“Are you ready so soon?”
“I am ready,” Noort says.
So Bhengarn demonstrates, approaching the wall, bringing his penetrator claws into play, driving them like pitons into the ice, hauling himself up a short distance, extending his claws, driving them in, pulling upward. He has never climbed ice before, though he has faced all other difficulties the world has to offer, but the climb, though strenuous, seems manageable enough. He halts after a few minutes and watches as Noort, clumsy but determined in his altered body, imitates him, scratching and scraping at the ice as he pulls himself up the face until they are side by side. “It is easy,” Noort says.
And so it is, for a time, and then it is less easy, for now they hang high above the valley and the midday sun has melted the surface of the wall just enough to make it slick and slippery, and a terrible cold from within the mass of ice seeps outward into the climbers, and even though a Traveler’s body is a wondrous machine fit to endure anything, this is close to the limit. Once Bhengarn loses his purchase, but Noort deftly claps a claw to the middle of his spine to hold him firmly until he has dug in again; and not much later the same happens to Noort, and Bhengarn grasps him. As the day wanes they are so far above the ground that they can barely make out the treetops below, and yet the top of the wall is too high to see. Together they excavate a ledge, burrowing inward to rest in a chilly nook, and at dawn they begin again, Bhengarn’s sinuous body winding upward over the rim of their little cave and Noort following with less agility. Upward and upward they climb, never pausing and saying little, through a day of warmth and soft perfumed breezes and through a night of storms and falling stars, and then through a day of turquoise rain, and through another day and a night and a day and then they are at the top, looking out across the broad unending field of ferns and bright blossoms that covers the summit’s flat surface, and as they move inward from the rim Noort lets out a cry and stumbles forward, for he has resumed his ancient form. He drops to his knees and sits there panting, stunned, looking in confusion at his fingernails, at his knuckles, at the hair on the backs of his hands, as though he has never seen such things before. “Passing strange,” he says softly.
“You are a born Traveler,” Bhengarn tells him.
They rest a time, feeding on the sparkling four-winged fruits that sprout in that garden above the ice. Bhengarn feels an immense calmness now that the climax of his peregrination is upon him. Never had he questioned the purpose of being a Traveler, nor has he had regret that destiny gave him that form, but now he is quite willing to yield it up.
“How far to Crystal Pond?” Noort asks.
“It is just over there,” says Bhengarn.
“Shall we go to it now?”
“Approach it with great care,” the Traveler warns. “It is a place of extraordinary power.”
They go forward; a path opens for them in the swaying grasses and low fleshy-leaved plants; within minutes they stand at the edge of a perfectly circular body of water of unfathomable depth and of a clarity so complete that the reflections of the sun can plainly be seen on the white sands of its infinitely distant bed. Bhengarn moves to the edge and peers in, and is pervaded by a sense of fulfillment and finality.
Noort says, “What will become of you here?”
“Observe,” says Bhengarn.
He enters Crystal Pond and swims serenely toward the farther shore, an enterprise quickly enough accomplished. But before he has reached the midpoint of the pond a tolling sound is heard in the air, as of bells of the most pure quality, striking notes without harmonic overtones. Sudden ecstasy engulfs him as he becomes aware of the beginning of his transformation: his body flows and streams in the flux of life, his limbs fuse, his soul expands. By the time he comes forth on the edge of the pond he has become something else, a great cone of passive flesh, which is able to drag itself no more than five or six times its own length from the water, and then sinks down on the sandy surface of the ground and begins the process of digging itself in. Here the Awaiter Bhengarn will settle, and here he will live for centuries of centuries, motionless, all but timeless, considering the primary truths of being. Already he is gliding into the Earth.
Noort gapes at him from the other side of the pond.
“Is this what you sought?” the Dutchman asks.
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“I wish you farewell and Godspeed, then!” Noort cries.
“And you—what will become of you?”
Noort laughs. “Have no fears for me! I see my destiny unfolding!”
