The Time Traveler's Almanac (124 page)

Always adaptable, Arisón had never suffered long from the disabilities incident on having returned after a time at the Front. Mag-lev train travel and other communications had tended to unify the speech and the ethos, though naturally the upper reaches of the Great Valley and the military zone in the mountains of the north were linguistically and sociologically somewhat isolated. In the western uplands, too, pockets of older linguistic forms and old-fashioned attitudes still remained, as the family found on its holidays. By and large, however, the whole land spoke the tongue of the “contemporary” subtropical lowlands, inevitably modified of course by the onomatosyntomy or “shortmouth” of latitude. A “contemporary” ethical and social code had also spread. The southern present may be said to have colonized the northern past, even geological past, somewhat as the birds and other travelling animals had done, but with the greater resources of human wits, flexibility, traditions and techniques.

Ordinary people bothered little about the war. Time conceleration was on their side. Their spare mental energies were spent in a vast selection of plays and ploys, making, representing, creating, relishing, criticizing, theorizing, discussing, arranging, organizing, co-operating, but not so often out of their own zone. Arisón found himself the member of a dozen interweaving circles, and Mihányo was even more involved. Not that they were never alone: the easy tempo of work and life with double “weeks” of five days’ work, two days free, seven days’ work and six days free, the whole staggered across the population and in the organizations, left much leisure time which could be spent on themselves. Arisón took up texture-sculpting, then returned after two years to painting, but with magneto-brush instead of spraypen; purified by his texture-sculpting period, he achieved a powerful area control and won something of a name for himself. Mihányo, on the other hand, became a musician. Derestó, it was evident, was going to be a handler of men and societies, besides having, at thirteen, entered the athletic age. His sister of eight was a great talker and arguer. The boy of six was, they hoped, going to be a writer, at least in his spare time: he had a keen eye for things, and a keen interest in telling about them. Arisón was content to remain, when he had reached it, second in the firm: a chiefship would have told on him too much. He occasionally lent his voice to the administration of local affairs, but took no major part.

*   *   *

Mihányo and Arisón were watching a firework festival on the North-Eastern Sea from their launch off one of the southern promontories. Up here, a fine velvety backdrop for the display was made by the inky black of the northern sight-barrier, which cut off the stars in a gigantic arc. Fortunately the weather was fine. The silhouettes of the firework boats could just be discerned. In a world which knew no moon the pleasures of a “white night” were often only to be got by such displays. The girl and Derestó were swimming round and round the launch. Even the small boy had been brought out, and was rather blearily staring northward. Eventually the triple green star went up and the exhibition was over; at the firework boats a midnight had been reached. Derestó and Venoyyè were called in, located by a flare, and ultimately prevailed on to climb in, shivering slightly, and dry off in the hot-air blaster, dancing about like two imps. Arisón turned the launch for the shore and Silarre was found to be asleep. So was Venoyyè when they touched the jetty. Their parents had each to carry one in and up to the beach house.

Next morning they packed and set out in the automob for home. Their twenty days’ holiday had cost 160 days of Oluluetang time. Heavy rain was falling when they reached the city. Mihányo, when the children were settled in, had a long talk on the opsiphone with her friend across the breadth of Oluluetang: she (the friend) had been with her husband badger-watching in the western uplands. Finally Arisón chipped in and, after general conversation, exchanged some views with the husband on developments in local politics.

“Pity one grows old so fast down here,” lamented Mihányo that evening; “if only life could go on forever!”

“For ever is a big word. Besides, being down here makes no difference to the feeling – you don’t feel it any slower up on the Sea, do you now?”

“I suppose not. But if only…”

To switch her mood, Arisón began to talk about Derestó and his future. Soon they were planning their children’s lives for them in the way parents cannot resist doing. With his salary and investments in the firm they would set up the boy for a great administrator, and still have enough to give the others every opportunity.

