The Time Traveler's Almanac (183 page)

“All those years … all those years. I went through hell in high school, you know. I was the only girl in my class who didn’t have a date for the prom. So where were you then, huh? While I was sitting alone at home, crying my goddamn eyes out? How about all those Saturday nights I spent washing my hair? And even worse, those nights I worked at Hastings’ Bar serving drinks to salesmen pretending they don’t have wives. Why couldn’t you have been around then, when I needed you?”

“Well, I’ve only got the first five pages of the manual…” He walked over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. She didn’t move away. He gently pulled her closer to him. She didn’t resist. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m a real zarkhead. I’ve made a mess of everything. You’re happily married, you never wrote the story … I’ll just go back where I came from, and none of this will have ever happened.”

“Who said I was happy?”

“But you just got married.”

She pushed him away. “I got married because I’m thirty years old and figured I’d never have another chance. People do that, you know. They reach a certain age and they figure it’s now or never … Damn you! If only you’d come when you were supposed to!”

“You’re thirty? Matrix, in half an hour you’ve gone from a toddler to someone older than me.” He saw the expression on her face, and mumbled an apology.

“Look,” she said. “You’re gonna have to go. My husband’ll be back any minute.”

“I know I have to leave. But the trouble is, that drebbing story was true! I took one look at your photo, and I knew that I loved you and I always had. Always. That’s the way time works, you see. And even if this whole thing vanishes as the result of some paradox, I swear to you I won’t forget. Somewhere there’s a point in space that belongs to us. I know it.” He turned to go. “Good-bye Cecily.”

“Alan, wait! That point in space – I want to go there. Isn’t there anything we can do? I mean, you’ve got a time machine, after all.”

What an idiot, he thought. The solution’s been staring me in the face and I’ve been too blind to see it. “The machine!” He ran down the front porch steps and turned around to see her standing in the doorway. “I’ll see you later,” he told her. He knew it was a ridiculous thing to say the minute he’d said it. What he meant was, “I’ll see you earlier.”

*   *   *

Five men sat together inside a tent made of animal hide. The land of their fathers was under threat, and they met in council to discuss the problem. The one called Swiftly Running Stream advocated war, but Foot Of The Crow was more cautious. “The paleface is too great in number, and his weapons give him an unfair advantage.” Flying Bird suggested that they smoke before speaking further.

Black Elk took the pipe into his mouth. He closed his eyes for a moment and declared that the Great Spirit would give them a sign if they were meant to go to war. As soon as he said the word, “war”, a paleface materialised among them. They all saw him. The white man’s body was covered in a strange bright garment such as they had never seen, and he rode a fleshless horse with silver bones. The vision vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving them with this message to ponder:
Oops.

*   *   *

There was no one home, so he waited on the porch. It was a beautiful day, with a gentle breeze that carried the scent of roses: certainly better than that smoke-filled teepee.

A woman appeared in the distance. He wondered if that was her. But then he saw that it couldn’t be, the woman’s walk was strange and her body was misshapen. She’s pregnant, he realised. It was a common thing in the days of overpopulation, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a pregnant woman back home – it must have been years. She looked at him questioningly as she waddled up the steps balancing two paper bags. Alan thought the woman looked familiar; he knew that face. He reached out to help her.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m looking for Cecily Walker.”

“My name’s Walker,” the woman told him. “But I don’t know any Cecily.”

Matrix, what a moron, Alan thought, wanting to kick himself. Of course he knew the woman; it was Cecily’s mother, and if she was pregnant, it had to be 1948. “My mistake,” he told her. “It’s been a long day.”

*   *   *

The smell of roses had vanished, along with the leaves on the trees. There was snow on the ground and a strong northeasterly wind. Alan set the thermostat on his jumpsuit accordingly and jumped off the bike.

“So it’s you again,” Cecily said ironically. “Another case of perfect timing.” She was twenty pounds heavier and there were lines around her mouth and her eyes. She wore a heavy wool cardigan sweater over an oversized tee-shirt, jeans, and a pair of fuzzy slippers. She looked him up and down. “You don’t age at all, do you?”

