“You’re not the Old Ones?”
“Oh, no. They are the ones who told us you were coming,” said Hallam. “That’s why we learned your language. We are the only two who speak it.”
“The Old Ones will send you home, I suppose, when the time comes,” said Dana, leading them back out the tunnel. “Meanwhile, there are, or will be, five stops I think. But we must get you back to the rendezvous.”
“Pronto,” said Lee, holding up his PalmPC.
The cursor was blinking.
Cole felt a strange, deep sadness as they rode the stepless escalator back down the mountainside. It was peaceful here in the future—but look at the price.
“From eight billion, in our time, to less than two hundred million,” he said to Dana, as they climbed into the little plane. “Was there a particular, uh, problem, that set it off? A sort of slow-motion catastrophe?”
“Catastrophe?” asked Hallam. “There were hundreds. Famines, floods, wars, diseases, murdered so many.”
“And murdered the soul,” said Dana. “The Restoration went on for hundreds of years.”
“The masks,” Cole said.
“They couldn’t face themselves, or each other, directly. There had been so much violence and destruction. Protocol was everything.”
“During the Restoration, they thought the Mourning was over,” said Hallam. “We look back now and see that they were still in the middle of it.”
“Just as some say we are still in the Restoration,” said Dana.
The takeoff was silent, except for the rush of air. As they climbed, Cole asked Hallam where they were.
Africa, he was told. “On your maps this would be the coast of Mozambique, and that city in the distance —”
Hallam spoke gently to the airplane in a strange language that sounded a little like Chinese, and it rose higher. Between two hills, they could see a scattering of pastel buildings, like wild flowers in a clump.
“— would be Aruba, and there —”
And there, floating on the horizon like a cloud or the dream of a cloud, was the white robed summit of Kilimanjaro. The snowcap it had lost was back. Even though Cole had never seen it nor, indeed, ever been to Africa, it was familiar from a thousand pictures, its vast hump unchanged and undiminished. A thousand years is nothing to the world of rock and ice.
They descended, and Kilimanjaro slipped under the horizon, still there, but invisible, like the past—or the future.
Hallam and Dana kissed them both, Cole and Lee, French style, at the foot of the hill. What an eerie kiss they share, Cole thought, they who live a thousand years apart. It was for him like kissing a dream or a hope; for them, he imagined, a ghost.
“Fare well.”
“Fare well.”
“So long,” said Lee.
“When you hit RETURN you will go on another stage,” said Hallam. “There will be five more. That’s what we were told by the Old Ones. Told to tell you.”
Lee nodded gravely and headed up the path. Cole caught up with him at the top. “Five more?” he asked. “I thought we were supposed to be picking up Dear Abbey. What happened with that? And who are these Old Ones?”
“Beats me,” Lee said. “Time ride!”
He showed Cole his PalmPC. The cursor was blinking, surrounded by numbers, all scrolling upward in a slow flood.
“I swear to God, Lee, I think you’re just pretending you don’t speak English! That means nothing to me. How do we get back to our own time? And what are we doing here in the first place?”
But Lee just smiled his inscrutable Oriental smile. Arguing with him was pointless. They were at the glider, and the wind was suddenly sharp. Cole wished he still had his vest. Lee buttoned up his hideous safari jacket. If he imagined that Kilimanjaro, unseen but still present, lent it a certain appropriateness, he was dead wrong, thought Cole. It looked as stupid, and he as nerdy, as ever.
“Let’s go, then.” Cole was pissed without knowing why. He pulled Lee down beside him on the glider and covered his little pale hand with his own big brown mitt. “You’re the big shot.”
“Huh?”
“Just hit RETURN.”
+10,000
They didn’t return. Not right away.
They went on.
On, forward in Time, or so it seemed to them at the “time,” although as they were to learn, Time Travel is only possible once, at the End of Time, when there is no forward left. Then and only then is a loop back possible, for there is only one End of Time.
