by John Varley
Gradually, as he continued his silence—he learned early that even saying "no comment" only encouraged them—the crowds lessened. It helped that Susan was giving accounts of their adventure—always on tape, never live, and always carefully controlled by Howard's spin doctors. The story she told was the truth, in the sense that she didn't lie about anything, but there was much she did not or would not tell.
"It must have been awful."
"Not as bad as what you went through. I watched them hounding you. I did more interviews than I wanted to so maybe it would take some of the pressure off you."
Matt smiled. "You know, I thought it might be something like that. Thanks."
"I have no idea if it did any good." She looked down at the table. "I have a confession to make." She looked up again. "It was during that first year, after wondering where you were while they had you locked up, and then seeing what they were doing to you... it was then that I realized that I loved you."
Matt said nothing. She took his hand.
"I liked you a lot when we were working together. I liked making love to you, it made me less afraid of what was happening to us. But I was always a little afraid of you."
Matt was genuinely shocked.
"How could you be afraid of me? I didn't think you were afraid of anything."
"Oh, there's plenty of things that scare me. I just try not to show it. You were just so... so damn smart. You were so much smarter than me I just couldn't keep up with you. When you started talking about quantum physics and like that, I felt like such a dope."
"Last time I checked, they weren't graduating any dopes from veterinary school. Seems to me you need the same skills as somebody who becomes a doctor, only your patients can't even tell you what's bothering them."
"Wrong word, maybe. I know I'm smart, but it's... relative, like Dr. Einstein said. I felt like a dope." She smiled briefly. "I'd never met a supergenius."
Matt grimaced. "I've had that trouble all my life. I try not to talk shop, explain what it is I'm researching, but with you, we were both working, and you wanted to know. I probably shouldn't have, but as a conversationalist, I am a dope."
"I'm not blaming you, Matt. I wanted to know what you were doing. And you're a good explainer. But you'd lose me."
"Like you say, it's all relative. I happen to have a mind that's quick with numbers. And you know what? There are people with an IQ of 60, people who can't even tie their shoes, who can do anything with numbers I can do." "Is what you've got to tell me more about the time machine? More quantum theory and chaos theory and stuff like that?"
"I began to realize that my point of view was entirely too provincial to explain the universe as I had encountered it."
THE media circus that his life had become gradually abated, though it never entirely folded its tent. There was a flurry of activity at the one-year anniversary and from time to time an enterprising intern for a television show would approach him, usually in restaurants while he was eating, in the vain hope that he'd suddenly decide to spill his guts. But a circus can't go on forever if the trapeze artist won't swing.
Matt deliberately tried to lead as boring a life as possible, in part to discourage the hordes of the curious. In other words, he sometimes realized wryly, he tried to return to the kind of life he led before Howard Christian barged into it. He thought about returning to a university somewhere to continue his researches, plenty of places would have jumped at the chance of having the guy they thought of as "the man who invented time travel" on the faculty, no questions asked, no pressure applied, here's your lab, Matt, and do whatever you want in it... but he realized that didn't appeal to him anymore. His quest was taking him in other directions.
He entered a monastery in New Mexico for a while. Partly it was so he could look out the window and see the forlorn press pool, only a handful at that point, forced to stake out the building in the blistering heat. But he really was in need of a quiet, cloistered lifestyle.
This was sort of a Club Med monastery, nondenominational, catering to people with emotional problems to resolve or deep doubts about existence to work out. Matt put himself in the latter category. The quarters were Spartan, the food was plain, the brothers wore robes, and you chanted and sang at appointed hours, but nobody demanded that you believe in God. Sort of religion lite.
Things eased up greatly when the biggest male box office star in the world was arrested for murdering his wife and two children. He claimed to be innocent and there were no eyewitnesses but his story was Swiss cheese. He hired a team of high-powered lawyers—some of them lured away from Howard's school of piranha—and suddenly there was hardly room on the news for coverage of the war in Indonesia, much less a nontalking has-been quasicelebrity like Matt Wright. The news organizations took to checking in on him weekly, then monthly, and then he was gone.
Not lost. They found him again easily enough. And during the brief period when there had been no reporters aware of his whereabouts, Matt noticed that two men he had thought were reporters were still dogging him. One was a very large man with very little fat on him, maybe an ex-marine. The other was wiry, moved smoothly as a lizard, and had eyes like stones. He called them Jarhead and Snake. He decided they were probably Howard's agents, and knew they would never give up, but they never interfered with him so he ignored them.
"He was easy. Some of the ones before him were tougher." He grinned.
"OH, Matt, that's awful."
"Scared me a little, I admit it. He told me they'd 'taken down' three men who were trying to do me harm, and foiled one kidnap attempt. Said they'd heard rumors that one foreign government was thinking about trying to get their hands on me."
"What did you do?"
Matt shrugged. "What could I do? I felt claustrophobic enough with the press corps following me around. I didn't like Jarhead and Snake following me, for that matter, but I never complained after that. I didn't want to lock myself away behind walls. I enjoyed the monastery for a month, but I wouldn't have wanted to stay longer. I decided to take my chances.
