Memories of the Future Page 15

  Lowery paces the floor, smoking cigarettes. He keeps the lights down low and the blinds drawn because there are Quadripartite agents in the area. At last the psychosurgeon’s aircraft drops down into the clearing in front of the chalet. Lowery runs outside to meet him, and the two old friends walk arm in arm back to the chalet. The psychosurgeon is well up in years, but is unsurpassed in his profession. He directs Lowery to lie down on the divan. Lowery complies. The psychosurgeon opens his little black bag and withdraws a rectangular chrome-plated box. After plugging it into a nearby baseboard outlet, he holds it exactly eleven inches above Lowery’s forehead and clicks it on. Three pencil-thin blue rays leap from the box’s bottom and converge in the middle of Lowery’s forehead. “This won’t take long,” the psychosurgeon says reassuringly, bending over his patient to make sure the rays have converged in just the right spot. “We’ll have it burned out of there in a jiffy.”

  The psychosurgeon’s breath smells strongly of Franco American spaghetti. It is a dead giveaway: Only Quadripartite loyalists eat Franco American spaghetti. Lowery shoves the box aside and leaps to his feet. “I know what you’re up to!” he cries. “The Quadripartite want the Block removed! They sent you!”

  “In point of fact, they do and did,” the psychosurgeon says calmly. A fly emerges from his left nostril, crawls diagonally across his hairless upper lip and halts at the corner of his mouth. “They feel that in depriving you of your flame they went too far, and now they wish to rectify their mistake. If you’ll kindly resume your former position on the divan, I’ll—”

  “No!” Lowery shouts. “I don’t trust you! I’m going back to the past!”

  Instantly, the room swarms with Quadripartite agents.

  Somehow, Lowery eludes their clawing fingers and gets through the door. He runs down the hill, expertly evading the grasping hands that reach out at him from behind every tree he passes. At the base of the hill, he homes in on the chrono-window and crawls back through the stasis field and into his cell. He pulls his body through after him, shaking it free from a Quadripartite agent who has gripped it by the heels. It flows smoothly around him in the darkness, sinks pleasantly into the inner-spring mattress. Frantically he feels for the Parnassian Block. It is still intact, still in place. He sighs. Lowery sleeps.

  The Haute Bourgeoisie

  “IT SEEMS TO ME, STARFINDER,” Ciely Bleu declares one evening, her blue-flower eyes fixed on the timescreen in the whaleship’s lounge, “that a disproportionate amount of Earth’s history consists of people crossing things. Moses crossing the Red Sea, Alexander the Great crossing the Hellespont, Hannibal crossing the Alps, Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Columbus crossing the Atlantic, Balboa crossing the Isthmus of Panama, and now Samuel Johnson crossing Inner Temple Lane.”

  “You’re a fine one to be complaining,” Starfinder says. “What other twelve-year-old girl from Renascence—or from any of the other terrestrialized planets, for that matter—has ever before been treated to a spacewhale’s eyeview of history?”

  “I wasn’t complaining. I was merely giving verbal vent to a perspicacious observation.” Then, “Look!—Dr. Johnson almost fell!”

  “He’ll be all right,” Starfinder reassures her. “He’s only got a few more steps to go to reach his doorway.”

  “He’s counting them, I’ll bet.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  Judging from the stick figure that takes shape in both their minds, the whale, which communicates tele-hieroglyphically, is somewhat contemptuous of Dr. Johnson’s alcoholic propensities:

  “I don’t think that was a very nice thing to say, Charles,” Ciely says. “Charles” is her name for the whale. “After all, Dr. Johnson did compile the first English lexicon, and without so much as a smidgen of help from that snooty Lord Chesterfield either! He earned the right to at least a little leeway in his social activities, I think!”

  “Well, anyway, he made it home,” says Starfinder, as the door of No. 1 Inner Temple Lane closes behind the subject of their conversation. “In a few more minutes he’ll be safe in bed. And speaking of bed—”

  Sadness shadows Ciely’s thin face, darkening her blue-flower eyes. “Couldn’t we tune in one more place-time first, Starfinder? This is my final night on board the whale, you know.”

