Millennium

by John Varley

  Oh, my people. So lovely and so useless.

  Call me Morlock.

  At about the turn of the twentieth century a man named Herbert George Wells wrote a book. He knew nothing about time travel, had never heard of the Gate; his book was largely social commentary.

  But his hero traveled into the future. There he found two societies: the Eloi and the Morlocks.

  We call them drones and ... what? Those of us who worked called each other zombies, or hardasses, or morons. Morlocks was good enough for me. In Wells" book the Eloi were lovely and useless, but they had a lot of fun. The Morlocks were brutish and worked down in the crankcase of society.

  You can't have everything; this metaphor has run out of steam. In our case, both the drones and the workers were lovely on the outside and rotten at the core. But we zombies worked and the drones didn't.

  I have never really blamed them. Honest.

  There are several possible responses to a hopeless situation: Despair and lethargy.

  Eat-drink-and-be-merry.

  Suicide.

  And mine, which was to grasp at the last straw of hope time travel offered. About one citizen in a thousand chose to emulate me.

  Suicide was popular. In the springtime you didn't dare walk the streets for fear of being squashed by a falling body. They jumped singly, in pairs, in great giggling parties. The Skydivers at the End of Time.

  But the favourite anodyne was to live it up. I can't think of any cogent reason why that choice was not the best. For them, that is. If I could do it, I'd have been a grease spot on the pavement along time ago.

  The trouble is that grease spot would not be doing anything to change the world that had killed my child. f could not prove that my work was any more effective, but at least there was a chance of it.

  Nobody forces anyone to work. If they don't want to, we wouldn't have them anyhow. I can't imagine stepping through the Gate toward some long-ago catastrophe with a draftee at my side.

  There are some fringe benefits of working. Extra drug and nutrient rations, personal robot servants, black market tobacco ... I guess that about sums it up. Oh, yeah. As a worker, I can kill anybody I want to if they get in my way while I'm working on a Gate project. The BC protects the civil rights of drones only where it concerns other drones. I can snuff them with impunity, can go amok, if I want to, and lay waste to thousands and the BC will never upbraid me for it.

  I usually don't. Though sometimes in the mornings, on the sidewalks ...

  If I kill another worker I'd better have a damn good reason. But I can do it if I think I can talk my way out of it.

  That may be the biggest difference between my world and the thousands of years of human civilization that have preceded it. We don't have a government to speak of. The BC takes care of running things. We are the Anarchy at the End of Time. An odd thing for somebody with the title of Chief of Snatch Team Operations to say, maybe. But I simply took the job when it became vacant. If anybody wanted it bad enough I'd give it to them.

  One day nobody will want it, and we can shut down the Gate.

  There was another snatch scheduled for that afternoon. It had been on the agenda for three days. In that time the Operations gnomes had been setting up the details, choosing the teams, plotting the strategy. We don't usually have that much time; I've been on snatches that got off in twenty minutes, total.

  But on this one I'd be leading personally. Again, I didn't pick myself. The BC did that, based on the fact that I was the closest body match to a stewardess who would be alone in her hotel room from the night before the ill-fated flight until shortly before she boarded the plane.

  That can be a handy way to start an operation. We call it a joker run, and I was to be the joker.

  The name of this stewardess (flight attendant, actually, since the snatch was not going to 1955 but to the liberated '80s) was Mary Sondergard. She worked for Pan American World Airways.

  It meant I'd be spending a night in New York, all by myself. I didn't mind. New York in the '80s is not a bad place. If you can't make it there, you can't make it anywhere.

  There was a large team assembled for the snatch. This was to be a mid-air collision. Two large jets were going to tangle in the air and our job, as usual, was to get the passengers off before they hit the ground.

  I assembled everyone in the ready-room and examined their disguises. Each was made up to look like a flight attendant on one of the planes, so they fell into two groups according to company uniform. There was Lilly Rangoon and her sister Adelaide, Mandy Djakarta, Ralph Boston, Charity Capetown, William Paris-Frankfurt, and Cristabel Parkersburg, plus several others I didn't know well. It looked like a good team to me.

