Part 21 (1/2)
”Well, I did it, didn't I? Three times. Nothing goes wrong 'cause you know it's going to happen,”
she repeated patiently. ”I mean, when you get there you expect it. I found a note I'd written to myself telling me what to do. Like the butler's name was Johan. And my friends. And to say I was sick.”
”You could see the future?” Dov frowned. ”What happened? I mean, the news?”
”Oh, well, I don't know, I mean I wasn't very curious. All I saw was some old house. Like it was partly underground, I guess. But Dovy, you know about things, you could see all the news, even in just like half an hour you could find out what was going on. You could even read your own research, maybe!”
”Hmh-”
That wasn't quite the end of it, of course. It was the evening of the sixth day when Dov and Loolie came in from the moonlight on the sh.o.r.e and went hand in hand into Mr. Aerovulpa's quiet corridors.
(Which were found unlocked, an out-of-character fact unless it is recalled that Mr. Aerovulpa too had glimpsed the future.) There was a handle set on standby. Loolie threw it and power hummed up beyond a gleaming wall in which was set a kind of airlock. She swung the lockport to reveal a cubicle inside the wall.
”It's just big enough for all three of us,” she giggled, pulling him in. ”What do you suppose we'll do, I mean, the old usses who came back here? I mean, we aren't giving them very long.”
”Ask your son,” said Dov fondly, mentally reviewing the exciting things he wanted to find out about THE FUTURE.
So they set the dials that would exchange their young psyches with their older selves forty years ahead, when Dov would be-good G.o.d, sixty-two. Loolie let Dov be cautious (this first tune, she told herself secretly) and he selected thirty minutes, no more. They clasped hands. And Loolie tipped the silent tumblers of the activator circuit unleas.h.i.+ng the t.i.tanic-capacitators waiting to cup the chamber in a temporal anomality, OOOMM!!!
-And by a million-to-one chance shooting young Dov Rapelle uptime into the lethal half-hour when a coronary artery ballooned and ruptured, as he lay alone in a strange city.
So Loolie Aerovulpa Rapelle returned from a meaningless stroll in a shopping arcade in Pernambuco to find herself holding Dov's dead body on the control room floor. Because dying, any time, is an experience you don't survive.
Not even-as Loolie later pointed out to the numerous temporal engineers her father had to hire-not even when it involves a paradox. For how could Dov have died at twenty-two if he actually died at sixty-two? Something was terribly wrong. Something that had to be fixed, that must be fixed, if it took the whole Aerovulpa fortune, Loolie insisted. She went right on saying it because the psychomed had been quite right. Dovy was the only man she ever loved and she loved him all her life.
The temporal engineers shrugged, and so did the mathematicians. They told her that paradoxes were acc.u.mulating elsewhere in the society by that tune, too, even though only a few supra-legal heavy persons owned jumpers. Alternate time-tracks, perhaps? Time-independent hysteresis maybe? Paradoxes of course were wrong. They shouldn't happen.But when one does-who do you complain to?
Which wasn't much help to a loving little girl facing fifty-nine long gray empty years... twenty-one thousand, five hundred and forty-five blighted days and lonely nights to wait... for her hour in the arms of her man on a Hudson Bay blanket.
I'LL BE WAITING FOR YOU WHEN THE SWIMMING POOL IS EMPTY.
Cammerling was a nice Terran boy, which is to say that his folks came from Groombridge 34 Nu and surprised him with a Galhonda 990 starcoupe for his traditional Wanderjahr. But Cammerling was one sigma off median in that he not only chose to travel by himself but also to visit the remoter parts of the ephemeris where the hostels were unrated or even nonexistent. Which is how he came to be the first Terran-or certainly the first for a long, long time -to land on the planet of G.o.dolphus Four.
As his port opened, Cammerling's ears were a.s.sailed by a stupendous braying, skirling and clas.h.i.+ng which rose from an immense dust-cloud in which gleamed many s.h.i.+ning points. When the dust settled a bit Cammerling made out that there was a barbaric festival of some sort in progress.
