The Book of Feasts & Seasons Read online

  The meaning of life, and the purpose of the earth, is to give rise to all these experiments and events in the future, in order that the past, and the universe itself, should be created.

  All human religion, philosophy, and investigation into the meaning of life is, of course, carefully monitored and curtailed by the superior intelligences of the remote future and the distant stars so that these investigations do not create any events unforeseen or that might derail the established self-creating past and future.

  Why, you may wonder, are science fiction writers aware of the true meaning of life, when men of much greater genius and spiritual stature, thinkers and philosophers and theologians, are kept in ignorance of this great truth?

  It is not due to any cruelty or love of irony by the superior races of the later eras, but merely to the fact that Wells and Stapledon first stumbled across the secret, and their published results were taken as fiction by unbelieving editors and an incredulous public.

  We can be safely told, because no one will believe us.

  That is the dreadful secret revealed to me by Mr. Ellison. Naturally, I would not have believed so fantastical a tale had I not seen the time machine with my own eyes.

  Even then I was skeptical. The names he whispered, Sise-Neg, Padway, and Crane, I recognized from stories by Alfred Bester or L Sprague de Camp. The time agents of Nexx I recognized from a book by Keith Laumer. So I laughed and demanded that Mr. Ellison confess he was merely having me on. Surely it was a jest! It was not as if these science fiction writers had any sort of records or unpublished manuscripts from Wells or Stapledon that they mined for names or ideas, or that they used the time machine themselves.

  He fixed me with his bloodshot eyes and assured me it was merely a joke he was having at my expense.

  Nothing else could have so completely convinced me of the utter and horrific truth of what he revealed. Suddenly the closeness of the basement, the rusted and angular shape of the Wells time machine sitting under its cobwebs seemed stifling and oppressive. My head was pounding with drink and whirling with dread. I pushed myself free from Ellison, and ran up the crooked stairs, flung myself out into the cool midnight air, staggering and breathing in deep gulps.

  Behind me, there came a flare of red-gold brilliance, brighter than the glare of electricity, flashing through the basement windows and throwing blood-colored wedges of light across the lawn. With horror the words and the warning returned to me. Ellison had said — practically his last words! — that any attempt to investigate these matters would bring instant retaliation from the stars or from our own remote future, deadly retaliation from beings willing to do anything needed to preserve their own existence, and the existence of the sidereal universe.

  Back I ran, down the stairs and to the door. As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor. Harlan Ellison was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment – a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The time machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the basement was empty. A pane of the basement windows had, apparently, just been blown in.

  One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times.

  Or was what I had seen the operation of some fantastic weapon operated by intelligences vast and cool and unsympathetic from some remote location on the moon or beyond Arcturus, set merely to obliterate anyone attempting to operate the forbidden machine?

  The meaning of life, it seems, is not something about which is safe for living men to inquire.

  And yet I still have, drawn in a few, short, clear strokes in a bar napkin, the diagram for building a time machine of my own. While I sit and type these words, I can hear my children playing downstairs, and I can see the sunlight shining through my study windows, and I rejoice in the goodness of life. It is only at midnight, when no one is near, that I take out the napkin, study the diagram, and vow to myself that someday I must plumb the secrets of time. Perhaps my actions are ones the universe will require to bring the universe into being? Perhaps the star beings will spare me?

  Perhaps I, I, will be allowed to see what other eyes have never looked upon? It that not worth any risk? Surely it was not for no reason this diagram on this stained napkin came into my hands!

  Always, I remind myself of my wife and children and tell myself to burn the diagram.

  And always, with trembling fingers, I fold the withered napkin carefully and replace it in my wallet.

  Queen of the Tyrant Lizards

  Epiphany

  There was no time. That is the first thing to remember. I did not know what was about to happen. That is the second thing to remember.

  Imagine a time line. Select a zero point. To one side is an infinity of tomorrow, starting with positive one. To the other is an infinity of yesterday, starting with negative one. But between the positive and the negative infinities, what is there? Less than nothing, less than half of nothing, a pinprick, a dot, a point, less time than it takes to decide to murder them all.

  I look into the first moment of negative one: one second ago.

  Imagine a frozen moment. The glass of the chapel doors is breaking. Men in tall white hoods carrying shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles are firing. The guests are screaming, falling to the floor. And you, my love, have thrown your tall, strong body over mine, selflessly, lovingly, without a moment to think, without a moment to decide. I am feeling your body shuddering, though not with passion as you embrace me. I yield to your embrace, and then we are falling; you shudder with the impact of bullets and buckshot throwing your blood, your living blood, your warmth, in sprays like Rorschach blots across the dark expanse of the expensive tuxedo I picked out, the dark expanse of your warm skin, and across the white satin of my wedding dress, the dress my many mothers sewed.