  And it felt good not to be rushing. Cristabel pointed out to me after I briefed them that my speech was rather jumbled and full of words that were antique in 1980 America. That can happen. Among ourselves we talk a polyglot with elements as varied as thirteenth-century Chinese and fortieth-century Gab. Before a snatch we try to limit ourselves to the target language, but it can get messy. I have the fragments of a thousand tongues in my head.

  Sometimes the cross-chatter is awful.

  So I took a booster shot of 20th Amerenglish and hoped for the best. In no time, my head was buzzing with vocabulary and idiom. It doesn't always go smoothly. Once I caught an alliteration bug from a defective language pill and spent weeks babbling my Babylonian and scattering silly syllables in my Swedish until people could hardly live with me.

  I ... stepped through the Gate and saw instantly there had been a mistake.

  We'd tried to catch Ms Sondergard in the bathroom, preferably in the tub. You're never more helpless than when you're naked, prone, and up to your neck in water. She was in there, all right, but instead of stepping inside with her I had materialized stepping out of the bathroom.

  I'm sure the BC would have a long, technical explanation for it; for my money, the silly son of an abacus must have reversed a sign.

  But it was a pretty problem. I couldn't go in after Sondergard, even though I could see her there in the tub, because I'd simply step back through the Gate and into the future. However, the Gate has only one side (one of the least odd things about it). From where she sat she could not see the Gate, though she was looking right through it. This was as it should be, since from her side the Gate was not there. If she stepped through she'd only travel into the bedroom.

  So I caught her eye, wiggled my fingers at her, grinned, and stepped aside. She could no longer see me. I waited.

  It sounded like she churned most of the water out of the tub. She had seen something ... or at least she thought she had seen ...

  "What the hell?" Her voice was not pleasant when she was scared. "Who the hell ... is somebody ... Hey!" I was taking mental notes. The voice is the trickiest thing to get right, and I'd have to imitate it for a while. Now if only she wasn't a screamer.

  I figured she'd have to come out and see what was going on, scared or not. I was right.

  She hurried out of the bathroom, passing right through the Gate as if it wasn't there -- which it wasn't, from her side. She had a towel wrapped around her.

  "Jesus Christ! What are you doing in my-"Words fail you at a time like that. She knew she ought to say something, but it would sound so silly. How about, Excuse me, haven't I seen you in the mirror? I put on my best Pan American smile and held out my hand.

  "Pardon the intrusion. I can explain everything. You see, I'm -- ", I hit her on the side of the head and she staggered and went down hard. Her towel fell to the floor.

  " -- working my way through college." She started to get up, so I caught her under the chin with my knee.

  I knelt and checked her pulse, and rubbed my knuckles on the carpet. Heads are surprisingly hard. You can hurt yourself hitting them. She'd be okay, but I had loosened some front teeth with my knee.

  I was supposed to shove her through the Gate, but I had to pause. Lord, to look like that with no skinsuit, no prosthetics. She
nearly broke my heart.

  I grabbed her under the knees and wrestled her to the Gate. She was a sack of limp noodles. Somebody reached through, grabbed her wet feet, and pulled. So long, love! How'd you like to go on a long voyage? Then there was not much to do. I sat on the edge of her bed for a while, letting the excitement die away, then kicked off my shoes and took her purse from the table beside the bed. I poked through it. There was an open pack of Virginia Slims and one still in cellophane.

  I lit four of them, took a deep drag, and leaned back on the bed.

  It's rare to have free time on a snatch. Here it was only eight o'clock in the evening.

  Sondergard's flight didn't leave until tomorrow evening. I was suddenly struck with very un-

  Chief-like thoughts. Just outside my room was the Big Apple, and I was in the mood to make applesauce.

