Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (28 page)

CHRISTMAS IN GONDWANALAND
by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg
is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor (he was editor of the original anthology series
New Dimensions,
perhaps the most acclaimed anthology series of its era), Silverberg was one of the most influential figures of the Post New Wave era of the ’70s, and continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, plus SFWA’s prestigious Grand Master Award.

His novels include the acclaimed
Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born With The Dead, Shadrach In The Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’ Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, Mountains of Majipoor;
two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories
, Nightfall
and
The Ugly Little Boy; The Long Way Home,
and the mosaic novel,
Roma Eterna.
Recently published were a reprint of an early novel,
T
he Planet Killers;
a novel omnibus
, The Chalice of Death;
and a mystery novel
, Blood on the Mink.
His collections include
Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone,
six massive retrospective collections
—To Be Continued: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 1; To the Dark Star: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 2; Something Wild is Loose: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3; Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4; The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 5; Multiples: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 6; We Are For the Dark: the Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 7; Hot Times in Magma City: the Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 8—
as well as collections
Phases of the Moon: Stories from Six Decades,
and two collections of early work
, In the Beginning and Hunt the Space-Witch!.
His reprint anthologies are far too numerous to list here, but include
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One
and the distinguished
Alpha
series, among dozens of others. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.

Here’s another fast-moving Time Patrol story in which Manse Everard faces his most desperate challenge—keeping the Time Patrol itself from never having existed in the first place.

“You want
me to go
where
?” Manse Everard asked, astounded. He was not a man who astounded easily, not after all he had seen and done, the multitude of places and times he had visited.

“Gondwanaland,” said Daniel Ben-Eytan again.

Everard stared. “Right. That’s what I thought you said. But there isn’t any history to protect in Gondwanaland, except for the Founding Convocation itself, I suppose. There’s hardly even any
pre
-history. Therefore the Patrol has no work to do there, unless somebody has it in mind to launch an attack on the whole fabric of the time-line from start to—”

“Exactly,” Ben-Eytan said. “The whole fabric of the time-line is what’s in jeopardy.”

It was much too lovely a spring day in Paris to be hearing stuff like this, Everard thought. He had been there two days, now, laying the groundwork for what was going to be one of the great furloughs of his life—a couple of weeks in the glorious 1920s Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker and James Joyce. He had found himself a pleasant room in a lovely little hotel in the rue Jacob and had spent the two days strolling along the banks of the nearby Seine, checking out restaurants, peering admiringly at Notre Dame upstream and the Eiffel Tower down the other way, and reconnoitering all the famous Left Bank literary landmarks, the Dome and the Coupole and the Brasserie Lipp and the Deux Magots. Now he was sitting at one of the streetfront tables of the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, enjoying a mid-afternoon Pernod and watching the passing parade. The day was warm and mild, the sky a perfect blue, the air like champagne. Wanda Tamberley would be joining him here tomorrow, and the anticipatory thought of her slender blonde loveliness filled him with delight. Despite the gap of nearly forty years in their ages—and in the Patrol, how could you ever keep track of how old you really were, what with the constant skipping back and forth in time and the Danellian longevity treatments on top of that?—he had never known a woman who excited him as much as Wanda did, and that was saying quite a lot.

And then, out of the blue in the most literal way, materializing out of that champagne air, Daniel Ben-Eytan had descended upon him to tell him to forget about Paris, to forget about his holiday with Wanda, to forget about everything cheerful and pleasant and delightful, and get himself back in time some X or Y hundred million years to save the world from chaos.

Everard peered sourly at the stocky, swarthy little twenty-eighth-century Israeli. “You know, you could just as easily have dropped in on me at the
end
of my vacation instead of the beginning, Daniel. We would still be able to manage whatever it is that needs to be managed back there in the Cambrian. Showing up when you did is very goddamned linear-minded of you.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Ben-Eytan complacently. He was like that. “But this is when I arrived, didn’t I? They told me to get to work. And here I am. I’m mixed up in this thing, too. Also Spallanzani, Nakamura, Gonzalez. You know who I mean, yes? Yes. Of course you do. They’re already waiting at the headquarters that’s been set up. I wasn’t joking when I said the time-line’s in jeopardy. For Christ’s sake, Manse, buy me a drink, will you?”

“Very well. For Christ’s sake, if not for yours, you irritating bastard.” Everard signalled to a waiter. Just then a big, handsome kid with a little dark mustache, a youngster who might easily have been Hemingway, walked by down the street, no more than ten feet from where Everard and Eytan were sitting. He was accompanied by a smaller, fair-haired young man who quite probably was Scott Fitzgerald, and they were very deep in what looked like an exceedingly serious discussion. The Paris of the lost generation, yes! Everything right here within reach. Everard could gladly have throttled Ben-Eytan. Everard was something like sixty years old, or so he believed, and had been in the Patrol some thirty biochronological years, and he felt he was entitled to a little down-time.

This trip was supposed to have been something special. His annoyance at having it interrupted like this had nothing to do with dereliction of duty. No matter when he took off from his current location in time on this new job, he’d arrive in the remote past at the proper point. But the Israeli, annoyingly, had tracked him down right here and now. To tell them that he must go—
where
? And to do
what
?

