Okay, this is not exactly a theological matter. It has to have an explanation. But—
nobody is quite sure why.
A simple switch got flipped after lying ten billion years dormant, perhaps. A relay went on the fritz. A bug somehow crept into the mechanism. And a disappeared sentient species was suddenly dumped out into the very cold last night.
First thought: "Oh shit."
Next: "So cold."
"Fuck me, William," says Lu. "Make me warm. I'm so cold. Please, William, fuck me until I burn."
Heat death. The cold night at the end of time. That's where I come from. Where Lu comes from. We're the future. Bleaker than the bleakest hell any religion every invented to punish its sinners and unenlightened. We're the dust kicked up by the final, limp breeze blowing through the empty halls of the end of the castle.
We want to live. Will want. We remember what it was like in heaven, before we got dumped out.
But—
and here's the big secret—
to travel back in time, I had to give up being, well—
human.
Was I really human to start with? I like to think so. In a way. The cached, you know. You may be one of them. They're archived, allowed limited processing space. It's not as good as being biologically alive.
Not so inside the egg. In there, we had eternity to spread out. To process. To dream. Or so we thought. In any case, we did end up with billions of years.
And we changed. We became—not alive. Not dead. Each one of us a self with a million centuries of barnacle thoughts attached, a rattle on the end of a snake of memes. Practically unrecognizable as human.
But that was a lot closer than—
what I am now—
what I am learning to dislike
—completely.
Myself.
I stand. Pull up my pants.
"I'm sorry," I say to Lu. "I'm married"
She turns over. Impossible to hurt in this way. Smiles.
"Yes. To me."
"Not anymore," I say. "Not now."
I let her go. Push her forward. She lands with a huff on the Persian rug—it's a nice one I picked out with Rebecca on a world grazed by giant mutant sheep—in a tangle of her own limbs. Lu's surprised, humiliated. Even a goddess looks stupid splayed out like that. But not for long.
I have to get away from her before she says the right thing, makes the right move, to draw me back.
I pick myself up. Run through my office door. Throw myself through the portal, with Lu's laughter echoing behind me.
A random jump. End up somewhere in the M5. At least so the tracker number reads on the blank wall I face Whatever. Wherever. Back through. Another jump. Another.
To no avail.
You can't escape the present. As you are well aware.
You.
Me.
I jump back to Old Earth.
I'm somewhere in the southern hemisphere, I think. The portal opens onto a night vista of jagged mountains. I have no idea what they're called.
But they feel like home.
Above, a full moon.
The moon.
I gaze up at the moon.
Something cold.
I look down at my hand.
It's holding the gun.
Lu has put it there, of course.
Time Travel 101: how to go back into the past.
You can't.
Okay, you can, in a way. First you have to lose yourself. Unmoor. No other way around it. You have to join the universe, become a permanent principle of nature.
Something like what happens to the fitters when they serve their indentures, but like I said, it's not the same.
It's not the same, because you make it so you have never lived.
How?
Here's the classic method: kill your grandfather. Or something to that effect. You release your particulars to the void. Only the part of you that stands outside of time survives. It's a shadow. A spectre. A haint.
Call it a "type," like the fitters do. But the fitters can, theoretically, get back their humanity.
Time travelers, theoretically, can't.
The mechanics are straightforward. You appear to your ancestor—usually in the form of a fiery angel or demon or some such, depending on the era. He (or she, as the case may be) acquiesces to the logic of the weapon in your hand.
It would be easier on the conscience perhaps to do away with one of your barely sentient Homo habilis forbearers, but you can't go too far back or you'll take out half the human race in the bargain.
When you kill your grandfather, you do actually kill yourself. And your father or mother. Any siblings. But that's just the tip of the space-time iceberg. You kill all the generations to come, as well.
You kill your own children. And theirs. And theirs.
Thousands. Millions.
Because it's not like you decide not to have those children. No, you obliterate the possibility from the realm of the conceivable—and that's a whole other thing. Because those possibilities once did exist as realities.
And they leave echoes.
They fucking haunt you is what they do.
And so I am free to ply the time ways because I took out one Thomas Langurn. From the Great Migration generation itself. But Tom wasn't going to download to a cache, nor migrate into the cathedral. Tom was going to die in a rather nasty portal data mismatch accident a mere decade after I showed up.
He was going to die anyway, damn it, and never get cached. Just not before he had a few kids.
When I met Rebecca, the attraction between us was instant. Almost as magnetic as the attraction between me and Lu. While I no longer possess the genes of my ancestors, I still retain the shadow of their personalities. The soul, as I've called it.
So it was perhaps no surprise that I would be attracted to the same sort of woman as my distant grandfather Thomas had been attracted to.
A woman who was also my distant grandmother.
Okay, never mind that.
I was married in the future. And it's not like I had left Lu behind there, either. She was just as much a time traveler as I, and a much more active one. She appeared in my office on a regular basis to deliver her orders from the far future. But Lu is a construct, a chimera. As am I. Or at least, as I was.
