All told, that week I shed more than $500,000. My brokers were stunned. I had a reputation for infallibility among them. Most of them had become wealthy simply by duplicating my own transactions for their own accounts.
“Sweetheart, what happened?” they asked me.
My losses the following week came to $1,250,000. Still no news from (now + n). My brokers felt I needed a vacation. Even Selene knew I was losing heavily, by now. Curiously, my run of bad luck seemed to intensify her passion for me. Perhaps it made me look tragic and byronic to be getting hit so hard.
We spent wild days and wilder nights. I lived in a throbbing haze of sensuality. Wherever we went we were the center of all attention. We had that burnished sheen that only great lovers have. We radiated a glow of delight all up and down the spectrum.
I was losing millions.
The more I lost, the more reckless my plunges became, and the deeper my losses became.
I was in real danger of being wiped out, if this went on.
I had to get away from her.
Monday, October 26. Selene has taken the deepsleep wire and in the next two hours will flush away the fatigues of three riotous days and nights without rest. I have only pretended to take the wire. When she goes under, I rise. I dress. I pack. I scrawl a note for her. “Business trip. Back soon. Love, love, love, love.” I catch noon rocket for Istanbul.
Minarets, mosques, Byzantine temples. Shunning the sleep wire, I spend next day and a half in bed in ordinary repose. I wake and it is forty-eight hours since parting from Selene. Desolation! Bitter solitude! But I feel (now + n) invading my mind.
“Take this down,” he says brusquely. “Buy 5,000 FSP, 800 CCG, 150 LC, 200 T, 1,000 TXN, 100 BVI. Go short 200 BA, 500 UCM, 200 LOC. Clear? Read back to me.”
I read back. Then I phone in my orders. I hardly care what the ticker symbols stand for. If (now + n) says to do, I do.
An hour and a half later the switchboard tells me, “A Miss Hughes to see you, sir.”
She has traced me! Calamitas calamitatium! “Tell her I’m not here,” I say. I flee to the roofport. By copter I get away. Commercial jet shortly brings me to Tel Aviv. I take a room at the Hilton and give absolute instructions am not to be disturbed. Meals only to room, also Herald-Trib every day, otherwise no interruptions.
I study the market action. On Friday I am able to reach (now – n). “Take this down,” I say brusquely. “Buy 5,000 FSP, 800 CCG, 140 LC, 200 T—”
Then I call brokers. I close out Wednesday’s longs and cover Wednesday’s shorts. My profit is over a million. I am recouping. But I miss her terribly.
I spend agonizing weekend of loneliness in hotel room.
Monday. Comes voice of (now + n) out of Wednesday, with new instructions. I obey. At lunchtime, under lid of my barley soup, floats note from her. “Darling, why are you running away from me? I love you to the ninth power. S.”
I get out of hotel disguised as bellhop and take El Al jet to Cairo. Tense, jittery, I join tourist group sightseeing Pyramids, much out of character. Tour is conducted in Hebrew; serves me right. I lock self in hotel. Herald-Tribune available. On Wednesday I send instructions to me of Monday, (now – n). I await instructions from me of Friday, (now + n). Instead I get muddled transmissions, noise, confusions. What is wrong? Where to flee now? Brasilia, McMurdo Sound, Anchorage, Irkutsk, Maograd? She will find me. She has her resources. There are few secrets to one who has the will to surmount them. How does she find me?
She finds me.
Note comes: “I am at Abu Simbel to wait for you. Meet me there on Friday afternoon or I throw myself from Rameses’ leftmost head at sundown. Love. Desperate. S.”
I am defeated. She will bankrupt me, but I must have her.
On Friday I go to Abu Simbel.
She stood atop the monument, luscious in windswept white cotton.
“I knew you’d come,” she said.
“What else could I do?”
We kissed. Her suppleness inflamed me. The sun blazed toward a descent into the western desert.
“Why have you been running away from me?” she asked. “What did I do wrong? Why did you stop loving me?”
“I never stopped loving you,” I said.
“Then—why?”