  I pulled the drapes and looked out. I estimated I was on the third and top floor of one of those long, new (in the '80s) airport motels, the kind whose signs seem to blur together: the Thunderhilton Regency Inn. I couldn't spot the airport itself, wasn't really sure if I was near La Guardia or Idlewild (sorry; JFK). Some sort of shopping center was spread out below me.

  The parking lot was crowded with Christmas shoppers. Across the way was a disco.

  I watched the couples coming and going and tried to fight off the blues. It would have been nice to go over there and dance the goddam night away. Hell, I'd have settled for pushing a cart through the aisles of the big barn of an A&P.

  As a younger woman I would have done it. As Chief of Snatch Team Operations it was out of the question. There were strict security regulations against that sort of thing. Risks had to be minimized, and a one-legged para-leper be-bopping to the Bee Gees just didn't qualify as a risk that needed to be taken. What if I got hit by a car while crossing the parking lot? What if I was driven mad by the muzak Christmas carols in the A&P? Whether I lived, died, or stayed sane was not ultimately important to the Gate Project, but letting some doctor from the '80s get a look at my bionic leg was.

  So I pulled the curtain.

  I picked up the phone and ordered a big meal from room service, then discovered Sondergard had almost no cash She had lots of plastic, but signing her name on the check was not something I was prepared to do. So I went to my own purse and dug out the wad I'd brought with me. I checked the dates on a couple of bills -- ultra-cautious, I guess, but it never hurts to be sure-and even went so far as to rub one with my thumb to be sure the ink was dry.

  They'd fool the Treasury Department, no doubt of that.

  I sat on the bed and read the Gideon Bible until the food came. That Gideon sure had a weird sense of humor. Try "The Book of Genesis."

  The book was bogging down in a lot of begats when the bellhop arrived. Along with a rare steak I'd asked for a six-pack of Budweiser and a carton of Camels. I lit a couple of cigarettes, turned on the television set, and ate the steak. The meat was bland, as twentieth-

  century food always is. I looked through the closet, but mothballs were no longer a common item in hotels, so I wolfed it down as it was.

  Then I took a warm bath and stretched out on the bed, wiggling my bare toes in front of the TV screen.

  Who needs disco? I was having a wonderful time, I realized. It was nice to be completely alone. I watched the news and the Johnny Carson show. The late movie was The Candidate, with Robert Redford. I could eat that guy alive. I'd been in love with him since they showed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on one of the flights I was snatching.

  All I can say is he better watch what planes he gets on. If I ever get my hands on him, Sherman goes on the junk heap.

  I slept late. I can't remember how long it had been since I'd done that.

  The television kept me company through the afternoon, until it was time to dress, call a taxi, and get to the airport. It was a beautiful day. The freeway was blanketed in a thick fog of hydrocarbons. The air was so rich I smoked the Camels one at a tune.

  I was aware that I was surely the only person in New York that day who was enjoying the air, but that made it even better. Suffer, you healthy bastards!

  I deliberately arrived as late as I safely could. When I got there, the other flight attendants were boarding. I was able to keep the chatter to a minimum; since some of the others knew Sondergard I had to be careful. I pleaded a hangover, and that went over well. Apparently it wasn't out of character.

  For the early part of the flight I kept away from the others by working my tail off, keeping too busy tending to passengers to spend time jawing with the rest of the crew. That got me some odd looks -- I was realizing Sondergard had not exactly been the Pride of Pan Am -- but it didn't matter. As the flight went on I replaced the stews one by one as the Gate appeared and then vanished in the mid-ship lavatories.

  That's an easy trick. There's an indicator on my wristwatch. It senses the presence of the Gate. When my wrist tingled I'd simply go to the lavatory, open the door, and call for one of the flight attendants.

  "Look at this," I'd say, with a disgusted expression. They were invariably eager to see what new atrocity the passengers had worked on their domain. (Flight attendants are almost as contemptuous of the goats as I am.) When she was in position I'd plant my boot on her fanny and she'd be through before she could draw a breath. Her replacement would arrive almost as quickly.

