Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

“Does ‘instantaneous’ mean anything under such circumstances?” Joshua asked.

“Call it a metaphor, then. The transcordions operate on a principle of physical correspondences rather than on the doubtful proposition of simultaneity. Simultaneity’s an assumption of no real usefulness when you’re dealing with persons sundered from each other by time. By definition, the past and the present do not, and cannot, coincide.”

Joshua said, “Or they’d be the same thing.”

Kaprow accepted Joshua’s remark with a distracted nod. “However, in another sense, perhaps they are.”

“Oh, God,” Blair interjected. “One hand clapping.”

“No, don’t worry. I’m not going to go Zen on you just yet. The instantaneousness I’m talking about derives from a metaphorical simultaneity based on the concord between the time-displaced receiver and its mate. In a physical dimension about which we are pathetically ignorant, the past does indeed run parallel to the present.”

Joshua slid his transcordion across the desk to Kaprow, who picked it up and fondled it absent-mindedly. If the past and the present ran parallel to each other, why, damn it all, they were simultaneous. At least insofar as Joshua could get a grip on the matter. What good was a metaphor that muddled your metaphysics past all rational recourse? In comparison, one hand clapping was altogether comprehensible….

“Wait a minute,” Joshua cried. “Time travel involves movement in space, too, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does. Every particle of matter travels along a world line consisting of three dimensions in space and one in time. Once we’ve transferred the physical components of White Sphinx to the Lake Kiboko Protectorate, Joshua, and once you’ve harnessed yourself to the Backstep Scaffold, we’ll reverse the equations of motion for the finite region of space enclosing you. Then we’ll transport that region backward along its various world lines to the destination dictated by your dreamfaring.”

“My spirit-traveling, you mean.”

“The terminology’s of no consequence. The dreamfarer is himself the key to the journey, because time, like our universe, is an attribute of consciousness. In fact, it’s possible that it has no significant meaning apart from consciousness. White Sphinx cannot shift inanimate objects—these transcordions, for instance—into the past without the intervention of a living psyche.”

The workshop, with its corrugated walls and cold concrete floor, its high fluorescent tubes and hanging pulleys, its snakelike electrical cables and blocky machine presses, seemed more than an ocean away from the grasslands, rhino wallows, and wattle huts of East Africa. Indeed, it was. It was a little cathedral to human progress, a memorial to the evolution of insight and ingenuity. It was a starting place. Joshua was not sure, however, that he liked it very much.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this, about my… my physical displacement into the past.”

“That’s natural enough,” Kaprow said. “And?”

“I’ll be going back to the general vicinity of Lake Kiboko’s eastern shore almost two million years ago.”

“The site of our most productive digs,” Blair put in.

“Okay. But I’m going to end up in an ancient Africa that occupies the same space-time coordinates as present-day Africa. Have I got that right, Dr. Kaprow?”

“Pretty much. I won’t quibble with your construction of the matter.”

“How?” Joshua demanded. “How does that happen? Our sun, the solar system, the whole damn galaxy—they’re moving , aren’t they?”

“Right. At a speed of approximately six hundred million miles a year, foot to the floorboard.”

“Then to what goddamn East African Pleistocene will I really be going? It won’t be the same one that existed two million years ago. The Earth supporting that geological epoch no longer exists. That Earth is a ghost-Earth a giga-zillion miles behind us somewhere, and there’s no way to set me down on it without some sort of zippy, faster-than-light contraption. Right?”

“Right,” Kaprow acknowledged.

“Well, I don’t think that”—he nodded at the buslike vehicle beside Blair—“qualifies. In fact, I’m sure it doesn’t. So where the hell exactly am I going to end up?”

Blair’s expression betrayed surprise, dismay, chagrin. Joshua’s objections, as Joshua himself could see, were ones that he had never considered. The idea that time travel has a spatial dimension was a novelty to him, a revelation. It gave the paleontologist pause. If Joshua did not emerge from Kaprow’s machine into a primeval world of hominids, dinotheres, and antlered giraffes, but instead into a formless void like the clock tick before Creation, Blair had no hope of obtaining any concrete proof of his theories about human origins. Further (no small consideration), Joshua might gasp for breath, draw none, and die. Was it possible that Blair had delivered his developing third-world country into the arms of the Americans for a trade-off of dubious long-term benefit? Had he been duped?

“Listen,” said Kaprow, addressing both men. “My previous work—some of it in West Germany, so that I know I’m not dealing solely with a local phenomenon—has demonstrated that common to every Earthbound site all along its distribution across the time axis, there’s a kind of persistent… well, call it a geographic memory. That memory, Dr. Blair, is objectifiable. In other words, it’s visitable .”

“A pseudoscientific rationale for ghosts?”

“For ghosts, hauntings, and a few other supposedly paranormal phenomena. If calling that rationale

‘pseudoscientific’ pleases you, be my guest.” He crossed the workshop and removed the transcordion from Blair’s hands. “The point is that Joshua is already psychically geared to a specific set of these geographic memories. When we drop him back to the Pleistocene—with his active cooperation—he’ll find himself in a physical dimension congruent with that epoch as it actually occurred. Joshua’s name for what he does in his dreams—spirit-traveling—is a good name for what White Sphinx is all about, too.

Like my term dreamfaring, though, it does ignore the important aspect of bodily displacement. But there’s really no reason to—”

“We’ll be installing him in a bloody diorama of the Pleistocene! A simulacrum of East Africa two million years ago! That’s not time travel, Kaprow—that’s a contemptible fraud!”

Kaprow’s eyes seemed to bob in their almost transparent whites. “That’s what my government thought, too. To begin with.”

“Until they discovered they could sell Zarakal a worthless bill of goods for a couple of military bases.

That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”

“You’re also receiving several hundred million dollars of direct American aid. That played a rather substantial role in President Tharaka’s decision to permit the bases, wouldn’t you say? Besides, he’d made up his mind on that point a month or two before White Sphinx was part of your working vocabulary. We’re gravy, Joshua and I. Why are you making ugly accusations?”

“Gravy or no gravy, Kaprow, it doesn’t forgive the duplicity of this diorama business.”

“Please listen to me, Dr. Blair. Joshua may be going back to a ‘diorama’ of the Pleistocene, or a

‘simulacrum,’ to use another of your words, but it’s going to be a living diorama, a perfect simulacrum.”

The Great Man’s forehead wrinkled skeptically.

“Time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it is an utter impossibility. The future is forever inaccessible because it hasn’t happened yet. It has no pursuable resonances. The past is accessible only because of adepts like Joshua here, a person whose collective unconscious—whose psyche , if you prefer—establishes an attunement to a particular place at a particular time. This is an extremely rare talent.”