“I will tell you,” I said, “a secret I have shared with no human being other than myselves.”
Words tumbled out. I told all. The discovery of my gift, the early chaos of sensory bombardment from other times, the bafflement of living one hour ahead of time and one hour behind time as well as in the present. The months of discipline needed to develop my gift. The fierce struggle to extend the range of extrasensory perception to five hours, ten, twenty-four, forty-eight. The joy of playing the market and never losing. The intricate systems of speculation; the self-imposed limits to keep me from ending up with all the assets in the world; the pleasures of immense wealth. The loneliness, too. And the supremacy of the night when I met her.
Then I said, “When I’m with you it doesn’t work. I can’t communicate with myselves. I lost millions in the last couple of weeks, playing the market the regular way. You were breaking me.”
“The amulet,” she said. “It does it. It absorbs psionic energy. It suppresses the psi field.”
“I thought it was that. But who ever heard of such a thing? Where did you get it, Selene? Why do you wear it?”
“I got it far, far from here,” said Selene. “I wear it to protect myself.”
“Against what?”
“Against my own gift. My terrible gift, my nightmare gift, my curse of a gift. But if I must choose between my amulet and my love it is no choice. I love you, Aram, I love you, I love you!”
She seized the metal disk, ripped it from the chain around her neck, hurled it over the brink of the monument. It fluttered through the twilight sky and was gone.
I felt (now – n) and (now + n) return.
Selene vanished.
For an hour I stood alone atop Abu Simbel, motionless, baffled, stunned. Suddenly Selene was back. She clutched my arm and whispered, “Quick! Let’s go to the hotel!”
“Where have you been?”
“Next Tuesday,” she said. “I oscillate in time.”
“What?”
“The amulet damped my oscillations. It anchored me to the timeline in the present. I got it in 2459 A.D. Someone I knew there, someone who cared very deeply for me. It was his parting gift, and he gave it knowing we could never meet again. But now—”
She vanished. Gone eighteen minutes.
“I was back in last Tuesday,” she said, returning. “I phoned myself and said I should follow you to Istanbul, and then to Tel Aviv, and then to Egypt. You see how I found you?”
We hurried to her hotel overlooking the Nile. We made love, and an instant before the climax I found myself alone in bed. (Now + n) spoke to me and said, “She’s been here with me. She should be on her way back to you.” Selene returned. “I went to—”
“—this coming Sunday,” I said. “I know. Can’t you control the oscillations at all?”
“No. I’m swinging free. When the momentum really builds up, I cover centuries. It’s torture, Aram. Life has no sequence, no structure. Hold me tight!”
In a frenzy we finished what we could not finish before. We lay clasped close, exhausted. “What will we do?” I cried. “I can’t let you oscillate like this!”
“You must. I can’t let you sacrifice your livelihood!”
“But—”
She was gone.
I rose and dressed and hurried back to Abu Simbel. In the hours before dawn I searched the sands beside the Nile, crawling, sifting, probing. As the sun’s rays crested the mountain I found the amulet. I rushed to the hotel. Selene had reappeared.
“Put it on,” I commanded.
“I won’t. I can’t deprive you of—”
“Put it on.”
She disappeared. (Now + n) said, “Never fear. All will work out wondrous well.”
> Selene came back. “I was in the Friday after next,” she said. “I had an idea that will save everything.”
“No ideas. Put the amulet on.”
She shook her head. “I brought you a present,” she said, and handed me a copy of the Herald-Tribune, dated the Friday after next. Oscillation seized her. She went and came and handed me November 19’s newspaper. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She vanished. She brought me the Herald-Tribune of November 8. Of December 4. Of November 11. Of January 18, 1988. Of December 11. Of March 5, 1988. Of December 22. Of June 16, 1997. Of December 14. Of September 8, 1990. “Enough!” I said. “Enough!” She continued to swing through time. The stack of papers grew. “I love you,” she gasped, and handed me a transparent cube one inch high. “The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2206,” she explained. “I couldn’t get the machine that reads it. Sorry.” She was gone. She brought me more Herald-Tribunes, many dates, 1988-2002. Then a whole microreel. At last she sank down, dazed, exhausted, and said, “Give me the amulet. It must be within twelve inches of my body to neutralize my field.” I slipped the disk into her palm. “Kiss me,” Selene murmured.
