King's County (12 page)

"So, we all got wasted, as usual, and
we forgot all about it. Everybody was in the other cars at the
other end. I guess time... when you're having fun...” He blew his
nose into a napkin and continued,

“Well, when we finally got back around
that way, I think Yuri was there first, it had been about a week.
You can't imagine. The smell. Hordes of flies everywhere. Some of
the iguanas were still alive, too. They were sick, dying, crawling
all over everything. But the worst part - there was also a girl
trapped in the room. She was dead. Overdose, maybe intentional. She
couldn't be saved, too far gone at that point. You see, I turned
off the control system for that car. All the background automation
was disabled. I meant for it to be temporary, to add a bit of edge
to things. And I just forgot about it."

Richelieu and a tall, nearly naked girl
joined us. He leaned in close to talk to me and she giggled and
whapped him in the side of the head with her bouncing, pumped up
breasts.

"Have you met Penny yet? She is really
something. Different. Very different." Richelieu said and was
whapped again.

I shook my head.

"She’ll be at one of these parties. But
she's well read like you are, interesting to talk to..." The girl
whapped and giggled.

Walter was lost in his own thoughts.
His eyes had gone glassy. He was starting to get morose and
muttered quietly to himself.

Richelieu changed the subject, "These
rooms were inspired by the tesseract. Are you familiar with it? It
is an extra dimensional concept."

I told him I’d never heard of it. For
lack of a better way, he used the pile of cocaine to sketch out the
basic idea.

Richelieu drew out a large square. He
connected lines to it to illustrate a cube. From the cube he
scrapped out fine little lines connecting to another cube inside
it.

"You see, it is a space within a space.
For every dimension you have other dimensions adjacent to it, like
this room here. Only here it feels like a real dimension, but it is
not real at all. It's just a trick, much like the dimension of time
is a trick."

"I know what you mean. Time doesn't
mean much anymore." I said.

"You know about relativity, I guess.
That's not really what I mean, but it helps to show us the
way."

"I’m not sure. On the mission we aged
less, compared to on Earth, because of the craft’s speed and
distance from gravitational bodies. That's the theory but it
wouldn’t amount to much of a difference. Our craft wasn't nearly
fast enough." I said.

"Yes, of course that's the classic
theory, and it’s well established. But the trick is seen in what
really did affect you. You wouldn't notice the relative time
dilation from your voyage. But the pills that slowed you down, the
aging treatments, the metabolic chip, that’s what was real for
you."

"They took that chip out after we
landed actually. Does everybody have one now?"

He ignored my question to finish his
thought, "So you understand how time perception can be bent and
manipulated. In classic relativity time must bend, it must give
way. Otherwise you have a paradox. But this explanation leads to
another paradox because time must then stop at the speed of light.
And from this premise we find even more paradoxes."

"Some sort of experiment could explain
it, I suppose. We’ll never know. Light speed is impossible." I
said.

"But I already know the answer. The
answer is there is no time. Time is a false premise, it’s a
misconception and a misperception. There are too many paradoxes we
encounter at every step of trying to understand it. Why can our
perception of time be so easily influenced? Why does it only go in
one direction? It doesn't because it doesn't go at all. It doesn't
exist in any way we can understand. It’s perception is so easily
influenced because it is an illusion to begin with."

"What about causality? If one event
causes another to happen, doesn't that imply the passage of time?"
I said.

"It does in some examples
but not most. Where does causality begin? Could you tell me, for
instance, how this table came to be here? To be designed,
manufactured, selected, transported and placed here? Could you
truly explain how
you
came to be here in this moment right now? It's too complicated
to begin to explain everything that went into this one very simple
and ultimately inconsequential occurrence.”

“Well, thanks.”

"No, I’m sorry, just imagine everything
you know about the universe - all of your perceptions and memories,
flawed as they are - think of this as your window into reality.
Your window really is only a tiny peephole into the universe, not
much more than a Euclidean point.

"Think of your window as being at the
narrow end of a huge cosmic cone. On the wide end of the cone is
all knowledge. Every scrap of information is on this side,
essentially, the position and movement of every atom in the
universe."

The girl had stopped whapping him with
her breasts and now sat beside Walter who was whispering into her
ear. Richelieu went on explaining,

"So what you can comprehend from your
end of the cone would give you a very limited ability to predict
cause and effect. Wherever you look, you can only see a tiny
portion of the universe. True reality would be unknowable for any
man or machine we can conceive of. Are you following
me?"

"Yeah. But how does this mean that time
doesn't exist? Cause and effect are impossibly complex but they
still exist." I said.

"Because if we were to have total
knowledge, then we would know everything: past, present, and
future. Time would be irrelevant."

“Time is only for us mere mortals,
then.”

"If we think from the big picture, from
the other end of the cone, even if we can't capture it, there are
truths to be discovered. Otherwise we’re necessarily hidebound by
our perspective."

"You're saying if you knew everything
you could predict the future because you'd know how everything
would play out. But the future would still be the future, the past
would be the past." I said.

"No, not if you had perfect knowledge.
Free from the constraints of information, time would appear to not
exist."

"So, the clock would stop, like it
should, or like it might, when approaching the speed of
light?"

"No, it wouldn't stop. That wouldn't
happen...you're confusing things. It would just do what it was
meant to do. A clock is only a primitive tool, useful for
technologies but not much else."

