Word circulated, and before long the chair of the department knocked on Perelmann’s son’s office door. The chair urged him to take some time off, please, for his own sake.
“Bill,” said Perelmann’s son with a knowing smile. “Is this about the hats?”
The chair admitted that he was concerned.
“Bill,” said Perelmann’s son again, touching the chair’s wrist. “Don’t worry about me. I’m not going crazy, at least not yet! The hats serve a purely functional purpose.”
It looked silly, he knew, but the hats helped him keep separate his two conflicting roles—first as a son still grieving for his dad, second as a scholar trying to understand, to historicize, and, yes, to critique, as dispassionately as possible, his father’s ideas. Before hitting upon the two-hat system, he’d lived in a state of perpetual self-reproach: when he thought of Perelmann in the way that a son thinks of his dad, the scholar in him condemned his lack of objectivity, and when he thought of Perelmann in the way that a scholar thinks of his subject, the son in him condemned his lack of loyalty.
The hats put an end to all that.
When he pulled on the old Red Sox cap, its snug fit and familiar smell had a Proustian effect. He was returned to the grandstands of Fenway Park, beside his father. He was suffused with compassion and pity, with respect, love, and acceptance—for his father’s flaws no less than for his virtues. He wanted to annihilate his father’s academic detractors and slaughter those who would attempt to understand him as a product of his milieu. Such was the effect of the Red Sox cap. But under the weight of the brown fedora, beneath its sober brim, he could put aside his childish devotion and scrutinize his father’s thought with the skepticism required of an intellectual historian. He investigated the genealogy of his father’s ideas, examined their internal consistency, considered their presuppositions and limitations.
“Bill, I admit it’s a strange system!” said Perelmann’s son, laughing. “That what happens in our heads should be so affected by what happens on top of our heads. But, for me, this does seem to be the case.” He shrugged. “It helps me proceed. I do not question it.”
The department chair went away intensely impressed, even moved. Word went around that Perelmann’s son was not crazy but brilliant.
At our next brown-bag colloquium, Perelmann’s son claimed to wear “four hats.” He was Perelmann’s son, Perelmann’s biographer, Perelmann’s philosophical interlocutor, and Perelmann’s estate executor.
The following morning, the graduate student reported that two new hats, a black bowler and a purple yarmulke, had entered the rotation. From what he’d seen, he hypothesized that the bowler was the executor hat and the yarmulke was the interlocutor hat. Perelmann’s son had spent most of the early evening going calmly back and forth between the Red Sox cap and the bowler. At around eight o’clock, the yarmulke had gone on and stayed on until just after nine. From then until midnight, he’d frantically switched among the yarmulke, the Red Sox cap, and the brown fedora. He had ended the night with forty-five relatively relaxed minutes in the black bowler.
“I’m fine, Bill!” said Perelmann’s son, touching the chair’s wrist. “How can I summon memories of my father one minute, and deal with his taxes the next? Impossible, unless I physically put on the bowler hat. One minute I’m recalling the sensation of being up on his shoulders, the next I’m attacking his peculiar interpretation of Kant? The purple yarmulke. Who taught him this idiosyncratic Kant, and when? Brown fedora.”
By the next colloquium, Perelmann’s son wore sixteen hats. He was Perelmann’s son, Perelmann’s biographer, Perelmann’s philosophical interlocutor, Perelmann’s estate executor, Perelmann’s publicist, Perelmann’s usurper, Perelmann’s housekeeper, Perelmann’s zealot, Perelmann’s annihilator, Perelmann’s designated philosophical heir, Perelmann’s defector, Perelmann’s librarian, Perelmann’s gene carrier, Perelmann’s foot soldier, Perelmann’s betrayer, and Perelmann’s doppelgänger. Twelve new hats joined the repertoire, including a beret, a bandana, a small straw hat, and a sombrero.
