The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It was thoughts of this sort, only inchoate as yet and with the necessary conclusions not yet drawn, that occupied the mind of the President pro tem of the Otherhood as he walked the vast length of an iron and glass railway station in the capital city of an aged empire. He stopped to take a cigar case from within the black Norfolk overcoat he wore, and a cigar from the case; this he lit, and with its successive blue clouds hanging lightly about his hat and head, he walked on. There were hominids at work on the glossy engines of the empire’s trains that came and went from this terminus; hominids pushing with their long strong arms the carts burdened with the goods and luggage that the trains were to carry; hominids of other sorts gathered in groups or standing singly at the barricades, clutching their tickets, waiting to depart, some aided by or waited upon by other species—too few creatures, in all, to dispel the extraordinary impression of smoky empty hugeness that the cast-iron arches of the shed made.

  The President pro tem was certain, or at any rate retained a distinct impression, that at his arrival some days before there were telephones available for citizens to use, in the streets, in public places such as this (he seemed to see an example in his mind, a wooden box whose bright veneer was loosening in the damp climate, a complex instrument within, of enameled steel and heavy celluloid); but if there ever had been, there were none now. Instead he went in at a door above which a yellow globe was alight, a winged foot etched upon it. He chose a telegraph form from a stack of them on a long scarred counter, and with the scratchy pen provided he dashed off a quick note to the Magus in whose apartments he had been staying, telling him that he had returned late from the country and would not be with him till evening.

  This missive he handed in at the grille, paying what was asked in large coins; then he went out, up the brass-railed stairs, and into the afternoon, into the quiet and familiar city.

  It was the familiarity that had been, from the beginning, the oddest thing. The President pro tem was a man who, in the long course of his work for the Otherhood, had become accustomed to stepping out of his London club into a world not quite the same as the world he had left to enter that club. He was used to finding himself in a London—or a Lahore or a Laos—stripped of well-known monuments, with public buildings and private ways unknown to him, and a newspaper (bought with an unfamiliar coin found in his pocket) full of names that should not have been there, or missing events that should have been. But here—where nothing, nothing at all, was as he had known it, no trace remaining of the history he had come from—here where no man should have been able to take steps, where even Caspar Last had thought it not possible to take steps—the President pro tem could not help but feel easy: had felt easy from the beginning. He walked up the cobbled streets, his furled umbrella over his shoulder, troubled by nothing but the weird grasp that this unknown dark city had on his heart.

  The rain that had somewhat spoiled his day in the country had ceased but had left a pale, still mist over the city, a humid atmosphere that gave to views down avenues a stageset quality, each receding rank of buildings fainter, more vaguely executed. Trees, too, huge and weeping, still and featureless as though painted on successive scrims. At the great gates, topped with garlanded urns, of a public park, the President pro tem looked in toward the piled and sounding waters of a fountain and the dim towers of poplar trees. And as he stood resting on his umbrella, lifting the last of the cigar to his lips, someone passed by him and entered the park.

  For a moment the President pro tem stood unmoving, thinking what an attractive person (boy? girl?) that had been, and how the smile paid to him in passing seemed to indicate a knowledge of him, a knowledge that gave pleasure or at least amusement; then he dropped his cigar end and passed through the gates through which the figure had gone.

  That had not been a hominid who had smiled at him. It was not a Magus and surely not one of the draconics either. Why he was sure he could not have said: for the same unsayable reason that he knew this city in this world, this park, these marble urns, these leaf-littered paths. He was sure that the person he had seen belonged to a different species from himself, and different also from the other species who lived in this world.

  At the fountain where the paths crossed, he paused, looking this way and that, his heart beating hard and filled absurdly with a sense of loss. The child (had it been a child?) was gone, could not be seen that way, or that way—but then was there again suddenly, down at the end of a yew alley, loitering, not looking his way. Thinking at first to sneak up on her, or him, along the sheltering yews, the President pro tem took a sly step that way; then, ashamed, he thought better of it and set off down the path at an even pace, as one would approach a young horse or a tame deer. The one he walked toward took no notice of him, appeared lost in thought, eyes cast down.

  Indescribably lovely, the President pro tem thought: and yet at the same time negligent and easeful and ordinary. Barefoot, or in light sandals of some kind, light pale clothing that seemed to be part of her, like a bird’s dress—and a wristwatch, incongruous, yet not really incongruous at all: someone for whom incongruity was inconceivable. A reverence—almost a holy dread—came over the President pro tem as he came closer: as though he had stumbled into a sacred grove. Then the one he walked toward looked up at him, which caused the President pro tem to stop still as if a gun had casually been turned on him.

  He was known, he understood, to this person. She, or he, stared unembarrassed at the President pro tem, with a gaze of the most intense and yet impersonal tenderness, of compassion and amusement and calm interest all mixed; and almost imperceptibly shook her head no and smiled again: and the President pro tem lowered his eyes, unable to meet that gaze. When he looked up again, the person was gone.

