by John Varley
The week after that conference they were dating, and a month after that they were sleeping together and dodging the tabloid photographers because, let's face it, though Howard had never been of much interest to the celebrity-mad masses, being at least as nerdy and homely as Bill Gates and twice as boring, Andrea was right up there with Liz and Di and Michael and Elvis and Jackie, who were all dead now except for Elvis, and maybe Michael, and then there was the Romeo and Juliet angle, not the star-crossed lovers part or the teenage mad infatuation though it sometimes felt that way to Howard, but the fact that they were from warring houses, the putative rapist of the environment versus the Queen of Green.
Now they were to be married, Andrea up to her unlinered eyebrows in preparations for the Wedding of the Century on a remote Pacific atoll whose name and location were the most closely guarded secret since the Manhattan Project, a place the paparazzi couldn't reach if they tried to fly in on a cruise missile, with a guest list part Billboard Top Twenty, part Variety box office leaders list, part Who's Who in Washington, New York, Paris, and Geneva, and Howard spent a few minutes every day with his lawyers, honing the language of the prenuptial agreement so it would be generous but not profligate, conservative but not insulting, because no matter how infatuated Howard might be his permanent adolescent doubts lingered in an atavistic corner of his brain and he sometimes woke in the middle of the night silently screaming She couldn't possibly love me!
But it really seemed she did. There she stood in her high-heel sneakers, her red dress, with her wig hat on her head, and over it all a full-length coat of Columbian mammoth fur, one of only twenty such coats on the planet, a gift from Howard valued at well over a million dollars and the subject of endless controversy among animal lovers worldwide (Is fur murder if the animal was already dead? Would a roadkill possum coat be okay? Is it moral to wear a century-old mink?)... feeding grapes to Fuzzy.
Fuzzy loved the coat. It was possible that the pelt had come from his mother, though Howard had been adamant about never doing the DNA testing to determine just which Curson Avenue carcass was the mother.
Until the events on Wilshire Boulevard no one had known anything about the skin and possible furriness of a Columbian mammoth. It turned out that Columbians did have hair, three to four inches in length. This was nothing like the luxurious coat of the woolly, up to three feet long in some places, black or reddish brown, but it would do, it would do, and Howard found the very best tanners and furriers in Russia, who worked wonders with the coarse and lifeless material they were given, ending with a small number of coats, hats, and stoles that sold for unbelievable prices.
Now Fuzzy momentarily ignored the offered handful of grapes and reached through the bars of the enclosure to rub the sensitive tip of his trunk over Andrea's coat, from her shoulders down to the hem at her knees... and what must he be thinking? Howard wondered.
So who knew what was going through that large brain? Though there could be little of mammoth scent or of mammoth texture on the hairs Fuzzy was so fondly stroking, who knew what Fuzzy's incredibly superior nose and extremely sensitive trunk tip smelled and felt? Howard looked into the old, wise eye—and all mammoth eyes were old and wise, just like elephants, even when they were infants—and he looked at the slight figure of Andrea standing there, looked at the two beings most beloved to him in the universe, and he felt himself smile.
THE feeling persisted out of the mammoth house and into a slow Oregon drizzle, Warburton carefully holding a big umbrella over Andrea and a bodyguard holding open the door of the pearl-gray 1936 Cord Cabriolet convertible. Howard was about to get behind the wheel when Warburton leaned over and said something into his ear, and Howard's mellow mood vanished at once. He got in the car and slammed the door and just sat there for a moment, until his fiancee looked at him with a brow wrinkled in a way only Andrea de la Terre could wrinkle an eyebrow.
"Something wrong, darling?" she asked.
For a moment Howard could only sit there, the oversized steering wheel in his hands. It had been five years, five long frustrating years since that face had loomed in his sights, so close he had felt he could reach out and touch it, and in those five years he had never again felt that feeling of utter omnipotence, never held a man's life in his hands so intimately. And for the first two years he had felt, at best, ambivalence about his decision not to shoot because, after all, there might be answers to secrets locked up in that head, the secrets of how the universe was really put together, if answers there were.
