The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (44 page)

She looked up, startled. “What are you saying?”

“They can cobble up a twentieth-century man out of nothing more than fragmentary records and make him plausible, can’t they? Or an Elizabethan, or anyone else of any era at all, and he’s authentic, he’s convincing. So why couldn’t they do an even better job with you? Produce a Gioia so real that even Gioia can’t tell the difference? But a Gioia that will never age—a Gioia-construct, a Gioia-program, a visitor-Gioia! Why not? Tell me why not, Gioia.”

She was trembling. “I’ve never heard of doing any such thing!”

“But don’t you think it’s possible?”

“How would I know?”

“Of course it’s possible. If they can create visitors, they can take a citizen and duplicate her in such a way that—” 

“It’s never been done. I’m sure of it. I can’t imagine any citizen agreeing to any such thing. To give up the body—to let yourself be turned into—into—”

She shook her head, but it seemed to be a gesture of astonishment as much as of negation.

He said, “Sure. To give up the body. Your natural body, your aging, shrinking, deteriorating short-timer body. What’s so awful about that?”

She was very pale. “This is craziness, Charles. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me.”

“You can’t possibly understand.”

“Can’t I? I can certainly understand being afraid to die. I don’t have a lot of trouble understanding what it’s like to be one of the few aging people in a world where nobody grows old. What I can’t understand is why you aren’t even willing to consider the possibility that—”

“No,” she said. “I tell you, it’s crazy. They’d laugh at me.”

“Who?”

“All of my friends. Hawk, Stengard, Aramayne—” Once again she would not look at him. “They can be very cruel, without even realizing it. They despise anything that seems ungraceful to them, anything sweaty and desperate and cowardly. Citizens don’t do sweaty things, Charles. And that’s how this will seem. Assuming it can be done at all.

They’ll be terribly patronizing. Oh, they’ll be sweet to me, yes, dear Gioia, how wonderful for you, Gioia, but when I turn my back they’ll laugh. They’ll say the most wicked things about me. I couldn’t bear that.”

“They can afford to laugh,” Phillips said. “It’s easy to be brave and cool about dying when you know you’re going to live forever. How very fine for them; but why should you be the only one to grow old and die? And they won’t laugh, anyway. They’re not as cruel as you think. Shallow, maybe, but not cruel. They’ll be glad that you’ve found a way to save yourself. At the very least, they won’t have to feel guilty about you any longer, and that’s bound to please them. You can—”

“Stop it,” she said.

She rose, walked to the railing of the patio, stared out toward the sea. He came up behind her. Red sails in the harbor, sunlight glittering along the sides of the Lighthouse, the palaces of the Ptolemies stark white against the sky. Lightly he rested his hand on her shoulder. She twitched as if to pull away from him, but remained where she was.

“Then I have another idea,” he said quietly. “If you won’t go to the planners,
I
will.

Reprogram me, I’ll say. Fix things so that I start to age at the same rate you do. It’ll be more authentic, anyway, if I’m supposed to be playing the part of a twentieth-century man. Over the years I’ll very gradually get some lines in my face, my hair will turn gray, I’ll walk a little more slowly—we’ll grow old together, Gioia. To hell with your lovely immortal friends. We’ll have each other. We won’t need them.”

She swung around. Her eyes were wide with horror.

“Are you serious, Charles?”

“Of course.”

“No,” she murmured. “No. Everything you’ve said to me today is monstrous nonsense. Don’t you realize that?”

He reached for her hand and enclosed her fingertips in his. “All I’m trying to do is find some way for you and me to—”

“Don’t say any more,” she said. “Please.”

Quickly, as though drawing back from a suddenly flaring flame, she tugged her fingers free of his and put her hand behind her. Though his face was just inches from hers he felt an immense chasm opening between them. They stared at one another for a moment; then she moved deftly to his left, darted around him, and ran from the patio.