And so. She wears her amulet; we are inseparable; I have no contact with my other selves. In handling my investments I merely consult my file of newspapers, which I have reduced to minicap size and carry in the bezel of a ring I wear. For safety’s sake Selene carries a duplicate.
We are very happy. We are very wealthy.
Is only one dilemma. Neither of us use the special gift with which we were born. Evolution would not have produced such things in us if they were not to be used. What risks do we run by thwarting evolution’s design?
I bitterly miss the use of my power, which her amulet negates. Even the company of supreme Selene does not wholly compensate for the loss of the harmoniousness that was
(now – n)
(now)
(now + n)
I could, of course, simply arrange to be away from Selene for an hour here, an hour there, and reopen that contact. I could even have continued playing the market that way, setting aside a transmission hour every forty-eight hours outside of amulet range. But it is the continuous contact that I miss. The always presence of my other selves. If I have that contact, Selene is condemned to oscillate, or else we must part.
I wish also to find some way that her gift will be not terror but joy for her.
Is maybe a solution. Can extrasensory gifts be induced by proximity? Can Selene’s oscillation pass to me? I struggle to acquire it. We work together to give me her gift. Just today I felt myself move, perhaps a microsecond into the future, then a microsecond into the past. Selene said I definitely seemed to blur.
Who knows? Will success be ours?
I think yes. I think love will triumph. I think I will learn the secret, and we will coordinate our vanishings, Selene and I, and we will oscillate as one, we will swing together through time, we will soar, we will speed hand in hand across the millennia. She can discard her amulet once I am able to go with her on her journeys.
Pray for us, (now + n), my brother, my other self, and one day soon perhaps I will come to you and shake you by the hand.
AFTER THE MYTHS WENT HOME
Ed Ferman’s Fantasy and Science Fiction was to celebrate its twentieth anniversary of publication with its October, 1969 issue, and in June of that year Ferman asked me to contribute a story to the special anniversary issue. I was flattered and honored by the request—F & SF had been a favorite of mine since the age of fourteen, when I had discovered its first issue on the newsstands—and I quickly sent him “After the Myths Went Home.”
To my disappointment, though, it got squeezed out of the October number. “I kept hoping to get it in,” Ed told me on July 28, “but then Sturgeon came through with a story, and then I discovered that yours was a bit close in story line to a Niven piece that had to go in, and so on: no one reason, just a bunch coming together. Yours was one of several excellent stories that I didn’t have room for, so I’m planning the November issue as a sort of Twentieth Anniversary Again Issue. If Harlan can do it, we can.” (The reference is to Harlan Ellison’s just-announced Again, Dangerous Visions, the sequel to his controversial first anthology, containing stories by authors who hadn’t contributed to the earlier volume.)
Time assuages all disappointments, sooner or later. I missed out on F & SF’s much-heralded Twentieth Anniversary Issue, but Ferman reprinted “Sundance”—which a vote of readers and my fellow writers had chosen as one of the best stories in the magazine’s history—in the Thirtieth in October of 1979. Just by way of demonstrating my longevity and persistence I did a story for the Fortieth too, ten years later, and for the Fiftieth when 1999 rolled around, and I’m already thinking about one for the Sixtieth, which is still a couple of years in the future as I write this.
——————
For a while in those years we were calling great ones out of the past, to find out what they were like. This was in the middle twelves—12400 to 12450, say. We called up Caesar and Antony, and also Cleopatra. We got Freud and Marx and Lenin into the same room and let them talk. We summoned Winston Churchill, who was a disappointment (he lisped and drank too much) and Napoleon, who was magnificent. We raided ten millennia of history for our sport.