Two vast ma.s.ses of men were rus.h.i.+ng toward each other on the plain before him. From one side pounded phalanx upon phalanx of individuals clad in leather cuira.s.ses and greaves and bearing obsidian lances decked with streaming hair and what Cammerling took to be dried nuts. Galloping at them from his other side came a stampede of reptiles mounted by persons cased in glittering mail and whirling large spiked yo-yos around their crests. Just behind all these Cammerling saw ranks of archers advancing with fire-headed missiles on their bows, and the whole ma.s.s was being urged on by horn-blowers, cymbalists and bull-roarers and standard-bearers staggering under huge pennants realistically resembling entire flayed human hides.
As Cammerling stepped forward for a clearer view, the two hordes fell upon each other in primal fury, and the plain became a vortex of slas.h.i.+ng, spearing, gouging, beheading, disemboweling, dismembering and other unmistakably hostile interactions.
”Good grief,” said Cammerling, ”can this be an actual, real live war?”
His presence was now noticed by several of the nearer combatants who stopped to stare and were promptly clouted by those beyond. A head flew out of the melee and rolled to Cammerling's feet, making faces and jetting gore. Without pausing to think he switched on his Omniglot Mark Eight voder and shouted, ”STOP THAT!”
”Oh, sorry,” he added, as he heard the sound of obsidian shattering all over the field and noted that numerous persons were rolling on the ground clutching their ears. Tuning the voder down, he recalled his panthropological semester notes and began to scan the armies in close detail, searching for their leaders.
To his gratification he located a group of banner-bearers on a hilltop somewhat behind the fray. In their midst was an armored giant mounted on a tall yellow carnosaur with jeweled fangs and spurs. This colorful individual was leaning back in his saddle to accommodate a hamsized triple phallus from which spouted green smoke, alternately bellowing and shaking his fist at Cammerling and chug-a-lugging from a gem-encrusted skull.
On a similar rise across the way Cammerling observed a gaudy pavilion under which a very fat man reclined upon a gold litter upholstered with feebly squirming naked infants and langourously nibbled tidbits from a poignard while he eyed Cammerling. As Cammerling watched, the fat man wiped the poignard by running it through one of the meatier infants and snapped his jeweled fingers at his aides.
All these barbaric manifestations pained Cammerling, who was a good Terran boy, but at the same time he felt exhilarated by stumbling upon what was undeniably the Real Thing. Disregarding the flaming arrows and other missiles that were now arriving in his vicinity and being deflected by his invisible summer-weight nonabsorptive GE-Bilblas forcefield, he focused the voder to project directly at the twochieftains.
”Greetings,” he said. ”I'm Cammerling from Groombridge 34 Nu. How about coming over here where we can interact, if you aren't too busy?”
After a bit of milling, Cammerling was pleased to see the two personages and their retinues converging upon him, while the crowd nearest him drew back. Unfortunately, the delegations halted at a distance that Cammerling felt was too great for a really meaningful encounter, so he stepped toward them and said winningly, ”Look, friends. What you're doing-you know, it's-well, don't take this wrong, but it's not nice. It's obsolete, truly it is. I don't want to insult your cultural ident.i.ty in any way, but since you're going off this war buzz sooner or later-I mean, studies prove it... why not stop now?”
Seeing that they were staring at him blankly, he added, ”I don't recall my historical symbolism too clearly, but what I mean, I think, is that you two men should shake hands.”
At these words the fat prince in the palanquin spitted three infants and screamed, ”Me touch that lizard-fondling offspring of an untranslated defecation-equivalent diseased female organ? I shall serve his barbecued gonads to condemned thieves!”
And the dragon-chief threw back his head and roared, ”Me handle that chromosomally unbalanced caricature of a feces-eating cloacal parasite? His intestines will be cruppers on my corpse-wagons!”
Now Cammerling could see at once that this was going to be a quite jangled situation to harmonize and as he recalibrated his voder, which had begun to oscillate, he also reminded himself that he must be careful not to show disrespect for these people's cultural norms. So he said pleasantly, ”If I could serve as a resource-person here, I'd like to offer the suggestion that molecular genetics and ethical intuition agree that all men are brothers.”
Hearing which, both chieftains looked at each other with instant and total comprehension. Then they both wheeled around and hurled every weapon in reach at Cammerling, and their retainers followed suit.