  I cannot see you as you die. You are on top of me, crushing me beneath your weight. But I see the flower girl, the preacher's daughter, with her little pink pillow falling, her little face that will never grow any older, never see her own wedding day. She is falling, and the gold ring not on your finger is flying in the air, catching the beam of sunlight from the broken stained glass window, the one showing Christ turning water into blood-red wine.

  My ring is on my finger, a perfect unmarred circle of gold. A ring is like eternity, like the eternal, infinite return of the cosmos from Big Bang to the Eschaton, from Creation to Big Crunch. It is supposed to be as eternal as a vow of love. It is shaped like a zero.

  Imagine a zero moment. For all the seconds of the weeks and months before zero, the negative of time, I can see when we met on the bus, when we spoke, when I asked you why you sat in the back, when you smiled, when you touched my hand to help me down the steps at our bus stop in Atlanta and the driver scowled at you, a look of hatred. During all those seconds, my happiness was complete.

  During all that time, during my exile from time, I did not know what was about to happen.

  Next comes the zero moment itself: You have placed the white gold wedding band on my pale white finger, but I have not yet done the same to you. I have said the words, the two little words no bride can take back if she says them.

  I do.

  But the preacher it took us so long to find, to find someone willing to marry us, he has not turned and asked you yet.

  So I am an uncertain bride. The probability wave has not collapsed. I am in the zero between fiance and wife.

  You are an uncertain bridegroom. I thought it was cute that you were nervous. Ha
d I only known the reason for your fear! Why did I select this time for my exile?

  Right next door to the chapel is the hall where the State Democrat Party is having its meeting. There is a big smiling poster of Bull Connor, their national committee chair, hanging over the front door. He is the commissioner for safety. The men in white hoods had come out of the meeting hall with their hunting rifles tucked under their arms. These are not elephant guns, but smaller caliber weapons, not something that could penetrate the hide of a rhino or a charging elephant. That is the third thing to remember. It was the reason why I do what I will do, here in the zero moment, here in eternity. Part of the reason.

  All seconds after the zero is nothing but horror and pain and loss. The change is that sudden. Heaven is hell.

  I look farther back, when first we met.

  I ask 'May I sit here?' And you say 'Please.' That is also the last thing you ever say in life to the man raising a gun. Please.

  I remember you saying, 'Why would a time traveler take a bus?' And I tried to explain about how hard it was to get a license when your birth is a probability cloud stretched between many timelines, how hard it is to operate machines that neither speak nor listen to commands. "But you know how to drive your Time Machine, right? You have a Time Machine?"

  “If you are thinking of a thing with a saddle and the sweep of years flashing by like a film in fast motion, or a blue box like a telephone booth, no, nothing like that."

  I tried to explain about the zero point, the place a scientist would call the probability wave of the universe before the Big Bang, the moment when all matter and energy, but also all mind and thought, all time and space, were gathered into one knot, smaller than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom. It contains all probability and no actuality. More than one possible universe can issue forth from the moment before time begins, and in one of them, time travel is possible. Life is possible.

  What is life? Ah, my poor, poor beloved, my poor innocent three-dimensional perfect man, my prince, my everything, you who are trapped in one worm-like line of cause and effect, always going forward at one second per second, with no turn offs, no take backs, no way to undo a decision, no way to undo saying “I do.”

  I know what life is. I can never explain it to you.

  Life is the intersectional membrane where eternity touches the continuum. That is why matter only can ever operate by cause and effect, like a row of dominoes toppling, whereas living things, every stop along the chain of evolution, reaching back to the first single celled amoeba, can perform the act of anticipation. And what is anticipation? It is to act outside normal cause and effect, react to things before they happen. All life, even the humble one-celled organism, can see far enough into the future to move away from what endangers it and toward what feeds it.

  Amoebas never murder other amoebas. Amoebas never kill themselves. They are too simple. But even they, humble as they are, are touched by eternity.

  I could explain the science behind it, talk about the nested interaction of probability waves, how time at the submicroscopic level is symmetrical forward and backward: but pretend instead that you live in a world of magic.

  Life is a miracle.

  Life remembers that moment before time began, that zero point before this universe started and after the previous version of this universe collapsed inward on itself, a cosmos crushed into a pinpoint.

  And what of my life? The life of time travel? I am the one who had the memory of that moment thrust upon her. Why me? Why am I the one worm who grew butterfly wings and soared into the eleven dimensions? That answer is complex, and does not concern us now.

  My cosmos is crushed into a pinpoint as I see my love die. I am his wife; here is the ring on my finger; but he is not my husband. His ring is in midair, impaled on a sunbeam from a shattered image of the Virgin Mary saying that all the wine is gone. All gone.

  I look in the past direction, and I remember our talk on that long bus ride. You are well read, and wanted to make something of yourself. You were studying paleontology. You said the ancient beasts were monsters of legend, but real.

  The talk turned to mythology. I remember you saying, 'But why would the moon goddess love Endymion? All he can do is sleep.'

  'Yes, but it is eternal sleep, so he never dies,' I say.

