Millennium (27 page)

I had passed out, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the weapon. I think I whacked my head on the corner of the table as I went down, and again on the floor.

My eyes hurt, too. I couldn’t move them. I couldn’t even blink. They were drying out.

For a second I thought I was dead, that this was what death
was like. Then I discovered I was still breathing. I could feel the cold concrete floor under me, the cold air over me, and my chest rising and falling. I could see the lattice of steel roof girders and a couple dim lights. That was my universe.

Broken neck, I thought. Quadraplegic. Catheters and iron lungs and feces bags and no sex life…

But it didn’t add up to a broken neck. I could feel my legs. One was bent slightly under me, and it was going to sleep. I knew when I moved—
if
I ever moved again—it would be pins and needles.

I don’t remember a lot of the next few minutes. I was scared, I don’t mind admitting it. Something had happened I didn’t understand. All I could do was lie there. I couldn’t even look away from the ceiling.

Then I found there was something else I could do. I could hear.

It was nothing loud, but it was the only sound in the hangar, so I heard it. I decided it was two people walking, trying to do it quietly. I never would have heard them if I wasn’t listening so hard.

*    *    *

After a long time of that, I decided it was three people. Later, I was sure it was four. It was amazing how much I could hear if it was all I had to do.

I waited. One of them would come close soon enough, and they’d decide what to do with me.

One of them did. I saw him looming into my field of vision. He was looking down at me. He turned, and whistled softly. I heard the others converging. They gathered around me. They made a circle and looked down at me. They were wearing what looked like scuba suits: all black rubber, covering everything but their faces.

“Who is it?” one of them asked.

“Who do you think?”

I knew that voice.

Well, she had said she’d see me tonight.

*    *    *

They debated whether or not I was alive. Then they moved out of my hearing; at least, though I could tell they were whispering about me, I couldn’t hear the words. I had the impression some of them were not in English.

They came a little closer and took another look. This time I heard a few words here and there.

“…shorted something out.”

“…stun beam…focused…”

“Damn lucky…dead man…”

“What the hell is he doing here now?” That was Louise.

“…take the stunner?”

“…Gate’s due in twenty minutes…hell out of here.”

“He’s sure sweating a lot.”

That didn’t surprise me. I didn’t expect to sweat much longer, though. I knew I was a dead man. I’d stumbled into something I wasn’t supposed to see, some kind of stun weapon. Since I couldn’t move my eyes I hadn’t gotten a good look at them, but I remembered vague shapes dangling from their belts, and everything about them shrieked
commando.
They weren’t here to play games.

So I’d surely be killed.

About all I didn’t understand—at least in the tactical sense—was why Louise had revealed herself to me so many times before now. Had she been trying to enlist my help in some way?

I remembered how badly she’d wanted me to stay away from work today. Okay, so she was trying to keep me from being here when they made their search…except that
I
hadn’t even known I was going to be here until an hour ago. Normally, I wouldn’t have been in this hangar at this hour.

Something had screwed up badly for them and I had no idea what it was, but I was sure the easiest solution for their present problem was for me to die.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard them going away.

Then Louise was back. She loomed over me so suddenly that if I could have moved, I’d have jumped a foot. I could feel my
heart hammering, and the drops of sweat flowing down the side of my face.

“Smith,” she said. “You don’t know me. I can’t tell you who I am. But you’re going to be all right.”

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

I had never seen Gate Operations as quiet as it was when I stepped through from Bill’s hotel room.

These things are relative, of course. I wasn’t there ten seconds before the Gate Congruency Duty Officer warned me to get out of the way, and I stood aside to watch about a hundred soldiers of the Roman Second Century fall down the chutes and into the sorting apparatus.

But when they were gone, the place was utterly quiet. On a slow day Operations is about as quiet as Chinese New Year.

*    *    *

I went up to Gate Control. Lawrence was there at his console, which was not surprising since he couldn’t leave it. What was surprising was that out of hundreds of other duty stations, there were only five or six gnomes left. It was a little bit as if, on a trip to Nepal, one discovered most of the individual peaks of the Himalayas had taken a trip to Japan.

One station still occupied was Lawrence’s second-in-command, David Shanghai. He was flipping switches one at a time, and each time he hit one a light went off on his console. He had a faint smile on his face.

“Hello, Louise,” Lawrence said. “I hope the assignment wasn’t too hard.”

“He was hard enough,” I said. “What’s all this? Where’s everybody? I thought there wouldn’t be any more snatches until this paradox was resolved.”

He shrugged.

“We didn’t plan to. Then this situation in North Africa presented itself, and we just decided to go for it. I guess old habits die hard. We got ninety-three centurions in prime condition. They’ll be a ‘lost batallion,’ or whatever they call it.”

David’s board was almost dark now. When he had it down to one glowing ready-light, he looked up at Lawrence.

“Good-bye,” he said, and he nodded to me. He turned off the last light.

His eyes closed, and he leaned back in his chair.

“Good-bye,” Lawrence said, not looking at him. The words were too late, anyway. David was already dead. He’d switched off his heart, located somewhere under his chair.

“Is that where everybody went?” I asked.

“That’s it. Will you be needing me for anything?”

“Fuck you. What a thing to ask. Where’s Sherman?”

“He’s at your apartment. He said to remind you that your second time capsule is ready to be opened in thirty minutes. After you read it, he said, you’ll know what to do.”

I looked at Lawrence. He didn’t look back, just gazed over the deserted Operations floor.

“Are you really ready to shut yourself off?”

“There’s no hurry. I can wait until you’ve seen Sherman.”

“It’s a hell of a thing for me to ask,” I said, “but I’d appreciate it if you would. Just until I see if he has anything else in mind.”

“You know where to find me.”

