The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  He could make out the top of the escarpment, at least he could see that it did have a top, an edge indicating that it had stopped its vertical climb, but he could tell little more than that. As his eyes traveled further down he was able to focus on more detail, and taking a few steps back gave him a better perspective.

  There were numerous more or less clearly defined strata, each in movement seemingly independent of the others, sometimes in an opposite flow from those adjacent, and sometimes the same but at a different speed. Like a multilayered roulette wheel, he thought, which seemed appropriate.

  Trapped in most of these layers were visible figures – some of them blurred, but some of them so clear and vivid that when they were looking in his direction, as if from a wide window in the side of a building, he attempted to gain their attention by waving. None responded in any definitive way, although here and there the possibility that they might have seen him certainly seemed to be there.

  The vast majority of these figures appeared to be ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities – fixing or eating dinner, housecleaning, working in offices, factories, on farms – but occasionally he’d see something indicating that an unusual event was occurring or had recently occurred. A man lying on his back, people gathered around, some attending to the fallen figure but most bearing witness. A couple being chased by a crowd. A woman in obvious anguish, screaming in a foreign language. A blurred figure in freefall from a tall building.

  The settings for these dramas, suspenseful or otherwise, were most often sketchily drawn: some vague furniture, the outlines of a building, or not indicated at all. The figures sometimes acted their parts on a backdrop of floating abstractions. In a few cases, however, it was like looking out his front door – at random locations a tree branch or a roof eave actually penetrated the outer plane of the escarpment and hung there like a three-dimensional projection in the contemporary air.

  It was like a gigantic three-dimensional time-line/cruise ship passing through the eastern Colorado plains, each level representing a different era. It was like a giant fault in time, shifting the temporal balance of the world in an attempt to rectify past mistakes. But there was no compelling reason to believe any of these theories. It was an enormous, fracturing mystery traveling through the world.

  And just as suddenly as it had appeared, becoming so dramatically there it sucked up all the available reality of its environment, it was gone, reduced to a series of windy, dust-filled eddies that dissipated within a few seconds. Will shakily examined himself with eyes and hands. Would he lose his mind the way his Jeff had?

  * * *

  If they’d pulled their son out of school when these storms first began he’d be okay right now. That’s what they’d been called at first, “storms”, because of their sudden evolution, and the occasional accompanying wind, and the original belief that they were an atmospheric phenomenon of some sort, an optical illusion much like sunlight making a rainbow when it passed through moisture-laden cloud, although they couldn’t imagine why it was so detailed, or the mechanism of its projection. Tracy had wanted to pull Jeff out until the world better understood what all this was about, and a few other parents, a very few, had already done so. But Will couldn’t see the reasoning. If there was a danger how would Jeff be any safer at home? These insubstantial moving walls came out of nowhere, impossible to predict, and as far as anyone knew they weren’t harmful. There had been that case of the farmer in Texas, but he’d been old, and practically senile anyway, and it must have been a terrible shock when it passed through his barn.

  Tracy inevitably blamed Will, because in Jeff’s case it certainly hadn’t been harmless, and then Will had compounded things by being late that day. Will was often late. He had always worked at being some sort of success, even though the right combination of jobs and investments had always eluded him. He’d been selling spas and real estate, filling in the gaps with various accounting and IT consulting. Too many clients, too many little puzzle pieces of time, everything overlapping slightly so that at times his life was multidimensional, unfocused, and he was always late to wherever he was scheduled to be.

  He’d pulled up to the school twenty minutes late that day to pick up Jeff. Normally it wouldn’t have mattered that much – Jeff liked hanging out in the school library using their computers. And if that’s where he’d been he would have probably been okay. But that particular afternoon Jeff had decided to hang out on the playground, shooting hoops until his dad came to pick him up. And that’s where he’d been when the towering wall came through. One of the teachers who’d witnessed the event said later that the wall appeared so suddenly no one had time to move, and it ran over Jeff much like a runaway truck, looking scarily solid, seemingly obliterating everything in its path as it thundered across the concrete and asphalt.

  Will had arrived just in time to see that rapidly moving wall vanishing into a dusty brown mist, bending gel-like, quickly losing resolution as it leaned precariously like some old building coming down in an earthquake, but silently – the roar and the shaking were entirely visual, the trauma entirely mental. He had raced into the last of its shimmering eddies and scooped his drooling boy off the ground.

  Will drove the pickup back toward his parents’ farm more slowly, and with more care than he had when he left. The ambient light of the day had dimmed only slightly, but the canopy of sky appeared even lower than before, only a hundred yards up or so. The landscape looked flattened, stretched out under the pressure of the low-hanging clouds. He could hear rumbles in the distance, and could see the brief glimmer of escarpments appearing, disappearing, surfacing, diving back into the world. Time escaping, time buried and sealed.

  Another pickup approached on the narrow gravel road, identical, or almost identical to his. He held his breath, wondering how he would handle it if he encountered a younger or an older version of himself driving the same pickup on the road. Surely that would still be impossible, even during Twember? And if it did occur, might that not shatter the world?