  You shake your head and smile that handsome smile. 'But he never knows her. He is never awake.'

  I whisper then that if she knows he lives, it is enough.

  Why did I select this time for my exile? It was not a hard question: earlier eras did not have the conveniences of modern life, no cool air at the push of a button when it was hot, no electric lights when it was dark, no aspirin for pain, and no anesthesia for childbirth.

  Why no farther in the future you might ask, when everyone is driving flying cars and rockets to cities on the moon? My love, I will not crush your hopes, but that future does not ever come.

  Instead, the farther you go away from the zero point between Postwar America and Pre-Jihad America, what you find is more riots, more dirt, more diseases without cures, atomics used as a fashion statement to advertise religious or political points of view, and no one able to travel or buy without paperwork and identity chips. So many cameras, and so many computers tracking your every move. A woman with no birth certificate cannot travel freely, and I won't wear a veil while walking through the bad section of town.

  The laws against discrimination close all chapels and synagogues. No one tips his hat to a lady. No one holds the door for me. And the music, the pornography, the swearing, the crudeness, the loutishness, all of it gets worse and worse.

  Why did the men of this generation throw everything away? This is the highest point of civilization out of all history. I know. I've looked.

  But even here, there is hatred and violence and death. You would think they would love this nation and this era so much they would never raise their bloodstained hands against each other. But sometimes hate overwhelms love.

  Look farther back into the negative direction, the past. There I am in the Fortress of Limbo with my mothers. She is me, an older version, the me that gives birth to me. She is the other time travelers. I am the only time traveler there is; they are all me. One is dressed in a snappy Nazi uniform of the women's auxiliary, a cigarette in a hold in her shining black leather glove. The next is dressed in the floral skirts and wide brimmed straw hat of a Southern Belle, and girls waiting on her are mulatto, half-negresses, and they are both her slaves and her half sisters. Another version of me is dressed in the colors of Lady Baltimore, and she looks disdainfully at the slaves, since, in her timeline, the British Empire abolished the institution after the Southern Colonies attempted a second rebellion no more successful than the first.

  One problem with being a time traveler is sometimes you do not get along with yourselves.

  The Fortress is round and lucent as a pearl, and hangs in space among a belt of asteroids in a version as remote as we can possibly reach, the one where Earth never formed. In the center is a smaller pearl, this one made of thinking crystal, and it shows a fourth dimensional representation of the eleven dimensional map of time.

  Everyone of me, at some point, is given The Talk. Mine came when I was young. I had only made one or two short hops, once to step on a butterfly in the dinosaur age so that Reagan would win an election and win the Cold War. The other was to drop a kitchen magnet on a dirt road in the backwoods for a little boy to find. Playing with the idly found magnet would lead to a lifelong passion for science, and the boy would later grow up to be the greatest inventor of all time, and this leads to the defeat of Sorainya of Gyronch, a version of me I did not like at all. Maybe that is what brings me to the Fortress of Limbo for The Talk.

  After being told the usual gross stuff about birds and bees and incest, about giving birth to myself and marrying my own son, Lazarus, the topic of destroying worlds comes up.

  One of my mothers, Sorainya of Roma, points to a fork in time. “Here is the d
ecision point,” says she, grey-haired, severe, dressed in the robes of the Vestal Order. “In this branch you create a paradox that destroys one of the six hundred and sixty six timelines. In the other…”

  I say, “And if I foreswear time travel utterly? Agree never to use it for any purpose whatsoever? I am weary of being a puppet pulling on my own strings, of always knowing what comes next, what I will do next.”

  She says, “That creates a Schrödinger's Cat cloud, a zero point of uncertainty, from which our foretelling sees two possible results: you will behold a man murdered before your eyes, and be tempted, but will resist, and will let him die. After a long monolinear life, the danger point will pass, and you will be raised against to be one of us, a sister among sisters. The other is that you will turn time back to slay his slayers, and set in motion paradoxes beyond what we can smother.”

  Her eyes narrow dangerously, and I recall that they feed fighting slaves to the gladiatorial circus in her world, and hang traitors on crosses to die in the sun.

  “If you select the second option, if you use your power, you earn the ultimate penalty. We will retroactively eliminate you from the moment of your conception."

  The Nazi version of me, Sorainya of the Reich, adds coolly, “This conversation will never have taken place, and there will be no guilt on the conscience of the Sisterhood, because we will have forgotten as well. We have no record of ever imposing this penalty on any of us before. How could we?”

  A version of me from the timeline where the Agrarian Revolution never took root is dressed like a cavegirl in the tanned skins of the Red Elk. Now she speaks. What her world lacks in tools and machines, it more than makes up for in wisdom: “Either hate overcomes love, or love overcomes hate. That is the only decision to be made.”

  I say, “What do I care if some monolinear worm lives or dies?” We call normal people worms because they can never break out of their own personal time, never move faster than the inchwormish one second per second. And from the viewpoint of the timelessness, you sort of look like that.