Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas
“All those Napoleons and Joans of Arc that have been cluttering the asylums for the last few hundred years,” Maggie Caldwell said. “Could it be that they’re really hosts for time travelers going backward in time?”
“You can’t go backward,” said Mortenson. “You know that. The round trip has to begin with a forward leap.”
“Under present theory,” Caldwell said. “But present theory’s only five years old. It may turn out to be incomplete. We may have had all sorts of travelers out of the future jumping through history, and never even knew it. All the nuts, lunatics, inexplicable geniuses, idiots savants—”
“Save it, Maggie,” Bleier said. “Let’s stick to what we understand right now.”
“Oh? Do we understand anything?” McCulloch asked.
Bleier gave him a sour look. “I thought you said you weren’t worried.”
“I’m not. Not much. But I’d be a fool if I thought we really had a firm handle on what we’re doing. We’re shooting in the dark, and let’s never kid ourselves about it.”
“T minus fifteen,” Rodrigues called.
“Try to make the landing easy on your host, Jim,” Bleier said.
“I’ve got no reason not to want to,” said McCulloch.
He realized that he had been wandering. Bleier, Maggie, Mortenson, Ybarra—for a moment they had been more real to him than the congregation of lobsters. He had heard their voices, he had seen their faces, Bleier plump and perspiring and serious, Ybarra dark and lean, Maggie with her crown of short upswept red hair blazing in the laboratory light—and yet they were all dead, a hundred million years dead, two hundred million, back there with the triceratops and the trilobite in the drowned former world, and here he was among the lobster people. How futile all those discussions of what the world of the early twenty-second century was going to be like! Those speculations on population density, religious belief, attitudes toward science, level of technological achievement, all those late-night sessions in the final months of the project, designed to prepare him for any eventuality he might encounter while he was visiting the future—what a waste, what a needless exercise. As was all that fretting about upsetting the mental stability of the person who would receive his transtemporalized consciousness. Such qualms, such moral delicacy—all unnecessary, McCulloch knew now.
But of course they had not anticipated sending him so eerily far across the dark abysm of time, into a world in which humankind and all its works were not even legendary memories, and the host who would receive him was a calm and thoughtful crustacean capable of taking him in with only the most mild and brief disruption of its serenity.
The lobsters, he noticed now, had reconfigured themselves while his mind had been drifting. They had broken up their circle and were arrayed in a long line stretching over the ocean floor, with his host at the end of the procession. The queue was a close one, each lobster so close to the one before it that it could touch it with the tips of its antennae, which from time to time they seemed to be doing; and they all were moving in a weird kind of quasimilitary lockstep, every lobster swinging the same set of walking-legs forward at the same time.
—Where are we going? McCulloch asked his host.
—The pilgrimage has begun.
—What pilgrimage is that?
—To the dry place, said the host. To the place of no water. To the land.
—Why?
—It is the custom. We have decided that the time of the Molting of the World is soon to come; and therefore we must make the pilgrimage. It is the end of all things. It is the coming of a newer world. You are the herald: so we have agreed.
—Will you explain? I have a thousand questions. I need to know more about all this, McCulloch said.
—Soon. Soon. This is not a time for explanations.
McCulloch felt a firm and unequivocal closing of contact, an emphatic withdrawal. He sensed a hard ringing silence that was almost an absence of the host, and knew it would be inappropriate to transgress against it. That was painful, for he brimmed now with an overwhelming rush of curiosity. The Molting of the World? The end of all things? A pilgrimage to the land? What land? Where? But he did not ask. He could not ask. The host seemed to have vanished from him, disappearing utterly into this pilgrimage, this migration, moving in its lockstep way with total concentration and a kind of mystic intensity. McCulloch did not intrude. He felt as though he had been left alone in the body they shared.
As they marched, he concentrated on observing, since he could not interrogate. And there was much to see; for the longer he dwelled within his host, the more accustomed he grew to the lobster’s sensory mechanisms. The compound eyes, for instance. Enough of his former life had returned to him now so that he remembered human eyes clearly, those two large gleaming ovals, so keen, so subtle of focus, set beneath protecting ridges of bone. His host’s eyes were nothing like that: they were two clusters of tiny lenses rising on jointed, movable stalks, and what they showed was an intricately dissected view, a mosaic of isolated points of light. But he was learning somehow to translate those complex and baffling images into a single clear one, just as, no doubt, a creature accustomed to compound-lens vision would sooner or later learn to see through human eyes, if need be. And McCulloch found now that he could not only make more sense out of the views he received through his host’s eyes, but that he was seeing farther, into quite distant dim recesses of this sunless undersea realm.
Not that the stalked eyes seemed to be a very important part of the lobster’s perceptive apparatus. They provided nothing more than a certain crude awareness of the immediate terrain. But apparently the real work of perceiving was done mainly by the thousands of fine bristles, so minute that they were all but invisible, that sprouted on every surface of his host’s body. These seemed to send a constant stream of messages to the lobster’s brain: information on the texture and topography of the ocean floor, on tiny shifts in the flow and temperature of the water, of the proximity of obstacles, and much else. Some of the small hairlike filaments were sensitive to touch, and others, it appeared, to chemicals; for whenever the lobster approached some other life-form, it received data on its scent—or the underwater equivalent—long before the creature itself was within visual range. The quantity and richness of these inputs astonished McCulloch. At every moment came a torrent of data corresponding to the landslide senses he remembered, smell, taste, touch; and some central processing unit within the lobster’s brain handled everything in the most effortless fashion.