Naturally, we were a little alarmed. His evenings, the graduate student reported, were now mere blurs of hat transitions. Nothing stayed on his head for long. But reality, we assumed, would sooner or later impose a limit on his mania. There are only so many kinds of hats, just as there are only so many relations that can possibly obtain between a father and a son. In due course Perelmann’s son would run out of either hats or relations, we thought—probably hats—and thereafter he would return to reason.
But soon there were relations we had never considered, hats we’d never heard of. He was Perelmann’s old-Jewish-joke repository, Perelmann’s voice impersonator, Perelmann’s sweater wearer, the last living practitioner of Perelmann’s skiing technique, Perelmann’s surpasser, Perelmann’s victim. He wore an eighteenth-century tricorne, a deerstalker, a round Hasidic kolpik, an Afghan pakol with a peacock feather tucked into its folds.
By the end of the fall semester we knew something had to be done. The explosion of hats and relations had not abated. Left alone, we realized, Perelmann’s son would partition his relationship with his father ad infinitum, and for each infinitesimal slice of relationship he would purchase a hat. Ultimately he would turn his relationship with his father—by nature, one simple thing—into something infinitely complex, for no discernible reason, and his hat collection would, correspondingly, grow without bound, and he would wind up destroying himself. His analytical tendency, along with the huge hat collection that resulted from it, would obliterate him.
So, one morning, in an attempt to save Perelmann’s son from himself, a group of graduate students and junior faculty members slipped, with the department chair’s blessing, into Perelmann’s son’s apartment. (He was at a Perelmann conference.) We gathered all the hats and put them in garbage bags—a hundred and twenty-eight hats in twelve garbage bags—and got them out of there.
But in our hearts we must have known that we were treating the symptom, not the cause. Yesterday, according to our informant, Perelmann’s son spent all day and all night in a ten-gallon hat of thus far unknown paternal associations.
The Madman’s Time Machine
On the coldest night of the year, a madman was taken to Boston Medical Center with third-degree frostbite. Police had found him under an overpass, naked in a cardboard box. Scrawled on the box in black Magic Marker were the words: “TIME MACHINE.”
Oddly, the frostbitten madman was jubilant.
Until recently, he told the psychiatrist assigned to him, he had been the most intelligent person in history, smarter even than Einstein (“if only by a little bit”) and Newton (“if only by a little bit”). But his historic intelligence had been a curse.
“Being able to perceive the true nature of everything instantly is actually awful,” he told the psychiatrist. He had grown bored and lonely. The moment that he initiated a thought, he reached its logical terminus. “At some point,” he said, “there is just nothing left to think. Meanwhile, everyone else is back there at the first principles, the assumptions, the postulates.”
He had investigated the great problems of cosmology but solved them immediately. In May, he ended metaphysics. He turned to the nature of time, which he hoped would divert his mind for at least a few weeks, but it revealed itself to him in an afternoon. Once again he was bored and lonely. So he built the time machine.
“That right there?” the psychiatrist asked, gesturing at the cardboard box, which the madman had refused to relinquish.
“That,” the madman said with a strange smile, “is merely a cardboard box.”
The real time machine, he said, was obviously much more complicated, and was obviously made entirely, or almost entirely, out of metal. For a while it had relieved his boredom. He visited the recent past, then the near future, then the distant past, and then the remote future. He sought out the company of his fellow-geniuses. He discussed gravity with Galileo and buoyancy with Archimedes. He brought Fermat to t
he near future and ate future bagels, which are “much puffier and much more moist,” according to the madman, than the bagels of today. He met one of the most important thinkers of the remote future, a mammoth reptilian creature with an unpronounceable name, and took him back in time to meet Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King. This meeting, the madman said, was “incredibly awkward.”
Soon the madman had talked to everyone worth talking to, seen everything worth seeing, thought about everything worth thinking about, and yet again was left bored and lonely. Even the company of geniuses was not enough; boredom would always be with him, he realized, as long as he had this huge, historic intelligence. Suicide was the only way out. He decided to commit suicide by paradox. He would go back in time and kill his own grandfather—a logical impossibility, as we all know, he said, since killing his grandfather would mean that he himself wouldn’t be born, which would mean that he couldn’t go back in time to kill his grandfather. So this might be interesting, he said. Plus he would get to murder the man who had handed down to him this huge, horrible, historic intelligence.
