Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  Tubdu was crossing the hall—not the woman I had last seen, in her sixties, grey-haired and tired and fragile, but Tubdu of The Great Giggle, Tubdu at forty-five, fat and rosy-brown and brisk, crossing the hall with short, quick steps, stopping, looking at me at first with mere recognition, there’s Hideo, then with puzzlement, is that Hideo? and then with shock—that can’t be Hideo!

  “Ombu,” I said, the baby word for othermother, “Ombu, it’s me, Hideo, don’t worry, it’s all right, I came back.” I embraced her, pressed my cheek to hers.

  “But, but—” She held me off, looked up at my face. “But what has happened to you, darling boy?” she cried, and then, turning, called out in a high voice, “Isako! Isako!”

  When my mother saw me she thought, of course, that I had not left on the ship to Hain, that my courage or my intent had failed me; and in her first embrace there was an involuntary reserve, a withholding. Had I thrown away the destiny for which I had been so ready to throw away everything else? I knew what was in her mind. I laid my cheek to hers and whispered, “I did go, mother, and I came back. I’m thirty-one years old. I came back—”

  She held me away a little just as Tubdu had done, and saw my face. “Oh Hideo!” she said, and held me to her with all her strength. “My dear, my dear!”

  We held each other in silence, till I said at last, “I need to see Isidri.”

  My mother looked up at me intently but asked no questions. “She’s in the shrine, I think.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I left her and Tubdu side by side and hurried through the halls to the central room, in the oldest part of the house, rebuilt seven centuries ago on the foundations that go back three thousand years. The walls are stone and clay, the roof is thick glass, curved. It is always cool and still there. Books line the walls, the Discussions, the discussions of the Discussions, poetry, texts and versions of the Plays; there are drums and whispersticks for meditation and ceremony; the small, round pool which is the shrine itself wells up from clay pipes and brims its blue-green basin, reflecting the rainy sky above the skylight. Isidri was there. She had brought in fresh boughs for the vase beside the shrine, and was kneeling to arrange them.

  I went straight to her and said, “Isidri, I came back. Listen—”

  Her face was utterly open, startled, scared, defenseless, the soft, thin face of a woman of twenty-two, the dark eyes gazing into me.

  “Listen, Isidri: I went to Hain, I studied there, I worked on a new kind of temporal physics, a new theory—transilience—I spent ten years there. Then we began experiments, I was in Ran’n and crossed over to the Hainish system in no time, using that technology, in no time, you understand me, literally, like the ansible—not at lightspeed, not faster than light, but in no time. In one place and in another place instantaneously, you understand? And it went fine, it worked, but coming back there was . . . there was a fold, a crease, in my field. I was in the same place in a different time. I came back eighteen of your years, ten of mine. I came back to the day I left, but I didn’t leave, I came back, I came back to you.”

  I was holding her hands, kneeling to face her as she knelt by the silent pool. She searched my face with her watchful eyes, silent. On her cheekbone there was a fresh scratch and a little bruise; a branch had lashed her as she gathered the evergreen boughs.

  “Let me come back to you,” I said in a whisper.

  She touched my face with her hand. “You look so tired,” she said. “Hideo . . . Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes. I’m all right.”

  And there my story, so far as it has any interest to the Ekumen or to research in transilience, comes to an end. I have lived now for eighteen years as a farmholder of Udan Farm of Derdan’nad Village of the hill region of the Northwest Watershed of the Saduun on Oket, on O. I am fifty years old. I am the Morning husband of the Second Sedoretu of Udan; my wife is Isidri; my Night marriage is to Sota of Drehe, whose Evening wife is my sister Koneko. My children of the Morning with Isidri are Latubdu and Tadri; the Evening children are Murmi and Lasako. But none of this is of much interest to the Stabiles of the Ekumen.

  My mother, who had had some training in temporal engineering, asked for my story, listened to it carefully, and accepted it without question; so did Isidri. Most of the people of my farmhold chose a simpler and far more plausible story, which explained everything fairly well, even my severe loss of weight and ten-year age gain overnight.

