Launch Pad (24 page)

“For them it is. They know of nothing else. Weren’t you warned about postchronic talk while you’re here?”

“I thought it was just not to spoil the-the-flavor. They don’t know?”

“Truth.”

“But that’s cruel—unfair!”

“Why? They’re stuck in their lives just as you and I are imbedded in our own. Are we any less actors in someone else’s drama than they?”

“Philosophy, like religion, is a very useful drug,” she didacted, “but it should be used only to condone the evils we cannot control—and not those we create.”

“You’re quoting,” I guessed.

“My most valued ability,” she agreed. “I have a memory like a wideband slowcrystal—the input can’t be erased without destructing the device. Do you condone this make-believe?”

“It isn’t make-believe. And convince me that it’s evil.”

“But it’s so limited—”

“They have the whole world. Their world—the world of the Seventeenth.”

“They don’t—not in any real sense. This whole area can’t be bigger than—than—”

She looked to me for help. I shrugged. “I don’t know either. But however large it is, it’s also—in a very real sense—unbounded. How much can a man expect to see in one normal lifetime—especially limited to horses and sailing ships for transportation? Any of these people who wish to go to France or the New World will get there. Aided by Anno Domini, they will arrive in their France without noticing whatever odd maneuvering the ship does in the ‘channel.’ I’ve taken that trip.”

“What would happen if I decided to get up and just walk—” she pointed off to the left—“that way, in a straight line?”

“You’d come to the edge,” I said. “Wherever that is.”

“Yes. Suppose I were a native—a resident—then what?”

“Then you’d probably fall asleep by the side of the road, and when you woke you’d suddenly remember urgent business back in town, or forget what you were doing there in the first place. And you’d never have the urge to roam again.”

“You mean they dethink and rethink these people? Just to keep them putting on a show for us?”

“Also to keep them happy,” I argued. “It’s for their own good. Think how they’d feel if they knew they were part of a display. This way they live out their lives without knowing of any options. It’s no more unfair to live here than it was to live in the actual Seventeenth century. A lot better: the food is adequate, diseases are eliminated, sanitation is much improved.”

“It sounds like an argument for slavery,” Diana snapped. “Or pig farming!”

O O O

We had come to what had to be the main street of the district. It was paved and lit. Bayswater High Street, the signpost read. The lights were open flames on stanchions, bright enough to mark the way but not to illuminate. “Perhaps we had better head back,” I suggested. “In another half-hour it will be too dark to see our way.”

“The moon will be up in twenty minutes,” Diana told me. “And it’s only two days off full. Plenty of light.”

“Example of your memory?” I asked.

She nodded. “I saw a chart once.”

The houses were two and three story, the upper stories overlapping the first. Picturesque in daylight, they were transformed at dusk into squatting ogres lurking behind the streetlights. The few people left on the street were scurrying like singleminded rats toward their holes.

“Some things are changeless,” I said, pointing my walking stick at a receding back. “Fear of the night is one such. These people fear footpads and cutthroats—our people fear the stars. Evolution, I fear, is too slow a process. Our subconscious is still a million years behind us—in the caves of our youth.”

“You mean that literally?” Diana asked. “About our people fearing the stars?”

“Extraordinarily literally. Astrophobia is the current mode. Not a fear of standing under the stars, like Chicken Little, but fear that, circling one of those points of light, is the race that will destroy humanity. The government spends billions each year in pursuit of this fear. I believe that it couples with the subconscious belief that we deserve to be destroyed. That all Earth has turned its back to the stars to live wholly in the past is part of the syndrome.”

Diana asked me a question then, something about the deeper manifestations of this ailment, and I prattled on about how easy it was to recognize the problem, but no one was getting it cured because it was chronolous to declare the inside of your head sacrosanct—if you were of high enough status to make it stick. I’m not sure of what I said, as most of my attention was on three sets of approaching footsteps I was attempting to analyze without alarming Diana. In step, but not in the rhythm of soldiers—a slightly slower, swaggering step. Three young dandies out for an evening’s entertainment, no doubt.