Over the next years, as Matt Wright wandered the globe like some demented Diogenes looking for an honest philosophy, Howard had come to believe the man knew no more than he himself did, that the answers didn't exist. For the last year, Howard had devoted himself to pure and simple hatred.
At last, he sighed and started the car.
"Andrea, Matt Wright has returned."
22
SUSAN had been contrite about the blow. It was inexcusable for one person to hit another except in self-defense, she said, and he told her he figured if anybody ever had good reason to strike another, she was it. She didn't have anything to say to that, but after a long pause during which he felt like a specimen under a microscope, and not a very appetizing one, she unlocked the front door and invited him in.
And then it was... awkward.
He had a million things he wanted to tell her and another million things he wanted to ask her, but he had been far from sure he'd even be invited in the door, and, once in, his tongue seemed tied in knots. So... what have you been up to? He knew most of that; Susan's life had been well documented from the time Fuzzy came into her life. She was famous, had been on the television many times in the early years. Hell, she was a character on a Saturday morning animated television show, she had been played by Andrea de la Terre in the movie version of Little Fuzzy.
There was only one question worth asking, and he couldn't just come right out and ask it, certainly not with the cold look in her eye as she sat stiffly on a big cane chair opposite him, one leg curled up under her and the other one, the bad one, carefully extended. No, you'd have to work up to that one, if you ever had the guts to ask it at all, and she sure wasn't giving anything away.
What little conversation there was soon died away, and she didn't seem to know what to do with her hands and neither did he, so finally she asked, in a tone of voice that sounded to him a little like one you might use if your least favorite uncle had plopped himself down in your living room and just wouldn't go away, if he wanted something to eat. And he wasn't proud, no sir, he'd use any excuse to stretch his time with her until what he was beginning to feel would be the final and inevitable outcome, himself trudging once more down that lonesome road outside.
So he showered, and hacked away at his unruly and scraggly beard until it was almost presentable, dressed in the only change of clothes he had, and descended the stairs again to find her in the kitchen just pouring spaghetti into a colander.
"You know I'm not a cook," she said, wiping the condensed steam from her forehead with the back of her hand in a gesture that made him almost weep with longing. "But there's nobody around here that delivers except a so-so pizza shop, and I did make this sauce—spaghetti sauce is one of the five things I know how to make. Anyway, it's from the freezer, and so is the bread, and there's no salad because I'm hardly ever here and I just can't keep the refrigerator stocked with fresh things." She shrugged, and set the bowl of noodles and the bowl of bubbling red sauce on the simple pine table. "Anyway, here it is. Do you want some wine?"
He did, and she selected a red from a walk-in cellar with rack space for hundreds of bottles, only a dozen of them occupied.
He was hungry, he hadn't had anything since an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, having spent the whole day pacing or sitting on her front deck, and the food was good, when he could bring his attention to it, but most of the time it tasted like nothing in his mouth, just something to choke down until they could move on to the next stage, which was f
inding out if she was at all interested in listening to his story or if she'd shake his hand on the way out the door.
It was the tensest meal he ever ate, consumed in absolute silence.
Then they retired to the vast living room with glasses of wine and she invited him to sit on a plush couch with some sort of Indian art pattern, facing the fire ring, which was an artful arrangement of native stones, no mortar, set on glistening white beach sand in the center of the room. A copper funnel hung from the ceiling high above to catch the smoke. She struck a long match and touched it to several places around the stack, then sat in the same chair she had been in before she had invited him to dinner. She reached over to the small table beside her chair and picked up a small stack of postcards, shuffled them idly through her fingers before tossing them onto the small coffee table that separated them, where they fanned out in accusation. He reached out and picked up the topmost card, saw the picture of the Big Sur coast, waves crashing on huge rocks. He turned it over and could barely read his own indecipherable scrawl:
I am well, but cannot contact you as yet.
Will explain later.
I love you.
Matt
His face flushed as he flipped rapidly through them. Had anything ever sounded so lame? But he didn't know how else to say it.