  The pickup slowed as it came up alongside him. He stared at the driver. Because it was Lana Sumpter, much as she’d been when she was seventeen years old – her face so new, fresh, and shiny with a soft-lipped smile cradling her words. “Will? Will Cotton? Is that you?”

  Both trucks stopped; his head still shook. “I, I’m not sure,” he replied. “Probably not the same one. Lana, are any of us the same one?” He was babbling, just like he used to with her. He’d loved her so much his bones used to ache, making his skin seem ill-fitting. He’d never loved anyone that much before, or since.

  Lana gazed at him, cheeks slightly flushed. The dark blue of the truck appeared to fade, to lighten, to whiten. Will blinked, then could see the individual bits of faux snow accumulating, layering the truck with a sugary coating, and the white air looking crisp, brittle, about to break. She laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. It was like words escaping under stress. “I, I guess not, Will. Not these days. Seems like only yesterday I felt too young. Now I feel too old.”

  Lana’s face still flushed, her eyes looking uncomfortable, her smile struggling to remain. And her lips not moving. She wasn’t the one speaking.

  Will shifted his head a bit to the side and peered past the lovely young girl to the older woman sitting in the shadows on the passenger side. The woman leaned forward, and although the face was somewhat puffy, and makeup had cracked in not the most flattering ways, there was a ghost of a resemblance, and as if a mask of reluctance had been peeled away, Will recognized her with a jolting, almost sickening sensation.

  He felt ashamed of himself. He’d never been one to care much about people’s appearances, so why did it bother him that he might have passed Lana – at one time the love of his life – on the street and not even recognize her. It was as if he’d been in love with a different person.

  “This is my daughter Julie. Julie this is Will, an old friend. We knew each other when we were kids.”

  “Hi, Julie,” he said
, and had to take a breath. “You look like your mother.”

  “Everybody says that.” The girl didn’t sound as friendly, or as sweet, as Will had first thought.

  “Are you out from Denver for awhile?” Lana asked.

  “Me and the family. I don’t know for how long. I don’t know when we should go back, or if.”

  She nodded, frowned. “A lot of the old crowd came back here. Jimmie, Carol, Suze. I don’t know if they wanted to be home at a time like this, if it even still feels like home, or if they thought it’d be better here. It’s not really, I don’t think. But it’s more open out here. Maybe they figure these things will be easier to dodge out in the open.” She shook her head.

  “I know. But they come up so quickly. Maybe they’re not dangerous, but maybe they are.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your dad,” she said. “He didn’t run into one of these things, did he?”

  “No, he started getting confused, I don’t know, at least a year before the first one appeared. I don’t see how there could be a connection.” She didn’t say anything about Jeff, so Will figured she didn’t know. Will wasn’t about to bring him up. “The doctor prescribed a couple of drugs – they don’t seem to help much, but I still make sure he takes them. And for now at least, the pharmacy here still gets them. And the grocery store still gets his favorite chocolate candies. If he didn’t get those, well, he’d aggravate us all, I reckon.” Will forced a chuckle, and was embarrassed by the fakeness of it.

  “Do you think we’ll have shortages? My sister does. She says we’ll probably see the last supply deliveries any day now. She says, why would people continue to do their jobs with all this going on?”

  So here they were talking about illnesses and medicines and disasters freely roaming the world threatening everything. Just like old people. Why hadn’t they worried about those things when they were younger? Maybe when you were young you really didn’t understand what time it was, or how late it could all get to be. “What else are they going to do?” he asked. “It’s like the president said – no one knows how long this will last, what it means, or what the final outcome will be, so people need to go on with their lives.” It sounded stupid saying it, but he imagined it was still true.

  “But that broadcast was three weeks ago. How’s your television reception? We have a dish, and we’re getting nothing.”

  “Nothing much at our place either. What does Ray say about all this?” He hoped he had the name right – he hadn’t been there when she’d married, only heard about it.

  The girl, Julie, looked flushed, and turned her head away. Lana’s face fell back into the shadows, and her voice came out shakily. “My Ray died about three months back. COPD. He said it got a lot worse with this new weather, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know, Will – it was already pretty bad.”

  And again Will felt shame, because along with his sadness for her came this vaguely formed notion that there might be a new opportunity for him in this. What was wrong with him? He wasn’t going to leave his wife and son, so why think about it? He apologized, but of course did not fully explain why, and continued home toward Tracy, his family, and his present.

  * * *

  His eighth grade teacher Mrs Anderson used to emphasize in her social studies class that even kids from a small town school could become anything they wanted to be if only they applied themselves. “Dream big!” she’d say. “Your dreams are the only thing that will limit you.” In order to back up her thesis, throughout the school year she would sprinkle in inspirational stories about people from small towns who had “made a difference”, who had made it “big”.

