Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (17 page)

THE LINGERING JOY
by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter
made his first sale to
Interzone
in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to
Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Zenith, New Worlds,
and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific of his generation in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well, one who works on the cutting edge of science, whose fiction bristles with weird new ideas, and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope. Baxter’s first novel,
Raft,
was released in 1991, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as
Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux,
and the H.G. Wells homage—a sequel to
The Time Machine—The Time Ships,
which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels
Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, Emperor, Resplendent, Conqueror, Navagator, Firstborn, The H-Bomb Girl, Weaver, Flood,
and
Ark,
and four novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke
, The Light of Other Days
and the three novels of the
Time Odyssey
series. His short fiction has been collected in
Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces,
and
Hunters of Pangaea.
Recent and upcoming work includes the Northland sequence:
Stone Spring, Bronze Summer, Iron Winter,
and
The Long Earth,
a collaboration with Sir Terry Prachett.

In this sequel to Anderson’s “The Long Remembering,” Baxter shows us the effect on the next generation of the actions of the previous one, and how easy it is for them to fall into the trap of making the same mistakes themselves.

Rennie,
tall, gray, stooped, stood by the window of his living room. It was around ten p.m.

Through the glass of the old-fashioned sash window I could see the crescent moon rising, huge-looking, yellowed by the smoggy air. And cupped in the arms of the crescent I could clearly see the sparking of detonations. The Clavius War, the continuing three-way lunar battle over the Artefact.

“I remember the final question your father asked me,” Rennie said. “Before he submitted to the procedure. ‘Why can’t you send me into the future?’ I had no real answer—not yet. But he was just an experimental test subject, a graduate assistant out to make some spare cash—a young man with a wife, a baby on the way—
you
. It didn’t matter to him where I sent him.”

“It mattered later,” I said. “When he came back.”

“Yes.” He turned to me, his rheumy eyes tired. “And it’s the past that concerns you, isn’t it, Ms. Armand?” He patted a pocket, as if in search of a long-vanished pipe, and reached for the decanter on the table. “Are you sure you won’t have some of my Burgundy? It’s a fine vintage.”

“I’d rather just get on with it, Professor.”

He smiled, and refilled his own glass. “Professor Emeritus. I’m long retired. It seems odd to be impatient about time travel.” He glanced at the box he had brought up from his cellar and into this cluttered, book-lined living room. It was a wooden chest, very old-fashioned, set on an occasional table. When opened, it had revealed—well, not much. Bottles of drugs. Syringes, evidently elderly but vacuum-wrapped. A kind of whirling wheel, like an optical illusion. It looked like the travelling kit of a nineteenth-century illusionist.

“You do understand how this works? This isn’t time travel of the H.G. Wells variety, but something rather subtler.”

“I think so. My father didn’t exactly lay out the details.” He was too busy abandoning me and my mother for that. “Something to do with world lines.”

“Ms. Armand, I call it temporal psycho-displacement. Time travel of the mind, not the body. A world line is the track in four-dimensional space-time that each of us traces out through our lives. Your psyche, cut loose from the present, will be shunted down your own world line—and then the world lines of your ancestors, parent and grandparent and great-grandparent, on down the branching tree of your heritage, until you come to rest—well, I have no control over precisely where.

“World lines
,” he mused. “That was a good enough understanding when I started. I built on the work of amateur experimenters, who didn’t know what they were dealing with, and muttered of reincarnation. We would use other language today. We have a deep molecular connection with our ancestors through our DNA, of course—the cold chemical continuity of the genes . . .

“You understand you won’t just be visiting the mind of your remote ancestor. You will
be
that ancestor, for a while. Your own body will be in deep hypnosis for hours. And you will think, feel, what your grandmother thinks and feels. I think it’s that essential union that makes the process so traumatic.”

I knew all about the trauma. My father seemed to have lost his heart to a woman he, or his ancestor, had known in an age of humans and Neanderthals. My mother, pregnant, a bespectacled clerk, could not compete with such a vision. He started to call his marriage to her his “unending punishment.” I remembered those words from a very young age.

I preferred to think about the theory. I said, “To me it sounds like a hypostatic union. Two become one.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Ah. Like God and man joined in the person of Jesus. This is the language of your seminary, as you mentioned in your letters.” He glanced out of the window, at the flaring moon. “So many young people are receiving a religious education now. You know, in the years since the discovery of the Artefact—not to mention the war in the sky that is now raging over it—I believe we’ve entered a new age of religious feeling. A millenarian panic, if you like. Even my own work has been co-opted.”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“You’re not the first to come to me in recent weeks. You know that after the suicides my work was suppressed. The psychophysics department was shut down, an injunction was taken against publication. Very few know of my work—only the police, the FBI, the university, and the families of the—”

“The victims.”

“If you like. But, Ms. Armand, despite the prohibition, I have always had difficulty refusing relatives’ requests.” He looked fondly at his wooden chest. “You can see that the apparatus is easily assembled. Even the drugs are easy to come by. I have come to believe, in fact, that my apparatus does not so much enable the psychic travel but
unlock
a facility that is innate in all of us . . . And so, if a relative or loved one comes to me asking to travel, for whatever reason, I try to help.

“A month ago a young man came to me claiming to be a descendant of the family of Jesus Christ Himself. He had documentation, historical ‘proof’. He wanted to travel down the world lines to meet the Christ. Well, he failed. Perhaps it would have been worse still if he had found Him and been
disappointed
. . . The boy went into a tailspin, I understand. As a result I am reluctant to indulge further fantastical religious adventures.”

