The Time Traveler's Almanac (172 page)

I pull into the lot and park, leave the engine running so we can have some heat in the car. “If the cops come by and see us,” I say, “I could be in a lot of shit. They’ll think I’m some degenerate Indian perv with a thing for little girls.”

Shit. I shouldn’t be talking to a ten-year-old this way. Kamla always makes me forget. It’s that big head, those big words.

“DGS people do get abused,” she tells me. “Just like real children do.”

“You
are
a real child!”

She glares at me, then looks sad. She says, “Sunil and Babette are going to have to move soon. It’s so hard for me to keep up this pretence. I’ve managed to smartmouth so much at school and in our neighbourhood that it’s become uncomfortable to live there anymore.”

My eyes have become accustomed enough to the dark that I can see the silent tears running down her cheeks. I want to hold her to me, to comfort her, but I’m afraid of how that will look if the cops show up. Besides, I’m getting the skin-crawly feeling that comes when you realise that someone with whom you’ve been making pleasant conversation is as mad as a hatter. “I’m taking you back home,” I whisper. I start turning the key in the ignition.

“Please!” She puts a hand on my wrist. “Greg, please hear me out. I’ll make it quick. I just don’t know how to convince you.”

I take my hand off the key. “Just tell me,” I said. “Whatever it is, your parents love you. You can work it out.”

She leans back against the passenger side door and curls her knees up to her chest, a little ball of misery. “Okay. Let me get it all out before you say anything else, all right?”

“All right.”

“They grew us from cells from our originals; ten of us per original. They used a viral injection technique to put extra-long tails on one of the strands of our DNA. You need more telomeres to slow down aging.”

The scientific jargon exiting smoothly from the mouth of a child could have been comic. But I had goose bumps. She didn’t appear to be repeating something she’d memorised.

“Each batch of ten yielded on average four viable blastocytes. They implanted those in womb donors. Two-thirds of them took. Most of those went to full term and were delivered. Had to be C-sections, of course. Our huge skulls presented too much of a risk for our birth mothers. We were usually four years old before we were strong enough to lift our own heads, and that was with a lot of physiotherapy. They treated us really well; best education, kept us fully informed from the start of what they wanted from us.”

“Which was?” I whisper, terrified to hear the answer.

“Wait. You said you would.” She continues her story. “Any of us could back out if we wanted to. Ours is a society that you would probably find strange, but we do have moral codes. Any of us who didn’t want to make the journey could opt to undergo surgical procedures to correct some of the physical changes. Bones and muscles would lengthen, and they would reach puberty normally and thereafter age like regular people. They’ll never achieve full adult height, and there’ll always be something a little bit odd about their features, but it probably won’t be so bad.

“But a few of us were excited by the idea, the crazy, wonderful idea, and we decided to go through with it. They waited until we were age thirteen for us to confirm our choice. In many cultures, that used to be the age when you were allowed to begin making adult decisions.”

“You’re ten, Kamla.”

“I’m twenty-three, though my body won’t start producing adult sex hormones for another fifty years. I won’t attain my full growth till I’m in my early hundreds. I can expect—”

“You’re delusional,” I whisper.

“I’m from your future,” she says. God. The child’s been watching too many B-movies. She continues, “They wanted to send us here and back as full adults, but do you have any idea what the freight costs would have been? The insurance? Arts grants are hard to get in my world, too. The gallery had to scale the budget way back.”

“Gallery?”

“National gallery. Hush. Let me talk. They sent small people instead. Clones of the originals, with their personalities superimposed onto our own. They sent back children who weren’t children.”

I start the car. I’m taking her back home right now. She needs help; therapy, or something. The sky’s beginning to brighten. She doesn’t try to stop me this time.

Glumly, she goes on. “The weird thing is, even though this body isn’t interested in adult sex, I
remember
what it was like, remember enjoying it. It’s those implanted memories from my original.”

I’m edging past the speed limit in my hurry to get her back to her parents. I make myself slow down a little.