*    *    *

I went to the ready-room to get some clothes. There were three of my girls in there, dead, holding hands.

“Wipe those smiles off your faces,” I told them. “This is going to look terrible on your records.”

They didn’t seem to appreciate the humor. I went to my locker and poked through it. Talk about time’s closet. I had outfits in there ranging from poorly cured leopard hide to a spacesuit you could carry in your hip pocket. But my last pair of blue jeans had been ruined about a million years ago while being worn by a wimp who was also wearing my face.

What do you wear when you go to see the end of the world? What’s the proper outfit for an extinction?

I chose the dress I’d worn when we took the
Titanic.
Those had been the good old days.

*    *    *

There was shooting as I neared the tube station that would take me to the Federal Building. A lot of laughter punctuated the shots. It sounded like some drones were having a gay old massacre.

I hung back. The puny weapons the BC allows drones are big enough to blow out the back of your head if you put the barrel in your mouth, but they were no match for my firepower. I was in no mood to slaughter a bunch of drones, even suicidal ones.

The sounds moved away, and I entered the station. There were six or seven bodies. One of them moved, and I went to her. I turned her over. She’d taken four or five bullets, was very bloody, and a little surprised.

“It hurts,” she said. I nodded.

“You may last another couple hours,” I told her.

“Oh, I hope not.”

I nodded again, and put my arms around her head. She looked up at me and smiled.

“I like your dress,” she said.

I broke her neck.

*    *    *

This time there was no audience at the Fed. I went to the one chair in the room and sat down. My second time capsule was waiting for me on the table across the room.

“There you are, Louise,” said the BC. “I see you made it.”

“In a punctual manner of speaking.”

“Would you like to open it now?”

“Is it time?”

“Close enough.”

So I went to the table and took the shiny metal rectangle from the remains of the metal brick. Once again, it was in my handwriting.

The message hadn’t said anything about hurrying. It’s a good thing; I wasn’t in the mood to hurry, and I’d resigned from the Gate Project. I hadn’t told anybody, not that it mattered.

I went to a high place on the edge of the city and looked down at what was left.

It had been a hell of a city at one time. There were buildings out there dating back forty thousand years. The Fed was the biggest one.

Then there were the newer items. The Gate had been there for thousands of years, but the structures we’d built to house it were only six hundred years old. Next to it was the derelict field. Stretching off in the other direction were a hundred square miles of wimp vaults: low warehouses with a hundred million cubicles, one of which held my child.

On the third side of the Gate complex was the series of temporary geodesic domes—they’d only been there two hundred years—which we called the holding pens. What they held were about two hundred thousand sleeping human beings and ninety-three very confused Roman centurions who would soon be asleep themselves, if anybody was still there to handle the process.

They were held in suspended animation, a few degrees above freezing. Their hearts barely beat. They floated in a blue solution
of fluorocarbons and if you put one next to a wimp, you’d have had a hard time telling the difference. But that difference was all-important. They had minds, and memories, and past lives.

God, what a carnival it would have been to have set them all down on a virgin planet and awakened them!

Their birthdays ranged from 3000
B.C.
to 3000
A.D.
They were soldiers and civilians, infants and octogenarians, rich and poor, black, white, brown, yellow, and pale green. We had Nazis, Huguenots, Boers, Apaches, Methodists, Hindus, animists, and atheists. There were petty thieves and mass murderers and saints and geniuses and artists and pimps and doctors and shamen and witches. There were Jews from Dachau and Chinese from Tangshen and Bengalis from Bangladesh. Coal miners from Armenia and Silesia and West Virginia. Astronauts from Alpha Centauri. We had Ambrose Bierce and Amelia Earhart.

Sleepless nights, I used to wonder what sort of society they’d form when they all got to New Earth.

Leading away from the holding pens was a rail line to the spaceport, just visible in the distance. Sitting there were a few dozen surface-to-orbit craft that were seldom used these days…and the Ship.

The Ship was almost finished. Another two or three years and we’d have made it.

*    *    *

Sherman was waiting with no signs of impatience. His legs weren’t in lotus position, but he managed to resemble the Buddha. I regarded him, wondered if he wanted me to ring some bells or light incense or something. But I’d been coughing pretty bad since my return from the glorious twentieth, and I made a beeline to the revitalizer. I sat down heavily. As I plugged the feedline into my navel it began to take its samples.

“What are your orders?” I asked.

“Don’t take it like that, Louise,” he said. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“Neither did I. But one takes what one gets, doesn’t one?”

“One does.”

“Henceforth, I shall regard you as The All-Seeing Eye. I shall presume you know everything about everything. I’ll presume you know my thoughts before I think them. And you know what?”

“You don’t give a shit.”

I shrugged. “Okay, you talk to an infallible prophet, you never get to deliver your best lines. It must make it dull, knowing exactly what’s coming.”

“I wouldn’t call it dull.”

I thought about that, and managed to laugh.

“I guess not. You know that I’ve resigned?”

“I do. And that you broke security and told Bill Smith who and what you actually are, as best you could, and that he didn’t believe it.”

“Why did you want me to tell him I’d see him that night? I’d already been back, in the hangar. I couldn’t go back to his hotel room.”

“I wanted to insure he’d be in the hangar to meet you, as we knew he had already done.”

That one stumped me for a minute. The answer was obvious, but I didn’t see it because all my training had forced me to look at the situation in a particular way. Then I saw.

“You were forcing the paradox.”

“Correct.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have done it?”

I couldn’t answer that. Probably not.

“The Council would not have authorized the trip, either,” he went on, “if I had told them its purpose was to be sure you and Smith
did
meet. Your meeting him was what caused the paradox situation to get out of hand in the first place.”

“Then what’s the point? Why did I go back?”

He steepled his fingertips and was silent for quite a while. For a moment he looked startlingly human.