing hand over hand past galaxies unclustering, unforming, backward in time, like strings of spittle stretched to mist. Are you listening, Siggy?”
“I’m listening,” he shouted from his bedroom, upstairs. “Do you mind if I put on some music?”
“Yes. Then she hits the vertical, at about nineteen and a half billion years back, redshift close to ten thousand by the Doppler gauge.”
“Doppler gauge! You’re a nutcase, you know that?”
“There’s more,” I say. Siggy puts on a record …
Is that boy …
“Come on, can it, Sig! I said, there’s more.”
… SCREEE!
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s redshift ten thousand by Topsy’s Doppler. Every inch of ascent is about twenty million years back in time. Elly…”
“Eliot?”
“No, Elly! Not me! Elly is back a few feet, say, three quarters of a billion years or so closer to now. There are still galaxies forming around him
where he is. The air is thick with HHC’s from Duba’s cannon, viscous with time currents and whirlpools of inverse time. Even with his visor up, Elly sees galaxies and ferns and positrons kaleidoscoping through his field of vision. He’s not very smart except at column addition and chess; he doesn’t know where to find a foothold. Topsy is talking him through it.”
And Siggy said, “Here they come now.”
“Huh?”
“Look out the window, champ.”
So I looked. From our big picture windows you could look down the mountain and north over Broome County all the way to the airfield. Scrambling up the final cliff, grabbing onto vines and scrub growth for leverage, a jet-black woman in a khaki jumpsuit was leading a man who looked much too much like me.
* * *
It was a clean rise, thin as they come, with slight ripples and few visible scoops for a hand or foot to grip. The prominent weakness was a line of cracks zigzagging up out of sight, the hypostatic image of a causal ravine dating back to the Planck Epoch, bare inches from the summit. The sides of the cracks corresponded to causally disjunct parts of the primordial mass; the distance between them was greater than light could travel before they separated even more. Perhaps one could jam one’s knuckles or even just the shanks of one’s fingers into the line, to pull up, hand over hand, through the earliest millennia. Perhaps not.
There was no shortcut here; that’s not how the timeship worked. “… you have to mix yourself with it, Siggy,” I said. “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.”
But there was no “Siggy.” That was just another cul de sac in my chrono-anomalous nerve circuits, my mind like crystals of iodine, brown dust from a brown vapor, sublimed by a random puff of time. There was only me with dear Elly, the half-dead half-wit clinging to my black calf, and the defiled timeship, bleeding eons into empty space-time while we muscled our way toward ylem.
I tried flattening out the cliff by fiddling with the Doppler, rescaling, reducing the apparent Hubble slope, but that would increase our travel distance. With the timeship crumbling about us—while Duba’s hit men trundled home to their bonuses—we could only rush up the vertical and hope to make ylem before the leak killed us, well, me; Elly had a different death in store.
I hazarded a peek at my Doppler—close to ten to the fifth; now came trouble. Just above me, the seam was so narrow I could only lock one pinky in it and torque up maybe a hundred fifty million years, which looked like eight inches. I called down to Elly to do the same. His head was starting to loll from the poison in Bull’s dart. “Suck your chest into the wall! Stay vertical,” I warned him. Down where he was—galaxies dissolving backward in time—there was still a slight rib on which to get a foothold.
I heard pebbles sliding below. Elly’s fingers had slipped against a chockstone wedged inside the crack. It was a Bok globule, a cold, dark cloud about to collapse into protostars. He slid down more than a billion years and was flailing and yelling among crowds of infant galaxies. Suddenly he sat quite still.
I called to him: “Are you okay, Elly?”
“It’s so pretty!” he said. “It’s like big ghosts, Topsy! Look at them. See there how they’re lacing their fingers together? One’s got a ring on it.’’
“Push your visor up,” I said, but his visor was up.
“It’s all shining, Topsy. Gee, it’s pretty. Big necklaces and diamonds is eating littler ones. You go home. I’m gonna stay and watch, honey.”
“What?” I shouted.
“Honey!”
I held Sunshine’s girl tight and tried to ignore the Muthuhs snoring and fidgeting on the floor. We beat against each other like a jellyfish pulsing, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. She was too sleepy. I was too weak. I began to feel that we were a figment of the imagination of those sleeping gypsies, and in a way, I guess, we were. They were listening behind closed eyes, storing our sounds for their erotic fantasies. In the next room that record was skipping over and over:
“Is that boy still climbing up the mountain?
Has he faltered, or has he fallen down SCREEE!
Is that boy…”
And we humped and we humped. Somehow, I couldn’t get proper traction. We must have gone on like that for a couple of hours; I just wouldn’t give up. Can you believe it? And then my head hurt. It hurt something awful. And everything was so bright, it hurt my eyes. The air, it felt like hot lead all over me. There was barbells exploding in the sky and smoke rings and fiery things like slingshot stones. No, you go on home, Topsy. Follow your static, honey, right back home. I gotta take a snooze.
