Infinite Dreams

  “What the hell?” Bob says in a hoarse whisper.

  Sarah turns around just a bit too late to catch a glimpse of Three-phasing’s father. She does see Nine-hover before Bob does. The nominally-female time-caster is a flurry of movement, sitting at the console of her time net, clicking switches and adjusting various dials. All of the motions are unnecessary, as is the console. It was built at Three-phasing’s suggestion, since humans from the era into which they could cast would feel more comfortable in the presence of a machine that looked like a machine. The actual time net was roughly the size and shape of an asparagus stalk, was controlled completely by thought, and had no moving parts. It does not exist any more, but can still be used, once understood. Nine-hover has been trained from birth for this special understanding.

  Sarah nudges Bob and points to Nine-hover. She can’t find her voice; Bob stares open-mouthed.

  In a few seconds, Three-phasing appears. He looks at Nine-hover for a moment, then scurries over to the Dawn couple and reaches up to touch Sarah on the left nipple. His body temperature is considerably higher than hers, and the unexpected warm moistness, as much as the suddenness of the motion, makes her jump back and squeal.

  Three-phasing correctly classified both Dawn people as Caucasian, and so assumes that they speak some Indo-European language.

  “GutenTagsprechensieDeutsch?” he says in a rapid soprano.

  “Huh?” Bob says.

  “Guten-Tag-sprechen-sie-Deutsch?” Three-phasing clears his throat and drops his voice down to the alto he uses to sing about the St. Louis woman. “Guten Tag,” he says, counting to a hundred between each word. “Sprechen sie Deutsch?”

  “That’s Kraut,” says Bob, having grown up on jingoistic comic books. “Don’t tell me you’re a—”

  Three-phasing analyzes the first five words and knows that Bob is an American from the period 1935-1955. “Yes, yes—and no, no—to wit, how very very clever of you to have identified this phrase as having come from the language of Prussia, Germany as you say; but I am, no, not a German person; at least, I no more belong to the German nationality than I do to any other, but I suppose that is not too clear and perhaps I should fully elucidate the particulars of your own situation at this, as you say, ‘time,’ and ‘place.’”

  The last English-language author Three-phasing studied was Henry James.

  “Huh?” Bob says again.

  “Ah. I should simplify.” He thinks for a half-second, and drops his voice down another third. “Yeah, simple. Listen, Mac. First thing I gotta know’s whatcher name. Whatcher broad’s name.”

  “Well … I’m Bob Graham. This is my wife, Sarah Graham.”

  “Pleasta meetcha, Bob. Likewise, Sarah. Call me, uh …” The only twentieth-century language in which Three-phasing’s name makes sense is propositional calculus. “George. George Boole.

  “I ’poligize for bumpin’ into ya, Sarah. That broad in the corner, she don’t know what a tit is, so I was just usin’ one of yours. Uh, lack of immediate culchural perspective, I shoulda knowed better.”

  Sarah feels a little dizzy, shakes her head slowly. “That’s all right. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “I’m dreaming,” Bob says. “Shouldn’t have—”

  “No you aren’t,” says Three-phasing, adjusting his diction again. “You’re in the future. Almost a million years. Pardon me.” He scurries to the mover-transom, is gone for a second, reappears with a bedsheet, which he hands to Bob. “I’m sorry, we don’t wear clothing. This is the best I can do, for now.” The bedsheet is too small for Bob to wear the way Sarah is using the blanket. He folds it over and tucks it around his waist, in a kilt. “Why us?” he asks.

  “You were taken at random. We’ve been time-casting”—he checks with Nine-hover—“for twenty-two years, and have never before caught a human being. Let alone two. You must have been in close contact with one another when you intersected the time-caster beam. I assume you were copulating.”

  “What-ing?” Bob says.

  “No, we weren’t!” Sarah says indignantly.