  “You promised Inner Temple Lane would be the last.”

  “I know. But people are prone to promise almost anything when they’re on the verge of desperation. Anyway, what difference does it make what time I get up tomorrow morning? You said yourself you’re going to have Charles resurface off Renascence just three weeks after I stole—just three weeks after I disappeared. So no matter how long he remains in the Sea of Time, future time won’t pass for us.”

  “Maybe so, but in future time you’ve been missing for three whole weeks, and your parents must be worried sick.”

  “But they won’t be worried any sicker no matter how long we stay in the past. Assuming they are worried sick.”

  Starfinder sighs. “One more then. What would you like to see?”

  “Not what. Whom. I want to see Elizabeth Barrett when she was still living at No. 50 Wimpole St. Before she married Robert. When she was composing her Sonnets.”

  “And when was that?”

  “A.D. 1845,” Ciely answers. “In the spring, I should think.”

  Starfinder sighs again. “It’ll be a tough one to tune in, but I’ll try.”

  * * *

  Starfinder is a strange man. Who else but a strange man would choose, in the very prime of life, to live out the rest of his years in the belly of a converted spacewhale? A spacewhale that, despite its ability to plumb the depths of the Sea of Time, to see and hear for millions of miles while simultaneously seeing and hearing inside itself, to exceed by far the velocities of ordinary whaleships (i.e., dead ones); despite its compartmented, superbly appointed, phosphorescence-illuminated interior, its self replenishing life-support system, its hot and cold running water, its well-stocked larder, its luxurious lounge, its commercially-viable holds; despite its high intelligence, its fine sensibilities, its sense of humor—that, despite all these abilities, these assets, these qualities, is still, basically, nothing more than a sentient, self-propelled asteroid?

  He leaves the lounge, walks down the fore-to-aft middeck corridor to the forward companionway and ascends it to the bridge. When he tapped the audio-visual “petal” of the whale’s huge, rose-like ganglion and linked it electromagnetically to the lounge-viewscreen, he also attuned the on-board computer (installed as a matter of course by the Altair IV orbital shipyard converters) to the ganglion’s “stem,” or thought-center. The whale can resurface to any spatio-temporal coign of vantage it chooses, provided the coordinates don’t coincide with its dive-point, but were Starfinder to “say,” No. 50 Wimpole St. London, England, Earth; spring, A.D. 1845, it might not know what he is talking about, even though, during the brief span of their relationship, it has assimilated a large percentage of his lore. So, instead, he feeds the information into the computer, which translates it into coordinates more readily comprehensible to the whale, whereupon the whale re-enters the Sea of Time, resurfaces and reorients itself. The transition is almost instantaneous, and Earth, after briefly blanking out, reappears in the center of the bridge viewscreen. Only the different positions of the constellations, the moon, and Venus (the other solar planets are beyond the periphery of the screen) indicate that the whale now occupies a new coign of vantage and that over half a century has gone by.

  Starfinder returns to the lounge, where Ciely Bleu is leaning forward in her viewchair, gazing at the new London that has replaced the old. Inner Temple Lane still fills the screen. It has changed, but not very much. The problem is to get from it to Wimpole St.—a problem that the whale, which, of necessity, knows no more about nineteenth-century London than Starfinder does, dumped on his lap.

  Resignedly, he kneels before the timescreen and begins fiddling with the banks of dials that flank it and
for whose complexity he alone—as an amateur electronics engineer—is responsible. Inner Temple Lane gives way to White Chapel—the territory-to-be of Jack the Ripper. He continues to fiddle. Buckingham Palace, Baker St. (Baker St.?), Bunhill Row . . . Only through sheer chance does he finally find the street he is looking for, after which it is a cinch to tune in No. 50.

  Ciely leans forward in her viewchair. It is late afternoon, and there are a number of carriages passing on the street. Starfinder continues to work the dials. Presently a kitchen appears (walls are no barrier to the whale’s vision). In it, a dowdy servant woman is standing over a grotesque cast-iron stove, on which the contents of a large cast-iron pot are bubbling (the whale’s olfactory range is severely limited, which, in the present instance, is probably just as well). Starfinder next tunes in a study, in which an austere old man is sitting at a desk, poring over a pile of papers; then a large living room, in which two young men are lolling. And then, suddenly, a bed-sitting room appears, in which an attractive woman in her late thirties is reclining in her armchair, her legs covered with a lap robe.