  Hesitantly the President pro tem walked to the end of the avenue of yews and looked in all directions. No one. A kind of fear flew over him, felt in his breast like the beat of departing wings. He seemed to know, for the first time, what those encounters with gods had been like, when there had been gods; encounters he had puzzled out of the Greek in school.

  Anyway he was alone now in the park: he was sure of that. At length he found his way out again into the twilight streets.

  By evening he had crossed the city and was climbing the steps of a tall town house, searching in his pockets for the key given him. Beside the varnished door was a small plaque, which said that within were the offices of the Orient Aid Society; but this was not in fact the case. Inside was a tall foyer; a glass-paneled door let him into a hallway wainscoted in dark wood. A pile of gumboots and rubber overshoes in a corner, macs and umbrellas on an ebony tree. Smells of tea, done with, and dinner cooking: a stew, an apple tart, a roast fowl. The tulip-shaped gas lamps along the hall were lit.

  He let himself into the library at the hall’s end; velvet armchairs regarded the coal fire, and on a drum table a tray of tea things consorted with the books and the papers. The President pro tem went to the low shelves that ran beneath the windows and drew out one volume of an old encyclopedia, buckram-bound, with marbled fore-edges and illustrations in brownish photogravure.

  The Races. For some reason the major headings and certain other words were in the orthography he knew, but not the closely printed text. His fingers ran down the columns, which were broken into numbered sections headed by the names of species and subspecies. Hominidae, with three subspecies. Draconiidae, with four: here were etchings of skulls. And lastly Sylphidae, with an uncertain number of subspecies. Sylphidae, the Sylphids. Fairies.

  “Angels,” said a voice behind him. The President pro tem turned to see the Magus whose guest he was, recently risen no doubt, in a voluminous dressing gown richly figured. His beard and hair were so long and fine they seemed to float on the currents of air in the room, like filaments of thistle-down.

  “‘Angels,’ is that what you call them?”

  “What they would have themselves called,” said the Magus. “What name they call themselves, among themselves, no one knows but they
.”

  “I think I met with one this evening.”

  “Yes.”

  There was no photogravure to accompany the subsection on Sylphidae in the encyclopedia. “I’m sure I met with one.”

  “They are gathering, then.”

  “Not … not because of me?”

  “Because of you.”

  “How, though,” said the President pro tem, feeling again within him the sense of loss, of beating wings departing, “how, how could they have known, how…”

  The Magus turned away from him to the fire, to the armchairs and the drum table. The President pro tem saw that beside one chair a glass of whiskey had been placed, and an ashtray. “Come,” said the Magus. “Sit. Continue your tale. It will perhaps become clear to you: perhaps not.” He sat then himself, and without looking back at the President pro tem he said: “Shall we go on?”

  The President pro tem knew it was idle to dispute with his host. He did stand unmoving for the space of several heartbeats. Then he took his chair, drew the cigar case from his pocket, and considered where he had left off his tale in the dark of the morning.

  * * *

  “Of course,” he said then, “Last knew: he knew, without admitting it to himself, as a good orthogonist must never do, that the world he had returned to from his excursion was not the world he had left. The past he had passed through on his way back was not ‘behind’ his present at all, but at a right angle to it; the future of that past, which he had to traverse in order to get back again, was not the same road, and ‘back’ was not where he got. The frame house on Maple Street which, a little sunburned, he reentered on his return was twice removed in reality from the one he had left a week before; the mother he kissed likewise.

  “He knew that, for it was predicated by orthogonal logic, and orthogonal logic was in fact what Last had discovered—the transversability of time was only an effect of that discovery. He knew it, and despite his glee over his triumph, he kept his eye open. Sooner or later he would come upon something, something that would betray the fact that this world was not his.

  “He could not have guessed it would be me.”

  The Magus did not look at the President pro tem as he was told this story; his pale gray eyes instead wandered from object to object around the great dark library but seemed to see none of them; what, the President pro tem wondered, did they see? He had at first supposed the race of Magi to be blind, from this habitual appearance of theirs; he now knew quite well that they were not blind, not blind at all.

  “Go on,” the Magus said.

  “So,” said the President pro tem, “Last returns from his excursion. A week passes uneventfully. Then one morning he hears his mother call: he has a visitor. Last, pretending annoyance at this interruption of his work (actually he was calculating various forms of compound interest on a half million dollars) comes to the door. There on the step is a figure in tweeds and a bowler hat, leaning on a furled umbrella: me.

  “‘Mr. Last,’ I said. ‘I think we have business.’

  “You could see by his expression that he knew I should not have been there, should not have had business with him at all. He really ought to have refused to see me. A good deal of trouble might have been saved if he had. There was no way I could force him, after all. But he didn’t refuse; after a goggle-eyed moment he brought me in, up a flight of stairs (Mama waiting anxiously at the bottom), and into his study.

  “Geniuses are popularly supposed to live in an atmosphere of the greatest confusion and untidiness, but this wasn’t true of Last. The study—it was his bedroom, too—was of a monkish neatness. There was no sign that he worked there, except for a computer terminal, and even it was hidden beneath a cozy that Mama had made for it and Caspar had not dared to spurn.