  “Ah, quite so.” Three-phasing doesn’t pursue the topic. He knows that humans of this culture were reticent about their sexual activity. But from their literature he knows they spent most of their “time” thinking about, arranging for, enjoying, and recovering from a variety of sexual contacts.

  “Then that must be a time machine over there,” Bob says, indicating the fake console.

  “In a sense, yes.” Three-phasing decides to be partly honest. “But the actual machine no longer exists. People did a lot of time-travelling about a quarter of a million years ago. Shuffled history around. Changed it back. The fact that the machine once existed, well, that enables us to use it, if you see what I mean.”

  “Uh, no. I don’t.” Not with synapses limited to three degrees of freedom.

  “Well, never mind. It’s not really important.” He senses the next question. “You will be going back … I don’t know exactly when. It depends on a lot of things. You see, time is like a rubber band.” No, it isn’t. “Or a spring.” No, it isn’t. “At any rate, within a few days, weeks at most, you will leave this present and return to the moment you were experiencing when the time-caster beam picked you up.”

  “I’ve read stories like that,” Sarah says. “Will we remember the future, after we go back?”

  “Probably not,” he says charitably. Not until your brains evolve. “But you can do us a great service.”

  Bob shrugs. “Sure, long as we’re here. Anyhow, you did us a favor.” He puts his arm around Sarah. “I’ve gotta leave Sarah in a couple of days; don’t know for how long. So you’re giving us more time together.”

  “Whether we remember it or not,” Sarah says.

  “Good, fine. Come with me.” They follow Three-phasing to the mover-transom, where he takes their hands and transports them to his home. It is as unadorned as the time-caster room, except for bookshelves along one wall, and a low podium upon which the volume of Faust rests. All of the books are bound identically, in shiny metal with flat black letters along the spines.

  Bob looks around. “Don’t you people ever sit down?”

  “Oh,” Three-phasing says. “Thoughtless of me.” With his mind he shifts the room from utility mood to comfort mood. Intricate tapestries now hang on the walls; soft cushions that look like silk are strewn around in pleasant disorder. Chiming music, not quite discordant, hovers at the edge of audibility, and there is a faint odor of something like jasmine. The metal floor has become a kind of soft leather, and the room has somehow lost its corners.

  “How did that happen?” Sarah asks.

  “I don’t know.” Three-phasing tries to copy Bob’s shrug, but only manages a spasmodic jerk. “Can’t remember not being able to do it.”

  Bob drops into a cushion and experimentally pushes at the floor with a finger. “What is it you want us to do?”

  Trying to move slowly, Three-phasing lowers himself into a cushion and gestures at a nearby one, for Sarah. “It’s very simple, really. Your being here is most of it.

  “We’re celebrating the millionth anniversary of the written word.” How to phrase it? “Everyone is interested in this anniversary, but … nobody reads any more.”

  Bob nods sympathetically. “Never have time for it myself.”

  “Yes, uh … you do know how to read, though?”

  “He knows,” Sarah says. “He’s just lazy.”

  “Well, yeah.” Bob shifts uncomfortably in the cushion.

  “Sarah’s the one you want. I kind of, uh, prefer to listen to the radio.”

  “I read all the time,” Sarah says with a little pride. “Mostly mysteries. But sometimes I read good books, too.”

  “Good, good.” It was indeed fortunate to have found this pair, Three-phasing realizes. They had used the metal of the ancient books to “tune” the time-caster, so potential subjects were limited to those living some eighty years before and after 2012 A.D. Inte
rnal evidence in the books indicated that most of the Earth’s population was illiterate during this period.

  “Allow me to explain. Any one of us can learn how to read. But to us it is like a code; an unnatural way of communicating. Because we are all natural telepaths. We can read each other’s minds from the age of one year.”

  “Golly!” Sarah says. “Read minds?” And Three-phasing sees in her mind a fuzzy kind of longing, much of which is love for Bob and frustration that she knows him only imperfectly. He dips into Bob’s mind and finds things she is better off not knowing.

