The Time Traveler's Almanac (145 page)

He said, “If it meant so much, why didn’t I stay with you?”

It was the first, and the only admission, that he accepted what she said – not as factual or possible, certainly neither of those – but as a fiction worthy of analysis. But he said it with an edge to his voice that could have skinned an apple.

She said softly, “You couldn’t or wouldn’t, or weren’t allowed to. Or maybe, if you were some extraordinary kind of ghost, the power to survive in time is limited. Like light-cells. Or an echo. Except—” She put her hands together as if examining some element caught between them. “Next twenty you were gone. They searched. The theory was you’d stolen one of the wheel’s own lifeboats. I suppose one might have been missing. My grandfather said none was. But that was the theory. The wreck you’d come in on had disintegrated under the tests they’d been subjecting it to. They’d been careful, and that surprised them, but it can happen. As I say, you’d vanished without trace. Almost. Almost.” She waited, long enough for seven or eight bars of piano melody to fill the gap between them. At last she said, “You’re not going to ask me what, if anything, you left behind. Are you?”

The piano shivered like silver leaves, and he was no longer watching her. Two tears, like silken streamers, unraveled from her eyes. They didn’t spoil either her looks or her makeup, and presently they dried and might never have been.

The glow dawned through the Rouelle’s marble clock that showed one twenty was folding over into another.

The woman got up. She walked to the bar counter and bought a triple Noira brandy, and took it to the piano, setting the black-gold glass where the Sirtian could reach it. He bowed to her, like the prince he was, and she leaned forward and said something in his ear. He let the waves roll on over the keys while he thought, searching back through the storerooms of his brain to look out what she’d asked for, then, not breaking the rhythm, he tipped the tides of the music over into it. It was one of those old songs the Rouelle Etoile was so adept at conjuring. One of the songs from the celluloid era of twentieth-century Earth. In those same years, in Sirtis, they’d been raising temples of cloudy fire, like blue winter suns. But on the screens of Earth, the black-and-white flickering women, in their high-shouldered dresses that clung to them like snakes, the thin, bruised-eyed men, burning smokily out like the cigarettes in their mouths, had danced and fought and wise-cracked and loved. And all the while the wild pure stars had been waiting, and the Nature of Time, and, two hundred years away another era, of looking back, full circle, amazed, into recognizable eyes and hearts and minds. Everything changes; people, never. No, they never do.

The woman leaned by the piano, listening to the Sirtian play the song, her head averted from the booth. When the song ended, she turned, and Curtis was gone.

About five hours later, her own ship pulled off from the wheel. Nothing happened to the ship, she got wherever she was going, and so did the woman who had sat in the bar with Curtis. Afterwards, no one knew her name. The artisan ship’s listing had ten female crew aboard, three female passengers. She could have been any one of those. She became a beautiful strange event, a story that got told around. Because nobody in the bar heard much of the conversation between her and Curtis, guesswork calcified round it, staled it, defused it, and, at length, changed it into just another anecdote, which probably isn’t true.

*   *   *

What happened with Day Curtis himself, of course, is known pretty precisely.

At one-oh-seven of the new twenty, he walked along the gantry to the bay where
Napoleon
lay in her repair webbing like a vast wounded whale. Despite earlier predictions, her crew had got her patched, welded, and in fair shape. Certainly she looked sound enough to take the trip out to 98. Sonic reports were still coming in on that one, and a couple of liners were reportedly adrift, split wide open, and treasure-trove swirling out of them as if from a cornucopia. Some of the little lazy ships were even sneaking out now into Warp; the lions and the jackals would be feeding together.

Curtis’ crew were eager to be part of the show, and they hadn’t anticipated he would be any different in his reaction. Then Curtis knocked the walkway from under them by canceling the drive order and grounding the ship.

He didn’t give any reason, but that wasn’t uncommon. Generally the reason for anything he did would have been self-explanatory. Not now, of course.