They knew nothing of that, then. “Then”—how strange that word seems, now. “Now” …
On they fell through Time. The small death sea-smell was gone, though Cole still felt the “football injury” pain in his leg. Lights flashed, striated: hot, cold. Lee’s hand gripped his, tighter and tighter, until the glider slowed and stopped, at the front end of its arcless swing, and suddenly it was warm, almost hot. The world was white, like fog, fading. And they were in a grove of small trees with silvery striped trunks.
Music was playing. Cole looked all around; he was surrounded by people, most of them young, mostly dressed in black and white. They were all applauding. Lee was applauding too; applauding himself, it seemed. He and Cole looked at each other, laughed, and stood up and took a bow. Their hosts all laughed merrily and led them to a table under a tree, where a laughing waiter was pouring wine.
They all spoke French, which Cole could understand only with difficulty, until one of the group laid a small thick cloth the size of a long sock across his right shoulder.
“Pardonnez-moi,” she said. “OK?”
It clung to his shoulder, heavy yet flexible, like one of the lead robes they used to give you in X-ray.
“Okay,” he said.
“Excellent,” said Lee, who had just gotten his own. “This is some kind of instantaneous translator, no? And you are still speaking French?”
“Yes, yes,” said another of the group.
Whoa! “Hey, Lee, are you speaking English or French?” Cole asked.
“Neither,” Lee replied. “Mandarin. And now Cantonese. And now Russian …”
“Okay, okay,” Cole said. “I get it.” It was amazing. Lee’s voice sounded slightly processed, like someone on long distance; but the Texas accent was, mercifully, gone.
They were in Paris. The Old Ones, whoever they were, had landed them in a small park in the Marais in the year 12,879 HK (their year, “Jesus” year, 15,242 JC). Their hosts were students of history who assembled once a year to study and discuss the Modern World (which is what they called the ancient world, our world), and ultimately to meet them.
“The message from the Old Ones was that you would arrive today, June 23, for only a few hours. A crowd gathered to watch the materialization, which was quite a show.”
“I’m sure it was!” said Lee.
“But we asked them to leave us alone so we could talk. Would you like some more wine? It’s a very nice Alsatian.” A fortyish white woman named Kate explained all this to Lee and Cole. She wore a short black skirt and a black and white striped top. Her legs were long and thin and, Cole thought, beautiful. They were sitting at a table outdoors under a plane tree, with her and her three friends. Two were men, one of them African, though much much darker than Cole. The other woman was younger, about Helen’s age. Cole didn’t like her thin, polite smile.
What the Modernists, as they called themselves, didn’t know was more interesting to Cole than what they did know. They knew Mozart, Ellington, Liszt, but had never heard a live orchestra. They understood what capitalism was, but not what it was like. “Can you live anywhere you like?” they asked, and when Lee answered no and Cole answered yes, they all laughed and had another glass of wine. A very nice Alsatian.
Once Lee had discovered he could talk, there was no shutting him up. Not that the Modernists wanted to. They were fascinated by our pre-HK era (which they saw as lasting from about 1500 to 2500 AD, or Jesus Time). They had questions about China, about the USA, a
bout the “nuclear war that never happened” (was Cole ever relieved to hear that phrase!) and so on, and Lee had answers to them all.
“It was like an explosion,” he said. “Technologically and culturally. It was exciting and terrible at the same time. It was …”
Lengthy, wordy answers. Cole wasn’t so sure he didn’t prefer the old laconic cowboy Lee. Besides, he had a few questions for Lee himself. Questions like, who were these Old Ones? And, what had happened to their original mission, Dear Abbey? And most important, how would they ever get back to their own time?
Oddly, he was in no hurry to ask these questions. He felt curiously relaxed, almost numb. Perhaps, he thought, it was a time-travel version of jet lag. They were in the garden of a restaurant, and people came and went, some staring, but Cole didn’t mind. The wine was “very nice,” the cheese was tart, the bread was thick and chewy. He wondered how long he had been hungry.