  At the very last moment, just before the space ship left, they said, Hideo decided not to go to the Ekumenical School on Hain after all. He came back to Udan, because he was in love with Isidri. But it had made him quite ill, because it was a very hard decision and he was very much in love.

  Maybe that is indeed the true story. But Isidri and Isako chose a stranger truth.

  Later, when we were forming our sedoretu, Sota asked me for that truth. “You aren’t the same man, Hideo, though you are the man I always loved,” he said. I told him why, as best I could. He was sure that Koneko would understand it better than he could, and indeed she listened gravely, and asked several keen questions which I could not answer.

  I did attempt to send a message to the temporal physics department of the Ekumenical Schools on Hain. I had not been home long before my mother, with her strong sense of duty and her obligation to the Ekumen, became insistent that I do so.

  “Mother,” I said, “what can I tell them? They haven’t invented churten theory yet!”

  “Apologize for not coming to study, as you said you would. And explain it to the Director, the Anarresti woman. Maybe she would understand.”

  “Even Gvonesh doesn’t know about churten yet. They’ll begin telling her about it on the ansible from Urras and Anarres about three years from now. Anyhow, Gvonesh didn’t know me the first couple of years I was there.” The past tense was inevitable but ridiculous; it would have been more accurate to say, “She won’t know me the first couple of years I won’t be there.”

  Or was I there on Hain, now? That paradoxical idea of two simultaneous existences on two different worlds disturbed me exceedingly. It was one of the points Koneko had asked about. No matter how I discounted it as impossible under every law of temporality, I could not keep from imagining that it was possible, that another I was living on Hain, and would come to Udan in eighteen years and meet myself. After all, my present existence was also and equally impossible.

  When such notions haunted and troubled me I learned to replace them with a different image: the little whorls of water that slid down between the two big rocks, where the current ran strong, just above the swimming bay in the Oro. I would imagine, those whirlpools forming and dissolving, or I would go down to the river and sit and watch them. And they seemed to hold a solution to my question, to dissolve it as they endlessly dissolved and formed.

  But my mother’s sense of duty and obligation was unmoved by such trifles as a life impossibly lived twice.

  “You should try to tell them,” she said.

  She was right. If my double transilience field had established itself permanently, it was a matter of real importance to temporal science, not only to myself. So I tried. I borrowed a staggering sum in cash from the farm reserves, went up to Ran’n, bought a five-thousand-word ansible screen transmission, and sent a message to my director of studies at the Ekumenical School, trying to explain why, after being accepted at the School, I had not arrived—if in fact I had not arrived.

  I take it that this was the “creased message” or “ghost” they asked me to try to interpret, my first year there. Some of it is gibberish, and some words probably came from the other, nearly simultaneous transmission, but parts of my name are in it, and other words may be fragments or reversals from my long message—problem, churten, return, arrived, time.

  It is interesting, I think, that at the ansible center the Receivers used the word “creased” for a temporally disturbed transilient, as Gvonesh would use it for the anomaly, the “wrinkl
e” in my churten field. In fact, the ansible field was meeting a resonance resistance, caused by the ten-year anomaly in the churten field, which did fold the message back into itself, crumple it up, inverting and erasing. At that point, within the implication of the Tiokunan’n Double Field, my existence on O as I sent the message was simultaneous with my existence on Hain when the message was received. There was an I who sent and an I who received. Yet, so long as the encapsulated field anomaly existed, the simultaneity was literally a point, an instant, a crossing without further implication in either the ansible or the churten field.

  An image for the churten field in this case might be a river winding in its floodplain, winding in deep, redoubling curves, folding back upon itself so closely that at last the current breaks through the double banks of the S and runs straight, leaving a whole reach of the water aside as a curving lake, cut off from the current, unconnected. In this analogy, my ansible message would have been the one link, other than my memory, between the current and the lake.

