Lavie Tidhar - The Apex Book of World SF 2

As it were, the environment turned out to be not only a virtuality, but also a time displacement device that took its occupants to a very different set of co-ordinates from those originally expected. Suffice it to say that, when the doors of the elevator opened, the dumbfounded passengers were no longer in Kansas—at least not in 2113 Kansas anyway (for the building really was located in that American state) but in a shabby building in 1999 with a mere fifty floors.

After a few minutes of absolute confusion and, in some cases, total denial, the discombobulated denizens of the future returned to the elevator and told it to get them back to where they had come from. Fortunately, it was able to do so.

The First Prototype, as this elevator is called today, is on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian—but not before the post-virtual environment was carefully dissected and examined in search of what caused it to behave so unexpectedly. Something to do with quantum teleportation, apparently, but the details were never disclosed to the public. (Perhaps, as some media pundits said, because even the scientists didn’t know how the hell such a thing happened.)

Be it as it may, time travel rapidly became a fad, and—who would have expected that?—a sort of escape valve for the stressed citizen. People cherished the idea of travelling to a fine, quiet time, not to any turning point in History where they could be attacked by terrorists or die in an earthquake, for instance. Nobody tried to alter the past in order to change the future.

One of these Safe Years—as they were called—was the very first year reached by the elevator: 1999.

(Now, there were some dissenters who argued that even 2001 could be considered a Safe Year, in every city other than New York, but the majority preferred to stay on the safe side.) It was a year when anything could have happened—except that it didn’t.

Again, dissenters begged to differ—they said that it all depended on whose view it was, for in 1999 the following things happened: a 6.1 Richter scale earthquake hit western Colombia, killing at least 1,000; a fire in the Mont Blanc Tunnel in the Alps, killed 39 people, closing the tunnel for nearly 3 years; a magnitude 5.9 earthquake hit Athens, killing 143 and injuring more than 2,000. Another quake, this one Richter 7.6, killed about 2,400 people in Taiwan; not to mention the Kosovo War.

Accusations of Anglocentric attitudes ensued. (An argument much discussed was that Earth is a really big planet, and they recognised that many things happened outside the Anglo-American sphere of influence—most of the things that happened in the world, actually. Earth had come a long way in globalisation and, after all, time travel was discovered by a team of French, Indian, and Brazilian scientists in Accra, Ghana, so that was expected.)

The second phase of research and development was most focused in the matter of geopolitics. Using systems of co-ordinates and geolocation tools, they managed to make the time-travelling environment travel around the world as well as in time, so people could visit other cities in different historical periods instead of their own. It would seem to be most practical and convenient—until the second prototype was lost just outside Earth’s orbit. (You must be painstakingly accurate in order to compensate for the travelling of Earth itself around the Sun and across the galaxy, eventually. Not something to be taken lightly.)

Then it was pointed out that this apparent flaw could be used as an advantage. It would take a lot of effort and calculation, but nothing a quantum computer couldn’t handle.

Again, 1999 was a crucial year, much to the dismay of critics and nay-sayers, but for reason other than the historicity criterion: it was pointed out that the time travel mechanism would need a slingshot-effect to dislocate the prototype adequately through the space-time grid and do it safely enough with the maximum degree of precision and minimum risk.

1999 just happened to have the Y2K bug. Of course, it could have been any other thing, but why bother to try and invent it when the bug was already in place, just waiting for a chance to be useful? The “rollover” from 99 to 00 hadn’t played havoc with data processing as had been feared, but the transition to 2000 in the digital systems would jumpstart the mechanism and power the slingshot through this now-called Zero Year and enable the time-travelling environment to go anywhere in the space-time continuum. And they were not thinking only of Earth.

Humankind discovered interstellar travel in the mid-22nd Century.

I met a man with no shadow today.

He crossed into the village limits near dusk, furtive but resolute. He wanted to find the Mamman . He did not understand my description of the route, partly because he spoke gutter Yoruba learnt from leather traders, and partly because I have a stutter.

I decided to take him there because I thought it would be a very sad thing losing one’s shadow. He was grateful, but fell silent after our initial conversation. I told him to wait while I checked my traps, for I am a hunter.

I had caught one bush rat and the leg of an antelope who had chewed his limb off in order to escape my pot. I reset the traps under the studious gaze of the man with no shadow.

The sun hid beneath the horizon, and even my shadow did not survive. We crossed the brook of tears without getting our feet wet and waved greeting to the three drinkers at the palm-wine bar, men with whom I had been circumcised, but whose features had been blunted by ogogoro , their bodies the harvest of a misspent youth.

We walked past my house and I handed my puzzled wife the bag with the bush rat and my belt of charms. I kept the rifle slung over my shoulder. The Mamman had magic, but gunpowder and lead would work on anything that had a heart, shadowed or not.

“Your shadow is born when you are,” said the Mamman, “but it outlives you. You should cast a shadow until your body rots.”

She was fat, with massive swinging breasts that held intricate tattoos, and she had a sensual carelessness about her near-nakedness.

“You may go,” she said to me.

I shook my head. “I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Very well.” To the man, she said: “What have you brought for me?”

The man unwrapped a small package and lay a dried, blackened object at the Mamman’s side. “This is the trigger finger of the greatest warrior my village has ever known.”

“Did you kill him?” she asked.

“No, but it is mine to give away.” He offered no further explanation.

The Mamman put it away and, licking her lips, sat back down. “I’ve known two others who lost their shadows in my time.”

“I did not lose it,” said the man. “I drove it away.”

“Explain, outlander. I get bored easily and when I’m bored I amuse myself by sucking the brains out of the eyeballs of mouthy customers.”

It was a story of war.

The man’s village had been outnumbered by invaders from the north. Fair-skinned, heavily-clothed warriors with curved swords and strange customs. They outnumbered the indigenous people two to one and had mounted cavalry and bows and arrows.

“The witch doctor had a solution. He would bring alive our shadows, in the process, doubling the army strength, but we had to win the battle before sundown because he could only hold the spell from dawn till dusk of one day. We also had to fight alongside our counterparts so that they could find their way back to merge just before sundown. As it turned out, the invaders were so afraid of the dark warriors that they fled, but the shadow-selves were more… dishonourable.”