Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

“How on earth would these yokels have ever noticed me?” he asked.

“Your damn teeth,” she said. “Your flawless, glow-in-the-dark, impossibly white teeth.” She handed him a rather ugly set of yellowish fake teeth. “Put these on now.” Ralph did.

Sylvie then gestured toward a nearby hovel. “Over there,” she said. “Inside. It’s time for you to explain to me how time travel works.” He went where she told him to, and did what she said. How could he not? He was smitten. Fortunately for Ralph, Sylvie was likewise smitten. Many a woman would be, as he was a handsome man with good teeth, and he gave up his secrets readily.

Sylvie then traveled forward, to a time before she was born, and told her parents the secret of time travel. Her parents, who became the most famous temporal anthropologists in history, educated a few others and, when baby Sylvie came along, brought her up to leap gracefully from one century to the next. More gracefully, in fact, than her parents themselves, who vanished in medieval England when Sylvie was twelve. She was, in fact, looking for them when she came upon Ralph that very first time.

Ralph and Sylvie were married in Wessex in 1442, Ralph’s dental glory concealed by his fake teeth. Sylvie, inveterate time-traveler that she was, convinced him they should live in the timestream, giving them a sort of temporal immortality. And this is where Ralph, who was, after all, an engineer, not a physicist, failed to anticipate the effect of his actions.

Time does not fly like an arrow, it turns out. It just lies there, waiting for something new to happen. So when Ralph Drumm showed up — completely inappropriately — in the past, that past changed — the past healed itself — so that he had always been there. He acquired ancestors, was born, grew to adulthood — to Ralph’s exact age in fact — and his body just happened to be in the exact place where Ralph’s timeshadow showed up.

Time travel changes the past as well as the future: time is, in fact, an eternal present when viewed from outside the timestream.

So, as Ralph and Sylvie moved from time to time, they created more and more shadows of themselves in the timestream. As they had children — one, two, three, many — and took them about, the timeshadows of the Drumm children were generated and multiplied. Each shadow was as real as the original. Each shadow lived and breathed… and bred.

Although they were innocent of any ill intent, Ralph and Sylvie Drumm changed the flow of the stream of time in a way more profound than could be accomplished by any single action, no matter how momentous its apparent effect. Their genetic material came to dominate all of human history, an endless army of dark-haired, blue-eyed Caucasians with perfect teeth. They looked the same. They thought the same. They stuck together.

And this is why we, the last remnants of a differentiated humanity, are waiting here today in Wessex, in 1440 — to defend our future from the great surge of the Drummstream. This time, they will not escape us.

Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn

Dear Sirs:

Ordinarily, I would not respond to an email such as yours. I am by nature a skeptic and, as a former advertising writer, consider myself well able to resist the transparent come-on of a carelessly written appeal to my baser nature. Today, however…

Today I found myself wracked with guilt at how much time I spend goofing around. Sunday is the end of my work-week and, as usual, all the chickens came home to roost: I absolutely had to get a story finished and sent off. And I did. I didn’t do much of anything else: just worry and plot and write, all day long. I didn’t even call in a pizza. Fortunately, I keep on hand an adequate supply of snickerdoodles, a nutritionally perfect source of carbs, fats, and cinnamon that will keep anxiety at bay for up to 24 hours.

But now, sitting here at midnight amid crumpled manuscript pages and snickerdoodle crumbs, I feel there must be a better way.

And your email, which promises I could be lounging about on Sundays, taking the day off, doing the crossword puzzle, and idly staring at things without thinking of them, certainly caught my eye.

Can you really reduce my guilt to nothing, as your email claims? Is your service worth its unnamed but undoubtedly exorbitant cost?

Warily,

Eileen Gunn

Dear Ms. Gunn:

Every word in our ad is true! For very reasonable rates, our organization will take on your guilt for a day, a weekend, or even a month-long vacation! You may be especially interested in our Sunday subscription, a perennial bestseller among writers.

Here’s how it works: Go to our Rates page, and click on the service that best suits your needs and pocketbook. Prepay, using credit card, debit card, or PayPal. It’s as simple as that!

Let’s say you choose Guilt-Free Friday Nights. (This option is particularly popular among churchgoers! Garrison Keillor says, “It’s like being a Republican for an evening!”) Every Friday at precisely 5:30 p.m. local time, all your failures, inadequacies, and moral weaknesses become our responsibility. Do anything you like! Go out dancing and drinking. Stiff the waitress. Bring home an inappropriate sex partner. Stiff the waitress, bring her home, and have inappropriate sex with her. It’s all OK! You can even, if you like, Not Write!!! All the guilt you would normally feel is, through our proprietary process, painlessly transferred to a member of our degraded, subhuman staff.

For the first time since you don’t know when, you’ll go to sleep — as I have for many years — with a smirk on your face.

So don’t delay. Act now! You’ll be glad you did.

Sincerely,

Michael Swanwick

Chief Creative Officer

Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia

Dear Mr. Swanwick:

But if I didn’t feel guilty, how would I write?

I have it set up that I feel guilty every day until about midnight, when it becomes the next day’s problem.

I’d change that, but I’m afraid that if I didn’t wake up feeling guilty every day, I’d forget to feel guilty on Mondays.

Worriedly,

Eileen Gunn

Dear Ms. Gunn:

Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia offers a program for that! Sundays you can be guilt free, but the other six days of the week, we can hone and sharpen your guilt until it is a keen-edged weapon of productivity!

Just imagine: You’re sitting at your desk and you should be writing. Instead, you log on to the internet. Ordinarily, you’d waste countless hours on ego-searches, Sudoku, and Paris Hilton trivia. But — what’s this? It’s an email from the child you never knew you’d had, but which it turns out you abandoned in its infancy, telling you how badly her life turned out because of your neglect. You log off and reach for the phone to tell your best friend about this frightful development and — not incidentally — waste half the morning in idle chitchat and gossip. But before your hand reaches the receiver, the phone rings! It’s the Humane Society, telling you that your childhood pet, Fluffy, lost all these years, has died of a painful disease you could have cured with an inexpensive treatment, had it not been for the fact that you neglected to put your name and address on its collar.

Stunned, you put down the phone. You stare out the window — your last, best chance to avoid actual work. And then (this is our pièce de resistance! ) one of our trained professionals calls you up and in your mother’s voice says, “I saw what you did last night, and I’m very disappointed.”

You start to work. You don’t raise your head from the paper until twelve hours have passed and the first fifty pages of your blockbuster fantasy dekalogy have been completed. At this rate, the first volume will be finished in a month!