In all my life I never expected to meet both my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather.
I just sort of gaped at them, mouth open, as I shook their hands.
And my dad and mom, also shocked, shook their hands as well.
After introductions, Brenda sat on a blanket drinking a bottle of water and giggling every so often.
It seems they already knew me and Brenda very, very well, since after this point the two of us jumped all over in time.
In fact, right before great-great-grandpa Clarence dug to the crystal room in 1868, Brenda and I went back with this entire crew to help him make sure he didn’t touch the crystals with his bare hands when he opened up the room.
I have no idea of the timeline implications of all of us doing that at some point in the future, but it seems we had done it and so this chain of events is now the time-loop we are in.
I asked Dad why he built the door in front of the room we were about to open. He said that I told him to in 1990 and helped him build it. But I didn’t say why. And he had no idea what was behind that opening in the crystal wall.
But he and Grandpa had trusted me. I had also been the one, a future me, to tell them exactly when to meet Brenda and me.
“You know how damn hard that was to keep secret from you for all the years you were growing up?” my father said.
I laughed. “I can’t even imagine.”
“I kept the same damned secret,” Grandpa said, looking disgusted.
“Not a pleasurable secret to have,” Edward said.
“But worth it,” Great-great-grandfather Clarence said, “after seeing this family all together now long after my bones have gone to dust.”
Suddenly my physics brain kicked in and I realized that the two men had come from the past. From everything I could tell, traveling to an unknown point in the future with a crystal wasn’t possible.
Only going to the past was possible, and a past we knew. And if you were in the past, you could only go to a future you knew as well. Every time we had jumped back to the future, we had been gone the same amount of time as we had been in the past.
“How did you know what time to come to?” I asked my great-great-grandfather.
He frowned. ”I didn’t. A future you, dressed pretty much like you are now, came and brought me forward, told me what to expect out here and then vanished into thin air.”
I started to open my mouth and then stopped, stunned.
Brenda giggled again, then said, “You know, this isn’t mathematically possible.”
Everyone just nodded, even though not a one of us understood what she really meant.
“So does anyone know what is behind that wall or that door?” I asked.
“None of us do yet,” my father said. “This is all our present. It hasn’t been opened up until we all do it.”
I looked at my great-great-grandfather Clarence. “You worked the mine again a few years after we opened that room, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t get near this place again,” he said, “other than to come back and, with your help, board it up and set up some sort of fancy thing that made it look like there was a cave-in if someone did get in. I just wrote down I had worked the mine again.”
It seemed I had a lot of chores in the near future. If I didn’t do them, we all wouldn’t be sitting here.
“I never went inside the place,” my greatgrandfather Edward said. “Too damn busy to come all the way up here anyway.”
“So it looks like we are all going to find out what’s in that room at the same time,” Brenda said.
My parents, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and my great-great-grandfather all nodded.
But none of this was making any sense to my physics training. How in the world did this time-loop get started in the first place? And to keep it going I had to set all this up at some point in the future. Why would I do that? There were so many thousands of possible futures, possible timelines that were not this one, I couldn’t even begin to imagine them.
Suddenly I realized what was going on.
“Brenda, the crystal,” I said. “We have always used the same crystal, right?”
She nodded. “Every time.”
Then her wonderful mind caught up to where I was going and she stood.
“Are you thinking that every crystal in that cave is a different timeline?”
“That’s exactly what I am thinking,” I said. “If we had used a different crystal, this would have a different outcome. Who knows what?”
Brenda and I stood thinking while my father finished getting out the food and my mom set up some folding chairs and a table. No one said a word until my dad broke the silence of the mountain evening.
“Do either of you know what that room is? Or how it came to be?”
I glanced at Brenda, then at my father. “I have a hunch,” I said. “Science believes that time and space are linked, and many are starting to think that matter is linked as well in a way that we just don’t understand yet.”
“And that from every decision,” Brenda said, “two universes are created. Most fold back in together as nothing really changes from the decision. But a major decision with lots of ramifications can have untold numbers of universes created.”
All three of my grandfathers just shook their heads in disgust, but my father and mother seemed to be following Brenda.
“You think that room is a natural creation,” my mother asked, “from these universes splitting off?”
“Possible,” I said. “Again, we are only starting to understand the connections between space and time and matter. But there are not enough crystals in that one cave alone to even begin to account for all possible alternate universes of just this planet’s history.”