“What’s wrong?”
I opened my eyes and said, “Elly’s dead.”
The doctor said, “That’s what you’re seeing? That’s what you’re experiencing right now?”
“Yes,” I said. “Elly’s dead. Bull’s poison killed him. He didn’t make it.”
“Who is Bull?” the doctor asked.
“He’s in with Duba now. They were fighting at first, but now they’re in cahoots. Elly and Topsy were just cannon fodder. The big shots walk away from it with their pockets bulging and their arms around each other’s back.”
“Do you want to use my handkerchief?”
“No.”
“You’re mad at them, aren’t you?”
“No. It’s just the way the world is, I guess.”
“Tell me something,” the doctor said. “Do you feel like it’s your fault that Siggy ended up the way he did?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “I was with him the whole time.”
“Is that why you tried to kill yourself? Is that why you ended up here as well?”
“Maybe. But there’s something else.”
“What’s that, Eliot?”
“Elly, Doctor—he’s dead. And I don’t know if Topsy’s going to make it.”
* * *
It was not a skipping record that played that song over and over as I sweated on top of Sunshine’s girl. The record player was another instance of causal recovery. A bullet from Bull’s dirigibles had struck a certain mound of salt inside the timeship. The salt had exploded into the air and was caught up by one of Duba’s HHC’s.
Of this salt, one crystal was actually the hypostatic image of an event which had not yet unfolded at the time of Bull’s attack: Duba sitting in his office at the headquarters of Duba Enterprises, Inc., in a mammoth building that used to be a mountain near the Pennsylvania border, just outside of Binghamton; Duba blowing smoke rings from his fat cigar and humming to himself absentmindedly; he is thinking about Elly’s demise, a slight debit to his massive profit from the helium deal. Duba, his mind sugary, fat and lazy with wealth, sings to himself in a breathy voice:
“Is that boy still climbing up the mountain?
Has he faltered, or has he fallen down…?”
That’s what the salt crystal was—a voice, a song, a disjointed reverie. It swirled against Hubble time, became pocked, duplicated, altered, melted into other o’clocks and other venues, one of them a crowded room in Santa Fe, New Mexico, twenty billion years past ylem, where two weary primates made the beast with two backs.
* * *
My arm was pumped to the limit. I jammed the other hand into the fissure, pulled out my right and let it dangle for a minute, shaking blood back into it. This was the part I had been dreading: redshift above ten to the fourth, a week or so from the Big Bang itself, twenty billion years into what I used to think of as the remote past. The hypostats built into the timeship—the life of the cosmos as landscape—were competing with volleys of images and sensations swirling in through the leak in the hull. I wasn’t supposed to feel the terrific density and temperature I was passing through; they were supposed to be land features I could deal with in a dispassionate way.
I leaned into the hot rock face, frictioning my
foot against a wrinkle in the stone, hoping my toes wouldn’t butter down off their hold. I lunged upward. Hovering at the dead point of my maneuver for what must have been millennia on the referent time scale—I threw my right fist back into the crack and gained purchase at redshift ten to the ninth, one minute from the Big Bang.
Then I glimpsed my poppa’s tattoo. Straining till I saw blood, I chinned up to my highest hold and saw The Seventh Bull, the size of my face, chiseled into the rock. It was Bull Interplanetary’s “Kilroy was here.” This was the spot where Bull’s operative had managed to alter the primal nucleosynthetic process, to change the percentage of helium produced, creating me, inter alia, as a byproduct.
The Seventh Bull was a picture I knew—or thought I knew—from the series of ten Bulls in Buddhist lore:
The Bull is sought. The Bull is tracked.
The Bull is glimpsed. The Bull is caught.
The Bull is tamed. The Bull is ridden.…
And seventh—The Bull is passed!
I reached into my pocket, next to the Doppler gauge, and fished out Duba’s black ball. I knew what it was now—a dud. I threw it down the cliff and watched it disappear into the blinding clouds of the protosolar nebula. Then, with nothing more than a prayer holding me to the head-wall, I reached up to grab the overhang separating me from the summit. It was like biting a high power line. I mantled over the edge on bent arms, pumping to the limit, till my stomach was scraping against the summit.
I had reached Planck’s Epoch, redshift nearly a dectillion, temperature of ten million billion trillion electron volts, density 1,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms per cubic centimeter, but then the whole observable universe was only a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter across. I was deaf, blind, completely numb to sensations of any kind …
I vaulted onto the summit and into the Eighth Bull: Oneself Passed! And I realized—I was numb to the world because I was the world. I had passed inside my own Compton wave length, into the absolute freedom of the infinitesimal, Heisenberg’s sanctum, the undefilable mystery in the womb of the world, redshift going to infinity, data to zero—or whatever I would make it, I, Topsy the Primum Mobile!
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 80