  “He was trembling slightly, poor fellow, and had no idea of the social graces. He only turned to me—his eyeglasses were the kind that oddly diffract the eyes behind and make them unmeetable—and said, ‘What do you want?’”

  The President pro tem caressed the ashtray with the tip of his cigar. He had been offered no tea, and he felt the lack.

  “We engaged in some preliminary fencing,” he continued. “I told him what I had come to acquire. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said I thought he did. He laughed and said there must be some mistake. I said, no mistake, Mr. Last. At length he grew silent, and I could see even behind those absurd goggles that he had begun to try to account for me.

  “Thinking out the puzzles of orthogonal logic, you see, is not entirely unlike puzzling out moves in chess: theoretically chess can be played by patiently working out the likely consequences of each move, and the consequences of those consequences, and so on; but in fact it is not so played, certainly not by master players. Masters seem to have a more immediate apprehension of possibilities, an almost visceral understanding of the, however, rigorously mathematical logic of the board and pieces, an understanding that they can act on without being able necessarily to explain. Whatever sort of mendacious and feckless fool Caspar Last was in many ways, he was a genius in one or two, and orthogonal logic was one of them.

  “‘From when,’ he said, ‘have you come?’

  “‘From not far on,’ I answered. He sat then, resigned, stuck in a sort of check impossible to think one’s way out of, yet not mated. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘go back the same way you came.’

  “‘I cannot,’ I said, ‘until you explain to me how it is done.’

  “‘You know how,’ he said, ‘if you can come here to ask me.’

  “‘Not until you have explained it to me. Now or later.’

  “‘I never will,’ he said.

  “‘You will,’ I said. ‘You will have done already, before I leave. Otherwise I would not be here now asking. Let us,’ I said, and took a seat myself, ‘let us assume these preliminaries have been gone through, for they have been of course, and move ahead to the bargaining. My firm are prepared to make you a quite generous offer.’

  “That was what convinced him that he must, finally, give up to us the processes he had discovered, which he really had firmly intended to destroy forever: the fact that I had come there to ask for them. Which meant that he had already somehow, somewhen, already yielded them up to us.”

  The President pro tem paused again, and lifted his untouched whiskey. “It was the same argument,” he said, “the same incontrovertible argument, that was used to convince me once, too, to do a dreadful thing.”

  He drank, thoughtfully, or at least (he supposed) appearing thoughtful; more and more often as he grew older it happened that in the midst of an anecdote, a relation, even one of supreme importance, he would begin to forget what it was he was telling; the terrifically improbable events would begin to seem not only improbable but fictitious, without insides, the incidents and characters as false as in any tawdry cinema story, even his own part in them unreal: as though they happened to someone made up—certainly not to him who told them. Often enough he forgot the plot.

  “You see,” he said, “Last exited from a universe in which travel ‘through time’ was, apparently, either not possible, or possible only under conditions that would allow such travel to go undetected. That was apparent from the fact that no one, so far as Last knew, up to the time of his own single excursion, had ever detected it going on. No one from Last’s own future, that is, had ever come ‘back’ and disrupted his present, or the past of his present: never ever. Therefore, if his excursion could take place, and he could ‘return,’ he would have to return to a different universe: a universe where time travel had taken place, a universe in which once-upon-a-time a man from 1983 had managed to insert himself into a minor colony of the British Crown one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier. What he couldn’t know in advance was whether the universe he ‘returned’ to was one where time travel was a commonplace, an everyday occurrence, something anyway that could deprive his excursion of the value it had; or whether it was one in which one excursion only had taken place, his ow
n. My appearance before him convinced him that it was, or was about to become, common enough: common enough to disturb his own peace and quiet, and alter in unforeseeable ways his comfortable present.

  “There was only one solution, or one dash at a solution anyway. I might, myself, be a singularity in Last’s new present. It was therefore possible that if he could get rid of me, I would take his process ‘away’ with me into whatever future I had come out of to get it, and thereupon never be able to find my way again to his present and disturb it or him. Whatever worlds I altered, they would not be his, not his anyway who struck the bargain with me: if each of them also contained a Last, who would suffer or flourish in ways unimaginable to the Last to whom I spoke, then those eidolons would have to make terms for themselves, that’s all. The quantum angle obtended by my coming, and then the one obtended by my returning, divorced all those Lasts from him for all eternity: that is why, though the angle itself is virtually infinitesimal, it has always to be treated as a right angle.

  “Last showed me, on his computer, after our bargain was struck and he was turning over his data and plans to me. I told him I would not probably grasp the theoretical basis of the process, however well I had or would come to manage the practical paradoxes of it, but he liked to show me. He first summoned up x-y coordinates, quite ordinary, and began by showing me how some surprising results were obtained by plotting on such coordinates an imaginary number, specifically the square root of minus one. The only way to describe what happens, he said, is that the plotted figure, one unit high, one unit wide, generates a shadow square of the same measurements ‘behind’ itself, in space undefined by the coordinates. It was with such tricks that he had begun; the orthogons he obtained had first started him thinking about the generation of inhabitable—if also somehow imaginary—pasts.