They rounded the corner and appeared under the light. They were well dressed, indeed foppishly dressed, and carrying swords—so they were gentlemen of this time. Or at least they were sons of gentlemen.

“What say?” the first one said, seeing us. “Say what?” the second demanded.

“What?” asked the third. “What ho!” he amended, strutting toward us. “What have we here? A lissome lass, begad! And unescorted.”

“Madam,” the first said, “my lady, ma’am. Chivalry is not dead! We shall prove this.”

Diana looked puzzled, but completely unafraid. I don’t know how I looked—I felt weak. “Get behind me,” I instructed her.

“Yes, indeed,” the third amplified, “we shall chivalrously rescue you from that old man there, who’s clearly attempting to have his way with you.”

“We shall,” the second added, “expect a suitable reward.”

“Is this some game?” Diana asked me.

“No,” I told her. “These lads are going to try to kill me. If they succeed they’ll kill you, too—eventually.”

The first drew his sword. I twisted the handle of my stick until I felt it click. We were now about even—three swords against one sword-stick with a narcospray tip. Anyone within one meter of the front of the tip would fall inanimate ten seconds after he was hit—and I should be able to keep even three of them away for ten seconds.

“These are truly enemies?” Diana asked me, staring up into my eyes. There was an undercurrent of excitement in her expression.

“Yes,” I said briefly. “But don’t worry. Just stay—”

“I trust you,” she said, nodding as though she had just made a prime decision. “Enemies!” Then she was in motion.

She dived forward onto her shoulder and pushed off as she rolled, catching the first one on the chin with the heel of her boot. He flew backward and came to a skidding stop on his back across the street. The second was just starting to react when she slammed him across the side of his head with her forearm. He slid slowly to the ground, folding in the middle as he dropped.

The third was aware of his danger, although he had no clear idea of what this whirlwind was. His sword was up and he was facing her. I managed one step toward them when, with a small cry of joy, she was past his guard and had fastened both of her hands around his throat. She must have known just where to press with her small fingers, because he didn’t struggle, didn’t even gasp—he just crumpled. She went down with him, keeping her grip. Her eyes were alive with excitement and she was grinning. She had, somehow, not the look of a person who has vanquished a foe, but more that of a terrier who has cornered a rat.

“All right,” I said, going over and pulling her off. “It’s all right, it’s all over.”

She looked up, small and sweet and innocent, except for a rip in the right sleeve of her dress. “He’s still alive, this one.”

“No!” I yelled, when I saw her hands tighten around his throat.

She stared at me. “The other two, they are dead.”

“Leave him,” I instructed.

“Yes.” She stood up, sounding disappointed.

I took her hand and led her away. I began to tremble slightly—a touch of aftershock. Diana was calm and gentle. I had no empathy for the three ruffians—they had danced to their own tune—but I worried about Diana. No—I think rather she frightened me. I was not concerned with the ease with which she dispatched—body combat ballet is not new to me. I worried rather about the joy with which she destroyed.

I remembered to disarm the stick, so as not to shoot myself in the foot. “Diana,” I said, picking my words not to offend, “I admire the way you handled those men. It shows great skill and training. But when a man is down—more particularly when he is unconscious—you don’t have to kill him.”

“But he was an enemy. You said so.”

Semantic problem—or something more?

“Christopher?” We stopped at the innyard and she stared up at me, her eyes wide.

“Yes?” Tears were forming in the corners of her eyes and she was shaking. Delayed reaction? I held her and stroked her long hair.

“Those men wanted to hurt us. It wasn’t a secondary thing, like wanting to take our money and hurting us if we resisted. They just wanted to hurt us.”

“True.”

“Why would anyone behave like that?”

It wasn’t the fight that had her upset, but the morals of her opponents. “You killed two of them and were working on the third,” I reminded her.

“But that was their doing. You said they were enemies. They declared status, not I. They attacked unprovoked. And I had your word.”

“Right,” I said, deciding to watch my words around this girl who took my definitions so literally and acted on them with such finality. “Well, they behaved that way because they’ve been taught to think it’s fun.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Neither do I,” I agreed.