  “That’s right. So what we want is for you to read some of these books, and allow us to go into your minds while you’re doing it. This way we will be able to recapture an experience that has been lost to the race for over a half-million years.”

  “I don’t know,” Bob says slowly. “Will we have time for anything else? I mean, the world must be pretty strange. Like to see some of it.”

  “Of course; sure. But the rest of the world is pretty much like my place here. Nobody goes outside any more. There isn’t any air.” He doesn’t want to tell them how the air was lost, which might disturb them, but they seem to accept that as part of the distant future.

  “Uh, George.” Sarah is blushing. “We’d also like, uh, some time to ourselves. Without anybody … inside our minds.”

  “Yes, I understand perfectly. You will have your own room, and plenty of time to yourselves.” Three-phasing neglects to say that there is no such thing as privacy in a telepathic society.

  But sex is another thing they don’t have any more. They’re almost as curious about that as they are about books.

  So the kindly men of the future gave Bob and Sarah Graham plenty of time to themselves: Bob and Sarah reciprocated. Through the Dawn couple’s eyes and brains, humanity shared again the visions of Fielding and Melville and Dickens and Shakespeare and almost a dozen others. And as for the 98% more, that they didn’t have time to read or that were in foreign languages—Three-phasing got the hang of it and would spend several millenia entertaining those who were amused by this central illusion of literature: that there could be order, that there could be beginnings and endings and logical workings-out in between; that you could count on the third act or the last chapter to tie things up. They knew how profound an illusion this was because each of them knew every other living human with an intimacy and accuracy far superior to that which even Shakespeare could bring to the study of even himself. And as for Sarah and as for Bob:

  Anxiety can throw a person’s ovaries ’way off schedule. On that beach in California, Sarah was no more pregnant than Bob was. But up there in the future, some somatic tension finally built up to the breaking point, and an egg went sliding down the left Fallopian tube, to be met by a wiggling intruder approximately halfway; together they were the first manifestation of the organism that nine months later, or a million years earlier, would be christened Douglas MacArthur Graham.

  This made a problem for time, or Time, which is neither like a rubber band nor like a spring; nor even like a river nor a carrier wave—but which, like all of these things, can be deformed by certain stresses. For instance, two people going into the future and three coming back, on the same time-casting beam.

  In an earlier age, when time travel was more common, time-casters would have made sure that the baby, or at least its aborted embryo, would stay in the future when the mother returned to her present. Or they could arrange for the mother to stay in the future. But these subtleties had long been forgotten when Nine-hover relearned the dead art. So Sarah went back to her present with a hitch-hiker, an interloper, firmly imbedded in the lining of her womb. And its dim sense of life set up a kind of eddy in the flow of time, that Sarah had to share.

  The mathematical explanation is subtle, and can’t be comprehended by those of us who synapse with fewer than four degrees of freedom. But the end effect is clear: Sarah had to experience all of her own life backwards, all the way back to that embrace on the beach. Some highlights were:

  In 1992, slowly dying of cancer, in a mental hospital.

  In 1979, seeing Bob finally succeed at suicide on the American Plan, not quite finishing his 9,527th bottle of liquor.

  In 1970, having her only son returned in a sealed casket from a country she’d never heard of.

  In the 1960’s, helplessly watching her son become more and more neurotic because of something that no one could name.

  In 1953, Bob coming home with one foot, the other having been lost to frostbite; never having fired a shot in anger.

  In 1952, the agonizing breech presentation.

  Like her son, Sarah would remember no details of the backward voyage through her life. But the scars of it would haunt her forever.

  They were kissing on the beach.

  Sarah dropped the blanket and made a little noise. She started crying and slapped Bob as hard as she could, then ran on alone, up to the cabin.

  Bob watched her progress up the hill with mixed feelings. He took a healthy slug from the bourbon bottle, to give him an excuse to wipe his own eyes.

  He could go sit on the beach and finish the bottle; let her get over it by herself. Or he could go comfort her.