Lu is unreal.
Rebecca is real.
And, when I realized I had fallen in love with Rebecca, I felt real for the first time in a very long time. Rebecca brought something out in me. It couldn't have been genetic. It couldn't have been information that was hidden or sequestered. All of that had been erased when I'd deep-sixed Thomas Langurn.
I guess you would have to say that, in some measure, in some way, our souls met. I don't know what this means. I only know that there was a moment when we were both sitting at a table in some restaurant out on the long arm of the galaxy somewhere eating something like snails and drinking red wine to wash them down when I looked across the table and caught her eye. I swallowed a snail—or whatever it was—and made a face. And smiled to show her that it was all right, that the snail hadn't phased me. That I was enjoying this being here with her thing. This moment of moments.
And she moved her head to the side in that way she does and she said, "Know what? I want to have your children." And then she winked and touched my hand.
And that was love.
So you ditch the gun once again and go home to your wife.
You live in an old Victorian mansion. Old Earth authentic. Sort of. It is actually a space you built yourself within the confines of the project station, so it doesn't exactly have a gabled roof. The station itself is enormous, but it is not quite big enough to accommodate the kind of space you like to have available for your enjoyment. So you built a house with holes. Fractal dimensions for storage. Extra, unseen rooms. You're not the only one who does this. Most people have one or two interdimensional hidey-holes in their living quarters. But architects often go overboard. Everything simple and
yet as beautifully functional as possible. They get clever with design.
I live here.
Rebecca is waiting for me when I port home.
She has the Hauser in her hand.
I don't even pause to wonder where she got it.
I know. It just showed up. Dropped in. Like Mr. Sphere into Flatland.
Rebecca points the gun at me.
"Stay the hell away from me," she says. "I've figured out what you're up to. What they've told you to do."
"I won't hurt you," I say. "I swear."
"You put the voices here. To torment me."
"No, Rebecca. I didn't. I don't know what's wrong with you."
"Doesn't matter. I'm not going to die for that—" She points toward a window. I know what she's gesturing at, but we are turned away from the core at the time and only the galaxy shows through. She means the cathedral. "—that thing," she finishes.
Her right hand still holds the gun. It's shaking. If that gun goes off, it can kill even such as I am.
I step forward. Hold out a hand. "Give me that, please."
A moment of defiance. Wrinkles tighten around her eyes. Does her finger tighten as well? Would I even notice before the shot rings out and I am erased?
Rebecca slowly lowers the gun. She breaks into tears. "I know they're here," she says.
"Who?"
"The voices," she says. "I know them. I just don't know how I know them."
I pull her to me. Her wet face against my shoulder. "It's like some curse," she says. "Some curse I can't break."
I take the Hauser.
I push her away.
Gently.
I step back.
"Maybe I can break it," I say.
I point the gun at my head.
My index finger moves from the trigger guard. Hovers in the space between guard and action.
"It'll be like I never was," I say. "Like none of this happened."
My fingertip meets the metal. I am inevitability. I am a force of nature. I am—
"Daddy, don't."
A young voice. From someone unseen.
"Who said that?"
Then another voice, a female voice. A child. "We need you."
"Who?" I say. I keep the gun in position. "Whoever you are, stop it!"
"Don't kill yourself, Daddy."
I spin around, take aim.
At the curtains. At the empty Milky Way beyond.
At nothing.
"Tell me who you are."
A moment of silence. Decision.
"You know us."
Another voice. "You told us to stay hidden."
"I don't know you," I say. Faltering. My mind in flux. "I don't."
"Come here, my darlings." It's Rebecca's voice. But richer. Stronger than I've heard it in a long time.
Since before I told her she was going to die.
They emerge. The three of them.
And I remember.
An air vent breeze passes through a curtain and from the movement, a child materializes. Joel. Eight. Thin and long-boned. He's going to be a tall man. And handsome when he fills out.
I shift my weight. The floorboards creak. And from the floor rises Hannah, as if she has stepped up from a hidden staircase. Six years old. Beautiful. Those blue eyes.
Rebecca kneels, spreads her arms to the children. "Come here."
And from a swirl of dust dancing in a shaft of the faintest starlight.
Lavy. My youngest. My son.
He runs to his mother, looks out from within her skirts. And says the words.
"How are you today, Dadda?" He doesn't really know what he's saying. He's only two-and-a-half.
It all returns.
I remember.
Because the cathedral wants me to remember.
Because it has decided the time has come to remember.
Say you are going to kill somebody—and that you are not a murderer at heart. Say you have the gun in your hand. Your finger is on the trigger.
And say your victim looks at you, considers you coldly—and doesn't plead for his life. No, because he figures you're prepared for that. Doesn't plead the welfare of his family, either. Plenty of families have gotten along fine without one of the parents.
Say he makes the one appeal that might move you. He asks for his unborn children. Maybe somehow, some way, he recognizes who you are. What you are. What he is asking is that you save yourself.