Next morning it was still in something of a glow that Arisón bade farewell to his wife and went off to take up his work in the offices. He had an extremely busy day and was coming out of the gates in the waning light to his automob in its stall, when he found standing round it three of the military. He looked inquiringly at them as he approached with his personal pulse-key in hand.

“You are VSQ 389 MLD 194 RV 27 XN 3, known as HadolArisóndamo, resident at” (naming the address) “and sub-president today in this firm.” The cold tones of the leader were a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” whispered Arisón as soon as he could speak.

“I have a warrant for your immediate re-employment with our Forces in the place at which you first received your order for Release. You must come with us forthwith.” The leader produced a luminous orange tag with black markings.

“But my wife and family!”

“They are being informed. We have no time.”

“My firm?”

“Your chief is being informed. Come now.”

“I— I— I must set my affairs in order.”

“Impossible. No time. Urgent situation. Your family and firm must do all that between them. Our orders override everything.”

“Wh— wh— what is your authority? Can I see it please?”

“This tag should suffice. It corresponds to the tag-end which I hope you still have in your identity disc – we will check all that en route. Come on now.”

“But I must see your authority. How do I know, for instance, that you are not trying to rob me, or something?”

“If you know the code you’ll realize that these symbols can only fit one situation. But I’ll stretch a point: you may look at this warrant, but don’t touch it.”

The other two closed in. Arisón saw that they had their quickguns trained on him. The leader pulled out a broad screed. Arisón, as well as the dancing characters would let him, resolved them in the light of the leader’s torch into an order to collect him, Arisón, by today at such and such a time, local Time, if possible immediately on his leaving his place of work (specified); and below, that one man be detailed to call Mihányo by opsiphone simultaneously, and another to call the president of the organization. The Remployee and escort to join the military mag-lev train to Veruam (which was leaving within about fifteen minutes). The Remployee to be taken as expeditiously as possible to the bunker (W) and thence to the higher bunker (from which he had come some twenty years before, but only about ten minutes in the Time of that bunker, it flashed through Arisón’s brain – apart from six or seven minutes corresponding to his journey south).

“How do they know if I’m fit enough for this job after all these years?”

“They’ve kept checks on you, no doubt.”

Arisón thought of tripping one and slugging two and doing a bolt, but the quickguns of the two were certainly trained upon him. Besides, what would that gain him? A few hours’ start, with unnecessary pain, disgrace and ruin on Mihányo, his children and himself, for he was sure to be caught.

“The automob,” he said ridiculously.

“A small matter. Your firm will deal with that.”

“How can I settle my children’s future?”

“Come on, no use arguing. You are coming now, alive or dead, fit or unfit.”

Speechless, Arisón let himself be marched off to a light military vehicle.

In five minutes he was in the mag-lev train, an armoured affair with strong windows. In ten more minutes, with the train moving off, he was stripped of his civilian clothes and possessions (to be returned later to his wife, he learnt), had his identity disc extracted and checked and its Relief tag-end removed, and a medical checkup was begun on him. Apparently this was satisfactory to the military authorities. He was given military clothing.

He spent a sleepless night in the train trying to work out what he had done with this, what would be made of that, who Mihányo could call upon in need, who would be likely to help her, how she would manage with the children, what (as nearly as he could work it out) they would get from a pension which he was led to understand would be forthcoming from his firm, how far they could carry on with their expected future.

A grey pre-dawn saw the train’s arrival at Veruam. Foodless (he had been unable to eat any of the rations) and without sleep, he gazed vacantly at the marshalling yards. The body of men travelling on the train (apparently only a few were Remployees) was got into closed trucks and the long convoy set out for Emmel.