“Those of us living in extremely conservative or extremely poor places are having a difficult time. We stay in touch with them by email and cell phone, and we have our own closed Facebook group, but not all of us have access to computer technology. We’ve never been able to figure out what happened to Kemi. Some of us were never adopted, had to make our own way as street kids. Never old enough to be granted adult freedoms. So many lost. This fucking project better have been worth it.”

I decide to keep her talking. “What project, Kamla?”

“It’s so
hard
to pretend you don’t have an adult brain! Do you know what it’s like turning in schoolwork that’s at a grade-five level, when we all have PhDs in our heads? We figured that one of us would crack, but we hoped it’d be later, when we’d reached what your world would consider the age of majority.”

We’re cruising past a newspaper box. I look through its plastic window to see the headline:
“I’m From the Future,” Says Bobble-Headed Boy.
Ah. One of our more erudite news organs.

Oh, Christ. They all have this delusion. All the DGS kids. For a crazy half-second, I find myself wondering whether Sunil and Babette can return Kamla to the adoption centre. And I’m guiltily grateful that Russ, as far as we can tell, is normal.

“Human beings, we’re becoming increasingly post-human,” Kamla says. She’s staring at the headline, too. “Things change so quickly. Total technological upheaval of society every five to eight years. Difficult to keep up, to connect amongst the generations. By the time your Russ is a teenager, you probably won’t understand his world at all.”

She’s hit on the thing that really scares me about kids. This brave new world that Cecelia and I are trying to make for our son? For the generations to follow us? We won’t know how to live in it.

Kamla says, “Art helps us know how to do change. That’s made it very valuable to us.”

“Thank heaven for that,” I say, humouring her. “Maybe I’d like your world.”

She sits up in her seat, buckles herself in. Shit. I should have made her do that the minute she got in the car. I have one of those heart-in-the-mouth moments that I have often, now that I’m a parent. “In my world,” she says, “what you do would be obsolete.” She sniggers a little. “Video monitors! I’d never seen a real one, only minibeams disguised to mimic ancient tech. Us DGSers have all become anthropologists here in the past, as well as curators.”

“Wait; you’re a what?”

“I’m a curator, Greg. I’m trying to tell you; our national gallery is having a giant retrospective; tens of thousands of works of art from all over the world, and all over the world’s history. They sent us back to retrieve some of the pieces that had been destroyed. Expensive enough to send living biomaterial back; their grant wasn’t enough to pay for returning us to our time. So we’re going to
grow
our way there. Those of us that survive.”

There are more cars out on the road, more brakes squealing, more horns honking. “I’m not going to miss mass transit when I finally get home,” she says. “Your world stinks.”

“Yeah, it does.” We’re nearly to her parents’ place. From my side, I lock her door. Of course she notices. She just glances at the sound. She looks like she’s being taken to her death.

“I didn’t know it until yesterday,” she tells me, “but it was you I came for. That installation.”

And now the too-clever bloody child has me where I live. Though I know it’s all air pie and Kamla is as nutty as a fruitcake, my heart’s performing a tympanum of joy. “My installation’s going to be in the retrospective?” I ask. Even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m embarrassed at how eager I sound, at how this little girl, as children will, has dug her way into my psyche and found the thing which will make me respond to her.

She gasps and puts her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Greg! I’m so sorry; not you, the shell!”

My heart suicides, the brief, hallucinatory hope dashed. “The shell?”

“Yes. In the culture where I live, speciesism has become a defining concept through which we understand what it means to be human animals. Not every culture or subculture ascribes to it, but the art world of my culture certainly does.” She’s got her teacher voice on again. She does sound like a bloody curator. “Human beings aren’t the only ones who make art,” she says.

All right. Familiar territory. “Okay, perhaps. Bower birds make pretty nests to attract a mate. Cetaceans sing to each other. But we’re the only ones who make art
mean;
who make it comment on our everyday reality.”

From the corner of my eye, I see her shake her oversized head. “No. We don’t always know what they’re saying, we can’t always know the reality on which they’re commenting. Who knows what a sea cucumber thinks of the conditions of its particular stretch of ocean floor?”