Bhengarn, nestled now deep in the ground, enwombed by the earth, immobile, established already in his new life, watches as Noort strides boldly to the water’s edge. Only slowly, for an Awaiter’s mind is less agile than a Traveler’s, does Bhengarn comprehend what is to happen.
Noort says, “I’ve found my vocation again. But if I’m to travel, I must be equipped for traveling!”
He enters the pond, swimming in broad awkward splashing strokes, and once again the pure tolling sound is evoked, a delicate carillon of crystalline transparent tone, and there is sudden brilliance in the pond as Noort sprouts the shining scales of a Traveler, and the jointed limbs, and the strong thick tail. He scuttles out on the far side wholly transformed.
“Farewell!” Noort cries joyously.
“Farewell,” murmurs Bhengarn the Awaiter, peering out from the place of his long repose as Olivier van Noort, all his legs ablaze with new energy, strides away vigorously to begin his second circumnavigation of the of the globe.
NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK
And of course Alice Turner was right that I would be back to her almost immediately with another story. I had heard Bill Rotsler, a friend of mine, say to a young man who was bothering him at a science-fiction convention, “Go away, kid, or I’ll change your future.” At which I said, “No, tell him that you’ll change his past,” and suddenly I realized that I had handed myself a nice story idea. I wrote it in January, 1982—its intricate time-travel plot unfolded for me with marvelous clarity as I worked—and Alice bought it immediately for Playboy’s June, 1983 issue.
Some years later a major American movie company bought it also. They gave me quite a lot of money, which was very pleasant, but so far they haven’t done anything about actually making the movie. I hope they do, sooner or later. It’s one science-fiction movie I’d actually like to see.
——————
Between one moment and the next the taste of cotton came into his mouth and Mikkelsen knew that Tommy Hambleton had been tinkering with his past again. The cotton-in-the-mouth sensation was the standard tip-off for Mikkelsen. For other people it might be a ringing in the ears, a tremor of the little finger, a tightness in the shoulders. Whatever the symptom, it always meant the same thing: your time track had been meddled with; your life had been retroactively transformed. It happened all the time. One of the little annoyances of modern life, everyone always said. Generally, the changes didn’t amount to much.
But Hambleton was out to destroy Mikkelsen’s marriage—or, more accurately, he was determined to unhappen it altogether—and that went beyond Mikkelsen’s limits of tolerance. In something close to panic, he phoned home to find out if he still had Janine.
Her lovely features blossomed on the screen: glossy dark hair; elegant cheekbones; cool, sardonic eyes. She looked tense and strained, and Mikkelsen knew she, too, had felt the backlash of this latest attempt.
“Nick?” she said. “Is it a phasing?”
“I think so. Tommy’s taken another whack at us, and Christ only knows how much chaos he’s caused this time.”
“Let’s run through everything.”
“All right,” Mikkelsen said. “What’s your name?”
“Janine.”
“And mine?”
“Nick. Nicholas Perry Mikkelsen. You see? Nothing important has changed.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes, of course, darling. To you.”
“Keep
going. What’s our address?”
“Eleven Lantana Crescent.”
“Do we have children?”
“Dana and Elise. Dana’s five, Elise is three. Our cat’s name is Minibelle, and—”
“OK,” Mikkelsen said, relieved. “That much checks out. But I tasted the cotton, Janine. Where has he done it to us this time? What’s been changed?”
“It can’t be anything major, love. We’ll find it if we keep checking. Just stay calm.”
“Calm. Yes.” He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. The little annoyances of modern life, he thought. In the old days, when time was just a linear flow from then to now, did anyone get bored with all that stability? For better or for worse, it was different now. You go to bed a Dartmouth man and wake up Columbia, never the wiser. You board a plane that blows up over Cyprus, but then your insurance agent goes back and gets you to miss the flight. In the new, fluid way of life, there was always a second chance, a third, a fourth, now that the past was open to anyone with the price of a ticket. But what good is any of that, Mikkelsen wondered, if Tommy Hambleton can use it to disappear me and marry Janine again himself?
