Shiva and Other Stories (16 page)

Shiva

“W
E’LL TRY PARIS,” SOMEONE SAYS.
“Remember Paris.”

Sperber, trusted only for an apprentice assignment but still determined to be hopeful, huddles in the deep spaces of the extradimensional calculator, figuring out his further moves. Sperber has always been a thoughtful type, not impulsive, only reactive. That is one of the primary reasons for his participation in the program. Know your course, pull down vanity, move deliberately toward a kind of fruition. Still he thinks: How long can I remain hopeful doing stuff like this?

Still, he has. Remained hopeful, that is. Choice gleams like knives from the enclosure; shrugging, his life a cosmic shrug he thinks, Sperber is catapulted to Paris, 1923, finds himself with no real transition in a small café on the fringes of the Champs Élysées where he seems to be already engaged in profound conversation with the young Pol Pot and Charles de Gaulle, nationalists both, their expressions set intently toward a future that glows for them, even though Sperber knows better than they how problematic the situation.

“Excusez-moi,”
Sperber Says in his miserable, poorly accented French, tugging on the sleeve of de Gaulle’s brown jacket.

Even at this early stage of his life, de Gaulle seems to have taken on a military righteousness. “
Je
can stay only a moment. I am here to give you a glimpse of your future
s’il vous plait
.
Comment allez vous?
Would you like that portrait of your future?”

He hopes that the translator has done its wondrous work. There is no way that he can express to De Gaulle in this perilous situation without the help of that device. Still, it seems—like so much else in post-technological 2218—something of a cheat. Form has taken function all the way to the grave; the extradimensional calculator has, for instance, subsumed the causes of research or serious speculation.

De Gaulle is unresponsive to Sperber’s question. Perhaps premonitory apprehensions of the Fourth Republic have overtaken him; he seems distant, affixed to some calculation of a future that Sperber himself knows all too well. Saleth Sar (Pol Pot’s birth name or at least the name he employed in his student days) brandishes a teacup, looks at Sperber with a kind of loathing.

“And me?” he says. “What about me? What
s’il vous plait
are you undertaking to give me? My French is not perfect but I am worthy of your attention, no?

This certainly is true. Saleth Sar is worthy of his attention. In his excitement at finally meeting de Gaulle, Sperber has almost ignored the general’s old companion and rival in student debates.

“Pardon me,” he says. “I meant to give no offense. I am a student, I am in this place to study and to learn. It is not possible for me to know everything.”

“You do not have to know everything,” Pol Pot says reprovingly, “but it is not correct to know nothing at all.” He stares at de Gaulle sourly, takes the teacup from the general’s hand, and places it with a thump on the table. “I think I will ask you to leave this table,” he says. “You were after all not invited.”

“I have to tell you that the Algerian intervention will come to a very bad end,” Sperber says hastily. “Both of you must know this, also that the decision to leave Indo-China will lead in no way toward peace. Your intervention will be supplanted by ignorant Americans, the Americans will get in deeper and deeper, eventually the Americans will ignore the borders of Kampuchea and will commit severe destruction. No good will come of this, none at all. One country will be shamed, another sacrificed. You must begin to make plans now.”

“Plans?” Pol Pot says. “What kind of plans are we supposed to make? You babble of destiny, of destruction. But it is this kind of destruction which must precede the revolution itself. It is vital that the revolution prevail, that is why I have been sent to Paris. To study texts of successful revolutions, to know the Constitution of the United States among other things.”

Pol Pot, the admirer of democratic principles. Sperber had forgotten that.

Paris at this time was filled with future Communists who loved democracy, the United States, American music and sexual habits. It was betrayal, Americans not taking to Asian desires, which had tamed them into revolutionaries, anti-Bolsheviks. But Sperber had, of course, forgotten much else in his various missions; the lapse here was not uncharacteristic; lapses had carried him through all of these expeditions, making matters even more difficult.

De Gaulle shrugs much as Sperber had shrugged just subjective instants ago in the extradimensional calculator. The Frenchman’s face shines with confusion, the same confusion, doubtless, that exists in Sperber’s own. “There is nothing I can do about this,” he says. “Or about anything else for that matter.”