  “It’s her, Starfinder!” Ciely cries. “It’s ‘Ba.’ You’ve found her!”

  Starfinder returns to his viewchair and sits back down. Ciely is still leaning forward in hers. Presently, “But she’s not writing anything, Starfinder. She’s just sitting there, doing nothing. Why isn’t she composing the Sonnets from the Portuguese?”

  Starfinder is tempted to point out that, were they to look in on any woman of moderate or above-moderate means, in any given age, they would probably find her sitting, doing nothing; but he refrains. For one thing, Elizabeth Barrett is an invalid; for another, it will serve no practical purpose to taint his starry-eyed ward with his own cynicism.

  Elizabeth Barrett’s eyes, it soon becomes apparent, are closed. Moreover, her breast is rising and falling with telltale evenness. Lying facedown at her feet, in a puddle of afternoon sunshine, is a book that has apparently slipped from her lap.

  “Do you know what?” Starfinder says. “I think she’s sleeping.”

  “She is not! Do you think for one minute she’d fall asleep over a volume of Robert’s poems?”

  “But we don’t know that it is a volume of his poems.”

  “What else would she be reading with their marriage only a year away?”

  The whale is of the same mind as Starfinder.

  it observes.

  “Oh, you!” Ciely says.

  “Well whether she’s asleep or not,” says Starfinder, “I know someone who should be.”

  Slowly Ciely gets to her feet. She gives him a long, reproachful look and makes as though to turn her back on him and march out of the lounge. Then, abruptly, she darts over and kisses him, whispers “Good night” into his ear, and runs aft to her cabin, which is next to his, and which she refers to as her “room.”

  * * *

  Long after she leaves, he can feel the moist coolness of her kiss upon his cheek, but he is totally unaffected by it. He cannot afford to be affected by moist kisses bestowed by innocent young maidens overflowing with love and affection, because the problem that confronts him requires a cold objectivity of thought that cannot be attained if he is to allow himself to be sidetracked by silly sentimentality.

  In a way, the roots of the problem go back to when he was a converter in the Orbital Shipyards of Altair IV; to when the whale “said,”

  indicating that if he would repair its unique auxiliary ganglion, which the Jonah who destroyed the primary one hadn’t known existed, it would obey his every command for the rest of its life and take him where/whenever he wished to go in (space) and (time).

  But the roots can be traced back farther yet. They can be traced back to the days when he himself was a Jonah and killed spacewhales, ostensibly for a living but actually out of revenge for his having been temporarily blinded by one, and scarred for life. Killed them, till one day he saw his face in one and could kill them no longer.

  The complexity of problems is no new thing under the suns, but the complexity of this one is nevertheless unique. Ciely Bleu, at odds with the proletariat society she grew up in on Renascence (a Andromedae IX) and whose members she scornfully calls the “haute bourgeoisie” because of their middle-class values and because they put on “parvenu airs,” stole a star eel that was undergoing experimental conversion out of the Renascence Orbital Shipyards (where her father is employed as a converter) to keep it from being enslaved. Three weeks later (Renascence time), the eel, which she had named “Pasha” and which she loved, affixed itself to Starfinder’s whale and began absorbing its 2-omicron-vii lifeblood. Starfinder boarded the eel, conned Ciely into returning with him to the whale, where he talked her into calling the eel off. The whale, acting out of instinct, promptly rammed the eel, destroying it. Starfinder should have anticipated this, but he didn’t.

  The eel, despite its gargantuan size, was Ciely’s pet, and its death overwhelmed her. The whale, contrite, substituted itself.

  it “said,” indicating that she and Starfinder and itself would henceforth be three comrades in the Sea of and . The antidote worked, and she has come to love “Charles” as much as she loved “Pasha.” It is now up to Starfinder to return her to her “haute bourgeoisie” parents.

