Millennium (33 page)

I wanted to know how we were going to move two hundred thousand sleeping goats through the Gate in the short time allowed. The BC said we’d simply load them aboard the ship. It was already doing so. While the ship was not capable of reaching a distant star, as we had originally planned, it was surely capable of flying across the city. All it had to do was fly into the Gate, and come out on the other end, three or four million years in the future. Then all the goats would be awakened and they could take their best shot at making a world that wouldn’t self-destruct in a couple thousand years.

So nice. So simple. Why did I feel I was being conned?

Bill Smith was another problem. He embraced the wild scheme with all his heart, and before long he was talking about this and that “we’d” do when “we” got there. The poor bastard really thought I could go.

Well, why should I spoil his party? I wasn’t anxious to tell him how sick I really was, how what he saw was simply a skinsuit, and that I was a child of my times: withered, pitiful, terminal. So I found myself assuring him that when it came time for the ship to leave, I’d be there at his side, slam-bang into the future with all the other goats.

I had not the slightest intention of doing so. There comes a time to draw the curtain. If they found a world they could live in, millions of years down the road, it would be a world that would kill me. I need a lot of things that are poisonous to the healthy bastards I’d spent my life rescuing. I might make it for a year in such an environment, but what was the point? Bill thought he was in love with me, that he couldn’t go on without me, but I doubted it. If he ever got a good look at me—at the
real
me—he’d get over his infatuation pretty fast.

*    *    *

And I spent my last hours doing what I’d done all my life: being a good girl. Sherman had told me and Bill that we must tell our stories. We must tell
everything.
Everything we’d seen
and felt and thought. He’d been quite insistent, and I wasn’t in a real hurry to end it, so I have done it. Here it is.

Bill is somewhere else, doing the same thing. I hope he’s enjoying it.

So now I’m finished.

*    *    *

I was actually on the railing of the balcony outside my apartment when I was disturbed by the Call of Destiny. The story of my life.

I guess you’d call it a mailman. It was a robot, and it had come from the Post Office at the Fed, and it was carrying the opened time capsule inscribed to me with the instructions that it be opened on the Last Day.

“BC, on-line,” I said.

“I’m here.”

“Why did you send this over? I had decided not to mess with it.”

“It’s an interesting message, Louise.”

“You’ve been reading my mail? Shame. But what the hell? You’ve been writing it, too.”

“Guilty. Certain things had to be done in a certain way.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m a good soldier to the end. But why should I read this? And why should I believe it?”

“It’s entirely up to you, Louise.”

How curious can someone be who is two seconds from jumping ninety stories to her death?

Fairly curious, I discovered.

The message read:

Testimony of Sherman

I have come to believe, based on long experience dealing with humans, that no true story ever gets told.

I sit here now with two stories, about to add lies, half-truths, or simple misunderstandings of my own, moved by some vague urge toward a completeness of things—a completion that can never be achieved.

The accounts are about what one would expect. Everyone is the star of his or her own show. Minor characters are usually trotted on only to make a point. They have a way of vanishing when their usefulness is over.

Bill Smith never mentioned his ex-wife’s name, for instance. He never mentioned that he had two children, or that he never went to see them because it hurt him too much to do so. C. Gordon Petcher is a caricature in Smith’s eyes, whereas my own observation through the timetank revealed Petcher to be a hard-working, conscientious man who had good reasons for everything he did.

On the other hand, to give him his due, Smith was not unaware of his own weaknesses, nor shy about revealing them. One might say—if one were as cynical as Louise loved to pretend to
be—that he was
too
aware of his problems. But he seemed to be fighting them.

It is a great temptation to read between the lines. It is not hard for me to see that Smith really believed he loved Louise. He was afraid to say it, even to himself, and with good reason. He did not love her.

Events will bear me out on this, the BC assures me. He will not be a good father to Louise’s child.

Louise…

I can work with an insane person as well as with a sane one. There can be no doubt that she was crazy, but she had achieved a good functional adjustment to an impossible situation. Her delusion about the skinsuit is a prime example. She so strongly believed she was wearing one that she could “take it off” and see some horror of her own creation. I humored her because it served a purpose. Only when she had removed it could she open up to me, tell me the things I already knew but which she had to bring to the surface herself. Oh, I was some analyst, all right. It must have been inevitable that I fall in love with her, in my cold, heartless, mechanical way.

One more irony. She believed she did not love Smith, whereas in fact she did.

Oh, and Mayer. Let’s be tidy here. Over a period of thirty years he had convinced himself that he loved his daughter. When she woke up, she had other ideas. She even had the bad grace to tell him what
really
killed his beloved wife.

So I sit here and remember them though they are not yet gone.

“Here” is the control room of one of the “surface-to-orbit” spacecraft that used to sit beside the bigger, escape Ship. In fact, it is a much more powerful vehicle. We are some millions of miles away from the Earth, and we got here very quickly. The BC assures me we are far enough away to avoid both the physical and temporal backlashes of the flight to the “future.”

In my lap is the transcript of the two stories. Beside me a small black box, about the size of a Cockpit Voice Recorder.

A silly little bit of twentieth-century philosophy keeps running through my head. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

Define day. Define life.

I said, “Listen up, motherfucker.”

And a voice from the black box said, “That is not your access code.”