“Please can I come in? It’s freezing.”

“Yeah, yeah. Come in. You like a cup of coffee?”

“You mean liquid caffeine? That’d be great.”

He followed her into the living room and his mouth dropped open. The red sofa was gone, replaced by something that looked like a giant banana. The television was four times bigger and had lost the rabbit-ears. The floral wallpaper had been replaced by plain white walls not very different from those of his apartment. “Sit,” she told him. She left the room for a moment and returned with two mugs, one of which she slammed down in front of him, causing a miniature brown tidal wave to splash across his legs.

“Cecily, are you upset about something?”

“That’s a good one! He comes back after fifteen years and asks me if I’m upset.”

“Fifteen years!” Alan sputtered.

“That’s right. It’s 1994, you bozo.”

“Oh darling, and you’ve been waiting all this time…”

“Like hell I have,” she interrupted. “When I met you, back in 1979, I realised that I couldn’t stay in that sham of a marriage for another minute. So I must have set some kind of a record for quickie marriage and divorce, by Danville standards, anyway. So I was a thirty-year-old divorcee whose marriage had fallen apart in less than two months, and I was back to washing my hair alone on Saturday nights. And people talked. Lord, how they talked. But I didn’t care, because I’d finally met my soul-mate and everything was going to be all right. He told me he’d fix it. He’d be back. So I waited. I waited for a year. Then I waited two years. Then I waited three. After ten, I got tired of waiting. And if you think I’m going through another divorce, you’re crazy.”

“You mean you’re married again?”

“What else was I supposed to do? A man wants you when you’re forty, you jump at it. As far as I knew, you were gone forever.”

“I’ve never been away, Cecily. I’ve been here all along, but never at the right time. It’s that drebbing machine; I can’t figure out the controls.”

“Maybe Arnie can have a look at it when he gets in, he’s pretty good at that sort of thing – what am I saying?”

“Tell me, did you ever write the story?”

“What’s to write about? Anyway, what difference does it make?
Woman’s Secrets
went bankrupt years ago.”

“Matrix! If you never wrote the story, then I shouldn’t even know about you. So how can I be here? Dammit, it’s a paradox. And I wasn’t supposed to cause any of those. Plus, I think I may have started an Indian war. Have you noticed any change in local history?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Look, I have an idea. When exactly did you get divorced?”

“I don’t know, late ’79. October, November, something like that.”

“All right, that’s what I’ll aim for. November, 1979. Be waiting for me.”

“How?”

“Good point. Okay, just take my word for it, you and me are going to be sitting in this room right here, right now, with one big difference: we’ll have been married for fifteen years, okay?”

“But what about Arnie?”

“Arnie won’t know the difference. You’ll never have married him in the first place.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be back in a minute. Well, in 1979. You know what I mean.” He headed for the door.

“Hold on,” she said. “You’re like the guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and doesn’t come back for thirty years.”

“What guy?”

“Never mind. I wanna make sure you don’t turn up anywhere else. Bring the machine in here.”

“Is that it?” she said one minute later.

“That’s it.”

“But it looks like a goddamn bicycle.”

“Where do you want me to put it?”

She led him upstairs. “Here,” she said. Alan unfolded the bike next to the bed. “I don’t want you getting away from me next time,” she told him.

“I don’t have to get away from you now.”

“You do. I’m married and I’m at least fifteen years older than you.”

“Your age doesn’t matter to me,” Alan told her. “When I first fell in love with you, you’d been dead three hundred years.”

“You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you? Anyway, don’t aim for ’79. I don’t understand paradoxes, but I know I don’t like them. If we’re ever gonna get this thing straightened out, you must arrive before 1973, when the story is meant to be published. Try for ’71 or ’72. Now that I think about it, those were a strange couple of years for me. Nothing seemed real to me then. Nothing seemed worth bothering about, nothing mattered; I always felt like I was waiting for something. Day after day I waited, though I never knew what for.”

She stepped back and watched him slowly turn a dial until he vanished. Then she remembered something.

