Bearing an Hourglass (32 page)

Nestled below the male efforts were a few female offerings. These were small, neat, and polite, and seemed to represent genuine efforts to communicate. “My John avoids me, but I still love him. What should I do?” one asked plaintively. Below it was an answer in a different feminine hand: “Mine, too; it hurts.” And another: “Stay the course, sister; he’ll get tired of the tart.” And another: “Who wants him, then? Used goods.” And a final one: “Who you calling a tart?” Norton had to smile, somewhat wanly. He liked the company of these anonymous but distressed women better than he did that of his own kind; at least they seemed sensitive and human.

He noticed that nothing on the wall had been erased. All contributors and readers seemed to honor this rule: thou shalt not erase another person’s message. It was all right to talk back to a message by writing a contradicting one, but not to destroy the original, no matter how crowded the wall got. Small messages were written within large ones; there was much overlapping, but no actual molesting. Here was the ultimate free society!

Norton knew that all men were not loud, crass boors and all women were not sweet and troubled innocents. They just came across that way on walls. Perhaps it would be the same if the rest of society were similarly free and anonymous; the constraints of civilization did have a lot to offer. The graffiti were the exposed underside of society, just as this service alley, with its garbage cans, was the backside of the town. Both sides, actually, were probably necessary.

Moved by a curious emotion, he got up, went to the wall, scrounged in the debris at its foot for a fragment of chalk, and wrote below the feminine messages: “This John loves you, not the tart.”

He returned to the step. Would the original woman ever see his offering? Would it mean anything to her? Or
would it be blotted out by the excretions of mocking male graffiti? He probably would never know. That was the problem with anonymity. But he had had to speak, however feebly, for his kind.

He looked at the wall, tracing to the place where his own contribution was—and his graffito was gone. Startled, he peered closer—then realized that its absence was explicable. He and the world were moving backward in time, so his present situation preceded his message on the wall. His words would appear in due course, when time resumed its normal flow.

But the message had not been there when he first sat down! How could he explain that?

He pondered and worked it out. He was not an ordinary member of this scene. He had not been here on the original go-round. What he did was not a reversal of what he had done before; it was new. So he was, in fact, changing reality in some small degree. His graffito had not existed before he had made it, but did exist now—or
would
exist when normal time resumed, though he probably would not retrace his course to make it. He was exempt from paradox. He did what he did and it was done—though a normal person could not have done it that way. Normal rules did not apply to Incarnations. He was continuing to learn his trade.

To the right, a desultory mongrel dog wandered up, tail-first. The animal meandered to a pile of refuse and paused, partially squatting. Sausage-shaped chunks of the refuse lifted from the ground and squeezed into the dog’s waiting posterior. Norton watched, disgusted but fascinated. Of course biology was backward too! The dog, a mere animal, did not realize what had happened—but how would a human being react to this particular necessity of life?

The dog, satisfied, trotted backward on past Norton to a garbage can to the left. The lid was off and the contents partially scattered. The dog went and neatened it up; fragments of garbage jumped into the can, and then the lid sailed to seal it as the dog removed its nose.

Then a demon appeared, walking backward. This one was larger than the one by the capsule bottle. They
were
searching for him! That meant Satan did have some notion of what was going on. The backward flow of time had surely given him the hint! How he planned to stop Chronos was a mystery—but Satan’s craft and power were great, and Norton did not want to meet that challenge directly. He had to avoid the demon!

The thing was regressing down the street, tail-first, peering from side to side. Soon it would spot Norton. And—there was another backing in from the opposite side! They had him cornered.

Norton jumped up and turned the old-fashioned round-knob handle of the door behind his step. The door opened; evidently the occupants were not worried about intrusions from this direction—or maybe they were simply careless, or believed they had nothing worth stealing.

The doorway opened directly into a kitchen. A woman sat there eating a snack. She was a housewife in her thirties, not yet past the age of sex appeal, but frowsy in her curlers and housecoat. She was not aware of Norton, and this was not surprising, because she had distractions of her own. She was consuming her snack backward, and this evidently bothered her, but she couldn’t stop it. What she had eaten had to be uneaten.

The cup of coffee was not bad; she brought it to her mouth and tilted it, and the flow of fluid into the cup was hardly visible. Her throat worked, bringing up a swallow. Then she set down the cup, its level of coffee raised, and stared at it with dismay.