  But I think a truer image is the whirlpools of the current itself, occurring and recurring, the same? or not the same?

  I worked at the mathematics of an explanation in the early years of my marriage, while my physics was still in good working order. See the “Notes toward a Theory of Resonance Interference in Doubled Ansible and Churten Fields,” appended to this document. I realize that the explanation is probably irrelevant, since, on this stretch of the river, there is no Tiokunan’n Field. But independent research from an odd direction can be useful. And I am attached to it, since it is the last temporal physics I did. I have followed churten research with intense interest, but my life’s work has been concerned with vineyards, drainage, the care of yamas, the care and education of children, the Discussions, and trying to learn how to catch fish with my bare hands.

  Working on that paper, I satisfied myself in terms of mathematics and physics that the existence in which I went to Hain and became a temporal physicist specializing in transilience was in fact encapsulated (enfolded, erased) by the churten effect. But no amount of theory or proof could quite allay my anxiety, my fear—which increased after my marriage and with the birth of each of my children—that there was a crossing point yet to come. For all my images of rivers and whirlpools, I could not prove that the encapsulation might not reverse at the instant of transilience. It was possible that on the day I churtened from Ve to Ran’n I might undo, lose, erase my marriage, our children, all my life at Udan, crumple it up like a bit of paper tossed into a basket. I could not endure that thought.

  I spoke of it at last to Isidri, from whom I have only ever kept one secret.

  “No,” she said, after thinking a long time, “I don’t think that can be. There was a reason, wasn’t there, that you came back—here.”

  “You,” I said.

  She smiled wonderfully. “Yes,” she said. She added after a while, “And Sota, and Koneko, and the farmhold . . . But there’d be no reason for you to go back there, would there?”

  She was holding our sleeping baby as she spoke; she laid her cheek against the small silky head.

  “Except maybe your work there,” she said. She looked at me with a little yearning in her eyes. Her honesty required equal honesty of me.

  “I miss it sometimes,” I said. “I know that. I didn’t know that I was missing you. But I was dying of it. I would have died and never known why, Isidri. And anyhow, it was all wrong—my work was wrong.”

  “How could it have been wrong, if it brought you back?” she said, and to that I had no answer at all.

  When information on churten theory began to be published I subscribed to whatever the Center Library of O received, particularly the work done at the Ekumenical Schools and on Ve. The general progress of research was just as I remembered, racing along for three years, then hitting the hard places. But there was no reference to a Tiokunan’n Hideo doing research in the field. Nobody worked on a theory of a stabilized double field. No churten field research station was set up at Ran’n.

  At last it was the winter of my visit home, and then the very day; and I will admit that, all reason to the contrary, it was a bad day. I felt waves of guilt, of nausea. I grew very shaky, thinking of the Udan of that visit, when Isidri had been married to Hedran, and I a mere visitor.

  Hedran, a respected traveling scholar of the Discussions, had in fact come to teach several times in the village. Isidri had suggested inviting him to stay at Udan. I had vetoed the suggestion, saying that though he was a brilliant teacher there was something I disliked about him. I got a sidelong flash from Sidi’s clear dark eyes: Is he jealous?

  She suppressed a smile. When I told her and my mother about my “other life,” the one thing I had left out, the one secret I kept, was my visit to Udan. I did not want to tell my mother that in that “other life” she had been very ill. I did not want to tell Isidri that in that “other life” Hedran had been her Evening husband and she had had no children of her body. Perhaps I was wrong, but it seemed to me that I had no right to tell these things, that they were not mine to tell.

  So Isidri could not know that what I felt was less jealousy than guilt. I had kept knowledge from her. And I had deprived Hedran of a life with Isidri, the dear joy, the center, the life of my own life.

  Or had I shared it with him? I didn’t know. I don’t know.

  That day passed like any other, except that one of Suudi’s children broke her elbow falling out of a tree. “At least we know she won’t drown,” said Tubdu, wheezing.