How could she ever have forgotten such a thing? She was eleven and she was combing her hair in front of her bedroom mirror. She screamed. When both her parents burst into the room and demanded to know what was wrong, she told them she’d seen a man on a bicycle. They nearly sent her to a child psychiatrist.

Damn that Alan, she thought. He’s screwed up again.

*   *   *

The same room, different decor, different time of day. Alan blinked several times; his eyes had difficulty adjusting to the darkness. He could barely make out the shape on the bed, but he could see all he needed to. The shape was alone, and it was adult size. He leaned close to her ear. “Cecily,” he whispered. “It’s me.” He touched her shoulder and shook her slightly. He felt for a pulse.

He switched on the bedside lamp. He gazed down at a withered face framed by silver hair, and sighed. “Sorry, love,” he said. He covered her head with a sheet, and sighed again.

He sat down on the bike and unfolded the printout. He’d get it right eventually.

IF EVER I SHOULD LEAVE YOU

Pamela Sargent

Pamela Sargent is an American writer who has won the Nebula and Locus awards, been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, and Sidewise Award, and was honored in 2012 with the Pilgrim Award, given for lifetime achievement in science fiction and fantasy scholarship by the Science Fiction Research Association. She has written many novels including
Cloned Lives, Eye of the Comet, Homesmind, Alien Child,
and
The Shore of Women.
Her short fiction has appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, New Worlds, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, Universe,
and
Nature,
among others. “If Ever I Should Leave You” was first published in a much different form in
Worlds of If,
February 1974, and in this preferred text in
Afterlives,
edited by Pamela Sargent and Ian Watson, Vintage, 1986.

When Yuri walked away from the Time Station for the last time, his face was pale marble, his body only bones barely held together by skin and the weak muscles he had left. I hurried to him and grasped his arm, oblivious to the people who passed us in the street. He resisted my touch at first, embarrassed in front of the others; then he gave in and leaned against me as we began to walk home.

I knew that he was too weak to go to the Time Station again. His body, resting against mine, seemed almost weightless. I guided him through the park toward our home. Halfway there, he tugged at my arm and we rested against one of the crystalline trees surrounding the small lake in the center of the park.

Yuri had aged rapidly in the last six months, transformed from a young man into an aged creature hardly able to walk by himself. I had expected it. One cannot hold off old age indefinitely, even now. But I could not accept it. I knew that his death could be no more than days away.

You can’t leave me now, not after all this time, I wanted to scream. Instead, I helped him sit on the ground next to the tree, then sat at his side.

His blue eyes, once clear and bright, now watery with age and surrounded by tiny lines, watched me. He reached inside his shirt and fumbled for something. I had always teased Yuri about his shirts: sooner or later he would tear them along the shoulder seams while flexing the muscles of his broad back and sturdy arms. Now the shirt, like his skin, hung on his bones in wrinkles and folds. At last he pulled out a piece of paper and pressed it into my hand with trembling fingers.

“Take care of this,” he whispered to me. “Copy it down in several places so you won’t lose it. All the coordinates are there, all the places and times I went to these past months. When you’re lonely, when you need me, go to the Time Station and I’ll be waiting on the other side.” He was trying to comfort me. Because of his concern, he had gone to the Time Station every day for the past six months and had traveled to various points in the past. I could travel to any of those points and be with him at those times. It suddenly struck me as a mad idea, an insane and desperate thing.

“What happens to me?” I asked, clutching the paper. “What am I like when I see you? You’ve already seen me at all those times. What do I do, what happens to me?”

“I can’t tell you, you know that. You have to decide for yourself. Anything I say might affect what you do.”

I looked away from him and toward the lake. Two golden swans glided by, the water barely rippling in their wake. Their shapes blurred and I realized I was crying silently. Yuri’s blue-veined hand rested on my shoulder.

“Don’t cry. Please. You make it harder for me.”

At last the tears stopped. I reached over and stroked his hair, once thick and blond, now thin and white. Only a year before we had come to this same tree, our bodies shiny with lake water after a moonlight swim, and made love in the darkness. We were as young as everyone else, confident that we would live forever, forgetting that our bodies could not be rejuvenated indefinitely.