"Anyway, it was just about two years before I thought things had cooled off enough that I could move around freely. It wasn't wasted time; I was reading and thinking. I read everything I could find about time travel theories. I read every science fiction story I could get my hands on, from H. G. Wells to some ridiculous thing about taking people off of airplanes that were about to crash. But there were places I wanted to go, people I wanted to talk to, and I needed to travel...."
MATT became a globetrotter. For almost three years he sought out people who might have insights that had been denied him in his education, which had been the best possible in the sciences but quite deficient in everything else.
He wandered India, speaking to the holy men of that country's thousand religions. He bathed in the Ganges. He went to Tibet, to Rome, to Jerusalem, to Mecca. He climbed Mount Fujiyama, sought out eremites in Ethiopia and Egypt. He sat in a sweat lodge in Arizona and chewed peyote and tried LSD.
Since the days of Einstein, scientists had been searching for a "Theory of Everything," a paradigm that would tie together all the known forces in the universe. Much progress had been made, but every time humanity seemed on the verge of being able to write it all down in an equation as elegant as E=mc2, something else came along that made the results more complicated rather than less, requiring more theories to explain the new data.
Matt had begun to wonder if everybody was looking in the wrong direction. "YOU'RE not going religious on me, are you, Matt?" Susan smiled at him.
"Listen, I know you don't want to hear more about string theory, but bear with me a minute. You'll be relieved when I get through it, I promise you.
"What we call a 'string' is a sort of loop of pure energy. They would be very small. Imagine the sun, one million miles across. Now imagine a proton in the center of the sun. Expand that proton until it is the size of the Solar System, out to the orbit of Pluto. A string within that proton would be the size of the proton
before we expanded it."
"Pretty damn small."
"The technical term for it is 'teeny weeny weeny weeny weeny weeny.' Now, the thing is, string theory has been around a long time now... but no one has come up with any experiment that could prove or disprove it. No one has thought of a way to detect a string, to shine a light on it. There are good theoretical reasons to believe that there is no way for us to detect them. We keep fiddling with the theory because the math is intriguing, it works out elegantly... but we have no way to know if it connects with reality." Matt snorted. "As if we even had a useful definition of 'reality.' "
Susan frowned. "I need a beer. You want one?"
"Sure."
She got up and walked the few steps to the refrigerator, glad to have a chance to turn her back on him for a moment. What he had said earlier had settled her mind a lot, but she supposed she would never be entirely comfortable when he was in his professorial mode.
You'd better learn to get comfortable with it, girl. A professor is what he is, that's the guy you've fallen in love with, so get used to it.
She popped the tops on two cans of Henry Weinhard's and handed one to Matt, then sat back down in the little lecture hall and tried to look alert.
"So you're saying it could all be just a mental game," she said.
"What we mathematicians call 'jacking off,' " Matt agreed. "Nothing wrong with that. Much of mathematics has nothing to do with the 'real' world. But don't worry about it. String theory has nothing to do with it, I'm just showing you some examples. Say we could prove string theory. Strings are made of pure energy. Okay, but what is the nature of energy? Don't answer that, it doesn't matter."
"Very likely. We've been reaching dead ends all over the realm of physics. Don't get me wrong, there is a vast amount still to learn, and if the past is any guide, a lot of what we think we know now is wrong.
"But look at the other end of the scale. We can now see out to the theoretical end of the universe. It's fourteen or fifteen billion light-years away, and it seems we can't see any farther than that because there is no 'farther than that.' Space is curved, and what we see out there is what was happening fifteen billion years ago. If somebody is out there, on the edge of the universe, looking at us... what they are seeing is an infant universe. Quasars, protogalaxies."
"You've lost me again."
"Don't worry about it. The point is, it's another limit. One more example. Black holes. They were postulated a long time ago, and then we found them. A triumph for astrophysics. We can observe their effects, we can make a good stab at describing the conditions that exist around them, we can construct a theoretical model of what might be inside them, if that term has any real meaning with a black hole... but we can never, never look into one. Another dead end.
"What I'm saying is, we're reaching end points everywhere in what I have believed in all my life, what you might call rational science. So what's left?"
"Irrational science?"
Matt laughed.
"That's a good term for it. I like it better than mysticism, or pseudoscience, or 'wacko New Age stuff.' There are irrational numbers in math, and they are quite useful.
"Susan, we experienced something that, in a rational universe as I thought I understood it, simply could not happen. Therefore, a lot of my assumptions were wrong. I've been looking for answers in other places."
"And have you found anything?"
Matt spread his hands and sighed. "I'm ashamed to tell you just how little."
"Don't be ashamed. I've got a feeling you've found out more than anyone else would have."
"Maybe so, maybe not. Look... we all travel through time. We think of it as a train traveling at a steady speed on a straight track. Somebody buys us a ticket—"
"Are you talking about our mothers, or... God?"