"Not much else that leaves," I said.
Richelieu's enthusiasm was fading. I thought the cocaine he had
licked when cleaning his fingers might be wearing off.

"Consider this: no clock can ever be
truly accurate except as needed for our simplistic technological
purposes. As the calendars of the ancient Britons or Incas were
imprecise but were still useful to them in anticipating the seasons
and holidays and such."

"So what do you do with a theory like
this? It undermines our entire understanding of everything. It's
too much for me to even think about. Is there any
application?"

"I am retired. I've surrendered,
officially, and have been put out to pasture on this train. This
theory is too much for me, too, and it's not my own - just call it
drunk talk, my friend. None of this matters. Who would I share my
work with? It's a concept with no end."

"What about this Leland guy?" I
said.

Richelieu paused to think about what I
said. I'd expected him to dismiss it automatically.

"I don’t see any application, really.
But there is something from the theory that I think is useful to
know. It helps us to keep the correct frame. What we normally and
naturally think of as being the present is not the present. It is
an impression of the past, a version of it, poorly remembered and
poorly understood. This false present will always deceive you. The
real present is the future, as it is unfolding.

"Humans by our nature get this
confused. And so we will also confuse what the true present is with
what the future will be. The tendency is to think, 'this what is
happening now, so this is what will also be happening later' – the
wrong assumption. If it's happening now it's the present. The
future is defined by the fact that it always will be different but
you can see it unfolding at any moment. The present we think we
know is really the past and the future is in the present. To make
things worse, we more often tend to deny the present in favor of
the past, a false past which we may then also believe is the
future. We exist in a state of permanent confusion.”

“Tell me about it.”

"This has plagued man for millennia.
Complex predictions have been necessarily impossible. Only in the
last 25 or 30 years has this been mitigated, you might say, but
with technology so sophisticated it may be beyond our control.
We’ve eliminated the surprises, the uncertainties, and the urgency
of being alive. But the underlying cause of our problem, our
misunderstanding the nature of time, has only gotten worse. This
world may seem like the future and the present and the recent past
because it all seems the same, but it won’t last. We just can't see
why it won't last. Nothing has been cured or solved. Whatever our
technology, we’re still just dumb animals."

“The cure has killed us from what I've
seen. In the older literature, the men were so different, almost
alien. They were vulnerable in so many ways yet they were fearless
compared to us. Everything was a risk back then but they didn't
care. Everything they did would have an effect on their lives in a
significant way. And they all eventually failed and died and that
was life." I said.

“Doing nothing back then was a risk,
too.”

“It still is!” I said.

"We’ve become something else. Maybe
it's only natural that we become like machines after living with
them and depending on them so much. We’re mirroring them. It's sort
of flattering if you think about it. Man created in the image of
God."

"Are they mirroring us in
kind?"

"I think they might be." Richelieu
said.

"But who knows? Who knows anything
anymore? On the Artemis craft we at least had a library. I'd kill
to have that library back." I said.

"Well, promise you won't kill anybody
until you talk to Leland. I should go now but it's been very nice
talking with you. Don't forget Penny, either. She may have some way
to help you."

Richelieu led his naked giggling girl
away from the sofa and they dissolved into the crowd.

*

I searched the party for Tyndall but
didn't find him. At the door to the next car Walter stopped
me.

"Hey, kid, can you hold off on that? I
need some help with something."

"Sure, I guess. I was just looking for
someone."

"Don’t pay that little frog too much
mind. He's nuts."

"I was looking for Tyndall, actually.
Have you seen him?"

"Nah, I don't think so. He's nuts, too,
anyway. C’mon and gimme a hand. It’s good for you."

Walter was having trouble focusing on
me as he talked. He pulled his shirt out of his pants and blew his
nose into it.

"Are you sure you want to do this now?"
I said.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll be fine in a minute.
Follow me."

We fought our way through the party. It
seemed to be peaking with the tanned muscle dudes and bikini girls
paired up in an apparent ritual, dancing like some lost primitive
tribe. Some had fallen to the ground to fornicate in a wild
throng.

We passed Ed. He was face down by the
tiger’s alcove. The tiger laid beside him tenderly licking the back
of his neck and hair.

Back in the Bavarian room, relief
washed over me. It was cool and quiet. The main room was still
empty except for one table near the opposite door.

We passed the waitress sitting with
another girl who looked a lot like her. Both were wholesome looking
demure blondes. They were more stunning than I realized the night
before. They were drinking champagne and orange juice. I said hello
to them but neither bothered to acknowledge me.

In Mexico, I found Tyndall. The party
in the square had become more relaxed and seemed to be winding
down. Tyndall danced eyes closed to slow music with a beautiful
tall Spanish woman. It seemed too much of a shame to disturb
him.

Coming into the dining car was a jerk
back to reality. It was small and unforgiving compared to what I'd
become accustomed. At least this time I didn't fall.

The weight of the past 72 hours hit me.
The drinking and everything else was taking a toll. I told Walter
as much and he suggested a remedy.

"Yeah, I saw you limping a little
earlier and I was wondering. You’re gonna be a lightweight with no
chip, no way around that. But let’s see what we can do," he said. I
followed him to his berth where he rooted through an old bag
retrieved from the tiny closet,