  He tossed the bottle away, the gesture immediately making him feel stupid, and followed her. Later that night she apologized, saying she didn’t know what had gotten into her.

  The Mazel Tov Revolution

  I know exactly where this story comes from. One evening I was sitting with good friend Jack Dann, discussing anthologies. He wanted to edit a “theme” anthology—these are Great Science Fiction About Root Vegetables-type books—and we were bouncing around various topics that hadn’t been done yet, or at least not recently, and might be saleable. I suggested he do an anthology of Jewish science fiction, as he is quite Jewish (try to imagine a creature that’s a cross between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Henny Youngman) and does write science fiction. We even made up a list of various stories he might be able to use.

  Lo and gevalt, he sold it. He wrote asking me for a Jewish science fiction story—but for three cents a word. I wrote back saying, Jack, my friendship knows no bounds, but there is a lower bound on my word rate for original stories. Five cents a word, boychik. He didn’t write back.

  A year or so later, he sold another anthology, this time needing stories about faster-than-light travel. Again, three cents a word. Again, I demurred. Again, he refused to beg.

  And then yet another: science fiction stories about political power. Word rate, three cents. Again he would not beg.

  Finally, he writes saying he’s putting together another anthology of Jewish science fiction. I begin to feel like Dr. Frankenstein. Three cents, take it or leave it. So I sit down and write “The Mazel Tov Revolution”: a Jewish story about the effect of faster-than-light travel on political power. Sell it to Analog for a nickel a word.

  Moral: I may prostitute my art, but at least I’m not a cheap whore.

  This is the story of the venerated/ despised Chaim Itzkhok (check one). And me. And how we omade 238 worlds safe for democracy/ really screwed everything up (check another). With twenty reams of paper and an old rock. I know you probably think you’ve heard the story before. But you haven’t heard it all, not by a long way—things like blackmail and attempted murder, however polite, have a way of not getting in the history books. So read on, OK?

  It all started out, for me at least, when I was stranded on Faraway a quarter of a century ago. You’re probably thinking you wouldn’t mind getting stranded on Faraway, right? Garden spot of the Confederation? Second capital of humanity? Monument to human engineering and all that, terraformed down to the last molecule. I tell kids what it was like back in ’09 and they just shake their heads.

  Back then, Faraway was one of those places where you might see an occasional tourist, only because it was one of the places that tourists just didn’t go. It was one of the last outposts of George’s abortive Second Empire, and had barely supported it
self by exporting things like lead and cadmium. Nice poisonous heavy metals whose oxides covered the planet instead of grass. You had to run around in an asbestos suit with an air conditioner on your back, it was so damned close to Rigel.

  Still is too damned close, but the way they opaqued the upper atmosphere, they tell me that Rigel is just a baby-blue ball that makes spectacular sunrises and sunsets. I’ve never been too tempted to go see it, having worked under its blue glare in the old days; wondering how long it’d be before you went sterile, lead underwear not-withstanding, feeling skin cancers sprouting in the short-wave radiation.

  I met old Chaim there at the University Club, a run-down bar left over from the Empire days. How I got to that godforsaken place is a story in itself—one I can’t tell because the husband is still alive—but I was down and out with no ticket back, dead-ended at thirty.

  I was sitting alone in the University Club, ignoring the bartender, nursing my morning beer and feeling desperate when old Chaim came in. He was around seventy but looked older, all grizzled and seamed, and I started getting ready an excuse in case he was armed with a hard-luck story.

  But he ordered a cup of real coffee and when he paid, I sneaked a look at his credit flash. The number was three digits longer than mine. Not prejudiced against millionaires, I struck up a conversation with him.

  There was only one opening gambit for conversation on Faraway, since the weather never changed and there were no politics to speak of: What the hell are you doing here?

  “It’s the closest place to where I want to go,” he said, which was ridiculous. Then he asked me the same, and I told him, and we commiserated for a few minutes on the unpredictability of the other sex. I finally got around to asking him exactly where it was he wanted to go.