  We started the old thinning gambit when the dinner trays had been cleared.

  There are many ways to go about a snatch. Thinning them first is something we do when we can. The in-flight movies often help with that. While the cabin is darkened people don't notice as much as they would otherwise. We could take this one or that one and, in most cases, they never would be missed. From the moment the last stew was replaced there was a team member stationed at all times in the lavatory corridor in the center of the 747. When circumstances permitted we'd see to it that a passenger who got up to piss didn't actually get to do it for fifty thousand years.

  Each snatch is unique, each presents different problems.

  On this one we were clearing two jumbo jets simultaneously. That's good -- numbers usually are -- and bad, since the Gate can appear at only one location during any moment of time. That meant it had to be shuttled back and forth between the two planes.

  Both these flights were transcontinental. That sounds like an advantage, but it usually isn't. We can't take the people out during the first hour and let the plane fly empty across the country, hoping the pilot never leaves the cockpit.

  In this case, the 747 was going to remain marginally airworthy after the collision. That meant the real pilot had to stay with it to the end. It was just too dicey to take him and replace him with one of our people -- even a kamikaze. There was too much chance the plane would come down in a place history had already shown us it would not come down.

  With the DC-10 we had a lot more leeway. If it came to it, we could take the cockpit crew and simply follow instructions from Air Traffic Control, since that's what was going to cause this crash.

  The thinning was going well. We still had two hours to fly, and we'd taken forty or fifty out of the 747. The plane had departed with almost every seat full. One would think people would begin to notice empty seats, but the fact is it takes them a long time to realize what's happening. Part of that is because we pick the candidates for thinning very carefully. We would not take a child without its mother, for instance. Mommy would come looking. But taking a mother and her crying infant is perfect. The other passengers may notice on some level that the crying has stopped, but they never try to find out why. That's the sort of good fortune you just don't question.

  In the same way, we were alert for people most dissatisfied with the sardine-can seating arrangements, such as anybody sitting next to a tall person, or three unrelated men sitting in a row, especially if they were trying to work. If that middle fellow got up to get a drink or visit the rest room he was unlikely to come back. I'd never heard anybody complain about that, eithe
r.

  But the biggest thing we had working in our favor was the unimaginable nature of what we were doing. I'd see someone looking troubled, walking the aisles. Maybe he'd noticed all the seats were filled when we took off, and now there were all these gaps. What gives? But logic is on our side. The guy knows nobody has stepped outside for a smoke. Thus, logic proves everyone is still aboard; ergo, they must be in some other part of the plane. Nobody ever gets farther than that, not even if we take half the passengers.

  I concluded things were going smoothly and decided to take a look at the other plane, the DC-10. So the next time the Gate appeared I ... stepped through into the future, changed into a United uniform while Operations shifted its focus to the other plane, and ... stepped onto United Flight 35.

  Another advantage to jumbo jets: nobody notices a new flight attendant.

  Since the hazard was less on this flight, the team was being even more aggressive. They were summoning passengers to the rear o f the plane on one pretext or another, never to return I surveyed the situation with approval, and signalled to Ralph Boston. He followed me into the galley.

  "How's it going?" I asked him.

  "Easy. We plan to start the final operation in another couple minutes."

  "What's the local time?"

  "There's twenty minutes left."

  That can be disconcerting. When I'd left the 747 it still had three hours to o, which meant it was somewhere over the midwest. This pane was already in California, two and a half hours later. It's enough to give you a headache.

  But why not work it that way? Why, for instance, should the people uptime wait twenty-

  four hours while I watch the Carson show in a New York motel room? They had not, of course. As soon as the Gate vanished in my motel room Operations had reset it for the lavatory of the 747 the next day. What had happened, from Lawrence's viewpoint, is that I'd stepped through, Sondergard had come out, the Gate had flickered, and out came the first flight attendant I pushed into the lavatory the next day.