Timeline (17 page)

Chris said, “Professor Johnston has been there three days?”

“That’s right.”

“Who do the locals think he is?”

“We don’t know,” Gomez said. “We don’t know why he left the machine in the first place. He must have had a reason. But since he is in the world, the simplest thing for him would be to pose as a clerk or scholar from London, on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Sainte-Mère is on the pilgrimage route, and it is not unusual for pilgrims to break their trip, to stay a day or a week, especially if they strike up a friendship with the Abbot, who is quite a character. The Professor may have done that. Or he may not. We just don’t know.”

“But wait a minute,” Chris Hughes said. “Won’t his presence there change the local history? Won’t he influence the outcome of events?”

“No. He won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he can’t.”

“But what about the time paradoxes?”

“Time paradoxes?”

“That’s right,” Stern said. “You know, like going back in time and killing your grandfather, so that you can’t be born and couldn’t go back and kill your grandfather—”

“Oh, that.” She shook her head impatiently. “There are no time paradoxes.”

“What do you mean? Of course there are.”

“No, there aren’t,” came a firm voice behind them. They turned; Doniger was there. “Time paradoxes do not occur.”

:

“What do you mean?” Stern said. He was feeling put out that his question had been so roughly treated.

“The so-called time paradoxes,” Doniger said, “do not really involve time. They involve ideas about history that are seductive but wrong. Seductive, because they flatter you into thinking you can have an impact on the course of events. And wrong, because of course, you can’t.”

“You can’t have an impact on events?”

“No.”

“Of course you can.”

“No. You can’t. It’s easiest to see if you take a contemporary example. Say you go to a baseball game. The Yankees and the Mets — the Yankees are going to win, obviously. You want to change the outcome so that the Mets win. What can you do? You’re just one person in a crowd. If you try to go to the dugout, you will be stopped. If you try to go onto the field, you will be hauled away. Most ordinary actions available to you will end in failure and will not alter the outcome of the game.

“Let’s say you choose a more extreme action: you’ll shoot the Yankee pitcher. But the minute you pull a gun, you are likely to be overpowered by nearby fans. Even if you get off a shot, you’ll almost certainly miss. And even if you succeed in hitting the pitcher, what is the result? Another pitcher will take his place. And the Yankees will win the game.

“Let’s say you choose an even more extreme action. You will release a nerve gas and kill everyone in the stadium. Once again, you’re unlikely to succeed, for all the reasons you’re unlikely to get a shot off. But even if you do manage to kill everybody, you still have not changed the outcome of the game. You may argue that you have pushed history in another direction — and perhaps so — but you haven’t enabled the Mets to win the game. In reality, there is nothing you can do to make the Mets win. You remain what you always were: a spectator.

“And this same principle applies to the great majority of historical circumstances. A single person can do little to alter events in any meaningful way. Of course, great masses of people can ‘change the course of history.’ But one person? No.”

“Maybe so,” Stern said, “but I can kill my grandfather. And if he’s dead then I couldn’t be born, so I would not exist, and therefore I couldn’t have shot him. And that’s a paradox.”

“Yes, it is — assuming you actually kill your grandfather. But that may prove difficult in practice. So many things go wrong in life. You may not meet up with him at the right time. You may be hit by a bus on your way. Or you may fall in love. You may be arrested by the police. You may kill him too late, after your parent has already been conceived. Or you may come face to face with him, and find you can’t pull the trigger.”

“But in theory . . .”

“When we are dealing with history, theories are worthless,” Doniger said with a contemptuous wave. “A theory is only valuable if it has the ability to predict future outcomes. But history is the record of human action — and no theory can predict human action.”

He rubbed his hands together.

“Now then. Shall we end all this speculation and be on our way?”

There were murmurs from the others.

Stern cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t think I’m going.”

:

Marek had been expecting it. He’d watched Stern during the briefing, noticing the way he kept shifting in his chair, as if he couldn’t get comfortable. Stern’s anxiety had been steadily growing ever since the tour began.