We retired to our separate rooms and I spent some time studying the cracks in the ceiling in an effort to think before I fell asleep.

Diana and I spent the next ten days together in Shakespere’s London. Diana was delighted by everything and I was delighted by her. We grew closer together in that indefinable way men and women grow closer together, with neither of us mentioning it but both of us quite aware. She questioned me incessantly about everything, but gave little detail in return. I learned she had no family and grew up in a special school run by Earth government. I learned how beautiful she was, inside and out, in motion and in stillness.

After the first week we shared the same room. Luckily Seventeen was a time that allowed of such a change. The innkeeper persisted in winking at me whenever he could until I felt I had earned that dinner, but we suffered no other hardship for our affection.

Then one day over breakfast we decided to abandon the Seventeenth century. I voted for the Twentieth, and Diana ayed, although she knew little of it. “Those are the breakthrough years, aren’t they?” she asked. “First flights to the nearer planets!”

I munched on a bacon stick. “Out of the cradle and into the nursery,” I said. “And the babes yelling, `No, no, I don’t want to walk—haven’t learned to crawl properly yet.’ As though that skill were going to be of value to them in the future. Interesting times. As in the ancient curse.”

“Curse?” Diana asked, wide-eyed as a child.

I nodded. “May your children live in interesting times,” I said. “Chinese.”

“Not much of a curse,” Diana insisted. “Where are the mummies’ hearts and the vampires and such?”

“Now that would be interesting,” I said. After breakfast I pushed the call for Anno Domini and they removed us in a coach. They declothed us and reclothed us and backgrounded us and thrust us into an aeroplane.

III

This dubious contrivance, all shiny and silver and with two whole piston engines—to keep us going forward so we wouldn’t fall down—flew us to LaGuardia Field outside New York City. The field, like the aeroplane, was sleek and shiny and new and modern. Everything was modern—it was in the air. The modern taxi drove us to the modern city with its modern skyscrapers muraled with the most modern art. The year was 1938 and nothing could go wrong.

We checked into the Plaza and took a tenth-floor suite overlooking Central Park. It was evening and the park lights, glowing over the paths, roads, fields, rocks, ponds, streams, lakes and other structured wildnesses, turned it into a rectangular fairyland. The skyline surrounding the park was civilization surrounding and oppressing imagination, keeping it behind high walls and ordering its ways. This is known as interpretive sightseeing.

Diana had a lot of things she wanted to do. She wanted to see a play and a movie and a zoo and an ocean liner and a war and a soap opera and a rocket leaving for the moon.

“Everything but the rocket,” I told her. “Your timing’s off by about thirty years. They haven’t even designed the machines to build the machines to build the rocket yet.”

We compromised on a visit to the top of the Empire State Building, the closest thing to a trip to the moon that 1938 New York could provide.

“This is all real, isn’t it?” Diana asked as we wandered around the guard rail, peering at Bronx tenements and Jersey slums.

“In a sense,” I said.

“I mean the buildings are buildings, not sets, and the streets are streets and the river is a river and the ships are ships.”

“And the people are people,” I agreed. “The original had ten million, I believe. One of the three largest cities of the time. That’s a lot of people to stuff into a small area and move around by automobile and subway.”

She nodded. “How many people are here now—residents, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I doubt if they have the full original millions.”

“Still,” she said seriously, “it would be fair to say that there are a great many.”

“That would be fair,” I agreed.

“Why are they here?”

“It’s getting chilly,” I said, buttoning the two top buttons on my coat. “Let’s go eat dinner.”

“How can we justify bilking so many people out of their lives—out of whatever value their lives might have—by making them live in an artificial past?”

“How do their lives have any less value here than in realtime?” I asked in my best Socratic manner.

“Suppose you were an inventor,” Diana hypothesized. “How would you feel to discover that you had reinvented the wheel, or the typer, or the bloaterjet?”

“I’d never know it was a reinvention,” I said.

“But it would be. And you would have been cheated out of whatever good and new and beautiful you could have invented in realtime.”