But after half a century of this we grew bored with our game. We were easily bored, in the middle twelves. So we started to call up the myth people, the gods and the heroes. That seemed more romantic; this was one of Earth’s romanticist eras we lived in.
It was my turn then to serve as curator of the Hall of Man, and that was where they built the machine, so I watched it going up from the start. Leor the Builder was in charge. He had made the machines that called the real people up, so this was only slightly different, no real challenge to his talents. He had to feed in another kind of data, full of archetypes and psychic currents, but the essential process of reconstruction would be the same. He never had any doubt of success.
Leor’s new machine had crystal rods and silver sides. A giant emerald was embedded in its twelve-angled lid. Tinsel streamers of radiant platinum dangled from the ebony struts on which it rose.
“Mere decoration,” Leor confided to me. “I could have made a simple black box. But brutalism is out of fashion.”
The machine sprawled all over the Pavilion of Hope on the north face of the Hall of Man. It hid the lovely flicker-mosaic flooring, but at least it cast lovely reflections into the mirrored surfaces of the exhibit cases. Somewhere about 12570, Leor said he was ready to put his machine into operation.
We arranged the best possible weather. We tuned the winds, deflecting the westerlies a bit and pushing all clouds far to the south. We sent up new moons to dance at night in wondrous patterns, now and again coming together to spell out Leor’s name. People came from all over Earth, thousands of them, camping in whisper-tents on the great plain that begins at the Hall of Man’s doorstep. There was real excitement then, a tension that crackled beautifully through the clear blue air.
Leor made his last adjustments. The committee of literary advisers conferred with him over the order of events, and there was some friendly bickering. We chose daytime for the first demonstration, and tinted the sky light purple for better effect. Most of us put on our youngest bodies, though there were some who said they wanted to look mature in the presence of these fabled figures out of time’s dawn.
“Whenever you wish me to begin—” Leor said.
There were speeches first. Chairman Peng gave his usual light-hearted address. The Procurator of Pluto, who was visiting us, congratulated Leor on the fertility of his inventions. Nistim, then in his third or fourth successive term as Metabolizer General, encouraged everyone present to climb to a higher level. Then the master of ceremonies pointed to me. No, I said, shaking my head, I am a very poor speaker. They replied that it was my duty, as curator of the Hall of Man, to explain what was about to unfold.
Reluctantly I came forward.
“Y
ou will see the dreams of old mankind made real today,” I said, groping for words. “The hopes of the past will walk among you, and so, I think, will the nightmares. We are offering you a view of the imaginary figures by means of whom the ancients attempted to give structure to the universe. These gods, these heroes, summed up patterns of cause and effect, and served as organizing forces around which cultures could crystallize. It is all very strange to us and it will be wonderfully interesting. Thank you.”
Leor was given the signal to begin.
“I must explain one thing,” he said. “Some of the beings you are about to see were purely imaginary, concocted by tribal poets, even as my friend has just told you. Others, though, were based on actual human beings who once walked the Earth as ordinary mortals, and who were transfigured, given more-than-human qualities, raised to the pantheon. Until they actually appear, we will not know which figures belong to which category, but I can tell you how to detect their origin once you see them. Those who were human beings before they became myths will have a slight aura, a shadow, a darkness in the air about them. This is the lingering trace of their essential humanity, which no mythmaker can erase. So I learned in my preliminary experiments. I am now ready.”
Leor disappeared into the bowels of his machine. A single pure note, high and clean, rang in the air. Suddenly, on the stage looking out to the plain, there emerged a naked man, blinking, peering around.
Leor’s voice, from within the machine, said, “This is Adam, the first of all men.”
And so the gods and the heroes came back to us on that brilliant afternoon in the middle twelves, while all the world watched in joy and fascination.
Adam walked across the stage and spoke to Chairman Peng, who solemnly saluted him and explained what was taking place. Adam’s hand was outspread over his loins. “Why am I naked?” Adam asked. “It is wrong to be naked.”
I pointed out to him that he had been naked when he first came into the world, and that we were merely showing respect for authenticity by summoning him back that way.