Next she put her hand to her lips and spat out a few indelicate crumbs. Then she opened her mouth wide and ejected a bite of coffee cake. This was followed by another, and another, until the full cake was there. She stared at it with odd horror. “?gniod I ma tahW” she asked out loud.

“It’s all right,” Norton answered, closing the door behind him so the demons wouldn’t see him. “Time is backward.”

Startled, she looked at him. “?uoy era ohW” she demanded, drawing her housecoat open to reveal her bosom. Her reactions were, of course, reversed; she had intended to conceal herself.

“Don’t be concerned,” Norton said. “I’m hiding from—” But he paused as he realized that his words were gibberish to her, as hers were to him. Each was living backward relative to the other, though they moved in time together. She could see him and hear him, but could not understand him.

The woman scrambled from her chair—and almost fell, again because of her backward reactions. Norton hurried across to steady her, and this alarmed her even more. “!em hcuot t’noD” she cried, colliding with the wall. A dish rose from the floor, where it had evidently shattered, and nudged back to the jostled shelf with its companions.

He had to reassure her! Norton found a pad of note-paper on the table, and a pencil; she had perhaps intended to make out a grocery list.
I AM A FRIEND
, he wrote.

She stared at the sheet. He knew what her problem was: in a normal time sequence, his reassurance would have occurred before her fright that caused him to write it, and this cause-after-effect was difficult for her to accept. But she was living backward now, so his actions changed her reality. She was remembering what had happened in the immediate future.

Best to take her mind off the incipient paradox.
I’M HIDING FROM DEMONS
, he wrote on the sheet.

“,snomeD” she repeated doubtfully.

“Snomed,” he agreed, imitating her pronunciation. It was amazing how alien ordinary human speech sounded when pronounced backward! Then, on paper:
I’M UNDER A SPELL. I SPEAK BACKWARD
.

“,hO” she said, her face brightening with comprehension. “.drawkcaB”

“Drawkcab,” he agreed, aware that he was mangling the pronunciation and punctuation. He wrote:
THE WORLD IS GOING BACKWARD
.

She nodded agreement, her glance flickering warily past the unconsumed coffee and cake. Perhaps, he realized, she had thought she was being sick. Now she knew it was merely a different reality.

“?yhW” she asked.

Norton tried to phrase an answer she would be able to understand and accept, but found himself at a loss. How could he tell her that he was responsible, and be believed? To prove it, he would have to reverse the effect—and that he refused to do.

He was spared the awkwardness of answering by the arrival of another person. A man ambled into the kitchen backward, tilting a bottle of beer in his mouth. He was evidently the woman’s husband, for she evinced only boredom at his presence. He was in baggy trousers and undershirt, his hair tousled, his face unshaven for this day. What he was doing home at this hour Norton didn’t know; maybe this was one of the intermittent periods of underemployment the society suffered, so this family was subsisting on state funds while waiting for the economy to improve. The man unpoured the last drop of beer into the bottle as the final bubble descended into his mouth, then capped it and set the bottle into the refrigerator. Then he noticed Norton.

Norton held up his last sign:
THE WORLD IS GOING BACKWARD
, hoping to forestall a jealous-husband reaction. The woman tried to pull herself together again, and again succeeded only in further displaying her private flesh. “,drawkcab gnivil er’eW” she said.

“?eh si lleh eht ohW” the man demanded, glaring at Norton.

“,snomed morf gnidih s’eH” she explained.

“—lleW” he began, then paused. “?drawkcaB”

“,drawkcaB” she agreed firmly.

“!top eht ffo tog tsuj I tuB” he said, annoyed.

The woman looked at her unconsumed repast. “?did uoY” she asked, making a connection. “—snaem taht nehT”

“!taht toN” he exclaimed. “!t’nseod ti ,on ,hO”

Norton had by this time figured out what “top” translated to. He repressed a smile, remembering the dog in the alley.

“!ereh fo tuo gnitteg m’I” the man cried, charging backward out of the kitchen. But his reflexes, like those of the woman, betrayed him. Their dialogue had evidently been in sensible order for them, but their actions remained reversed. And though their individual phrases or sentences were backward, their separate verbal exchanges seemed to be more in the order of present consciousness. Norton’s presence altered their reality to a degree, but not enough to reverse them totally or to provide them true self-determination. The man, despite his horror, was backing toward what looked to be the bathroom.