Sperber knows then with sudden and sinking acuity that he has done all that is possible under these circumstances. There is nothing else that he can do. He has used the extradimensional calculator to detour to this crucial place, has warned the future leaders of consequence, has delivered the message as best as he can; now consequence—an extradimensional consequence, of course, one which has been imposed upon the situation rather than developed—will have to engage its own direction. It is a pity that he cannot bring documents, wave them in front of Pol Pot and de Gaulle, but the laws of paradox are implacable and no one may test them by bringing confirmation to the past. The speaker must make his point through fervor, through credibility. There is no supporting data.

“What are we supposed to do?” Saleth Sar says. “You surely cannot think to give us such an evaluation and simply disappear. We are not fools here, we are serious people. Even he is a serious person,” he says pointing to de Gaulle, “even though like all of his countrymen he is full of grand designs and stupid dreams. Serious stupid dreams, however. You must take responsibility for that as well as much else.”

Well, that seems fair enough. Perhaps that is so. “
Regrette
,” Sperber says. What else is there to say? In just a moment he will take the extradimensional calculator out of his briefcase, calculate the dials, and make his departure. He hopes that the café personnel will not take the calculator for a grenade or plastique; that they will not interpret his intentions as violent. His intentions are not violent, they are simply pedagogical in all of the better senses of that word.

* * *

Next assignment: This one the standard interview (in all of its hopelessness) which no one in training can avoid. “Don’t do this,” Sperber therefore says to JFK, appearing in the President’s private quarters at Hyannisport with the help of his speedy and selective instrument. “Don’t go to Dallas to resolve a factional dispute, the factions are hopelessly riven, there is nothing that you can do but interfere and otherwise, if you go there, horrendous personal consequences may follow. I am not even talking about the future of the country.”

Kennedy looks at him kindly, helps himself to another breadstick from the stack next to the table, seems to regard Sperber in a unique and favorable light. Jacqueline is ensconced upstairs, Dave Powers is pacing the corridors outside: This is a quiet night in the fall of 1963, quieter than most of them and therefore good for sitting by the calculator. Sperber has come to Kennedy noiselessly, with no disturbance whatsoever.

“You’re not the first from whom I’ve heard this, you know,” Kennedy says. “There has been a whole group of you who have come in mysteriously with a similar plea over the past few weeks. It’s a good thing I know I’m only hallucinating. Or are you really all emissaries from the future on some kind of training plan? That’s what I’m beginning to believe but I can’t get a straight answer out of any of you. It strikes me as the most reasonable guess; either that or you’re all really extraordinary actors and Lyndon is even more demonic than I think, trying to make me crazy here. But I don’t think I’m crazy; I have a rigorous, robust intelligence and know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Sperber knew of course about all the others. Kennedy in the fall of 1963 was one of the most popular destinations: unlike de Gaulle and Saleth Sar in the café, who were really unusual and almost secret. Certainly, Sperber would never make his knowledge of that site public. Still, you could not use only the most popular destinies; you had to do some original warning and rebutting or risk falling into imitation, the inattentiveness of the assessors. Alternate history was not merely an odyssey; it was a work of art, it had to be particularly shaped.

“What can I do to convince you that I’m different from the others?” he said. “I’m a specialist, I work on historical causation, on first cause, on original motivation, it’s been my field of study for years and if I didn’t have this opportunity, I would be abandoning the future to mindless consequence. It’s got to mean more than that.”

“I can’t get into arguments of this sort,” Kennedy says. He rocks back in his chair, sighing a little as his weak back is momentarily shifted from axis, then recovers his purchase. “All of you are so insistent, all of you seem so convinced that you carry the real answers.” He smiles at Sperber, his fetching smile, the smile that has been preserved in all of the living and dead histories through the hundreds of years between them, then pats Sperber on the hand. “It’s a fated business anyway,” Kennedy says. “And if I’m not mistaken, if I understand this correctly, it’s all happened anyway from your perspective.”