They punched for readouts and checked all their vital data against what they remembered. When your past is altered through time-phasing, all records of your life are automatically altered, too, of course, but there’s a period of two or three hours when memories of your previous existence still linger in your brain, like the phantom twitches of an amputated limb. They checked the date of Mikkelsen’s birth, his parents’ names, his nine genetic coordinates, his educational record. Everything seemed right. But when they got to their wedding date, the readout said, 8 FEB 2017, and Mikkelsen heard warning chimes in his mind. “I remember a summer wedding,” he said. “Outdoors in Dan Levy’s garden, the hills all dry and brown, the twenty-fourth of August.”
“So do I, Nick. The hills wouldn’t have been brown in February. But I can see it—that hot, dusty day—”
“Then five months of our marriage are gone, Janine. He couldn’t unmarry us altogether, but he managed to hold us up from summer to winter.” Rage made his head spin, and he had to ask his desk for a quick buzz of tranks. Etiquette called for one to be cool about a phasing. But he couldn’t be cool when the phasing was a deliberate and malevolent blow at the center of his life. He wanted to shout, to break things, to kick Hambleton’s ass. He wanted his marriage left alone. He said, “You know what I’m going to do one of these days? I’m going to go back about fifty years and eradicate Tommy completely. Just arrange things so his parents never get to meet, and—”
“No, Nick. You mustn’t.”
“I know. But I’d love to.” He knew he couldn’t, and not just because it would be murder. It was essential that Hambleton be born and grow up and meet Janine and marry her, so that when the marriage came apart she would meet and marry Mikkelsen. If he changed Hambleton’s past, he would change hers, too; and if he changed hers, he would change his own, and anything might happen. Anything. But all the same, he was furious. “Five months of our past, Janine—”
“We don’t need them, love. Keeping the present and the future safe is the main priority. By tomorrow, we’ll always think we were married in February of Twenty Seventeen, and it won’t matter. Promise me you won’t try to phase him.”
“I hate the idea that he can simply—”
“So do I. But I want you to promise you’ll leave things as they are.”
“Well—”
“Promise.”
“All right,” he said. “I promise.”
Little phasings happened all the time. Someone in Illinois makes a trip to 11th Century Arizona and sets up tiny ripple currents in time that have a tangential and peripheral effect on a lot of lives, and someone in California finds himself driving a silver BMW instead of a gray Toyota. No one minded trifling changes like that. But this was the third time in the last 12 months, so far as Mikkelsen was able to tell, that Hambleton had committed a deliberate phasing intended to break the chain of events that had brought about Mikkelsen’s marriage to Janine.
The first phasing happened on a splendid spring day: coming home from work, sudden taste of cotton in mouth, sense of mysterious disorientation. Mikkelsen walked down the steps looking for his old ginger tomcat, Gus, who always ran out to greet him as though he thought he was a dog. No Gus. Instead, a calico female, very pregnant, sitting placidly in the front hall.
“Where’s Gus?” Mikkelsen asked Janine.
“Gus? Gus who?”
“Our cat.”
“You mean Max?”
“Gus,” he said. “Sort of orange, crooked tail—”
“That’s right. But Max is his name. I’m sure it’s Max. He must be around somewhere. Look, here’s Minibelle.” Janine knelt and stroked the fat calico. “Minibelle, where’s Max?”
“Gus,” Mikkelsen said. “Not Max. And who’s this Minibelle?”
“She’s our cat, Nick,” Janine said, sounding surprised.
They stared at each other.
“Something’s happened, Nick.”
“I think we’ve been time-phased,” he said.