He looked up, and saw her drain her glass of wine. He realized it was her third glass, and the bottle sitting beside her was almost empty. She gave him a twisted smile, then tossed her empty glass at the stones, where it shattered.
She laced her fingers around her good knee and leaned back.
"So, Matt. What have you been doing with yourself?"
And the words began to spill out of him.
MATT fled the scene of slaughter that night with only one thought in his mind: He had to find a quiet place to gather his thoughts, order the events of the last hour, write it all down. His grasp on what he had seen in the depths of the time machine was so tenuous it made the waking residual images of a dream seem as solid as a slap in the face. He needed to retreat from the storm he could see coming. He was standing beside a brand-new pickup truck whose door was wide open, the owner fled who-knew-where. He saw the key was in the ignition.
Ten minutes later he was on the San Diego Freeway, heading north.
He didn't sleep, he didn't dare, he knew it would all go up in smoke and blow away if he slept; the only way he could keep it all in his head was to invent mathematical mnemonics to trick himself into remembering, so he sat there in the parking lot of a McDonald's, the first restaurant he had seen, and when it opened he bought six cups of coffee and drove carefully down the street to a Bank of America and waited for it to open. When it did, he went inside and, not without some difficulty, withdrew a hundred thousand dollars from his account, worrying every minute that Howard or some federal agency would be looking for him, putting a flag on his account or his credit cards. But he walked out with the cash in a canvas bag and, gulping coffee, found a large consumer electronics store and purchased three personal computers for six hundred dollars. Then he drove around town looking for a used car lot, abandoned the stolen pickup after wiping the steering wheel and door handles and everything else he might have touched. He knew he must have left DNA traces inside, but hoped that for a routine stolen car the police would only dust for fingerprints. He walked to the car lot and paid four thousand in cash for an anonymous gray sedan that looked reliable enough, then drove it to Ventura, where he checked into a Motel 6 at noon under the name of Kevin Moore, paying an extra hundred-dollar bill for the privilege of not showing his driver's license.
At first it was dense with mathematical symbols, as he tried to document and somehow rationalize the things he had seen in that little metal box on that fateful night twelve thousand years ago... or was it really fifteen thousand years ago? Was that too linear a way of thinking? It made it sound as if the Pleistocene was in some... direction, a place you could point to, or a vector whose length and orientation was the sole possible result of a specific equation.
He knew he had seen something that a human eye is not really equipped to see... and yet how could that be? It was a contradiction in terms, but so was everything else from the moment they went into the past. It could not happen, yet it had happened. Which meant that he, Matt Wright, mathematical genius, was missing something.
On the second day he began to get some inkling of a new direction. At first it was no more than an itch at the back of his mind, something he had experienced before when a new idea was struggling to be born. He knew he couldn't force it to come, so he did what he always did at times like that. He went to bed. Maybe his subconscious mind would give him a boost.
But he woke up no wiser, and knew it was time to move on. He was rested, felt up to driving now. So he checked out and drove on up the coast, up US 101, then California Route 1 until he got to Big Sur, where he pulled over and found a place where he could sit and watch the ocean pounding the shore.
After a while he noticed a collection of buildings not too far away from him. There were tents, yurts, a pool, gardens, a large green lawn, odd-shaped buildings with an impromptu, weathered look, all set in the rugged, up and down, rocky and deeply forested surf-battered terrain for which Big Sur was famous. It looked peaceful, secluded, open to the air and the sea. Some sort of resort, maybe. Possibly just the sort of thing he needed to get his thoughts together.
He got back in his car and soon was driving by a sign that said ESALEN INSTITUTE.
IT took a moment to penetrate, then Susan sat forward.
"Esalen?"
"That's right."
"That place where rich people go to get massages and soak in hot tubs?" "Well, they're not all rich, though it's not cheap. And there are hot tubs and massages, but there are classes, too, and discussions of... well, all sorts of things."
"Let me get this straight. While I was... while I... you were soaking in a hot tub in Big Sur?"