  Well, this doesn’t seem like much of a problem. There will be tears involved, of course, and sad farewells; but eventually Ciely will forget Starfinder and the whale and come to love her “haute bourgeoisie” parents, however much she may think she despises them. But wait: There are financial and legal complications to contend with. The star eel she stole was the property of Renascence’s Orbital Shipyards (OrbShipCo), and, at a conservative estimate, was worth in the neighborhood of $10,000,000,000. It is doubtful that Renascence law will allow a twelve-year-old girl to be prosecuted for grand larceny; nevertheless, someone is going to have to pay the $10,000,000,000 back.

  Starfinder is as poor as a church-mouse. He doesn’t even own his own whaleship—at least not legally.

  No doubt Ciely’s parents are moderately well-to-do and have money in the bank in the city of Kirth, which is the New Bedford of the star-eel industry and the headquarters of OrbShipCo. But how are they going to raise $10,000,000,000? How, for that matter, if their daughter can be prosecuted, are they going to raise enough to cover the fee of a lawyer crafty enough to keep her out of jail?

  Problem? This is no problem. This is a brick wall. A four-dimensional brick wall that slams against you just as hard when you try to climb over it or to go around it or to burrow under it as it does when you try to barge right through it.

  But fortunately Starfinder has in his possession a four-dimensional sledge hammer in the form of a whale.

  He turns off the timescreen, retires to his cabin and has the wardrobizer outfit him in nondescript apparel that will pass uncommented upon where and when he is going. From a secret drawer of his desk he removes a pair of telekinetic dice and slips them into one of the pockets of his nondescript coat. Into another pocket he slips an ostentatious bauble that can easily be converted into legal tender. Then he leaves the cabin, makes his way forward and ascends the companionway to the bridge. There, via the computer, he programs the whale to surface five hundred miles off the shores of Kirth (well beyond the orbiting dead star-eels and the conversion docks and the space stations that constitute the orbital shipyards) at a temporal level when Kirth was a small town and the star-eel industry was still in its embryonic stage, and he post-programs the whale to dive the moment he departs in the lifeboat and to resurface one Renascence month later at a corresponding point in space. Then he girds himself and descends to the boat-bay. He has a busy “night” before him.

  * * *

  “You look bushed, Starfinder,” Ciely says over her cereal. “Didn’t you sleep well last night?”

  Starfinder fortifies himself with a second cup of coffee and dials an order of toast and scrambled synthi-eggs. In the galley viewscreen, a Andromedae hangs like a dazzling Christmas-tre
e ornament from the black branches of the fir of space. In the foreground, hogging most of the screen, Renascence turns imperceptibly on its axis, its dayside green-gold, and tinged with blue. The orbital shipyards, visible only on the nightside, bring to mind a moving semicircle of twinkling trinkets.

  Where did those little crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes come from?” Ciely asks, when Starfinder makes no reply. “They weren’t there last night.”

  “I didn’t know there were any crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes.”

  “Well there are.”

  Starfinder doesn’t argue. Instead, he tackles his order of toast and scrambled synthi-eggs. He is wearing his captain’s uniform. It is white, with gold piping. The left side of the coat front is hung with seven rows of multi-colored ribbons, to each of which is attached a gleaming, meaningless medal. The epaulets match, in both color and design, the décor on the fore-piece of the white hat, which rests on the table near his elbow, and bear a strong resemblance to the scrambled synthi-eggs he is eating. The white trousers have triple creases and are tucked neatly into black, synthi-leather boots that are so highly polished you can see your face in them. The uniform came with the whale.

  Ciely is staring at the viewscreen. Her abbreviated khaki dress, faded from many washings, gives evidence from its tightness of the weight she has gained during her sojourn in the belly of the whale. “Are you going to come and see me after they put me in jail, Starfinder?”

  “No one’s going to put you in jail, Ciely. Everything’s been taken care of.”

  She doesn’t seem to hear him. “I’ll get life at least. And my mother and father will gloat. ‘Steal a ten-billion-dollar star-eel, will you?’ my father will say. ‘Well, you’re getting your just desserts.’ ”