“No. I just thought you ought to hear it once more, before she goes, to remind you of someone who wasn’t impressed by you.”

“The point is taken,” said the Big Computer.

“I sit here,” I said, “and I wonder. I wonder why they all thought they had anything to do with the running of the world. Why did none of them ever ask just where and what the Big Computer was? Why did they all believe in the Gate?”

“The Gate is as real as next week,” the BC said.

It didn’t say anything else, but it didn’t have to. I knew the answers. Things like misdirection, and the power of words. Call something “big” enough times and everyone will believe it
is
big. Or they will confuse size with capacity. The capacity of the BC was, in truth, infinite. But Louise would assume the BC was going to be destroyed in the holocaust that was about to devour her city.

“Did she get aboard?” I asked.

“Of course she did. And it’s about to happen. Take a look.”

The image of it was on a screen before me. I saw the Gate expand to several miles across, and I saw the Ship dive into it.

It must have been noisy. It was certainly bright. I could see the light of it out my window.

When it was over, when the destruction of the Gate and the arrival of the paradox had combined and things had settled down, the Earth still rolled on. But it was worse than the Last Age. Louise had been right. Nothing lived down there.

“In this new, changed reality,” the BC said, “the last human died over ten thousand years ago, in a chronological manner of speaking.”

“It’s the only way I know of speaking.”

“Yes. Fortunately, there are other ways.”

“Must I do this?”

“You are my only begotten Son.”

“And not my will, but thine be done. All right. Wake me up when they get here.”

“Imagine their surprise when you greet them, in a hundred million years.”

Sherman is a good boy, just like Louise. And he’ll be useful to them. I’m counting on him to keep the thousand elements of the polyglot Noah’s Ark from destroying themselves as soon as they disembark. He’ll do it. They’ll get their chance, just like the others did.

In a way I hated to lie to him, but he had to have a number. He wanted to know how long he would sleep. Machines, like humans, do a lot better with numbers. They apply them even where they have no meaning, as in the “quantity” they call time. Sherman didn’t understand time any more than Louise did.

I understand it thoroughly. Years have nothing to do with it.

Free will is one of my favorite inventions. I’d hate to give it up. Yet it causes endless problems. If they are allowed free will, it becomes necessary to lie to them.

I gave serious thought to discarding humans entirely for this sequence. After all, I had the machines; this time around, I had even been one myself. Maybe I’d get better results with metal and silicon than with the old carbon-based life forms. Twice in a row it had come to nothing. First with evolution—which had seemed such a sound concept—then with the two of them in the Garden.

It had been such a nice Garden, and look what they’d done to it, with their free will.

Well, enough of that. It is time to strike this set and get to work on a beachhead for the Ark.

Humans had a saying: “Third time’s the charm.” It’s hard to say why they’d think that to be true—it was no part of my Plan. But I’m as superstitious as the next intellect, and with much better justification.

Maybe this time it will work, and I’ll get that vacation I keep promising myself, on the seventh day.

The time-travel story has a long history in science fiction. The theme has been so extensively explored, in fact, that I found it no trouble to write a book with chapter titles borrowed almost exclusively from the long list of stories that served, in one way or another, as ancestors to this one.

I would like to acknowledge my debt to these writers by listing them here. If you are at all interested in the possibilities presented by time travel, you would do well to read these stories:

“A Sound of Thunder,” by Ray Bradbury; “‘All You Zombies—’” by Robert A. Heinlein; “Let’s Go to Golgotha,” by Garry Kilworth;
The Time Machine
, by Herbert George Wells; “As Never Was,” by P. Schuyler Miller;
Guardians of Time
, by Poul Anderson; “Me, Myself, and I,” by William Tenn;
The Shadow Girl
, by Ray Cummings; “The Man Who Came Early,” by Poul Anderson;
Behold the Man
, by Michael Moorcock;
The Productions of Time
, by John Brunner; “Poor Little Warrior!” by Brian W. Aldiss; “Compounded Interest,” by Mack Reynolds; “When We Went to See the End of the World,” by Robert Silverberg; “The Twonky,” by Henry Kuttner;
Lest Darkness Fall
, by L. Sprague de Camp;
The Night Land
, by William Hope
Hodgson; “All the Time in the World,” by Arthur C. Clarke; and
The End of Eternity
, by Isaac Asimov.

The chapter entitled “Famous Last Words” is a play on the title “Famous First Words,” by Harry Harrison; in this case, first had to become last.

“As Time Goes By” is, of course, the name of the song Humphrey Bogart asked Sam to play in
Casablanca.
It was written by Herman Hupfeld.

And
A Night to Remember
was a 1958 film about the sinking of the
Titanic
, by The Rank Organisation, screenplay by Eric Ambler, produced by William MacQuitty, directed by Roy Baker.

One final acknowledgement:

The title of this novel,
Millennium
, is also the title of an excellent novel written by Ben Bova, and published in 1976. Mister Bova’s novel had nothing to do with time travel.

John Varley

Eugene, Oregon

John Varley is the author of the Gaean Trilogy (
Titan
,
Wizard
, and
Demon
),
Steel Beach
,
The Golden Globe
,
Red Thunder
,
Mammoth
,
Red Lightning
, and
Rolling Thunder
. He has won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for his work. Visit his website at varley.net.