Susan felt she was right on the edge. She had loved him, she had worried about him, she had gotten angry at him as years rolled by with nothing but his maddening monthly postcards. She had briefly thought she hated him, and then she had tried her best to forget him. God knows she had enough to deal with, between Howard, Fuzzy, her unwanted fame, and Big Mama, goddamn Big Mama, who had damn near killed her. Now here he was, and the reason he hadn't come back to her was...
Esalen?
In that moment she felt she could hate him again.
"I couldn't just walk right in the door," he was saying. "You have to have reservations. But I got lucky, there was a cancellation. I got in after waiting three days at a motel in Monterey. I enrolled in
'Gestalt and Evolutionary Psychology' and 'An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy.' "
"What, no massage?"
"Well, yes, in the evenings." He glanced up at her, and hurried on.
"I almost quit after the first day. I had no idea what I was doing there, but I had this persistent feeling that I was on the trail of something important. But the courses were stupid. There was no logic to them. Things were posited with no empirical proof, then accepted as true with no further discussion. Or, none from anyone but me, that is. I began to realize that no one there but myself had any training in math or science... or what I think of as science, anyway. It was another culture entirely, couldn't have been more foreign to me if I'd been dropped off in the fourteenth century."
"Which I guess is no longer just a figure of speech."
"What? Oh, sure, I guess we proved it's possible."
"I didn't prove anything, Matt. I was just along for the ride."
"So was I. More than you'll ever know." He sighed heavily, and drank the last of the wine from
his glass. "Anyway, I stuck it out, and by the third day I felt I was beginning to get a handle on something."
"What, that Buddhism is the true faith? Did we travel with a Zen time machine?"
She had thought he would laugh, but he merely looked thoughtful
, then slowly shook his head.
"I began to see that there was a tool there... or maybe a set of tools, that could... what I was looking for, you see, was a new perspective. My scientific one, all my mathematical tools, had failed me.
He stared into the fire for a while.
"Go on," she said. "I'm hanging on the edge here. Did you discover the secrets of the universe?"
"Not right then," he admitted. "On the fourth night they came for me."
HE was never entirely sure just who they were.
Oh, he had a general idea. They were Americans. They represented the government... which theoretically represented the people, but the people would never be consulted on anything this group did, nor informed of the results of their actions.
He gathered that the people he came into contact with had been assembled from the myriad of law-enforcement and hush-hush and they-don't-exist agencies for the sole purpose of investigating this time travel phenomenon... which meant investigating Matt Wright, as he was the only one who seemed to know anything about it.
It began in the middle of the night. He had a vague memory of waking up in a panic, unable to breathe. He'd had dreams like that before, but this time it turned out to be true. He had a brief glimpse of a face blackened with soot, big white staring eyes and grinning teeth above him in the darkness, a sharp smell, the taste of a rag in his mouth.
Later, he figured it was good old chloroform. The old ways are the best.
When he woke up he might have been a few miles down the road or he might have been in Patagonia. He didn't know how long he had been out. He was in a sparsely furnished room—cot, steel sink with tin cup and a bar of soap, steel toilet, table with three chairs bolted to the floor, no windows to the outside, a steel door with a six-by-six mesh-reinforced window at eye level, a long mirror set into another wall.
A cell, no getting around it. Larger than most cells, he supposed, never having seen one except in the movies, maybe thirty feet square, room for some serious pacing. Only someone who had never seen a television cop show would fail to realize that the big mirror was partially silvered—the infamous one-way mirror. The ceiling was at least twelve feet high. A small camera was mounted in each of the four corners. It wasn't particularly clean. The linoleum floor was cracked and peeling in a few places, scuffed here and there, in need of mopping. Dust kitties had accumulated in the floor corners, and there were cobwebs in the ceiling corners. There were smudges on the walls that looked like they had been made by hands, as high as hands could reach. Overhead an ordinary fluorescent light fixture flickered and clicked maddeningly. Exploring the entire place, seeing absolutely everything there was to be seen, took a total of ten minutes.