Well, Norton thought, this was a necessary consequence of reverse biology. What was ejected from the body in the form of coffee, cake, or whatever had to be taken in in some other fashion. The biology of men and animals did not differ that much.

“!oN !oN” the man screamed from the hidden room. There was the sound of a toilet flushing backward. A pause, then a scream of sheer horror and outrage. It seemed the job had been done—or undone, as the case might be.

Norton decided to vacate the premises before the man returned to the kitchen, as he might be in an ugly mood after taking on that ugly load. Norton cracked the door open and peeked.

The demons were gone. He had slipped their net. He slid out, leaving the family to its adjustments. The last thing he saw as he glanced back inside was the woman’s face as she looked toward the bathroom. She wore a somewhat smug expression, as if she thought the man had gotten what he deserved.

Norton made his way across the street, then walked carefully backward to a small park. There he selected an isolated bench and sat on it. That way, he seemed no different from the normal people and did not attract unwelcome attention.

Perhaps an hour had passed; it was now, according to
the park clock, just after 10
A.M
. Norton watched the clock click back to the hour and heard it bong ten times. Even the bongs were in reverse: !GNOB ,GNOB He saw the squirrels leaping backward from branch to branch and assembling nuts from scattered shells and regurgitated interiors. Periodically a person would back past, attracting the whole peanuts to his swinging hand and depositing them in a bag.

A young couple backed past Norton and into the bushes behind his bench. They were not aware of him, intent on their liaison. But they became conscious of the reversal, and this seemed to affect their lovemaking. Norton listened unashamedly, trying to visualize what was happening. To experience the gratification first, followed by the buildup—that might be unsettling. Sure enough, after a while the couple backed away from the bushes with perplexed expressions.

The sun moved slowly eastward. Morning was arriving. Rush-hour traffic developed on the street, the cars and carpets crowding crazily backward at a hazardous velocity. People hurried back past the park without noticing it, paying no attention to Norton. He was just a character on a bench, not rating either a backward or a forward glance.

But he became aware of another problem. The progress of time was not perfect. At first he thought it was his own boredom stretching things out, but when he checked his watch, which measured his personal time, against the park clock, he discovered that the clock was taking a minute and a half to back up one minute. What was wrong?

The question prompted the answer: the magic was weakening. The Hourglass was powerful but not omnipotent, and the reversal of the whole world was a considerable chore. After two hours, the Hourglass was losing its edge, processing the enormous magic less efficiently.

He concentrated, willing the magic back to full potency. This was effective; the normal pace of time resumed. But now he had to keep his mind on it, because, when his attention slipped, so did time. He could not simply wait
for the key moment to arrive; he had to will its arrival. Fortunately, this was not difficult; it was like holding on to a suitcase. It did require effort, but the effort became automatic.

The clock bonged past nine and started toward eight-thirty. Then it bonged nine again. Norton jumped up, alarmed. He had started nodding, and time had not only slowed, it had resumed forward progress. That was no good! He concentrated again, and the clock bonged nine a third time and proceeded safely on backward.

Norton paced around the park, afraid to sit down again, lest he lose concentration. He had several hours to go and he meant to see it through.

He started into an intersection of paths near a backward-spouting fountain—and saw a demon on the intersecting path. The creature was approaching backward, so didn’t see Norton; that was the second time he had been in luck this way. He was walking forward when others were not near to see, pausing when they were. But if he paused here, the demon would come back far enough to spy him, and that could not be allowed. Norton retreated hastily the way he had come. He hid behind a tree and watched the demon pass. Surely the thing was looking for him; Satan did not send his minions out in public without good reason, for people tended to react negatively to demons. It wasn’t that Satan cared how human beings felt, but he did not like them getting jolted back to righteous living that would cost him souls. So he kept his operators covert, except for his continual ad campaign to convince people that Hell was in fact a fun place. No one with any sense believed that—but there were a lot of stupid people in the world. Satan also maintained discreet recruitment stations, but no demons were ever in evidence there; it was strictly soft sell.