If you credit the story of the black-haired woman, obviously you can figure out what the reason may have been. Curtis didn’t credit her, but he did credit she was working on him, and for a larger stake than a fifteen-year-old love affair. Whoever was really behind the scene in the Rouelle had made particular deductions based on Curtis’ presumed psychological patterns. Warned off going back into Warp that twenty, Curtis would, contradictorily, throw himself and his ship into immediate action. Or so somebody might have supposed. And if that was what they had predicted and wanted him to do, there must be some excellent reason also for their desires. Perhaps some very special welcome had been rigged for him, out in the Warp. Or the ship herself might have received some extra-special attention … If the girl in the Rouelle had been meant to push him into some type of contrary and precipitate heroism, she had failed. Though not believing her warning, he could act as if he did. Intended to race
Napoleon
away into space, he could stay put, and watch for what new developments occurred. And for which individuals or which organization was revealed by them.

Curtis gave his grounding order, and walked back along the gantry.

He had a crew who respected him totally, and, in most cases, hated him in equal measure. Up until then, their wants and their ambitions had run concurrently with his own. Now they’d been slaving on the tall white hip of
Napoleon,
in a blaze of sweat, steam and laserburn, and he strolled over from the bar and tolled their hopes of loot and blood, the reward they always needed to have from him in lucre or kind, because he never offered it any other way.

Half an hour after Curtis walked off the gantry,
Napoleon
’s Second Officer, a man named Doyeneau, led a ten-minute mutiny. By two-thirty,
Napoleon
was free of the Parameter and scorching out toward zero 98.

At two thirty-five, a message was sent back to Curtis at Tempi. He’d made the one immortal mistake of his career, and the message showed it. They were angry enough, that crew of his, to steal his ship, but much too afraid of him to sue for pardon. They would never be back. He must have known he’d lost everything, and when the second message came in, the automatic tracker on sonic, it was only the second most terrible error that twenty.

An hour out into the Warp, a little storm came up. It was so small it could have passed like the blow of a child’s fist striking the hull. But Doyeneau, already in a kind of panic, panicked himself into an avoidance maneuver Curtis had contrived maybe a hundred times. Doyeneau dove the ship at the eye of the storm, to break the barriers and get through, but there was no eye in this storm, only a center of spurling matter. And when, caught up in that, Doyeneau gave his order to jump the stream, one continuum to another,
Napoleon
’s patched casing blew, and took out most of the side of the ship.

There is no sound in space, we all know that. No sound, no air, no stopping place. A long fall that never ends, the bottomless pit. Picture a great white fish, cloven in one curving side, shriveling away and away down those empty rivers, her diesel-pod fluttering like a scarlet ember, dying.

At least, that’s how it goes. No one was ever entirely sure, since no one ever got back from
Napoleon.
They pieced a few fragments together from sounds picked up, a whole Cycle after, on the delay playback of the sonar here at Tempi. Her death is surmise. Like a lot of things.

Curtis lit off somewhere, at some time. The scenario and the characterization grow vague from the moment that his ship vanished, as if he had lost his soul. The last salient fact is that, one seven-mooned night on Syracuse, in an alley near the space-dock, someone, who is supposed to have resembled Curtis closely, negotiated a deal to rim an unspecified cargo out beyond Andromeda, in a merchantman whose name has not survived. This may or may not have been Curtis, but the far stars are pretty far away. Legends burn out there, good and bad, and reputations dwindle. And there was never anything to stop him altering his name, beyond a touch of legal wrangling. Whatever caused it, you lose him, like an echo, somewhere out among the rumors and the cold green suns.

As for the story about the woman in the Rouelle Etoile, as I said before, it’s probably apocryphal. If it weren’t, that sort of time paradox is too absurd to handle. It would be crazy enough for a man to get free of an exploding ship, take off in a lifeboat, and then home in on a timeless zone – in the wrong time. And to arrive Cycles out of synchronization, because a girl had drawn him there simply by forewarning him that she would – for that, actually, is what her warning entails … Yes, all that’s crazy enough. But then to add this other crazier time paradox on top of it: He ducked. The one thing the time cliché can’t take, that was what he did. He avoided it. He wasn’t
on
the
Napoleon
when she perished. So how could he home in, a magnetized time-ghost, to this whirling ironex wheel, outside of which, in the cool pool of the Parameter, time stands irreparably static?