But there was no sound. The ocean world appeared to be wholly silent. McCulloch knew that that was untrue, that sound waves propagated through water as persistently as through air, if somewhat more rapidly. Yet the lobster seemed neither to possess nor to need any sort of auditory equipment. The sensory bristles brought in all the data it required. The “speech” of these creatures, McCulloch had long ago realized, was effected not by voice but by means of spurts of chemicals released into the water, hormones, perhaps, or amino acids, something of a distinct and readily recognizable identity, emitted in some high-redundancy pattern that permitted easy recognition and decoding despite the difficulties caused by currents and eddies. It was, McCulloch thought, like trying to communicate by printing individual letters on scraps of paper and hurling them into the wind. But it did somehow seem to work, however clumsy a concept it might be, because of the extreme sensitivity of the lobster’s myriad chemoreceptors.
The antennae played some significant role also. There were two sets of them, a pair of three-branched ones just behind the eyes and a much longer single-branched pair behind those. The long ones restlessly twitched and probed inquisitively, and most likely, he suspected, served as simple balancing and coordination devices much like the whiskers of a cat. The purpose of the smaller antennae eluded him, but it was his guess that they were involved in the process of communication between one lobster and another, either by some semaphore system or in a deeper communion beyond his still awkward comprehension.
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McCulloch regretted not knowing more about the lobsters of his own era. But he had only a broad general knowledge of natural history, extensive, fairly deep, yet not good enough to tell him whether these elaborate sensory functions were characteristic of all lobsters or had evolved during the millions of years it had taken to create the water world. Probably some of each, he decided. Very likely even the lobsters of the former world had had much of this scanning equipment, enough to allow them to locate their prey, to find their way around in the dark suboceanic depths, to undertake their long and unerring migrations. But he found it hard to believe that they could have had much “speech” capacity, that they gathered in solemn sessions to discuss abstruse questions of theology and mythology, to argue gently about omens and heralds and the end of all things. That was something that the patient and ceaseless unfoldings of time must have wrought.
The lobsters marched without show of fatigue: not scampering in that dancelike way that his host had adopted while summoning its comrades to save it from the swimming creature, but moving nevertheless in an elegant and graceful fashion, barely touching the ground with the tips of their legs, going onward step by step by step steadily and fairly swiftly.
McCulloch noticed that new lobsters frequently joined the procession, cutting in from left or right just ahead of his host, who always remained at the rear of the line; that line now was so long, hundreds of lobsters long, that it was impossible to see its beginning. Now and again one would reach out with its bigger claw to seize some passing animal, a starfish or urchin or small crab, and without missing a step would shred and devour it, tossing the unwanted husk to the cloud of planktonic scavengers that always hovered nearby. This foraging on the march was done with utter lack of self-consciousness; it was almost by reflex that these creatures snatched and gobbled as they journeyed.
And yet all the same they did not seem like mere marauding mouths. From this long line of crustaceans there emanated, McCulloch realized, a mysterious sense of community, a wholeness of society, that he did not understand but quite sharply sensed. This was plainly not a mere migration but a true pilgrimage. He thought ruefully of his earlier condescending view of these people, incapable of achieving the Taj Mahal or the Sistine Chapel, and felt abashed: for he was beginning to see that they had other accomplishments of a less tangible sort that were only barely apparent to his displaced and struggling mind.
“When you come back,” Maggie said, “you’ll be someone else. There’s no escaping that. It’s the one thing I’m frightened of. Not that you’ll die making the hop, or that you’ll get into some sort of terrible trouble in the future, or that we won’t be able to bring you back at all, or anything like that. But that you’ll have become someone else.”
“I feel pretty secure in my identity,” McCulloch told her.
“I know you do. God knows, you’re the most stable person in the group, and that’s why you’re going. But even so. Nobody’s ever done anything like this before. It can’t help but change you. When you return, you’re going to be unique among the human race.”