I had a hunch I knew what was on the other side of that crystal now. I didn’t really want to see it, but we had to.
“Are you saying there may be more of those crystal rooms?” Clarence asked.
“Maybe thousands if not millions more rooms like it, bigger or smaller depending on the original splitting that started building the room. No way of knowing.”
“We need to open that wall to be sure,” Brenda said, nodding. “Now this is all starting to make sense mathematically.”
All three of my grandfathers just shook their heads and said nothing.
“We eat first,” my father said.
“Just like a Benson man,” my mother said, smiling at me. “Always thinking of their stomachs first.”
“I’ve noticed that,” Brenda said and both women laughed. None of the five Benson men did. We were too busy eating.
~ * ~
One hour later real time, I had everyone transported back to 1870. We all wore long sleeves and rubber gloves to make sure no crystal touched our skin and took us away from this mine and into a different timeline.
Then, carefully stacking the crystals in a certain place in the tunnel near where we took them out, we opened up the wall. After we got the wall opened, we would move the crystals inside the room just in case they needed to be there.
It was clear almost immediately that there was an even larger crystal room on the other side and that room merged into another and another off into the distance.
More than likely, the crystal room my great-great-grandfather had found would grow at some point to join this larger room. If it was still an active timeline for long enough.
There were millions and millions of crystals in just what we could see, some tiny, some huge, lining every inch of every wall.
And right down the middle there was a very long row of similar-looking coffin-like chambers.
And the coffins stretched off into the distance into the other visible rooms.
I saw the coffins and wanted to stop digging. My mother agreed with me, but Brenda convinced us we had to continue.
As we went back to carefully taking apart the crystal wall, I said, “Simply by wanting to stop, a new timeline started where we did stop and another ti
ny crystal has now formed in the room behind us.”
“Every decision means a new crystal?” great-grandfather Edward asked.
“Every decision starts a new timeline,” Brenda said, nodding. “A new one for the choice; the crystal representing the larger main timeline grows a little by absorbing the other half of the choice. So more than likely the crystal we have been using has grown just slightly.”
“I took exact measurements of it,” I said, “so we will be able to confirm that.”
Clarence snorted, then said, “If I wasn’t standing here with my son, my grandson, my great-grandson, and my great-great-grandson, I wouldn’t believe any of this.”
With that none of us could argue.
We finally got the door cleared enough to go through and silently, flashlights on, we walked toward the first coffin. The reflections off the millions of crystals seemed to make the room very bright even with just a few flashlights.
If I weren’t so scared, I’d be stunned at the beauty of it all.
The coffins were made out of some kind of metal, with a clear window-like opening over the top half of the casket. Each casket sat on top of a small riser, also made of metal.
There was a slight film of dust on them, but not much. It looked like they had been polished recently, or something was keeping them clean.
As I was afraid I would see, it was an older version of me.
And beside me lay an even older version of Brenda. Looks like I died a decade or two ahead of her.
Either something in the coffin kept our bodies preserved or this had only gotten here recently. But from the look of the line of coffins going off into the distance, that wasn’t possible.
“It looks like we had pretty long lives,” I said, trying to sound light even though I actually wanted to just be sick.
Seeing your own dead body can do that to a person.
Brenda held my arm with a grip that hurt and I didn’t care.
“We clearly come back here after we die at some point in the future,” I said.
“And now we’re ghosts as well,” Brenda said, shaking her head.
I didn’t want to argue with her, since basically she was right. We were standing in 1870, over a hundred years before either of us would be born, yet we were staring at our own bodies.
“There’s writing on a plate,” Grandpa Edward said, bending over. “It reads, Placed January 1st, 1700 at noon.”
“How in the. world do those bodies look that good?” Brenda asked.
“Something in the future got much better in embalming,” I said.
“Or the crystals in this room don’t let things deteriorate in here,” my father said.
Both Brenda and I looked at him. He had a point.
My mother turned away, but my father kept moving down to the third coffin. “Take a look at this,” he said.
I knew what it was and so did Brenda, but we followed anyway and my mother came back, not looking at the first two coffins.
It was another coffin with another me inside, about the same age as the first one. And Brenda was beside me again, again looking much older than when I had died.
The plate on this read, Placed January 2nd, 1700 at noon.
“I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life,” my mother said.