Clever of you to spot I’m heading somewhere. There is a sort of epilogue. Take it as you find it.

Remember, I said the story was told me on the twenty that they closed the Rouelle Etoile for keeps, the twenty after the tempest. The girl was softly crying her little lost piano notes in the background, the dead chandelier had been trundled away, and the brandy flask was almost dry. Remember too, I said no one here had ever come face to face with the ghost of Day Curtis, on the wheel at Tempi – except there is one story. It’s mine. I came face to face with that ghost, and all through that somber twenty, I sat in the Rouelle with him, drinking brandy. Listening to what he had to say. It truly was Curtis, at least to look at, the elegant build, the moon-tan skin, the dark hair, the Roman eyes. But he was about thirty-five years of age, and Curtis wasn’t his name. And he wasn’t a ghost.

You may have wondered how I knew, or how he knew to tell me, what their conversation was, the woman and Curtis, in the booth, which had been so low the rest of the room couldn’t hear it. But maybe she told someone. Found them and told them. Remember what she said to Curtis? About proof, and how it had been snatched away? Or perhaps my Curtis-who-wasn’t made it up. Perhaps he’d seen the old videos and a freak likeness to another man, and it took his fancy to pretend, and that’s all he was doing. Playing pirates. Sons of pirates.

But if you accept the story, only for a moment, she was sixteen, and very likely quite innocent. She could have had a child, although how, in anyone’s book, can a time-ghost convey biological life?

The place where the Rouelle used to be is a storage bay now. But sometimes, when you’re alone up there with black nothing crowding against the ports, you can hear the Sirtian’s piano still playing, far away. It’s the stutter of the sonar link-pipes in the walls, it has to be. There’s no time in a white hole, and no true past, and no true future, no matter what the future brings. As for lovers, they come and go, welcome or not. And as for time, outside the Confederation’s thirty-eight Parameters, and the thirty-six spinning ironex wheels, it’s there. It goes by.

AT DORADO

Geoffrey A. Landis

Geoffrey A. Landis is an American scientist and writer, working for NASA on planetary exploration, interstellar propulsion, solar power, and photo-voltaics. He has published over eighty short stories translated into over twenty languages and several novels. He has won the Nebula, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards for his fiction. “At Dorado” was first published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
in 2002.

A man Cheena barely knew came running to the door of the bar. For a brief second she thought that he might be a customer, but then Cheena saw he was wearing a leather harness and jockstrap and almost nothing else. One of the bar-boys from a dance house along the main spiral-path to the downside.

In the middle of third shift, there was little business in the bar. Had there been a ship in port, of course, the bar would be packed with rowdy sailors, and she would have been working her ass off trying to keep them all lubricated and spending their port-pay. But between dockings, the second-shift maintenance workers had already finished their after-work drinks and left, and the place was mostly empty.

It was unusual that a worker from one of the downside establishments would drop into a bar so far upspinward, and Cheena knew instantly that something was wrong. She flicked the music off – nobody was listening anyway – and he spoke.

“Hoya,” he said. “A wreck, a wreck. They fish out debris now.” The door hissed shut, and he was gone.

*   *   *

Cheena pushed into the crowd that was already gathered at the maintenance dock. The gravity was so low at the maintenance docks that they were floating more than standing, and the crowd slowly roiled into the air and back down. Cheena saw the bar-boy who had brought the news, and a gaggle of other barmaids and bar-boys, a few maintenance workers, some Cauchy readers, navigators, and a handful of waiting-for-work sailors. “Stand back, stand back,” a lone security dockworker said. “Nothing to see yet.” But nobody moved back. “Which ship was it?” somebody shouted, and two or three others echoed: “What ship? What ship?” That was what everybody wanted to know.

“Don’t know yet,” the security guy said. “Stand back now, stand back.”

“
Hesperia
,” said a voice behind. Cheena turned, and the crowd did as well. It was a tug pilot, still wearing his fluorescent yellow flight suit, although his helmet was off. “The wreck was
Hesperia.
”