“That sounds very awesome. But I’m not sure it’ll matter that much, Mag. I’m just taking a little trip. If I were going to Paris, or Istanbul, or even Antarctica, would I come back totally transformed? I’d have had some new experiences, but—”
“It isn’t the same,” she said. “It isn’t even remotely the same.” She came across the room to him and put her hands on his shoulders, and stared deep into his eyes, which sent a little chill through him, as it always did; for when she looked at him that way there was a sudden flow of energy between them, a powerful warm rapport rushing from her to him and from him to her as though through a huge conduit, that delighted and frightened him both at once. He could lose himself in her. He had never let himself feel that way about anyone before. And this was not the moment to begin. There was no room in him for such feelings, not now, not when he was within a couple of hours of leaping off into the most unknown of unknowns. When he returned—if he returned—he might risk allowing something at last to develop with Maggie. But not on the eve of departure, when everything in his universe was tentative and conditional. “Can I tell you a little story, Jim?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“When my father was on the faculty at Cal, he was invited to a reception to meet a couple of the early astronauts, two of the Apollo men—I don’t remember which ones, but they were from the second or third voyage to the Moon. When he showed up at the faculty club, there were two or three hundred people there, milling around having cocktails, and most of them were people he didn’t know. He walked in and looked around and within ten seconds he had found the astronauts. He didn’t have to be told. He just knew. And this is my father, remember, who doesn’t believe in ESP or anything like that. But he said they were impossible to miss, even in that crowd. You could see it on their faces, you could feel the radiance coming from them, there was an aura, there was something about their eyes. Something that said, I have walked on the Moon, I have been to that place which is not of our world and I have come back, and now I am someone else. I am who I was before, but I am someone else also.”
“But they went to the Moon, Mag!”
“And you’re going to the future, Jim. That’s even weirder. You’re going to a place that doesn’t exist. And you may meet yourself there—ninety-nine years old, and waiting to shake hands with you—or you might meet me, or your grandson, or find out that everyone on Earth is dead, or that everyone has turned into a disembodied spirit, or that they’re all immortal super-beings, or—or—Christ, I don’t know. You’ll see a world that nobody alive today is supposed to see. And when you come back, you’ll have that aura. You’ll be transformed.”
“Is that so frightening?”
“To me it is,” she said.
“Why is that?”
“Dummy,” she said. “Dope. How explicit do I have to be, anyway? I thought I was being obvious enough.”
He could not meet her eyes. “This isn’t the best moment to talk about—”
“I know. I’m sorry, Jim. But you’re important to me, and you’re going somewhere and you’re going to become someone else, and I’m scared. Selfish and scared.”
“Are you telling me not to go?”
“Don’t be absurd. You’d go no matter what I told you, and I’d despise you if you didn’t. There’s no turning back now.”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t have dumped any of this on you today. You don’t need it right this moment.”
“It’s okay,” he said softly. He turned until he was looking straight at her, and for a long moment he simply stared into her eyes and did not speak, and then at last he said, “Listen, I’m going to take a big fantastic improbably insane voyage, and I’m going to be a witness to God knows what, and then I’m going to come back, and yes, I’ll be changed—only an ox wouldn’t be changed, or maybe only a block of stone—but I’ll still be me, whoever me is. Don’t worry, okay? I’ll still be me. And we’ll still be us.”
“Whoever us is.”
“Whoever. Jesus, I wish you were going with me, Mag!”
“That’s the silliest schoolboy thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“True, though.”
“Well, I can’t go. Only one at a time can go, and it’s you. I’m not even sure I’d want to go. I’m not as crazy as you are, I suspect. You go, Jim, and come back and tell me all about it.”
“Yes.”
“And then we’ll see what there is to see about you and me.”
“Yes,” he said.
She smiled. “Let me show you a poem, okay? You must know it, because it’s Eliot, and you know all the Eliot there is. But I was reading him last night—thinking of you, reading him—and I found this, and it seemed to be the right words, and I wrote them down. From one of the Quartets.”
“I think I know,” he said:
“Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousnes
s—”
“That’s a good one, too,” Maggie said. “But it’s not the one I had in mind.” She unfolded a piece of paper. “It’s this:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started—”
“And know the place for the first time,” he completed. “Yes. Exactly. To arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.”
The lobsters were singing as they marched. That was the only word, McCulloch thought, that seemed to apply. The line of pilgrims now was immensely long—there must have been thousands in the procession by this time, and more were joining constantly—and from them arose an outpouring of chemical signals, within the narrowest of tonal ranges, that mingled in a close harmony and amounted to a kind of sustained chant on a few notes, swelling, filling all the ocean with its powerful and intense presence. Once again he had an image of them as monks, but not Benedictines now: these were Buddhist, rather, an endless line of yellow-robed holy men singing a great om as they made their way up some Tibetan slope. He was awed and humbled by it—by the intensity, and by the wholeheartedness of the devotion. It was getting hard for him to remember that these were crustaceans, no more than ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas; he sensed minds all about him, whole and elaborate minds arising out of some rich cultural matrix, and it was coming to seem quite natural to him that these people should have armored exoskeletons and jointed eyestalks and a dozen busy legs.
His host had still not broken its silence, which must have extended now over a considerable period. Just how long a period, McCulloch had no idea, for there were no significant alternations of light and dark down here to indicate the passing of time, nor did the marchers ever seem to sleep, and they took their food, as he had seen, in a casual and random way without breaking step. But it seemed to McCulloch that he had been effectively alone in the host’s body for many days.
He was not minded to try to reenter contact with the other just yet—not until he received some sort of signal from it. Plainly the host had withdrawn into some inner sanctuary to undertake a profound meditation; and McCulloch, now that the early bewilderment and anguish of his journey through time had begun to wear off, did not feel so dependent upon the host that he needed to blurt his queries constantly into his companion’s consciousness. He would watch, and wait, and attempt to fathom the mysteries of this place unaided.