Stunned, he watched her go, down the long marble corridor and out of sight. It was folly to give pursuit, he thought. She was lost to him: that was clear, that was beyond any question. She was terrified of him. Why cause her even more anguish? But somehow he found himself running through the halls of the hotel, along the winding garden path, into the cool green groves of the Paneium. He thought he saw her on the portico of Hadrian’s palace, but when he got there the echoing stone halls were empty.

To a temporary that was sweeping the steps he said, “Did you see a woman come this way?” A blank sullen stare was his only answer.

Phillips cursed and turned away.

“Gioia?” he called. “Wait! Come back!”

Was that her, going into the Library? He rushed past the startled mumbling librarians and sped through the stacks, peering beyond the mounds of double-handled scrolls into the shadowy corridors. “Gioia?
Gioia!
” It was a descration, bellowing like that in this quiet place. He scarcely cared.

Emerging by a side door, he loped down to the harbor. The Lighthouse! Terror enfolded him. She might already be a hundred steps up that ramp, heading for the parapet from which she meant to fling herself into the sea. Scattering citizens and temporaries as if they were straws, he ran within. Up he went, never pausing for breath, though his synthetic lungs were screaming for respite, his ingeniously designed heart was desperately pounding. On the first balcony he imagined he caught a glimpse of her, but he circled it without finding her. Onward, upward. He went to the top, to the beacon chamber itself: no Gioia. Had she jumped? Had she gone down one ramp while he was ascending the other? He clung to the rim and looked out, down, searching the base of the Lighthouse, the rocks offshore, the causeway. No Gioia. I will find her somewhere, he thought. I will keep going until I find her. He went running down the ramp, calling her name. He reached ground level and sprinted back toward the center of town. Where next? The temple of Poseidon? The tomb of Cleopatra?

He paused in the middle of Canopus Street, groggy and dazed.

“Charles?” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Right here. Beside you.” She seemed to materialize from the air. Her face was unflushed, her robe bore no trace of perspiration. Had he been chasing a phantom through the city? She came to him and took his hand, and said, softly, tenderly, “Were you really serious, about having them make you age?”

“If there’s no other way, yes.”

“The other way is so frightening, Charles.”

“Is it?”

“You can’t understand how much.”

“More frightening than growing old? Than dying?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose not. The only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want you to get old, Charles.”

“But I won’t have to. Will I?” He stared at her. 

“No,” she said. “You won’t have to. Neither of us will.”

Phillips smiled. “We should get away from here,” he said after a while. “Let’s go across to Byzantium, yes, Gioia? We’ll show up in Constantinople for the opening. Your friends will be there. We’ll tell them what you’ve decided to do. They’ll know how to arrange it. Someone will.”

“It sounds so strange,” said Gioia. “To turn myself into—into a visitor? A visitor in my own world?”

“That’s what you’ve always been, though.”

“I suppose. In a way. But at least I’ve been
real
up to now.”

“Whereas I’m not?”

“Are you, Charles?”

“Yes. Just as real as you. I was angry at first, when I found out the truth about myself.

But I came to accept it: Somewhere between Mohenjo and here, I came to see that it was all right to be what I am: that I perceive things, I form ideas, I draw conclusions. I am very well designed, Gioia. I can’t tell the difference between being what I am and being completely alive, and to me that’s being real enough. I think, I feel, I experience joy and pain. I’m as real as I need to be. And you will be too. You’ll never stop being Gioia, you know. It’s only your body that you’ll cast away, the body that played such a terrible joke on you anyway.” He brushed her cheek with his hand. “It was all said for us before, long ago:

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;”

“Is that the same poem?” she asked. 

“The same poem, yes. The ancient poem that isn’t quite forgotten yet.”

“Finish it, Charles.”

“Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

“How beautiful. What does it mean?”

“That it isn’t necessary to be mortal. That we can allow ourselves to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, that we can be transformed, that we can move on beyond the flesh. Yeats didn’t mean it in quite the way I do—he wouldn’t have begun to comprehend what we’re talking about, not a word of it—and yet, and yet—the underlying truth is the same. Live, Gioia! With me!” He turned to her and saw color coming into her pallid cheeks. “It does make sense, what I’m suggesting, doesn’t it?