A sea cucumber?
We’ve just turned onto her parents’ street. She’ll be out of my hands soon. Poor Babette.

“Every shell is different,” she says.

My perverse brain instantly puts it to the tune of “Every Sperm Is Sacred”.

She continues, “Every shell is a life journal, made out of the very substance of its creator, and left as a record of what it thought, even if we can’t understand exactly what it thought. Sometimes interpretation is a trap. Sometimes we need to simply observe.”

“And you’ve come all this way to take that … shell back?” I can see it sticking out of the chest pocket of her fleece shirt.

“It’s difficult to explain to you, because you don’t have the background, and I don’t have the time to teach you. I specialise in shell formations. I mean, that’s Vanda’s specialty. She’s the curator whose memories I’m carrying. Of its kind, the mollusc that made this shell is a genius. The unique conformation of the whorls of its shell expresses a set of concepts that haven’t been explored before by the other artists of its species. After this one, all the others will draw on and riff off its expression of its world. They’re the derivatives, but this is the original. In our world, it was lost.”

Barmy. Loony. “So how did you know that it even existed, then? Did the snail or slug that lived inside it take pictures or something?” I’ve descended into cruelty. I’m still smarting that Kamla hasn’t picked me, my work. My legacy doesn’t get to go to the future.

She gives me a wry smile, as though she understands.

I pull up outside the house, start leaning on the horn. Over the noise, she shouts, “The creature didn’t take a picture. You did.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. With my precious video camera. I’d videotaped every artifact with which I’d seeded the soil that went onto the gallery floor. I didn’t tell her that.

She nods. “Not all the tape survived, so we didn’t know who had recorded it, or where the shell had come from. But we had an idea where the recording had come from.”

Lights are coming on in the house. Kamla looks over there and sighs. “I haven’t entirely convinced you, have I?”

“No,” I say regretfully. But damn it, a part of me still hopes that it’s all true.

“They’re probably going to institutionalise me. All of us.”

The front door opens. Sunil is running out to the car, a gravid Babette following more slowly.

“You have to help me, Greg. Please? We’re going to outlive all our captors. We will get out. But in the meantime…”

She pulls the shell out of her pocket, offers it to me on her tiny palm. “Please keep it safe for me?”

She opens the car door. “It’s your ticket to the future,” she says, and gets out of the car to greet her parents.

I lied. I fucking hate kids.

THE TIME TELEPHONE

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is a University of London professor and writer of science fiction, the most recently published of his fourteen novels being
Jack Glass
(Gollancz 2012) and
Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea
(Gollancz 2013). He lives a little way west of London, England, with his wife, two children, and no cats. “The Time Telephone” was first published in
Infinity Plus
in 2002.

1.

A mother phones her daughter. The call costs her nearly €18,000. The number she dials is several hundred digits long, but it has been calculated carefully and stored as a series of tones, so the dialling process takes only seconds. The ring tone at the far end makes its distant musical drumroll once, twice, three times, and with a clucking noise the receiver is lifted.

‘Hello?’

The mother takes a quick breath. ‘Marianne?’

‘Speaking. Who’s this, please?’

‘This is your mother, Marianne.’

‘Ma? I thought you were in Morocco. You calling from Morocco?’

‘No, dear, I’m here, I’m in London.’

‘Here?’

‘This is a call from the past, my darling,’ says the mother, her heart stabbing at her ribs. ‘As I speak now, as I speak to you now, I’m actually pregnant with you. You’re inside my tummy
here,
and I’m speaking to you
there.
’

For a moment there is only the polluted silence of a phone line; that slightly hissing, leaf-rustle emptiness of a line where the person at the other end is quiet. Then the daughter says, ‘Wow, ma. Really?’

‘Yes my dear.’

‘It’s that time telephone thing? Yeah? I read about that, or, or I watched a thing about it, on TV. You’re really calling me from the past?’

‘Yes my dear. I have a question I want to ask you.’

‘Wow, ma. Like, wow. I watched this programme about it on TV, it was a whole big thing, like, decades ago. And now it’s actually happening to me! And I’m only on a, like, regular phone.’