Robert Silverberg: Now + n, Now – n

The pool was a vast octagon with a trampoline diving web and a set of underwater psych-lights making rippling patterns of color. Maybe fifty people were swimming and a few dozen more were lounging beside the pool, improving their tans. No one person can possibly stand out in such a mass of flesh, and yet when Selene emerged from the women’s dressing room and began the long saunter across the tiles toward me, the heads began to turn by the dozens. Her figure was not notably lush, yet she had the automatic magnetism that only true beauty exercises. She was definitely slender, but everything was in perfect proportion, as though she had been shaped by the hand of Phidias himself. Long legs, long arms, narrow wrists, narrow waist, small high breasts, miraculously outcurving hips. The Primavera of Botticelli. The Leda of Leonardo. She carried herself with ultimate grace. My heart thundered.

Between her breasts she wore some sort of amulet: a disk of red metal in which geometrical symbols were engraved. I hadn’t noticed it when she was clothed.

“My good-luck piece,” she explained. “I’m never without it.” And she sprinted laughing to the trampoline, and bounded, and hovered, and soared, and cut magnificently through the surface of the water. I followed her in. We raced from angle to angle of the pool, testing each other, searching for limits and not finding them. We dived and met far below, and locked hands, and bobbed happily upward. Then we lay under the warm quartz lamps. Then we tried the sauna. Then we dressed.

We went to her room.

She kept the amulet on even when we made love. I felt it cold against my chest as I embraced her.

But what of the making of money? What of the compounding of capital? What of my sweaty little secret, the joker in the Wall Street pack, the messages from beyond by which I milked the market of millions? On Thursday no contact with my other selves was scheduled, but I could not have made it even if it had been. It was amply clear: Selene blanked my psi field. The critical range was twenty feet. When we were farther apart than that, I could get through; otherwise, not. How did it happen? How? How? How? An accidental incompatibility of psionic vibrations? A tragic canceling out of my powers through proximity to her splendid self? No. No. No. No.

On Thursday we roared through London like a conflagration, doing the galleries, the boutiques, the museums, the sniffer palaces, the pubs, the sparkle houses. I had never been so much in love. For hours at a time I forgot my dilemma. The absence of myself from myself, the separation that had seemed so shattering in its first instant, seemed trivial. What did I need them for, when I had her?

I needed them for the moneymaking. The moneymaking was a disease that love might alleviate but could not cure. And if I did not resume contact soon, there would be calamities in store.

Late Thursday afternoon, as we came reeling giddily out of a sniffer palace on High Holborn, our nostrils quivering, I felt contact again. (Now + n ) broke through briefly, during a moment when I waited for a traffic light and Selene plunged wildly across to the far side of the street.

“The amulet’s what does it,” he said. “That’s the word I get from—”

Selene rushed back to my side of the street. “Come on, silly! Why’d you wait?”

Two hours later, as she lay in my arms, I swept my hand up from her satiny haunch to her silken breast and caught the plaque of red metal between two fingers. “Love, won’t you take this off?” I said innocently. “I hate the feel of a piece of cold slithery metal coming between us when—”

There was terror in her dark eyes. “I couldn’t, Aram! I couldn’t!”

“For me, love?”

“Please. Let me have my little superstition.” Her lips found mine. Cleverly she changed the subject. I wondered at her tremor of shock, her frightened refusal.

Later we strolled along the Thames, and watched Friday coming to life in fogbound dawn. Today I would have to escape from her for at least an hour, I knew. The laws of time dictated it. For on Wednesday, between six and seven p.m. Central European Time, I had accepted a transmission from myself of (now + n ), speaking out of Friday, and Friday had come and I was that very same (now + n ), who must reach out at the proper time toward his counterpart at (now – n ) on Wednesday. What would happen if I failed to make my rendezvous with time in time, I did not know. Nor wanted to discover. The universe, I suspected, would continue regardless. But my own sanity—my grasp on that universe—might not.

It was narrowness. All glorious Friday I had to plot how to separate myself from radiant Selene during the cocktail hour, when she would certainly want to be with me. But in the end it was simplicity. I told the concierge, “At seven minutes after six send a message to me in the Celestial Room. I am wanted on urgent business must come instantly to computer room for intercontinental data patch, person to person. So?” Concierge replied, “We can give you the patch right at your table in the Celestial Room.” I shook my head firmly. “Do it as I say. Please.” I put thumb to gratuity account of concierge and signaled an account transfer of five pounds. Concierge smiled.

Seven minutes after six, message-robot scuttles into Celestial Room, comes homing in on table where I sit with Selene. “Intercontinental data patch, Mr. Kevorkian,” says robot. “Wanted immediately. Computer room.” I turn to Selene. “Forgive me, love. Desolated, but must go. Urgent business. Just a few minutes.”

She grasps my arm fondly. “Darling, no! Let the call wait. It’s our anniversary now. Forty-eight hours since we met!”

Gently I pull arm free. I extend arm, show jewelled timepiece. “Not yet, not yet! We didn’t meet until half past six Wednesday. I’ll be back in time to celebrate.” I kiss tip of supreme nose. “Don’t smile at strangers while I’m gone,” I say, and rush off with robot.

I do not go to computer room. I hurriedly buy a Friday Herald Tribune in the lobby and lock myself in men’s washroom cubicle. Contact now is made on schedule with (now – n ), living in Wednesday, all innocent of what will befall him that miraculous evening. I read stock prices, twenty securities, from Arizona Agrochemical to Western Offshore Corp. I sign off and study my watch. (Now – n ) is currently closing out seven long positions and the short sale on Commonwealth Dispersals. During the interval I seek to make contact with (now + n ) ahead of me on Sunday evening. No response. Nothing.

Presently I lose contact also with (now – n ). As expected; for this is the moment when the me of Wednesday has for the first time come within Selene’s psi-suppressant field. I wait patiently. In a while (Selene – n ) goes to powder room. Contact returns.

(Now – n ) says to me, “All right. What do you know that I ought to know?”

“We have fallen in love,” I say.

Rest of conversation follows as per. What has been, must be. I debate slipping in the tidbit I have received from (now + n ) concerning the alleged powers of Selene’s amulet. Should I say it quickly, before contact breaks? Impossible. It was not said to me. The conversation proceeds until at the proper moment I am able to say, “I think I know how she does it. There’s a—”

Wall of silence descends. (Selene – n ) has returned to the table of (now – n ). Therefore I (now) will return to the table of Selene (now). I rush back to the Celestial Room. Selene, looking glum, sits alone, sipping drink. She brightens as I approach.

“See?” I cry. “Back just in time. Happy anniversary, darling. Happy, happy, happy, happy!”