Marek himself had no doubts about going. Since his youth, he had lived and breathed the medieval world, imagining himself in Warburg and Carcassonne, Avignon and Milan. He had joined the Welsh wars with Edward I. He had seen the burghers of Calais give up their city, and he had attended the Champagne Fairs. He had lived at the splendid courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Duc de Berry. Marek was going to take this trip, no matter what. As for Stern—

“I’m sorry,” Stern was saying, “but this isn’t my affair. I only signed on to the Professor’s team because my girlfriend was going to summer school in Toulouse. I’m not a historian. I’m a scientist. And anyway, I don’t think it’s safe.”

Doniger said, “You don’t think the machines are safe?”

“No, the place. The year 1357. There was civil war in France after Poitiers. Free companies of soldiers pillaging the countryside. Bandits, cutthroats, lawlessness everywhere.”

Marek nodded. If anything, Stern was understating the situation. The fourteenth century was a vanished world, and a dangerous one. It was a religious world; most people went to church at least once a day. But it was an incredibly violent world, where invading armies killed everyone, where women and children were routinely hacked to death, where pregnant women were eviscerated for sport. It was a world that gave lip service to the ideals of chivalry while indiscriminately pillaging and murdering, where women were imagined to be powerless and delicate, yet they ruled fortunes, commanded castles, took lovers at will and plotted assassination and rebellion. It was a world of shifting boundaries and shifting allegiances, often changing from one day to the next. It was a world of death, of sweeping plagues, of disease, of constant warfare.

Gordon said to Stern, “I certainly wouldn’t want to force you.”

“But remember,” Doniger said, “you won’t be alone. We’ll be sending escorts with you.”

“I’m sorry,” Stern kept saying. “I’m sorry.”

Finally Marek said, “Let him stay. He’s right. It’s not his period, and it’s not his affair.”

“Now that you mention it,” Chris said, “I’ve been thinking: It’s not my period, either. I’m much more late thirteenth than true fourteenth century. Maybe I should stay with David—”

“Forget it,” Marek said, throwing an arm over Chris’s shoulder. “You’ll be fine.” Marek treated it like a joke, even though he knew Chris wasn’t exactly joking.

Not exactly.

The room was cold. Chilly mist covered their feet and ankles. They left ripples in the mist as they walked toward the machines.

Four cages had been linked together at the bases, and a fifth cage stood by itself. Baretto said, “That’s mine,” and stepped into the single cage. He stood erect, staring forward, waiting.

Susan Gomez stepped into one of the clustered cages, and said, “The rest of you come with me.” Marek, Kate and Chris climbed into the cages next to her. The machines seemed to be on springs; they rocked slightly as each got on.

“Everybody all set?”

The others murmured, nodded.

Baretto said, “Ladies first.”

“You got that right,” Gomez said. There didn’t seem to be any love lost between them. “Okay,” she said to the others. “We’re off.”

Chris’s heart began to pound. He felt light-headed and panicky. He balled his hands into fists.

Gomez said, “Relax. I think you’ll find it’s quite enjoyable.” She slipped the ceramic into the slot at her feet, and stood back up.

“Here we go. Remember: everyone very still when the time comes.”

The machines began to hum. Chris felt a slight vibration in the base, beneath his feet. The humming of the machines grew louder. The mist swirled away from the bases of the machines. The machines began to creak and squeal, as if metal was being twisted. The sound built quickly, until it was as steady and loud as a scream.

“That’s from the liquid helium,” Gomez said. “Chilling the metal to superconduction temperatures.”

Abruptly, the screaming ended and the chattering sound began.

“Infrared clearance,” she said. “This is it.”

Chris felt his whole body begin to tremble involuntarily. He tried to control it, but his legs were shaking. He had a moment of panic — maybe he should call it off — but then he heard a recorded voice say, “Stand still — eyes open—”

Too late, he thought. Too late.

“—deep breath — hold it. . . . Now!”

The circular ring descended from above his head, moving swiftly to his feet. It clicked as it touched the base. And a moment later, there was a blinding flash of light — brighter than the sun — coming from all around him — but he felt nothing at all. In fact, he had a sudden strange sense of cold detachment, as if he were now observing a distant scene.