Sensation as of dropping through trap door: shock, confusion, terror. Followed by hasty and scary inventory of basic life data to see what had changed. Everything appeared in order except for the switch of cats. He didn’t remember having a female calico. Neither did Janine, although she had accepted the presence of the cat without surprise. As for Gus—Max?—he was getting foggier about his name, and Janine couldn’t even remember what he looked like. But she did recall that he had been a wedding gift from some close friend, and Mikkelsen remembered that the friend was Gus Stark, for whom they had named him, and Janine was then able to dredge up the dimming fact that Gus was a close friend of Mikkelsen’s and also of Hambleton’s and Janine’s in the days when they were married and that Gus had introduced Janine to Mikkelsen ten years before, when they were all on holiday in Hawaii.
Mikkelsen accessed the household call-master and found no Gus Stark listed. So the phasing had erased him from their roster of friends. The general phone directory turned up a Gus Stark in Costa Mesa. Mikkelsen called him and got a freckle-faced man with fading red hair who looked more or less familiar. But he didn’t know Mikkelsen at all, and only after some puzzling around in his memory did he decide that they had been distantly acquainted way back when but had had some kind of trifling quarrel and had lost touch with each other years ago.
“That’s not how I think I remember it,” Mikkelsen said. “I remember us as friends for years, really close. You and Donna and Janine and I were out to dinner only last week is what I remember, over in Newport Beach.”
“Donna?”
“Your wife.”
“My wife’s name is Karen. Jesus, this has been one hell of a phasing, hasn’t it?” He didn’t sound upset.
“I’ll say. Blew away your marriage, our friendship and who knows what all else.”
“Well, these things happen. Listen, if I can help you any way, fella, just call. But right now, Karen and I were on our way out, and—”
“Yeah. Sure. Sorry to have bothered you,” Mikkelsen told him.
He blanked the screen.
Donna. Karen. Gus. Max. He looked at Janine.
“Tommy did it,” she said.
She had it all figured out. Tommy, she said, had never forgiven Mikkelsen for marrying her. He wanted her back. He still sent her birthday cards, coy little gifts, postcards from exotic ports.
“You never mentioned them,” Mikkelsen said.
She shrugged. “I thought you’d only get annoyed. You’ve always disliked Tommy.”
“No,” Mikkelsen said, “I think he’s interesting in his oddball way—flamboyant, unusual. What I dislike is his unwillingness to accept the notion that you stopped being his wife a dozen years ago.”
“You’d dislike him more if you knew how hard he’s been trying to get me back.”
“Oh?”
“Wh
en we broke up,” she said, “he phased me four times. That was before I met you. He kept jaunting back to our final quarrel, trying to patch it up so that the separation wouldn’t happen. I began feeling the phasings and I knew what must be going on, and I told him to quit it or I’d report him and get his jaunt license revoked. That scared him, I guess, because he’s been pretty well behaved ever since, except for all the little hints and innuendoes and invitations to leave you and marry him again.”
“Christ,” Mikkelsen said. “How long were you and he married? Six months?”
“Seven. But he’s an obsessive personality. He never lets go.”
“And now he’s started phasing again?”
“That’s my guess. He’s probably decided that you’re the obstacle, that I really do still love you, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. So he needs to make us unmeet. He’s taken his first shot by somehow engineering a breach between you and your friend Gus a dozen years back, a breach so severe that you never really became friends and Gus never fixed you up with me. Only it didn’t work out the way Tommy hoped. We went to that party at Dave Cushman’s place and I got pushed into the pool on top of you and you introduced yourself and one thing led to another and here we still are.”
“Not all of us are,” Mikkelsen said. “My friend Gus is married to somebody else now.”
“That didn’t seem to trouble him much.”
“Maybe not. But he isn’t my friend anymore, either, and that troubles me. My whole past is at Tommy Hambleton’s mercy, Janine! And Gus the cat is gone too. Gus was a damned good cat. I miss him.”
“Five minutes ago, you weren’t sure whether his name was Gus or Max. Two hours from now, you won’t know you ever had any such cat, and it won’t matter at all.”
“But suppose the same thing had happened to you and me that happened to Gus and Donna?”
“It didn’t, though.”
“It might the next time,” Mikkelsen said.