Amid the shower of missiles, Cammerling perceived that a poignard and a kind of broadaxe had penetrated his summer-weight forcefield, making nasty runs in the lining. He was about to remonstrate with them when two pale-blue blips floated down from the nose of the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p behind him and instantly reduced the two princes, the carnosaur, the infants, and most of the entourage to thin vitreous puddles.
”Good heavens,” said Cammerling reproachfully to the s.h.i.+p, ”that wasn't nice either. Why did you?”
The voder print-out came to life and typed in cursive: ”Don't be disturbed, dear boy. Your mother put in a few contingency programs.”
Cammerling made a face and turned to address the a.s.sembled armies.
”I'm truly sorry about that. If the seconds in command on both sides want to come over here, I'll try to see it doesn't happen again.”
He waited patiently while some confusion died down, and presently two somewhat older and less flamboyant senior types were a.s.sisted to come forward and Cammerling repeated and clarified his previous suggestions. The two viziers looked at Cammerling with the whites of their eyes showing, and they looked at his s.h.i.+p, and at the puddles, which were now cooled and streaked with beautiful colors suitable for intaglio work on a rather large scale, and finally at each other. To Cammerling's intense satisfaction they eventually allowed themselves to be persuaded to a distant brus.h.i.+ng of the gloved hands.
In his excitement he recalled an historic phrase: ”Your swords shall be converted into plowshares!”
”Madness!” exclaimed both viziers, shrinking back. ”Ensorcell our swords into women?”
”A figure of speech,” Cammerling laughed. ”Now friends, I do want to emphasize that I didn't come here to intimidate you people with my superior technology created by the enlightened interplay of free minds in our immense interstellar peace-loving Terran Federation. But don't you think it would be interesting-just as an experiment, say-if you announced that peace has been declared, like in honor of my visit maybe-” he smiled deprecatingly, ”-and told your armies to go, uh, home?”One of the viziers uttered an inarticulate howl. The other cried wildly, ”Is it your will that we be torn to pieces? They have been promised loot!”
This made Cammerling aware that he had overlooked their concern about the emotional tensions which were bound to persist in a situation like this, but luckily he recalled a solution.
”Look, you have to have some kind of zestful popular sport. You know-a thing you play? Like s.h.i.+nny? Or curling? Tug-of-war even? Tournaments? And music! Isn't that the usual thing? We want to get those horns over here, my s.h.i.+p has Marsony twelve-channel. You'll love our snacks, too. I'll help you get organized.”
The hours that followed were somewhat jumbled in Cammerling's memory, but he felt it was, overall, quite successful. Some of the native sports turned out to be virtually indistinguishable from the original battle, and he did regret having inadvertently triggered the s.h.i.+p's vaporizers once or twice. But no one seemed overly upset, and when dawn broke over the plain there were a goodly number of survivors able to accept his good-bye gifts of inertia-free athletic supporters and other trade trinkets.
”That rugger-type thing you play truly has potential,” he told the viziers. ”Of course, I'd hope we could subst.i.tute an inanimate ball, and perhaps tranks instead of strychnine on the spurs. And the eviscerating part, that's out. Here, try another Groombridge Jubilee. I want to explain to you sometime about setting up a farm system. Tot Teams. By the way, what was the war about?”
One of the viziers was busy shredding his turban, but the other one began to recite the history of the war in a sonorous sing-song, starting with his tenth grandfather's boyhood. Cammerling set the voder on Semantic Digest and eventually decided that the root of the matter was a chronic shortage of fertile flood-plain from the local river.
”Well, holy nutb.u.t.ter,” he said. ”That's easy to settle. Just throw a dam across those foothills there and impound the water so everyone will have enough.”
”Dam?” said one vizier. ”He who chokes the father of waters,” said the turban-shredder hollowly, ”his gonads shall become as small dried berries, and his p.e.n.i.s shall be a dry wick. Aye, and all his relatives.”
”Believe me,” said Cammerling, ”I have nothing but respect for your cultural orientations. But really, in this one instance-I mean, from an existential viewpoint, although I'm aware that we should do this on a more partic.i.p.atory basis, men-look!”
And he took his s.h.i.+p up and vitrified a couple of miles of foothills; and after the riverbed had overflowed and filled up with mud and dead fish, there was a big lake where none had been before.