At this moment Hadolaris’ brain began to re-register the conceleration situation. About half a minute must have passed since his departure from Oluluetang, he supposed, in the Time of his top bunker. The journey to Emmel might take up another two minutes. The route from Emmel to that bunker might take a further two and a half minutes there, as far as one could work out the calculus. Add the twenty-years’ (and southward journey’s) sixteen to seventeen minutes, and he would find himself in that bunker not more than some twenty-two minutes after he had left it. (Mihan, Deres and the other two would all be nearly ten years older and the children would have begun to forget him.) The blitz was unprecedentedly intense when he had left, and he could recall (indeed it had figured in several nightmares since) his prophecy to XN 1 that a breakthrough might be expected within the hour. If he survived the blitz, he was unlikely to survive a breakthrough; and a breakthrough of what? No one had ever seen the Enemy, this Enemy that for Time immemorial had been striving to get across the Frontier. If it got right over, the twilight of the race was at hand. No horror, it was believed at the Front, could equal the horror of that moment. After a hundred miles or so he slept, from pure exhaustion, sitting up in a cramped position, wedged against the next man. Stops and starts and swerves woke him at intervals. The convoy was driving at maximum speeds.

At Emmel he stumbled out to find a storm lashing down. The river was in spate. The column was marched to the depot. Hadolar was separated out and taken into the terminal building where he was given inoculations, issued with walker, quickgun, em-kit, prot-suit and other impedimenta, and in a quarter of an hour (perhaps seven or eight seconds up at the top bunker) found himself entering a polyheli with thirty other men. This had barely topped the first rise and into sunlight when explosions and flarings were visible on all sides. The machine forged on, the sight-curtains gradually closing up behind and retreating grudgingly before it. The old Northern vertigo and somnambulism re-engulfed Had. To think of Kar and their offspring now was to tap the agony of a ghost who shared his brain and body. After twenty-five minutes they landed close to the foot of a mag-lev train line. The top-bunker lapse of twenty-two minutes was going, Had saw, to be something less. He was the third to be bundled into the mag-lev train compartments, and 190 seconds saw him emerging at the top and heading for bunker VV. XN 1 greeted his salute merely with a curt command to proceed by rocket to the top bunker. A few moments more and he was facing XN 2.

“Ah, here you are. Your Relief was killed so we sent back for you. You’d only left a few seconds.” A ragged hole in the bunker wall testified to the incident. The relief’s cadaver, stripped, was being carted off to the disposal machine.

“XN 2. Things are livelier than ever. They certainly are hot stuff. Every new offensive from here is pitched back at us in the same style within minutes, I notice. That new cannon had only just started up when back came the same shells – I never knew They had them. Tit for tat.”

Into H’s brain, seemingly clarified by hunger and exhaustion and much emotion, flashed an unspeakable suspicion, one that he could never prove or disprove, having too little knowledge and experience, too little overall view. No one had ever seen the Enemy. No one knew how or when the War had begun. Information and communication were paralysingly difficult up here. No one knew what really happened to Time as one came close to the Frontier, or beyond it. Could it be that the conceleration there became infinite and that there was nothing beyond the Frontier? Could all the supposed missiles of the Enemy be their own, somehow returning? Perhaps the war had started with a peasant explorer lightheartedly flinging a stone northwards, which returned and struck him? Perhaps there was, then, no Enemy?

“XN 3. Couldn’t that gun’s own shells be reflected back from the Frontier, then?”

“XN 2. Impossible. Now you are to try to reach that forward missile post by the surface – our tunnel is destroyed – at 15° 40’ east – you can just see the hump near the edge of the I/R viewer’s limit – with this message; and tell him verbally to treble output.”

The ragged hole was too small. H left by the forward port. He ran, on his walker, into a ribbon of landscape which became a thicket of fire, a porcupine of fire, a Nessus-shirt to the Earth, as in a dream. Into an unbelievable supercrescendo of sound, light, heat, pressure and impacts he ran, on and on up the now almost invisible slope …

DELHI

Vandana Singh

Vandana Singh teaches physics at a state university near Boston and writes in her non-existent spare time. She was born and raised in the city of Dilli (aka Delhi, India), where medieval ruins lie strewn among modern-day edifices. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and has frequently been reprinted in year’s-best publications. She is a winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. Her most recent publication is a story for
Lightspeed
magazine. “Delhi” was first published in
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy,
edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, in 2004.