John Varley - Millennium

"Jack London Square is/was an area near the waterfront of Oakland, California. It was named for a famous writer. It came into being as an urban redevelopment project in the mid-

twentieth century, and was something of a tourist attraction for those few people who visited Oakland for reasons of tourism. Do you want more?"

"No, I think that's enough."

I found Martin Coventry on the balcony outside the Gate building, looking over the derelict field. Or, as we snatchers sometimes call it, the Bermuda Triangle. In another age the place might have qualified as a museum. In our day, it was simply an historical junkyard. I joined Coventry and stood with him looking at the debris of five hundred years of Gate operations.

How would you go about snatching a one-Beater fighter plane? What about a plane that gets into trouble over the ocean and vanishes without a trace? Or a Spanish galleon going down in a hurricane? Or a space capsule that falls into the sun, killing all aboard? The best way to handle those types of disasters is to take the entire vehicle through the Gate. If it's a jet fighter, we field it in the retarder rings. The plane slows to a stop, we take the pilot off usually quite confused -- and then, depending on where he was going to crash, either catapult his wimp-piloted plane back a thousandth of a second later than we took it, or just dump it in the derelict field. Any vehicle which will never be found ends up out there on the field. Why send it back? It takes a lot of energy to send an ocean liner back through the Gate. There's a very good reason why nobody's ever found the wreck of the Titanic: it's sitting out there rusting away.

Right next to the pride of Cunard is a starship from the twenty-eighth century.

The derelict field is roughly triangular, five miles on a side, and is chock-a-block with every land, sea, air, and space vehicle imaginable. Right in- front of me were four propeller-

driven aircraft that, if memory serves, actually did come from the Bermuda Triangle."

They were in pretty bad shape. We'd taken them about fifty years ago and, like everything else on the field, the chemicals in the air had not done them any good. A rain shower :n the Glorious Future I call home is not something to take lightly.

"I was born to be an historian," Coventry said, unexpectedly. I looked at him. I couldn't have been more befuddled if he'd told me what he wanted Santa Claus to bring him for Christmas.

"Were you?" I said, helpfully.

"I was. What more honorable profession in the Last Age than that of historian?"

And what more futile, t thought, but kept it to myself. Historians, as I understood, existed to pass down knowledge and lore to future generations. Without descendants, the compilation of history struck me as a fairly dry business. But he was way ahead of me.

"I know I was born in the wrong age for it," he conceded, looking at me for the first time.

"Still, this breaks my heart. What a memorial this could have made. What a testament to the human will to keep going. Look at that."

He was pointing to what remained of a Viking longboat rd helped snatch no more than six months before. The thick fluid we are pleased to call air had eaten gaping holes in it already; out here, you might as well build something out of cheese as to build it of wood.

"Can you imagine setting out to row across the Atlantic Ocean in that ... that ... "

"Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean," I said. "But what you don't know is it was a real ship of fools. You didn't have to deal with a berserk Captain. Lars, Cleaver-of-Heads, he was called. He told me that Thor had called him to sail to Greenland. He hadn't messed with navigation, even though he knew more about it than you'd think, because it was a divine sailing. I picked up him and his crew becalmed in the horse latitudes, rowing to beat the band.

They were about two days from starvation. Before long they would have been eating their shipmates who'd already crossed over to Valhalla. Let me tell you, the stink on that -- "

"You don't have much romance in your soul, Louise."

I thought it over.

"I can't afford it," I said, finally. "There's still too much work to do."

"That's my point. You've got a lot in common with Lars, whether you understand that or not."

"I hope I don't smell like him."

Some of my best comebacks just go right over people's heads; he went on like he hadn't heard me.

"Your will to keep going is the strongest I have ever encountered. There are no new frontiers to push back. In fact, the best you can do is push back the date of the final blackout by a day or a week -- but you push!"

He was making me uncomfortable. There's no doubt he'd read me right in one way: I don't have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in anion, and I can tell you, it stinks.

"What's the consensus back there?" he said. "How are they taking my analysis of the situation?"

"Nobody's very happy about it. You said it's hopeless; I guess they all agree with you.

You're pretty much the voice of authority when it comes to the Gate and the timestream."

"So no one has anything to suggest? No course of action?"

"How could they? They're all looking to you to show them a way out. You said there wasn't any way out. If they had anybody to leave anything to, they'd all be writing their wills, I guess."

He looked at me, and smiled.

"Right. So what's your plan?"

There are nine people on the Council. I don't know why, though the BC might tell me if I asked, since it nominates and elects Council members. I've always fancied it's so, in case we ever screw up so totally that the universe does come apart at the seams and all eras coexist, we can field a team in the Never-neverland World Series.

Technically it's called the Programmers' Council. That's a polite fiction. They don't do any programming. Computers long ago grew too complex and too accurate to allow a mere human to fuck around with their instructions.

Yet there are qualities no one has ever succeeded in plating into the memory banks.

Don't ask me what they are.

Imagination might be one of them, empathy another. Or I could just be giving the human race credit for more than it deserves. Maybe the BC supports and maintains the Council to keep itself in check, to prevent it from actually becoming God. There is that hazard. Possibly the BC needs an element of foolhardiness and prejudice and meanness and ornery self-

interest to give it perspective. Or maybe, like the rest of us, it just needs a giggle now and then.

For whatever reason, the Council is the nearest thing we have to a government. To get on it you need to be incredibly ancient say thirty-six or thirty-seven; well beyond the median mortality age.

That they are gnomes goes without saying. Most are little more than a brain and a central nervous system. Sometimes only the cerebrum is left, and in more than one case I've suspected even that is gone.

There are requirements other than sheer age, but I've never been able to figure them out.

Intelligence is a good one, and so is eccentricity. If you're a thirty-eight-year-old super-genius and a real pain in the ass, your chances of ending up on the Council are excellent.

They are an odd lot. Most of them are not nearly as concerned with outward appearance as most gnomes. Several have elected to house their brains in full prosthetic bodies, but more often than not they don't look any more realistic than Sherman. Ali Teheran is like Larry: a torso fastened to a pedestal. Marybeth Brest is a talking head, a puss on a post, like from a cheap horror film. Nancy Yokohama is a brain in a tank, and The Nameless One is just a speaker sitting on a desk. Only the BC knows who, where, or what he is.