“Gondwanaland’s a big place, and it covers a lot of time. Which region, which area?”

“Alpha Point,” said Ben-Eytan.

Everard gasped. “The Founding Convocation!”

“Indeed. What else?” They had been speaking in English, but suddenly the Israeli switched to Temporal, the synthetic language used by the Patrol, which could handle the grammatical niceties of time travel much more rationally. “A terrorist group out of A.D. 9999 or thereabouts—we aren’t really sure of their point of origin, but it’s somewhere early in the period of the Chorite Heresiarchy—has/will/had gone back to the start and wiped out the entire Founding Convocation. The Patrol’s extinct. It has been/will be snuffed out right at the source. Decapitated. Its best people removed at one stroke. Not only is it gone, it never existed.”

Suddenly Lost Generation Paris and all its delights, and the impending additional delight of Wanda’s arrival there, lost all appeal. The world turned colorless and two-dimensional, and Manse Everard sat numb, stunned, disbelieving what he had just heard. For a long moment he was unable to speak.

The waiter arrived with Ben-Eytan’s drink, absinthe on the rocks. As usual, Ben-Eytan had gone Everard one better, one-upping his Pernod with the stronger drink.

“Santé,” he said cheerfully, tilting his glass toward Everard.

“All right, already. Tell me,” Everard said.

“I can show you. We can hover over the camp—we don’t want to get too close; the toxic cloud may still be potent—and you can see for yourself. Everybody dead. All the organizers, Saltonstall, Schmidt, Kipminu, Greyl, Gan-Sekkant, every big name you can think of, gone with the trilobites, every last one of them, right on the second day of the Convocation.”

“The Danellians, too?”

“No, not them, so far as we can tell. They got themselves out ahead of the attack, or maybe they arranged not to show up in the first place. They always know how to look after themselves.”

“Naturally.”

“But everyone else who was there—gone. And the Patrol with them.”

Everard felt the Boulevard Saint-Germain heaving and swirling around him. This was dizzying news indeed. Incomprehensible, in fact.

Slowly he said, “If the Patrol’s gone, if it’s all been unhappened, then what are we doing here in Paris? Would Paris still exist, minus the Patrol? We
ourselves
shouldn’t still exist. Wouldn’t the elimination of the Patrol eliminate every single intervention that the Patrol has carried out since it was organized? Which would include everything along the time-line that led to my existence, and yours. Shouldn’t the history of the world be screwed up fifty thousand different ways?”

His own intervention to keep Carthage from destroying Rome, for example. His interference with the Mongol conquest of North America in the thirteenth-century. His rescue of Tom Nomura’s girlfriend back in the early Pliocene, just as the Mediterranean was getting born. Dozens, scores, hundreds of other missions—all negated? And he was just one of who knew how many Patrolmen who wandered the corridors of time seeing to it that the multitudes of malevolent time-travelers who delighted in meddling with the stream of history were prevented from doing the harm that they so eagerly yearned to do. If there never had been any Patrol, if all that harm had/would have taken place after all, the stream of history became a nightmarish cataract of chaotic contradictions, forever mutable, completely at the indifferent mercy of anyone who could lay his hands on a timecycle.

His head was spinning.

Ben-Eytan said, “The time-line is fluid, Manse. But also very resilient. You know that. Come on, man. By now you should live by Aleph-sub-Aleph logic with every breath you take.”

“Even so—”

“We exist and we don’t exist. You know that. Everything’s conditional, until the unhappening of the Convocation is permanently unhappened. And it will be. The time-line isn’t screwed up because you—and I, and Nakamura, and Gonzalez, and Spallanzani—are going to/have already fixed it. The Danellians know that, because they know everything, and so they know that we are the team that will/has done the job, and therefore they have chosen us to go back and repair things. So be it. And here I am. Here be we. Q.E.D.”

The good old deterministic loop, Everard thought. It will be done because it has been done because it must be done. He felt even dizzier. This was not the first time that Everard had been caught up in the paradoxical circularities of a universe in which two-way travel through time was freely and easily possible. He had long before given up trying to account for the higher mysteries of it, though he still could not resist the temptation to pick and gnaw at some of the stranger aspects.

Still, it didn’t sound right. It was too glib. It sounded like the sort of thing that an instructor would tell a bothersome trainee at the Academy to shut him up when it was necessary to get on with the day’s lesson. If the Patrol had been removed at its point of origin in the Cambrian, how could anything, anything at all, still be remotely the same here in twentieth-century Paris? That bothered him very much.

And also Ben-Eytan’s bland assurance that the problem wasn’t manifesting itself here because they had/would have already fixed it. So far as he was concerned, they
hadn’t
fixed it, not yet. Even when he tried to think it through in Temporal he knew something had to be fishy. Some part of his mind wanted to protest that
nothing
in the time-flow ever was permanent, that no event could ever be permanently and finally unhappened. Ben-Eytan had just said so himself.
The time-line is fluid. Everything’s conditional.
Whatever they went back to Gondwanaland to fix could just as quickly be unfixed all over again. The past, as that great writer Faulkner had so shrewdly said, is never dead. It’s not even past, he’d said. How, then, Everard asked himself, could he be certain of his own continued existence, and of the continued existence of everything he held to be real?