The madman set his time machine for 1932 Berlin, where his grandfather was a promising Expressionist painter. He materialized in his grandfather’s studio carrying a gun. “Nein!” his grandfather yelled, raising his paintbrush, the madman told the psychiatrist. “Nein!” He aimed his pistol. His grandmother ran in. “Nein!” she said, according to the madman. “Nein! Nein!” He fired into his grandfather’s chest and the promising Expressionist painter fell over dead.
But the madman didn’t disappear. Nor, he said, did the universe implode.
Was there no paradox after all?
As his sobbing grandmother ran over to his dead grandfather, the madman noticed the slight swell of her belly. Ah! he realized, as he recalled to the psychiatrist. She was already pregnant!
That instant, the madman vanished from the studio and materialized naked under an overpass in the cardboard box labeled “TIME MACHINE.” The real time machine was gone. For a moment he was confused. Then everything became terrifically clear. His father had still been born, but now fatherlessly, and his life had gone, instead of well, poorly. Instead of becoming a mathematician, he’d become an underemployed roofer. His son, the madman, had no longer grown up in an intellectual milieu. Instead of becoming brilliant beyond bounds, the madman said with evident relief, he had become stupid, and even a little bit insane. And obviously in this alternate universe he was totally and utterly incapable of building an actual functioning time machine.
“Look at it now!” the madman cried joyfully. “A cardboard box!”
MY TIME AMONG THE BRIDGE BLOWERS
Eugene Fischer
Eugene Fischer studied physics at Trinity University and is a graduate of both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in San Diego. His writing has appeared in Asimov’s and Strange Horizons. His 2015 novella “The New Mother” won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, was awarded second place for the Sturgeon Award, and was nominated for the Nebula Award. As an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa, he created an undergraduate course on writing and reading science fiction. He currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he helped create a science-fiction-writing summer camp for children.
In “My Time Among the Bridge Blowers,” Eugene Fischer addresses both the strengths and shortcomings of 19th-century colonial fiction made popular by Rudyard Kipling.
Before I continued my journey south, I took a detour to the tall Gamal Mountains in the west, among whose peaks I was told could be found a still thriving village of one of the rarest and most intriguing of the tribes of man. I reached the foothill town of Reninep by autobus, but once there had to secure a guide and mount one of the animated clay donkeys favored by the local traders for the trip to the village. Mine was an intricately sculpted beast, well named and sure-footed, and, led by my guide Sant, I rode it up the half-abandoned mountain trails with relative ease. (As the temperature dropped with elevation I wrapped myself tightly in the quilt Marta had gifted me, that we had shared during our time together, and thought myself already quite as glad of it as she had prophesied I would come to be.) When the sky began to darken on the first day of our journey, Sant unpacked long, curved poles that fitted into notches in my donkey’s sides. Between these poles he strung a net hammock, to allow me to “sleep in the saddle” as my mount marched forward. I was initially terrified at the prospect of being suspended in the air while my donkey trod the steep mountain paths, but my mind was put significantly to rest by the sight of Sant unpacking an identical set of poles for himself—though I did then wonder if it was him or his donkey who was truly leading us! The hammock proved comfortable enough to sleep in, and so we were able to travel near-continuously for the three full days it took to reach the cliff-carved buildings of the village of the Hiatha, known more commonly as the Bridge Blowers.
The Bridge Blowers are mentioned in histories all the way back to the time of Ervil, who described men who went into the mountains and “learned to leap often from the peaks.” Though the Hiatha culture is insular, their amazing breath talent has long drawn the attention of outsiders. During the era of Crait imperial expansion, every forward battalion marched with conscripted Hiatha soldiers. It is from this time that we get the folktale of “The Loyal Bridge Blower,” in which a large company of soldiers, forced to retreat, find their way blocked by a wide ravine. The Hiatha conscript with them, despite the unfortunate treatment he has received at their hands, kneels at the ravine’s edge and breathes firmness into the air so that the company may cross to the other side. The soldiers traverse the long span of open air, supported continuously by the Hiatha’s capacity for circular breathing. All of the soldiers make it across the gap, and just as the last sets foot on solid ground, the enemy appears and moves to capture the Bridge Blower. But he is dead, having suffocated himself in the effort to save his comrades.