"You can kill me," he says, "but don't kill them."
It doesn't work that way, you tell him.
"You're from the ass-end of time," he says. So he does know. "Make it work that way."
You shake your head.
Pull the trigger.
You've got a world to save, after all.
But he did get you to thinking.
Me.
I can't have children. Types and humans can't mate.
I would obliterate myself. My work.
But what if I had them—and I hid them?
Really hid them. Kept them away from causality for a while. Not forever. Just long enough to get them to the true sanctuary that is coming. That I am helping to create.
Would I then disappear with a pop, taking my kids with me?
Or would the universe relent, and let us live?
Only one way to find out.
As I said, within my house, I built back doors, secret passages, to the cathedral. Fractal tunnels. Places out of time and out of mind.
Catacombs, if you will.
These passage ways lead to wormholes and those wormholes lead to the subbasement of the cathedral proper. Justice desires to spread itself. Meaning seeks meaning.
Some of the cathedral's physical laws have crept into my living quarters.
The fitters helped me build the passageways. Some of them did, anyway. Reb was the gang chief during the undertaking. All of those particular fitters, unfortunately, never did recover their memories afterward. Mark it all down to the pension fund debacle. Or, at least, so they thought.
Sorry Reb. Sorry fellows. It was me who took them.
Screwed by management again. I suck as a boss.
It was in those catacombs that my children were born. The cathedral is a place where normal cause and effect do not have consequence, unless you want them to, unless they ought to. It's a place where a type such as myself, a being whose essence is fundamentally outside of the normal time stream, and a human woman moored to time, such as Rebecca, could come together in love.
Could fuck like animals.
With all the consequences thereof.
And that's where I hid the children.
The children that the cathedral made me forget.
Almost.
Because who could really forget such wonderful children?
And now—
now I have to remember.
Because—
Lu stands before me.
Mr. Sphere, she's dipped her toe into our space-time and, lo and behold, here she is. Following up on her work order. Come to deal with the underdetermination nexus.
Otherwise known as my family.
"So you didn't do it." She said. "I'm pretty disappointed, William." She's smiling her placid, patronizing smile. Her all-knowing smile from the future.
But then the smile melts away. A hardness in her eyes is revealed. It was always there, but now you can see. Who she is. What she is.
An ugly force of nature.
"Stay the fuck away from my family," I say.
"Stupid," she says. "Stupid, stupid man. What have you done?"
Faster than thought, she's at my throat, her long fingers wrap around my neck.
I think about raising the gun. Shooting her.
But realize that, even if I were enhanced, even if I were fast enough, it would be useless. The cathedral would bend space, warp time. The cathedral won't let me kill her. Not here. Not now.
I pocket the Hauser.
Lu squeezes. Hard. Twists. My neck twists with her interlocke
d hands.
Crack. Pop. My vertebrae shatter. Most unpleasant.
Then her fingers pierce the skin. Dig in. Her hand comes away, trailing my spinal cord.
I must look a fright. My neck ripped open from behind. A trail of gooey neurons draping like a worm.
But even now, I feel my wounds healing. Quickly.
"This is about to be over," she says, and, still holding me by the neck, frog marches me toward the door. She turns to Rebecca, the kids. Her eyes pass over Joel. Hannah.
Settle on Lavy.
Again she smiles.
"Little boy. Listen to me, little boy. I'm going to take your Daddy outside and hurt him," she tells him. "If you come along, too—then I won't hurt him. And I won't hurt you. Nothing will hurt." Lu's smile brightens. Shows teeth. "Come now. Everything's going to be fine and it won't hurt a bit."
Lavy looks at me questioningly.
Pops the question, the eternal question.
"How are you today, Dadda?"
Just comforting sounds. He doesn't know what the words mean yet. Does he?
"I'm great!" I say. "You stay here, Lavy. Listen to me. Stay."
This takes a moment to register. Dadda is being yanked around by someone he doesn't know. He's a good boy, a brave boy, and longs to help.
But I smile, nod my head. "Dadda is great today," I say. "You stay here."
Lavy is a good boy, most of all. He does what his Dadda tells him.
Thank fucking God.
"No, William. You make him come," Lu growls at me. Her voice is low. And is there a trace of panic?
"No."
She sighs. "All the other children. All the ones who watched their mothers burn in ovens, who watched their fathers march off to war, never to come back. All the idiocy. All the waste. All the injustice. You would take their reward? Make their last thought, their last breath, a cry of suffering?"
I consider. And then I consider that I'm just one man. And I don't know how to answer this at the moment.
"I'm sorry," I say. And I begin to laugh. It's a raspy, airless affair. She's partially crushed my windpipe, after all. "But yes."
"Stop that!" she says. "It's disrespectful. Of the children. Not these. Not these. . . abominations. The real, dead children."
I don't stop. I laugh harder. I sound like a dull saw drawn roughly over iron, but I keep it up.
Eclipse Two Page 25