He looked around for a clock. Kate showed him her watch. It was analog, and the date was in French—1100h, Juin 23, Juedi. Cole asked if they had Time Travel, and Kate looked shocked. There was no such thing. It was an impossibility.
“What about us, then?”
“You are an anomaly,” said the African man. “Every impossibility comes complete with an anomaly.” They all laughed, though Cole didn’t get it.
“You are a special project of the Old Ones,” said the younger woman, whose name Cole didn’t catch. She sat next to Lee and stared at him worshipfully. She even seemed to think his safari jacket was cool. In fact they all seemed to find Lee fascinating: pouring his wine, cutting his cheese, hanging on his every processed word.
Cole found all this annoying, and must have showed it, for Kate pulled his sleeve and whispered: “Let’s you and me take a walk.”
Paris looked as Cole remembered it (from pictures, and one brief trip, not with Helen but an earlier Helen) except that there were fewer cars. They were still tiny and they all still honked their horns.
The Paris in which they found themselves was both a living city and a replica, continually being rebuilt but always more or less on the old eighteenth- to twentieth-century (JT) plan. There were lots of people on the streets but most of them seemed like tourists. Everyone strolled, no one hurried.
About a fourth of the people on the street were African, more or less, like Cole. People in the shops and stores were polite, but disinterested. There didn’t seem to be much to buy. One or two brands of cigarettes; one or two brands of gum. The newspapers were only one page but the print changed when you touched a square at the top of the page. The language, the print, the stories all seemed to change. The only languages Cole identified were French and Chinese; English seemed forgotten. Kate bought Cole a paperback book that doubled in size when he opened it. He wanted it because of the author’s picture on the back. She paid for it by blinking twice into the newsdealer’s little mirror.
Cole wasn’t the only one wearing a translator on his shoulder. Most of the men wore baggy pants and long shirts, but some wore khakis and sport coats, and others jumpsuits. He saw two men urinating on the street, into a hole. This was apparently common.
“I thought you might want to see a little of your world,” said Kate. “I will be able to see a vid of your friend’s presentation, later.”
“My world?”
“The world you made,” she said. “You are our ancestors; you brought us here.”
Cole asked about travel. Those who were in a hurry to get from Europe to Asia or America did it in two to three hours, but most commerce and trade was conducted by sail. People worked four-to-six hours a day and had half the year off. The countryside around Paris was filled with small farms, Kate assured him (he never saw them), though much of Europe was wild. They walked down the Seine toward the Eiffel Tower, which was replaced (duplicated) every 1,200 years, by contract. Cole was afraid to get too far from the garden restaurant in the Marais where the glider had “landed.” He had accepted the fact that they had gone from observing the future to walking around in it. He trusted Lee not to leave without him (and he assumed Kate had some kind of cell phone or communicator, in case Lee’s cursor started blinking). But still, he was a little nervous ….
Paris had cinemas and cafés amazingly like those of our own time. Cole was told that this was deliberate. Other cities had other diversions. London, for example, was devoted to clubs and plays, while Mexico City specialized in pottery and auto racing.
They stopped at a vid kiosk and Kate showed him maps of North America and Africa, with large swaths of wilderness. Industry was mostly recycling, and it was against the law to take minerals or oil out of the ground.
Cole wasn’t sure of the protocol. Was he allowed to ask about the part of the past that was still his own future, and therefore, at least to him, still uncertain? He risked it. “Was there some biocatastrophe, in Modern Times? Some man-made catastrophe, causing a lot of chaos?”
“It was all catastrophe,” Kate said. “And all man-made, wasn’t it? But we survived, didn’t we?”
Cole decided to be more direct. “Did you ever hear of an—event, a strategy—called Dear Abbey?”
She gave him a blank look and he realized he didn’t even know how the translator had rendered the phrase, much less his halting attempts to define it. Did she think Dear Abbey was a monastery like Mount St. Michel? What was French after a thousand years?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Many of our studies are incomplete. We did explore a gold mine last year. I know you loved gold.”