  Next came the date of the night in my rooms in the New Quadrangle, when I had wept and not known why I wept. And a while after that, the day of my return, transilient, to Ve, carrying a bottle of Isidri’s wine for Gvonesh. And finally, yesterday, I entered the churten field on Ve, and left it eighteen years ago on O. I spent the night, as I sometimes do, in the shrine. The hours went by quietly; I wrote, gave worship, meditated, and slept.

  And I woke beside the pool of silent water.

  So, now: I hope the Stabiles will accept this report from a farmer they never heard of, and that the engineers of transilience may see it as at least a footnote to their experiments. Certainly it is difficult to verify, the only evidence for it being my word, and my otherwise almost inexplicable knowledge of churten theory. To Gvonesh, who does not know me, I send my respect, my gratitude, and my hope that she will honor my intent.

  ANYTHING WOULD BE WORTH IT

  Lesley L. Smith

  The most unlikely things can have practical applications, under the right conditions . . .

  made it through one more morning without any crying or “crazy incidents.” In the coffee shop’s early afternoon lull, while I was hanging out reading online high-energy physics articles, there was a commotion in the doorway, with a lot of laughing. I heard shushing, and then someone approached my table.

  I looked up and there stood a woman and two beautiful little girls. My heart caved in as I took in their giggly faces.

  “Abigail?” The woman’s smile was luminous in her round, dark face. “I heard you’re a grad student and you do physics tutoring?”

  I’d been kicked out, but that was the least of my worries.

  The woman continued, “I’m Sophia, a new grad student.”

  “Yeah, I’m Abigail and I do tutoring,” I said, glancing at the girls who were fighting over where to sit. They appeared to be about seven and nine and were dressed in similar all-pink and all-purple outfits, complete with matching barrettes at the end of their frizzy black pigtails.

  A little younger, my daughters had also been in their “girly” phases. Against my will, my thoughts were drawn back to last fall.

  “Mommy!” my youngest, Emma screamed from the family room.

  “Mommy!” Isabella echoed.

  I dropped the dinner preparations in the kitchen and ran to the family room. When I got there, the girls were fighting over costumes and my husband, Jacob, was just sitting on the couch grinning, watching them.r />
  I put my hands on my hips. “Please no screaming in the house, girls. What’s going on in here?”

  Emma’s cheeks were flushed and her fine blond hair stuck out every which way. “Isabella tried to take my silver fairy wings! They’re mine! Tell her, Mommy.”

  Isabella’s blue eyes flashed as she shook her head vigorously, throwing her long hair back and forth. “I need the silver wings. The gold ones don’t go!” She pointed at her sparkly pink tutu on the floor.

  I turned to Jacob, still leaning back on the sofa, sporting his grin. “A little help here?”

  He glanced up at me with mischievous green eyes and a full-fledged smile spread across his face. “Oh, c’mon. They’re so cute! Look at them.”

  I couldn’t help smiling back at him. “Agreed—they’re adorable. But if someone doesn’t finish dinner, we won’t be able to eat. And you’re on fairy patrol, Jacob, so deal, dude.”

  He sighed in mock consternation. “Oh, all right.” He slipped off the couch onto the floor next to the girls. “The punishment for fairies acting up is the tickle monster!” He grabbed the girls and started tickling them.

  They laughed uncontrollably, but didn’t try to get away, I noticed.

  I took a step back toward the kitchen.

  “Watch out for the tickle monster, Mommy!” Emma cried out, reaching for my hand.

  Jacob crawled toward me. “Yep, look out, Mommy.” He pulled me down on the carpet and three sets of hands started tickling me. I laughed so hard it was hard to breathe.

  “Abigail?” a woman said.

  Suddenly aware of my surroundings again, I still found it hard to breathe, albeit for the opposite reason. Remembered joy had turned to ashes. My eyes tried to fill with tears, but I blinked them away. No more crying. Last time I’d started crying, I couldn’t stop and I’d ended up in the hospital for three months.