What about us? (34 page)

They had the authority to make
a choice such as the one I was facing, but I doubted their ability to remain
completely objective about it.  Shuffling through his memories and mine, I
realised that not all of the leaders and Board members were the same in both timelines. 
Could they be trusted to remain completely impartial? This led me to a more
worrying question.  Could I even trust myself? I decided that too much was at
stake to take needless risks.

There was only one person who I
really trusted, but discussing these questions with him would involve him being
able to see a future that he had no place in.  However, knowing him as I did, I
knew he would appreciate the irony of it and would not let it detract him from
the business in hand.  But first, I would have to return to my own time, to
re-establish myself in my own reality.  The one in which Grace had died in a car
accident centuries earlier.  The one in which Javier no longer lived.

Seconds after I arrived, the
base suffered another direct hit, telling me that I had successfully returned
to my own reality.  I quickly set the coordinates for there at the base, but
two days before Javier’s death.  I hadn’t been with him at that time, so there
was no danger of breaking the Golden Rule, but I felt sure I was about to break
some other fairly important ones, even if they hadn’t been written yet.  I also
had the distinct impression that I was about to saw off the branch that I was
sitting on.

I found myself pondering the
idea of parallels in time.  I knew how the world turned out after Grace had
been killed at the age of nineteen.  During her brief life she had made it a
better place for those she worked with, but had not really accomplished
anything more than that.  I also knew the life Jack had had without her; after
all, it was my life.  What I couldn’t know, was how the world would have turned
out if she had not died in the accident and had not met Jack.  Would there have
been someone else for her, someone from her own time? His memories and mine
told me there had never been anyone else for us.  He had always known this, but
I was only just beginning to realise it.  As I stood outside Javier’s door I
instinctively knew the answer.

She
knew
me.  I knew her
too and not just from the borrowed memories.  If I were to be completely
honest, there was something deep within me that responded to her in a way I had
never responded to another human being.  This was the reason I had never really
been willing to make an effort with the women I had admired, but had never been
able to love.  I knew that if she had lived but had not met Jack, she would
always have been searching for him and would never have settled for less.

I pushed the unwanted thought
away.  It had no place in my mind and there was nothing that could be done; the
time for me to make that choice had passed centuries before.  Even if she had
lived, she would have been long dead by now.  The relationship between us was
never meant to happen.  In the natural course of things we would never have met
and to believe otherwise was pure foolishness.  Yet there was a sense of
rightness about it that could not be explained rationally, which in itself
irked me.  I pushed the frustration aside and with an unpleasant jolt, realised
what I should have seen much earlier.

I was becoming the man he had
been; I had fallen in love with Grace.  This realisation clearly demonstrated
that I needed the assistance of a sharper mind to help me with the decision,
one that would not be led astray by emotions.

I announced myself on the
intercom, clearly waking my friend and mentor.

“Jack! It’s the middle of the
night, what brings you here now?” he said, as he opened the door.

He took one look at me, nodded,
then held out his arm to encourage me in.

“So, I see you come from the
future to talk to me.  This will be interesting.  Allow me a few moments to
change and wake up properly.  I take it that it’s not possible to talk me in
your own time?” He threw the question over his shoulder as he headed into one
of the other rooms.

“You are not there to ask.” I
told him simply.  He didn’t reply or ask further questions.

When he returned, we went to
the far corner of his apartment and sat down in comfortable chairs in the part
of the main room that he rather quaintly referred to as his study.  There was a
window that looked down onto the dark planet surface, a sight that always
focused the mind beautifully.

“Tell me what you can.” he
said, looking carefully at my features.  The me he was used to dealing with was
only forty-two.

With him I could be honest;
there was never any need to prevaricate.  “I think I have meddled.” I said
softly.

“That is not new.  It was not you
anyway, at least not the you that you’ve become, so it is not enough to bring
you here from the future.  Give me something else Jack.” he said, with a hint
of sharpness in his voice.

“No Javier, believe me, it is
new and it’s more than enough to bring me here.  I didn’t make the choice lightly. 
I have worked hard to achieve all that I have and it has not been easy, so more
worth the having.  But I’m beginning to see that this is possibly the hardest
thing I have ever done.”

I put my head in my hands; such
was the burden that I felt at that moment.

“Tell me.” he urged again.

“I think that when the Golden
Rule was broken, I didn’t do what I should have done; I didn’t repeat an event
that was actually fixed in time.  It was me.  I meddled, not him.”

He looked at me thoughtfully.  “I
think you had better start from the beginning.”

I transferred all the
information I had gathered to thought pods; they would take less time and be
more accurate than simply talking to him.  He would be aware of the echoes of
my other self, as well as hearing the voices of all those I had interviewed.

He let the information run
through his mind, pausing sometimes, only to ask a question.  At the same time,
I ran it all through my own mind again, hoping to find a vital fact that I had
either missed or attached too much or too little importance to.

Of course he would also become
aware of his impending demise, but I had shielded the precise details, because
although he could be trusted with information he had not earned, there are some
things no one should know.  Knowing that he had no part to play in a future
that his life’s work had been dedicated to improving would be hard enough.

He spent several hours going
through the information that the pods contained, listening to them over and
over again.  But I knew him well; there would be nothing gained in hurrying him. 
The pods spoke for themselves, but he also had the library records and my own
thoughts and ideas.  In fact, he now knew what I knew and I waited to hear what
he made of it all.