“Not me personally,” Cole said (remembering the ring Helen had wanted; that Helen). “But yes, gold was very popular in what you call ‘modern’ times.”
“I found the mine strangely beautiful, in a dark sort of way. People wanted to close them up, years ago, but I’m glad some were left. They are like scars, like tattoos, showing the marks of humankind on the world. A kind of love. A memento of the time when our relationship with the mother planet was more intimate.”
“And more destructive,” Cole said.
“Motherhood is always destructive, to the mother,” she said. “Today, heavy metals like iron and nickel that can’t be recovered from recycling are mined from asteroids.”
“So you do have space travel, then?”
“It’s not exactly travel, is it? Oh, people have been to all the planets, and even to a few nearby systems. There are people who live on Mars and Venus and the Moon, for research. But most of the mining, and the shuttling from orbit, is done by robots.”
There was another research station on Titan, according to Kate, and a more or less permanent colony had set out for a planet of a “nearby” star. But there was less and less interest in space exploration once it became clear that life was rare in the universe—and multicellular life even rarer.
“No first contact, then,” Cole said. “Contact was our dream. That was the whole point of exploration, space travel, science fiction—the stories we told. The dream of encountering the Other.”
“Oh, I guess we encountered the Other,” Kate said. “Only it was here. It was her. ARD.”
Ard?
“ARD is Earth’s name for itself. After the Sixth, and the Restoration, a monitoring system was put into place that linked every ecosystem, geological system, and weather system on the Earth. The idea was that never again would we be unaware of the condition of our fellow species on the planet, or of the planet itself.”
“I know of this,” Cole said. “EarthWatch.”
“It was self-maintaining and -installing. And, we discovered several thousand years ago, self-aware. After the network had been installed for almost half a millennium, ARD contacted the various governments (social, political, economic, all interlinked and elected) and for the first time humankind contacted a consciousness other than itself.”
“But one that we had created,” Cole pointed out.
“Yes and no. ARD is in a sense, I suppose, our child, but she is also our mother. According to her, she had be
en conscious all along, and we had merely given her the desire and the means to communicate. But then, every consciousness thinks it has always been. These were questions that led to much strife. We had a renaissance of religion, and then of war, for the two are closely linked. But there was a kind of joy in it, too. The universe can be a very lonely place.”
“Yes,” Cole said, as they climbed the hill of Montmartre. Paris was spread out below, looking neither old nor new but eternal. “So what is ARD like?”
“We don’t know much about her,” said Kate. “She established contact with us, but never had any interest in us. She will only speak with groups or organizations, never individuals. She is still there, maintaining the systems, as indeed she says she always had—wordlessly—since the emergence of life on the planet and even before. This is her claim. She changed certain things; she has let us know that there are closed areas on the planet where humans must not go. This seems appropriate to us. But she almost never speaks to us, or we to her.”
They walked down the hill, making a great circle. Back at the restaurant, they found Lee and his three Modernist companions sitting under the trees, drinking absinthe. Kate and Cole ordered a bottle of Bordeaux to catch up.
Cole had several questions he wanted to ask Lee, now that they could communicate. But Lee was still holding forth on the terrors of the Sixth Extinction. As amazing as it was to hear him speaking eloquently, thanks to the translator, Cole had heard it all before. So he amused himself opening and closing his book, making it large, then small again.
“Chester Himes,” whispered one of the two men, the white one. “A favorite. Well known in your age?”
“Our age has hardly heard of him,” Cole said.
“This visit with you, to your world, is an unexpected gift,” Lee was saying. “We thought the Earth would be a cinder by now. Or a trash midden.”
“We live more simply now,” Kate said. “In the cities or in the villages, people are more modest in their needs. Everything doesn’t have to get bigger and bigger all the time.”
“Nonsense!” said one of the men, the African. “Everyone is tired of having to get permission to travel to Paris, or to Lagos. I want to be able to go where I want, when I want.”
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 106