The world around him was completely, utterly silent.

He saw Baretto’s nearby machine was growing larger, starting to loom over him. Baretto, a giant, his huge face with monstrous pores, was bending over, looking down at them.

More flashes.

As Baretto’s machine grew larger, it also appeared to move away from them, revealing a widening expanse of floor: a vast plain of dark rubber floor, stretching away into the distance.

More flashes.

The rubber floor had a pattern of raised circles. Now these circles began to rise up around them like black cliffs. Soon the black cliffs had grown so high that they seemed like black skyscrapers, joining overhead, closing off the light above. Finally, the skyscrapers touched one another, and the world was dark.

More flashes.

They sank into inky blackness for a moment before he distinguished flickering pinpoints of light, arranged in a gridlike pattern, stretching away in all directions. It was as if they were inside some enormous glowing crystalline structure. As Chris watched, the points of light grew brighter and larger, their edges blurring, until each became a fuzzy glowing ball. He wondered if these were atoms.

He could no longer see the grid, just a few nearby balls. His cage moved directly toward one glowing ball, which appeared to be pulsing, changing its shape in flickering patterns.

Then they were inside the ball, immersed in a bright glowing fog that seemed to throb with energy.

And then the glow faded, and was gone.

They hung in featureless blackness. Nothing.

Blackness.

But then he saw that they were still sinking downward, now heading toward the churning surface of a black ocean in a black night. The ocean whipped and boiled, making a frothy blue-tinged foam. As they descended to the surface, the foam grew larger. Chris saw that one bubble in particular had an especially bright blue glow.

His machine moved toward that glow at accelerating speed, flying faster and faster, and he had the odd sensation that they were going to crash in the foam, and then they entered the bubble and he heard a loud piercing shriek.

Then silence.

Darkness.

Nothing.

In the control room, David Stern watched the flashes on the rubber floor become smaller and weaker, and finally vanish entirely. The machines were gone. The technicians immediately turned to Baretto and began his transmission countdown.

But Stern kept staring at the spot in the rubber floor where Chris and the others had been.

“And where are they now?” he asked Gordon.

“Oh, they’ve arrived now,” Gordon said. “They are there now.”

“They’ve been rebuilt?”

“Yes.”

“Without a fax machine at the other end.”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me why,” Stern said. “Tell me the details the others didn’t need to be bothered with.”

“All right,” Gordon said. “It isn’t anything bad. I just thought the others might find it, well, disturbing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Let’s go back,” Gordon said, “to the interference patterns, which you remember showed us that other universes can affect our own universe. We don’t have to do anything to get the interference pattern to occur. It just happens by itself.”

“Yes.”

“And this interaction is very reliable; it will always occur, whenever you set up a pair of slits.”

Stern nodded. He was trying to see where this was going, but he couldn’t foresee the direction Gordon was taking.

“So we know that in certain situations, we can count on other universes to make something happen. We hold up the slits, and the other universes make the pattern we see, every time.”

“Okay. . . .”

“And, if we transmit through a wormhole, the person is always reconstituted at the other end. We can count on that happening, too.”

There was a pause.

Stern frowned.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you saying that when you transmit, the person is being reconstituted by another universe?”

“In effect, yes. I mean, it has to be. We can’t very well reconstitute them, because we’re not there. We’re in this universe.”

“So you’re not reconstituting. . . .”

“No.”

“Because you don’t know how,” Stern said.

“Because we don’t find it necessary,” Gordon said. “Just as we don’t find it necessary to glue plates to a table to make them stay put. They stay by themselves. We make use of a characteristic of the universe, gravity. And in this case, we are making use of a characteristic of the multiverse.”

Stern frowned. He immediately distrusted the analogy; it was too glib, too easy.

“Look,” Gordon said, “the whole point of quantum technology is that it overlaps universes. When a quantum computer calculates — when all thirty-two quantum states of the electron are being used — the computer is technically carrying out those calculations in other universes, right?”