Eventually he sat back.  “There
is another echo trying to be heard Jack, a distant one.  It is not one you have
paid any attention to, because I do not see your thoughts turning to it at all. 
It is one of his memories; a faint one.  It makes only a tiny ripple, but it is
there.  It’s from before the accident where he saves this woman Grace.  From
what you have given me, I do not see his mind going back to it once he
recovered his memories.  It is most unusual; most unusual indeed.”

I looked up, confused.  Had I
missed something and was it important?

“Should I try to access it,
focus on it?” I asked.

He shook his head.  “I think
not Jack.  Let us leave it where it is for now, we have more than enough to
mull over without it.”

He began pacing about.  He was,
I knew, deep in thought, turning everything over as I had done before and was
still doing.

“This is all... well... it is
very
interesting.” he said, smiling at me.  “Thank you Jack for bringing it to me. 
It would be a great intellectual gift at any time, but to be given it now when
I have so little time left... well, thank you.  But we do have a problem;
therefore we must find the solution.”

He continued pacing, then he
stopped, stood still and looked at me sideways.  “I’m curious Jack.  Why do you
think that this is the wrong reality?”

“Because his happened first,” I
said slowly.  “He returned from the future to try and change the past, which
culminated in him breaking the Golden Rule.  Selfishly as it happens, because
all he wanted was his own happy ending.  However, he had already taken Grace
back to the past; she had already meddled in Sal Grundy’s life, so the two separate
families that were Sal’s descendents were already established by the date of
the accident in the year 2000.  Both lines ceased to exist at that point
because I did not meddle.”

I paused for a moment and
looked at him, but his face gave nothing away so I continued to share my own
thoughts.  “The question then becomes: why didn’t time wrap itself around Sal
and her son and give them a different death after Grace and the other Jack had
left Napier Street? And then; if Sal and Charlie were meant to die, why didn’t
you meet a similar, but different person to help you negotiate peace?”

I let the question hang there
before concluding.

“The realities are
fundamentally different, but they shouldn’t be.  There could be small
differences, but in all the important aspects they should be the same.  They
are not.  Certain events do not appear to be fixed, regardless of the
individual people involved, yet from history’s point of view there is no flux;
events have to be fixed in their right time.  All of which brings me back to
the inescapable fact that his reality came first.”

I paused for a moment.  I
needed to be sure that my next words were a truth for me.  “You have also seen
for yourself that his world is a better world than ours.  His should be the
right one.”

Javier sucked his cheeks in.  “First,
second.  Right, wrong.  Better, worse.  These are just words.  We know time is
not linear, we also know that the future is unshaped and yet... and yet... here
we have an interesting puzzle.  I am honoured that you trust me with it.  As
you yourself believed, there are not many that could remain objective with this
information.  But I think we can Jack.  Yes, I think we can.”

He sat down again, watching me
closely as he spoke.  “If we assume for a moment that you are right and that
this reality is not the fixed one, then if we go a step further and assume for
a moment that we are able to return things to the way they should have been,
then you will not necessarily have the life that you currently have.  You will
be that old man that you despised when you met him, when the Golden Rule was
broken.  How does that sit with you, hmm?”

He had seen that meeting from
the pod, so he knew my feelings and he also knew how the other me had felt.  Javier
had probably spent more time on the thoughts and feelings of my other self than
I had.  I still found it hard to believe we could be the same person.  As a
result I had always dismissed his feelings as being irrelevant.  After all, it
was difficult for me to be objective on this point.

I sat for a long time, thinking
about his question.  I, as I knew myself to be and this reality would cease to
exist, but at the same time the world would not be engaged in a futile,
destructive war.  Sal’s descendant, along with the man in front of me would
secure peace.  More than that; they would unite us once more and enable us to
work side by side to regenerate our home, the Earth.  Was that not a great
enough achievement to be part of? Was that not big enough to forego all the
others? I wondered.

‘But no one will know...’ said a
mean spirited voice at the back of my mind.  I couldn’t ignore it and had to
ask myself the question; would it be enough for my act of selflessness to go
completely unnoticed?

Unable to answer the question, I
turned to the life the other me had had, where all the achievements that this
me enjoyed and valued would be accompanied by a deep sense of loss, for I would
not be with Grace.  I forced myself to think of her by name.  I would always be
looking for a way back to her, not only to save her from the mess I’d put her
in, but to be with her.  The brief time that I would have with her, would that
not compensate? For those memories to be my own and not inherited, for those
times to be real for me and not echoes, would that not be compensation too? It
was then that the barely perceptible ripple Javier had spoken of floated into
my mind; unashamed and smug.

Javier was clever, which was
why I had sought his counsel.  He knew that if I’d attempted to focus on it, it
would have eluded me.  And if he had told me what it contained, I would not
have believed him.  But I recognised this lost fragment of a memory for myself;
I saw it when I wasn’t looking.  I also knew I could not ignore it.

“Ah... I see.” I said slowly,
looking up at him.

He just smiled.  “Yes, it
repeats itself over and over again, not just once but many times and each cycle
links to the next.  You see that now, don’t you?” His voice was insistent as he
asked and, his eyes bright with the sheer wonderment of it, the impossibility
of it.

“So many possible Jacks, all
trying to be with Grace.  There was a letter from another, different you;
that
was what propelled the other you to race out of that cafe and save her and who
knows how many others came before him.  Fascinating, absolutely fascinating.  You
know in all the years we have known each other, I have never thought of you as
a man led by his heart, but it seems you are Jack.  It seems you are...” He
finished thoughtfully.