“It’s happened,” Sperber says, wishing that he had managed a university education so that he could put this in more sophisticated terms. The trades were not a good place to be; this work was really too delicate for someone training fundamentally as a technician and yet that was the only way it could be financed. “It’s happening and happening but there’s a chance, just a chance, that if you avoid in the future the events which I know so well, that it can happen in a different way. I’m not doing this for recompense,” Sperber says unnecessarily. “I have a genuine interest in improving the quality of our lives in the present.”

“Well,” Kennedy says. “Well, well, there’s no answer to that then, is there? There’s no canceling travel and political commitments at such a late time unless there’s a proven disaster lying there and we know that that’s not the case. Sorry, pal,” Kennedy says, patting Sperber’s arm almost lovingly, “there’s just no way around this. Besides, I’m getting a little tired of all these visits anyway. They’re distracting and there’s nothing that I can do to change the situation anyway.”

“Je regrette,”
Sperber says in poorly stressed French, carrying over his response from an earlier interview, “
Je regrette
all of this, Mr. President, but it’s important for you to understand the consequence—”

“There is no consequence,” Kennedy says; “there is only outcome,” and Sperber in a sudden and audacious wedge of light, an extrusion that seems to come from Kennedy’s very intellect, which fires and concentrates his features, bathing them in a wondrous and terrible life, understands that Kennedy is right, that Sperber has been wrong, that he has been pursuing consequence at a distance in the way that a platoon of guards with rakes might trail the line of a parade, clearing the landscape. Sperber was no more consequential to Kennedy than such a crew would be to the parade.

“Don’t do it!” he says nevertheless, seizing the opportunity as best he can. “You still shouldn’t do it, no matter how right you feel; you will be surrounded by enemies, taunted by a resisting crowd, then you will perish among roses. You have got to heed me,” Sperber says, and jiggles the extradimensional calculator into some kind of response, already too late, but he is willing to try to get Kennedy to listen to reason even as the storm begins in his viscera and he feels himself departed through yet another wedge of history, spilled toward a ceaseless and futile present.

* * *

Sperber takes himself to be addressing Albert Einstein in a hideous cafeteria in Einstein’s student days, the unformed Alfred nibbling an odorous salami, calculations and obliterated equations on the table between them. “Don’t do this,” Sperber says in what he takes to be a final, desperate appeal, “don’t do it, don’t complete the equations, don’t draw the conclusions: This will lead to the uniform field theory, it will lead to one devastating anomaly after the next, it will unleash the forces of atomic destruction upon a hapless and penitential humanity surrounded by consequence. Don’t you understand this? Put it away, put it away!”

Einstein, another infrequent site, stares at Sperber with a kind of terror, not for him the cool insouciance of Kennedy, the political fanaticism of Saleth Sar and de Gaulle. Einstein is as fully, as hopelessly, astonished as Sperber was when informed, five or six subjective hours ago, of his mission.

“Change history?” Sperber had said. “I can’t even spell history,” and similarly Einstein shudders over his equation, stares at Sperber in a fusion of shyness and loathing. “I can’t shape history, I don’t even know myself,” Sperber, the student, had shouted when informed of his mission, and the implacable sheen of their faces when they had responsively shoved the extradimensional calculator into his hands was like the sheen of the salami that Einstein held in one hopeless, hungry hand.

“I don’t know of what you are speaking,” Einstein said. “Physics is too difficult a subject for me to understand; I can do nothing, don’t you know this? I can do nothing at all.” In Einstein’s despair, Sperber can glimpse the older Einstein, the saintly and raddled figure whose portrait adorns the site, a musty extrusion from the journals, who played the violin badly at Princeton and blamed everyone else for the bomb.

“Yes you can,” Sperber says, and resists the impulse to spout French again: the language of diplomacy, he had been told, but that was just another cracked idea of the assessors. “You can do something, all of you could have done something, you have to take responsibility, don’t you see? You must take responsibility for what you have given us.”

Sperber would have a great deal more to say but the sound of the assessors is suddenly enormous in the land and Sperber finds himself, however unwillingly, ground to recombinant dust in the coils of the calculator.