  Halfway in to high school Will, and many of his friends, had concluded that this was all just so much propaganda, the purpose of which was – well – he wasn’t sure, maybe to make Mrs Anderson feel better about teaching in such a small town. But they heard similar messages from other teachers, parents, pretty much anyone who came to speak to their class. Like relatively recent graduates on their way to the army or the peace corps.

  Big dreams were great, but they almost always seemed to shrink when you talked to guidance counselors, recruiters, or anyone else charged with evaluating your prospects realistically. There were some important, socially-conscious things you could do with your life, certainly, but not here, and not for much monetary compensation. And these other careers, the ones Mrs Anderson talked about – the thinkers and writers and scientists and actors – well, all you had to be was somebody else, somebody else entirely, and from some other place.

  On the trip back to his parents’ farm it was relatively easy for Will to imagine himself, and this land, as something else entirely. The road, the fields, were bleached, as white as he could imagine, and as far as he could see. The whiteness intensified at times to such transparency Will imagined he could almost see to where life both entered the plants and exited them, where time ate through the world and transformed it all into something else. He might have been traveling across Russia before the revolution in his wagon, his buggy, or in middle Europe as it began its entry into the ice age, in nineteenth century Oklahoma in the dead of winter, the children starving, the wife suffering in their bed, a new baby on the way. And Will couldn’t do much more than observe, and try to live, and keep his four wheels on the road, steady toward home.

  The farmhouse looked as it had during that long-remembered blizzard the winter he was nine years old, when so many of the cows had died, and a stiffened pheasant stared at him from the front yard, its shining eyes frozen into jewels. A series of flashes drew his own eyes to that distant horizon line in the direction of Denver, and he considered it might be lightning, even though he knew better. Great blocks shifted there, weaving in and out of each other’s way as if they had some sort of rudimentary intelligence. They appeared closer by the second, as if that city’s buildings themselves were slowly advancing toward him across the eastern plains.

  He pulled into the yard at the side of the house and jumped down onto the snow-laden ground, which cracked like layers of candy, allowing a white powdery residue to explode into the air with each of his steps. Of course this wasn’t snow – it was nothing like snow. It was like the moments had been snatched from the air and allowed to die, left to litter the ground. He tried to step carefully, but still they fractured with very little force.

  Inside the house there was the strong smell of cooking apples. A tree had been propped up in one corner. There were a few decorations on it, and his mother was sitting on the couch singing to herself and stringing popcorn into a garland.

  Tracy pushed Jeff into the room and set the wheelchair brake. Their son’s moaning stopped and he gazed at the tree. Will looked around for his father, found him in the corner by the front window, staring outside, motionless. Tracy came up to Will and stood there. She didn’t smile, but for the first time in a long time she didn’t look furious. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “Christmas,” she replied. “At least according to your mother.”

  “But it’s not Christmas,” he said, although truthfully he wasn’t completely sure anymore.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Is there going to be another Christmas this year, Will? I certainly don’t know. Do you?”

  He shrugged. “I guess it won’t hurt anything. It sure seems to have helped Jeff.”

  “‘Hold on to the moment.’ You used to say that a lot, remember? Why did you stop saying it – was it because of me?”

  He shrugged again. “You know I used to like it when you hummed in the bathroom? But the last few years it really annoyed me. That was something I shouldn’t have held on to. I mean really, why would that bother me so much?”

  “You used to turn the dumbest things into a celebration. Remember when it was Thomas Edison’s birthday, and you turned on all the lights in the house?”

  “That was before Jeff’s – accident. He’d had a really bad day. I ordered pizza and made a pretty bad birthday cake. It cheered him up.”

&nbs
p; “You wore a lamp on your head, plugged in and turned on. I thought you were going to electrocute yourself! I got so mad.”

  “You didn’t want to be married to a child. I burned my ear pretty badly taking that contraption off.”

  “Your mother thought this would be a perfect thing, give us all a little something to look forward to. Is that where you got the idea to create all those special holidays? From her?”

  “It was my dad,” Will replied. “One day he bought my mother an alligator handbag. From that year on we celebrated ‘Alligator Handbag Day’. There were special sandwiches. We wore tails made out of newspaper and did a little dance. Actually, my mother didn’t always fully appreciate Alligator Handbag Day.”

  “I can believe that.”

  There were several moments of awkward silence, then Will said, “This doesn’t mean you still love me, does it? I mean, this celebration, this stolen moment, doesn’t change anything fundamentally, does it?”

  “I don’t think I blame you for Jeff anymore. I really don’t.”

  “Things change, moments get away from you, the past pays a visit, and although there’s no blame, still nothing is forgiven. It’s hard to live here. It always has been,” he said.

  “Will—”she started to say, but his father drowned her out.

  “Whooh whooh!” his father yelled by the window. “Whooh whooh!” The house shook with thunder.

  A great striated wall moved past the glass. Will wondered if his healthy son was trapped inside there somewhere, if inside that wall he might find his wife’s love again, or some other Will, some other life. He tried to say something to Tracy, but he couldn’t even hear himself, so loud everything had suddenly become. He could feel time circling outside the house, circling again, raising its voice and ready to run them down.