"I don't know. We come into existence, we come into consciousness, we ride the train for a while, not knowing what our destination is, and then we get off. Not only do we not know what's outside the train, what's at the station, we don't even know what we are. What is consciousness? Would time exist without consciousness to appreciate it? Could consciousness somehow be the basis of it all? Would there be a universe at all without an aware being to witness it? These are the questions I've tried to answer."
Matt smiled. "Maybe 'finding an answer' was the wrong way to put it. I never expected that. I was exploring the concept of a creator, among other things. Different cultures have come up with very different ways of looking at the idea. I just wondered, do any of them have a better way of looking at it than the one I was taught?"
"Do you have a religion? I never asked you that."
"I never asked you, either. I was raised in the Christian world, therefore I see the world through that prism, even if I don't believe in it. Christianity and Islam, the great monotheistic religions, see God as omniscient and all-powerful. With Christianity, God is good and Satan is evil... but as I understand it, the game is rigged. At Armageddon a great battle will be fought, and the outcome is already known. I mean, we don't call him God for nothing. Which means that even God's fate is predestined. By himself, I guess, though I can't imagine why he'd bother to play the game if he knows the outcome."
Susan laughed. "I hate to say this, but you're losing me even quicker with this stuff than you did with the physics."
"That's exactly how I felt. So I looked around. The older religions, what we look down our noses at and call 'mythology,' like the Romans and Norse and Greeks, had a different worldview. Hindus today still see the universe like that. Their gods duke it out from time to time. They are willful, vain, childish, vindictive, quite willing to play dice with human lives."
"So's the Christian God, in my opinion."
"I couldn't agree with you more. But we put all those attributes into one being. Animists and others give different attributes to different gods." Matt sighed heavily. "What I'm going to tell you is that I've begun to get a... a hint of an inkling of an intuition of an enigma. Remember the old fable of the blind men and the elephant? One feels his trunk and says an elephant is like a snake. Another thinks he's like a tree, from feeling his leg. Another thinks an elephant is like a wall.
"What's happened to me is like... like I'm blind, deaf, and have no hands, and you gave me one hair off Fuzzy's back and asked me to deduce a mammoth from that."
"At last." Susan laughed. "A metaphor I can understand. How far have you gotten?"
"About as far as you'd expect. How about the railroad metaphor? I thought that one was pretty good."
"You're right. I got that one."
"Then try this. We think time is a long, straight train ride at constant speed. Actually, it can turn into a roller coaster. It's got big loops in it. It turns upside down now and then, and sometimes it goes forward and then backward. Why? I don't know. But it could be that during human history we've been riding on an abnormally straight stretch of track, that what we think of as universal laws concerning time are really only local. Maybe in the next galaxy down the block time runs backward. Maybe out there in empty space there are lots of loops, and we have no way to detect them.
"You've given me a lot of maybes."
"Best I can offer. I've got a million more. Maybe these loops in time open up more often than we let ourselves admit. What if the Loch Ness monster is an aquatic dinosaur that fell through a hole in time and swam around long enough to get spotted a few times, create a legend, and then died? What if the Sasquatch and the Yeti were time travelers? What if some—some, mind you, ninety-nine percent of them are swamp gas—some UFOs are lost astronauts from the future?"
"I've heard some of this stuff before. There are websites devoted to it."
"Sure. And until I traveled in time I dismissed them. I have no proof of any of them now, for that matter. As you say, all I've got is a lot of maybes."
Susan took another drink of her beer and thought it over.
"You're disappointed, aren't you?" Matt asked.
"A li
ttle," she admitted. "I was hoping you'd found some answers."
"I'm a long way from that. But I did learn to do a trick, and I did make a discovery. You may like the trick, but I don't think the discovery is going to be easy for either of us to accept. Watch this."
Matt reached into his pocket and took out something she immediately recognized as one of the marbles he had tinkered with five years earlier, when he was trying to duplicate the time machine. It looked like ordinary red glass, in a square cage with ridges that could be interlocked with other cages to slide over each other in any direction.
He held it between thumb and forefinger and started twisting it in the air. Left, right, right some more, forward, left again... she soon lost track of the permutations. It was like watching a safecracker twisting the dial, only he turned it through three axes. Then he stopped. Nothing happened.
"Nice trick," she said.
"It doesn't work every time. That's what's so frustrating. In science as I knew it, repeatability is everything. With this stuff... well, like my grandfather used to say, 'It don't work unless you hold your mouth right.' " He went through the motions again, and she was amused to see that he actually had screwed up one side of his mouth in an odd way, though she didn't think he was aware that he was doing it. Then he set it down on the table between them... and this time the little wire cube with the clear red glass ball in it seemed to be seized by a mysterious energy. It began to spin.
It... unfolded itself. Watching it, incredulous, Susan thought each move was as logical as unfolding a paper airplane or taking a flattened box and turning it into an assembled one... but neither of those operations hurt her eyes. This was an evolution that she felt instinctively that human eyes were not equipped to witness. Now there was a larger cube, three marbles on a side, now four, now five... and in a few eye-popping seconds there was the whole array, and the box that contained it, laid out like an opened suitcase in front of her.