The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it is the case that the Hiatha captured the imagination of the Crait Empire, and they became one of the first races subjected to the Empire’s assimilationist policies. Thousands of Hiatha were relocated and put into civil service, but the biome dependence which we now know affects so many of the talented races turned out to be especially pronounced among the Hiatha, and the displaced lost their breath abilities within two generations. This is why it was necessary for me to undertake such a detour to seek them out; unlike Marta and her clan of farseers, there are no enclaves of Hiatha to be found in the cities, dimly clinging through the years to the easy talents of their ancestors. The descendants of the assimilated, without their breath, were unable to return to the homes of their parents and grandparents, having lost the vital skill for survival in the mountains. Once there were Hiatha settlements all along the Tarko-Gamal range; now I had to travel for days to see one of the last remaining.
It was the morning of the fourth day when I got my first glimpse of the Hiatha’s mountain home. The sun had finally climbed high enough to peek down into the valley from which we ascended. Swaying in my hammock, I peeled Marta’s magnificent quilt from my body and called out to Sant again how, fine creature though it surely was, I was getting well tired of my donkey.
Sant was a quiet man, stout and confident with short pewter teeth and a long temper. (Much later in my journey I would learn that Sant was not his real name. A constable in Chennith, listening to my stories, informed me that “Sant” is a default pseudonym in Tarkuin, the name given to incoherent strangers and unidentifiable bodies.) Instead of acknowledging me with a grunt or a nod as had been his usual practice on the mountain paths, this time Sant answered by calling over his shoulder, “Won’t now be long.”
We stopped to stow my hammock and poles, and then continued up and out of the valley. Finally, we rounded a switchback, and there it was: the ridge we were on curved, and across the chasm of its hollow were unmistakable signs of habitation. Rock cut at right angles, footpaths and terraces, windows and
doors. All of it clearly placed by the industrious hand of man. But what variety of man? For even from this distance I could see that the architecture did not display the bottom-to-top linearity of a people whose feet never leave the ground. The will imposed on the rock was an accommodating will; doors were sunk into the stone not always at the ground, but wherever the stone was most yielding. The terrace farms were a constellation about our heads, rather than carpeting any one slope. A tuber and its nearest neighbor might be separated by a half-hour climb . . . or five Hiatha steps. How cruel and thorough was the loss suffered by the relocated Hiatha, once their breath was gone from them. At the edge of vision distant figures moved about their village with a facility no outsider could ever know.
We hadn’t gone much farther along the ridge before being spotted. A pair of envoys were sent strolling through the air out to meet us. They were dressed in goat wool clothing, and the taller of the two carried a long pole which I would come to recognize as a weapon: a blowgun from which a Hiatha hunter could fire a stone dart with deadly accuracy. As they approached us I could see their breath clouding in the morning mountain air. It seemed that they took turns supporting each other. One at a time, strange angles danced in the mist around their faces, like no cloud or steam I had ever seen. But it wasn’t their amazing talent or their calm suspension above so great an abyss that was sharpest in my mind. I was most struck by their complete lack of tattoos. I was aware, of course, that this was a culture removed from imperial civilization, and when preparing my journey had spent many pleasant, solitary hours contemplating drawn renderings of Bridge Blower women and children in an Expansionist Era folio by Nn. Lozlac. But seeing actual undecorated shoulders and calves and necks, each flex and twitch an expression of bare anatomy, was a shock of the sort for which it is impossible to adequately prepare. The fresh guard sigil above my coccyx, only twelve days old and still semi-wild, began to twist and snarl at the sight of unprotected flesh, and I felt my own mouth water sympathetically.