IGMS Issue 17

"Remember me, Wil Tibbits," Eleanor said just before taking that instantaneous wink into a distant future near a star that had no name. "Maybe I'll see you again at the end of time."

The likelihood of us running into one another again was negligible. There were simply too many stars.

And too many years.

Eleanor felt the need to correct me when, during the first day of our training on Mars, I mentioned something about how the Renkinns had made instantaneous travel possible.

"It isn't instantaneous," she said. "The Renkinn doesn't work that way."

"Of course it does," I replied. "It took no time between leaving Earth and arriving here."

That wasn't completely true. The trip from Earth orbit to Purcel station had taken a few hours, and then there was the delay of getting prepared for the wink, and the recovery time afterwards. But the wink itself had taken no apparent time whatsoever.

"It wasn't instantaneous," she repeated. "We were winking at light speed, and
time
," she asserted, "has a universal 'speed' of one second per second."

"Duh," I replied as though I didn't care. I just wanted to get under her so-superior skin.

"If . . . ," she went on, eager to belabor her trivial point, "
if
you had sent a message to Mars the instant we winked, that message would arrive on Mars at the same time as we did."

"Proving we spent no time in transit," I declared.

"We only
apparently
moved instantaneously," she shot back. "The rest of the universe is a few minutes older than us now."

"So what? For all practical purposes it's the same. Wink at Beijing and appear on Mons Olympus -- no time at all. Who cares about a minute or two? We've wasted more time than that talking about this."

Of the fifty applicants who met the criteria in the year I signed up, only a half dozen, including Eleanor, volunteered to accept the extreme physiological and mechanical modifications needed to interface with the Renkinns. The tiny number of altered recruits was barely enough to keep pace with the number of Renkinns being produced, and far fewer than those needed to support operations throughout the solar system.

Nearly instantaneous travel meant that interplanetary exploration was burgeoning. By time Eleanor and I entered the program, Renkinns were winking between every planet and dozens of moons. Only those hard-core pilots shuttling between solar system-wide locations suffered much loss of time, and few cared about the missing days or weeks. It didn't matter when most of the planets were never more than a day's wink apart.

It all seemed so simple then. Now I wonder if the price I've paid was worth seeing everyone I knew and loved disappear like chaff before the wind.

My first winks were pretty straightforward, carrying businessmen, engineers, andcolonists around the planets. They'd sit in shuttles that were lodged in clusters around the Renkinn like grapes on a vine, using those shuttles to reach their final destinations once we arrived planet-side.

The toll the Renkinn interface took on my body and the weeks it took to recover from each trip seemed like a small price to pay. I found a lot of interesting uses for the money and women who attached themselves to me, some of whom didn't even mind the modifications I had had.

Janet was one of them.

We met during one of my sailing trips down in the islands. She was nineteen and served as the cook on our boat. I was the captain, or at least that's how I fancied myself as I let others handle the sails and attend to the steering. Janet didn't seem to mind my augmentations and, after she discovered my love of fajitas, figured out how to prepare them seven different ways, flirting with me all the while.

We had a quickie wedding in Vegas.

I would have stopped winking when Janet got pregnant the first time, except she convinced me that we needed the money if we were going to raise our family properly.

"Let's do it just enough," she said, "until we can afford a house, maybe a nice car, and a few family vacations."

Wasn't that worth giving up a few weeks and months?

Except we could never seem to get ahead. The house required a lot of money to run, what with the cost of raising two girls who seemed to outgrow their clothing every other month, and the expensive parties Janet threw. Somehow the money seemed to dribble away.

Two years went by for me, more for Janet, who was now closer to my age than when we were cruising in the Caribbean. Our age difference become more of an issue when I had to do some cascade winks -- hopping from one location to another in a chain of winks that cost me several months of real time and weeks in the hospital afterwards.

I wanted to give up the winks, but Janet said we didn't have enough money yet. I thought the problem was solved when, a few months later, they increased my pay and included a double bonus for longer winks. I figured that in another subjective year I'd have enough to retire. I liked the idea of giving up winking and settling down with Janet and the two daughters that I'd hardly had time to know.

Janet figured otherwise. She said we needed more money, which led to a huge row that led to me living in a motel for a few days. Even after that, the argument simmered between us, neither of us willing to bend.