You’ll attempt it, won’t you? Whoever makes the visitors can be induced to remake you.

Right? What do you think: can they, Gioia?”

She nodded in a barely perceptible way. “I think so,” she said faintly. “It’s very strange. But I think it ought to be possible. Why not, Charles? Why not?”

“Yes,” he said. “Why not?”

In the morning they hired a vessel in the harbor, a low sleek pirogue with a blood-red sail, skippered by a rascally-looking temporary whose smile was irresistible. Phillips shaded his eyes and peered northward across the sea. He thought he could almost make out the shape of the great city sprawling on its seven hills, Constantine’s New Rome beside the Golden Horn, the mighty dome of Hagia Sophia, the somber walls of the citadel, the palaces and churches, the Hippodrome, Christ in glory rising above all else in brilliant mosaic streaming with light.

“Byzantium,” Phillips said. “Take us there the shortest and quickest way.”

“It is my pleasure,” said the boatman with unexpected grace. 

Gioia smiled. He had not seen her looking so vibrantly alive since the night of the imperial feast in Chang-an. He reached for her hand—her slender fingers were quivering lightly—and helped her into the boat.

JOHN KESSEL

John Kessel’s reputation as a writer of sophisticated literary fantasy and science fiction
is predicated on a handful of stories that frequently invade the territory of classic
writers and use the lessons in their literature as sounding boards for contemporary
values and social mores. The mock essay “Herman Melville: Space Opera Virtuoso,”

and the Nebula Award–winning riff on
Moby Dick,
“Another Orphan,” both chart
incongruous intersections of period Melville and modern times. “The Big Dream” tells
of a private detective on the trail of Raymond Chandler slowly evolving into a character
in a typical Chandler crime story. “The Pure Product”
(
which appears here
)
and

“Every Angel Is Terrifying” both extend ideas in the southern Gothic fiction of
Flannery O’Connor. H. G. Wells is himself a character in the Wellsian tale “Buffalo.”

These stories, and Kessel’s alternate-history tales “Some Like It Cold,” “The
Franchise,” and “Uncle John and the Saviour,” have been collected in his short fiction
compilations
Meetings in Infinity
and
The Pure Product.

The creative playfulness implicit in the “what-if” speculations of these stories extends
to Kessel’s work as a novelist.
Good News from Outer Space
sketches a satirical
portrait of a dysfunctional America on the eve of the twenty-first century, obsessed with
alien invasion and millennial irrationality.
Corrupting Dr. Nice
is a screwball time-travel story involving a father-daughter team of flim-flam artists who traverse timelines
and alternate histories in search of victims. Kessel has also written the novel
Freedom Beach
in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. In 2003 he was awarded the James
Tiptree Award for his short story “Stories of Men.”

If there were time travelers from the future, how would they see the America of
today? Would they look at it like the main character in Kessel’s story, as an entire
world to toy with, to manipulate as they choose? Would they be disinterested observers,
alighting five hundred years ago, then flitting through time as they choose, interacting
with whomever they happen to meet?

by John Kessel

I arrived in Kansas City at one o’clock on the afternoon of the thirteenth of August. A Tuesday. I was driving the beige 1983 Chevrolet Citation that I had stolen two days earlier in Pocatello, Idaho. The Kansas plates on the car I’d taken from a different car in a parking lot in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City was founded by the Mormons, whose god tells them that in the future Jesus Christ will come again.

I drove through Kansas City with the windows open and the sun beating down through the windshield. The car had no air conditioning, and my shirt was stuck to my back from seven hours behind the wheel. Finally I found a hardware store, “Hector’s” on Wornall. I pulled into the lot. The Citation’s engine dieseled after I turned off the ignition; I pumped the accelerator once and it coughed and died. The heat was like syrup. The sun drove shadows deep into corners, left them flattened at the feet of the people on the sidewalk. It made the plate glass of the store window into a dark negative of the positive print that was Wornall Road. August.