Brenda and I, arm-in-arm, just kept walking along the rows of coffins with our bodies in them, going deeper and deeper into the complex of crystal caves.
Every-so-often one of us would have died young, and every-so-often I lived much, much longer than the first one.
But we were always placed together and each placement followed the other by one day exactly.
After walking past a few hundred coffins, and no sign of the row of coffins ending in the distance, we stopped.
“We are all of them, aren’t we?” Brenda asked. “Right now, right here.”
“We are,” I said. “We decide to be brought back here and buried and all of these coffins are us from this point forward, in all the thousands of alternate universes that allow us to come back.”
“So these rooms are where all alternate universes branch,” she said. “That’s why all of our bodies from all the different universes can be here like this in one place.”
I instantly knew she was right.
“Of course,” I said, staring off into the dark distance at all my coffins. “This is the gateway to every alternate universe. They all are grounded here. At least all the ones springing from events on this planet. Time and space and matter are all connected.”
“And this is the connection point,” Brenda said.
“It seems we have some papers to write,” I said, smiling.
“You have errands to run first,” she said. “You have to bring your family together out of the past, actually the future from here, to first help your grandfather find that first room and second, get them here.”
“You are right,” I said, slipping my hand into Brenda’s hand and turning us back toward the beginning of the row of coffins. “We have to try to keep the start of this timeline together.”
In the distance I could see my three grandfathers and my father and my mother standing, talking, waiting for us. About halfway back to them something suddenly struck me as I once again walked past the two of us buried side-by-side.
I froze and stared at the two coffins.
“What’s wrong, besides the fact that we are dead?” Brenda asked.
“Both of us are right here, in every universe, side-by-side.”
She squeezed my arm and smiled. “I noticed that. It’s nice, isn’t it?”
It was nice that we stayed together, but there was only one problem.
“Who buried us here?”
Brenda blinked, then frowned.
And behind us an adult voice said, “Hi, Dad. Mom.”
We both spun around to see a twenty-year-old man, short, but solid, who looked a lot like both me and Brenda, smiling at us. He had my father’s smile and Brenda’s wonderful eyes.
And in the next cavern back were a few hundred more of the same guy, some dressed slightly differently, smiling and waving.
<>
~ * ~
RENN AND THE LITTLE MEN
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
L et me start by telling you this: I’m good with a gun.
In fact, I’m better with a gun than anyone I know, although most people don’t believe it. I’m the one who trained my brother Ralphie how to handle his.
Of course, now you know Ralphie as Kid Vicious— at least that’s what the dime novels call him. No one else does, or at least, no one else did until he got his own dime novels. Before that he was Ralphie the Kid, which he hated, or Ralph Visch, which is our last name, or plain old RV. Sometimes people called him That kid, you know the one, not as famous as Billy, but cuter.
Because Billy was one of the ugliest boys I’d ever met.
But I digress.
I don’t have a nickname. Girls don’t get good nicknames. Like Calamity Jane. I mean, really. That’s just mean. Little Annie Oakley. Yeah, not for me either.
My parents named me Renn, which they misspelled because they’re illiterate. Or really, I think the doc misspelled it because he’s barely literate. Or maybe it was the pastor, since I’m actually in the church rolls for my date of birth: Renn Visch, born—
Wait. I’m not telling you how old I am. It’s bad enough that I’ve told you Renn is misspelled. I’m not telling you my real name, the one my parents intended for me.
I learned the treacheries of that path not too long ago.
But I get ahead of myself.
The little men showed up at the farm one Saturday morning, three of them, looking for Ralphie, and I gotta tell you, it’s lucky they found me. Ralphie wouldn’t’ve taken them seriously. In fact, Ralphie might’ve just squashed them with his big old fancy cowboy boots.
Because they were no bigger than my thumb. It took me a while to believe they were real.
At le
ast I had a chance of figuring them out, because I read. Ma says I’m going to lose my eyesight, reading at night by candlelight, but really I think I’m more likely to burn the house down. Twice in the last year, I’ve put out curtain fires in my bedroom, not that Ma knows that because I stitch up some new ones each time from old cloth. I tell her I like patchwork curtains—the latest are green and pink and some kind of leaky purple (with dye that came off on my fingers as I stitched)—but honestly, I work with what’s available. And I hate purple, although not as much as I hate pink.
Westward Weird Page 15