I shook my head. “There is nothing fantastical in my purpose, sir. It’s a matter of logic.”

“Logic?”

I glanced at the flaring moon. “The logic of the Artefact. We only know one thing for sure about the Clavius Artefact: somebody made it. But that basic fact has theological consequences, for Christians.”

“Ah.” He smiled. “Logic indeed. This is the question of the Incarnation of Christ on Alpha Centauri . . . ”

It was a conundrum almost as old as Christianity itself. Christ was a union of God with humankind, a union made to save mankind from original sin. But what if intelligent aliens existed, on some remote star? Must they be fallen? Could they be saved by the word of Jesus, sent in mathematically encoded sermons whispered through giant radio telescopes? Or could the aliens have been given their
own
Christ, their own hypostatic union of God with mortal?

Rennie smiled. “Christianity is such a
literal
religion. I remember my
Age of Reason
—Tom Paine. He rejected Christianity for the bizarreness of Christ’s fate in such a scheme—how did he put it?—‘an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.’ And besides, isn’t it heretical to deny the uniqueness of the Incarnation?”

“Nevertheless,” I said, “given that the Visitors exist, or existed, the Vatican has now decreed, after much debate, that the mercy of God is surely not limited to one little world in a vast inhabited universe—not to one finite, flawed species. It must extend to
all
minds.”

He nodded. “I suppose it’s a hope we must cling to. For if the Visitors are fallen, and they have been
here . . .
But what’s that got to do with my technique?”

“I said
all
minds, Professor. On Earth as well as among the stars. There are other intelligences right here.”

His eyes widened. “My word. You’re looking for a Christ of the dolphins?”

I was impressed that he didn’t laugh. “The linguists are making new efforts to understand dolphin speech, and the chimps, and the whales. Already there are results, discoveries—oddly symbolic behaviours we’ve yet to understand.”

“Ah. I see why you’re here. You intend to look in the past too. The Neanderthals—well, they had speech. It was your father’s visit that first proved that, in fact, not that I was allowed to publish. They cared for the vulnerable. They venerated the dead . . . ”

“Yet the last of them died twenty thousand years before the salvation of Christ.”

He smiled. “So you’re looking for a bony-browed Jesus! I can’t fault your imagination, or your ambition. But you understand you will have no control over
where
your psyche comes to rest—in which of your chain of grandparents you will be, umm,
incarnated
.”

“I understand that.” I shrugged. “But my father found something he wanted—even though he didn’t know he wanted it. Perhaps if I want this thing enough, it will come to pass.”

“Or perhaps God will guide you.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I asked bluntly, “Will you help me?”

He considered the question. “Not because I believe in your quest. But because I owe it to you, as to others in your position.” He stood, and gathered up his box.

He led me to a rudimentary laboratory.

I lay on a couch and rolled up my sleeve. The preparation was simple. A couple of injections, that patterned disc whirling. “I’m told I am a good hypnosis subject, as my father was . . . ”

“Just relax, Ms. Armand.”

“Evavi. Call me Evavi.”

“An unusual name.”

“It meant something to my father. A parting gift, you might call it, before he left.”

“Your father, yes. You’ve come here in search of the past—seeking the Neanderthals, so you say, or your lost father, as a psychiatrist would probably opine. Yet I’m surprised at your lack of curiosity, Ms. Armand. I mean, about the future.”

Darkness spread around me.

“You see, as I implied to you, I think I now know
why
I can’t send you there. But you haven’t asked about that, have you? Not once . . . ”

I fell into night.

I am Valari-anaro-torkluk, which means The Woman who Draws a Bow Like a Man. But my true name I hold secret from the wind ghosts and the warlocks, and that I will not reveal.

Not even to a man. Not even to the Ghost Man. Not even to Kugul-akoni-ugnal, whose name means He Who Wrestled the Aurochs, who would have me as his wife, who would own me, and loan me out to his brothers, for that is how it is among the Men.

The events that I speak of happened in the month when the strange star hung in the sky, in the direction of the winter sunrise, which is a time everybody will remember.

It was to impress me that Kugul had gone to the other side of the river, and had returned with the head of the goblin doe, hanging from his belt by its long yellow hair. He threw this to the ground, before the big common hearth, with the squat huts of the Men all around. “Look!” he cried. “Look, Men! Look, Valari! This is the head of the last breeding doe in that cave! I went there alone, I fought off the bucks, I took this doe and I rutted with it and then I killed it and brought back its head! Am I not a great hunter? Am I not a Man?” He faced me, and I saw the blood on his hands and face, and on the front of his hide tunic where he had rutted with this creature.

And I saw the head of the doe. Her face. The pale skin. The eyes open, as if puzzled. The bruised mouth where Kugul had used her. She had freckles, I saw, freckles on her nose.

I remember the moment, as children squalled and the dogs yapped, on that bright autumn day. It was as if I was standing on a mountain, looking down on myself, and Kugul, and the severed head. In that moment I decided I would not let Kugul have me.

I stood before him, not with deference as a woman should, but as a man would, with defiance. “I am Valari-anaro-torkluk! I am not for you, Kugul! I will bring back the head of the last healthy buck. Then we will see who is the greater hunter, Kugul-akoni-ugnal, killer of does!”