John Varley - Millennium

There was a lot of gaily-colored paper and foil, most of it charred around the edges. I had to consult my cybernet memories before I knew what it was: the remains of Christmas presents. I saw new clothes, some still in plastic wrappers, and other things I was pretty sure were gifts. There was one heap of things that could only have been children's toys. It was all badly burned.

There was another area, the largest by far, where they had dumped a category of wreckage best defined as '?'.

It looked like it covered about an acre, and my Seiko said the stunner was in there.

The stuff was contained in big Hefty trash bags. Some of the bags had fallen on their sides and spilled their contents, and I'd have been hard pressed to determine what most of it was myself. It was even possible there were some bits of passengers in there. Obviously, the crews had walked over the site picking up everything that didn't look as if it belonged in a cow pasture, and if they couldn't tell what it was it had been dumped here for someone to go over later.

I counted a hundred bags and I wasn't a quarter of the way through.

I tried to think of some plausible reason for me to go wading into the middle of that, breaking open bags and dumping the contents on the concrete floor and rooting around in them. I couldn't think of a good reason. I still can't. If I'd had ten people alone and five or six hours to search, I probably would have found it. What I had was thirty minutes, me myself and I, and a hundred and fifty people to provide an interested audience. ("What're ya looking for, babe?" Souvenirs? Fingers with diamond rings on them? The most important object in the universe?) "I could use some of that coffee."

Coffee? Oh, right, I was here to pass out coffee, wasn't I? I turned, with a carefully calculated smile on my face, and there he was.

Bill Smith. The star of the show.

Time is my stock in trade. I shouldn't be surprised, by now, at the tricks it can play. But that moment was very much like another one, not much earlier, when a hijacker's bullet had hit me in the shoulder. Time slowed down, and a moment became an eternity.

I remember fear. I was an actress, playing a part on a stage before the most important audience I would ever face, and I couldn't remember my lines. I was an imposter: everyone could instantly see it, there was no escape from exposure. I was a pitiful freak hiding in a lying skinsuit, a monster from an unimaginable future. And the whole world hinged on this one man, and on what I did to or with him, and I was not expected to speak to him, offer him a cup of coffee, just as if he were an ordinary mortal.

At the same time, that's just what he was. I knew Bill Smith: divorce, incipient ulcer, drinking problem, and all. I'd read his biography from the childhood in Ohio right through Naval flight school and carrier landings and commercial aviation and the job with Boeing and the gradual rise through the Safety Board and the early retirement and the boating accident that would kill him.

And that's what hurt. I knew how this man was going to die. If I succeeded in my project, if I could turn the course of events back to what the timestream could tolerate, back to predestination, he would continue his slow decline. He would eat away at himself until his death would be a mercy.

For the first time, a goat had acquired a name and a history. And a lopsided, tired grin.

I turned, having looked at him for no more than a second, and started to walk away.

"Hey, how about that coffee?" .

I walked faster. In no time I was almost running.

I've made other mistakes in my career with the Gate. I did other things badly. After I got the top job, everyone's mistakes were my mistakes, in a sense. I will always bear a load for the mistake Pinky made, for instance. It meant I hadn't trained her well enough.

But a special guilt attaches to that day, to that first trip back to correct the paradox, because I don't know why I did what I did.

I ran out of the hangar and ran the quarter-mile to the place where the Gate had dropped me. I cowered there beneath that hateful sky until the Gate appeared again on schedule and I stepped through.

Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.

That first meeting was the one and only chance I'd ever have to cut the paradox knot cleanly, right at the source, and I bungled it. Do I mention predestination to excuse my failure, or did inexorable fate really grab me like a marionette and frogmarch me through the stations of some cosmic ritual? Sometimes I wish I'd never been born.

Then again, you have to be born to wish such a thing. And if I flubbed again as badly as I did the first time, that's exactly the situation we'd all be facing. Never-born, never-lived, never having tasted either success or failure. Bad as it is, my life is my own, and I accept it without reservation.

I returned with my sense of determination intact. We'd never expected this first trip to show much result; it was simply the direct approach, and the only one that could stop the paradox completely. Now we'd try more subtle avenues. Now we'd start the war of containment. Our goal would be to confine the paradox to limits the universe could withstand -- we'd seal it off, encapsulate it, turn events gently back toward what they should have been, and, though the timeline might vibrate like a plucked guitar string eight billion years long, pray that its fundamental elasticity would eventually prevail.

"It's like stuffing neutrons back into a critical mass of uranium," Martin Coventry said.

"Fine," I said. "You've got a machine that will do that, don't you? Let's start stuffing."

"I think he was speaking in twentieth-century terms," Sherman said.

That's right. Sherman.

I glared at him. Apparently I didn't have enough odd things in my life. Now my robot had staffed to act funny.

He had been there when I came back through the Gate, smiling and looking a bit guilty.

Both of those things are hard to do without a face, so he had grown one fur the occasion. His presence there was bad enough. So far as I knew, he'd never been out of the apartment since I uncrated him. But the face was utterly impossible.

Now the three of us were closeted in a room just off the operations level, discussing the shambles of the first trip. Lawrence was also present, via two-way remote, and I suspect somebody from the Council might have been listening in through the BC.

Three of us! That shows how much Sherman had shaken me. Before, I'd no more have counted Sherman in our number than I would a chair or a table.

"I think Louise is right," Lawrence said. I looked at his image in the vidscreen. "We shouldn't make too much of this. The thing to do is move on to the next phase."

"I'm afraid too much damage has already been done," said Martin. He really looked scared. His man-of-action phase had apparently faded; he was once again the cautious historian worse, a practical historian, with the terrifying capability to write his own history.

"What damage?" I wanted to know. "Okay, I didn't get what I went back for. We didn't estimate my chances were very good even before I went."

"I agree," said Sherman. I waited for Martin or Lawrence to protest the idiocy of letting an animated dildo have a voice in these proceedings, but neither of them batted an eye. They turned to listen to Sherman, so I did, too.

"To sum up what happened," he went on, "Smith saw her, she looked at him, and she ran.

Is that accurate, Louise? Don't bare your teeth like that; it's not attractive."

"Wait until I get you home with a screwdriver and a soldering iron."

"That's as may be. Right now we're talking about your recent failure. Is my account of your failure an accurate one?"

"I'll peel that smarmy face right off your head, you -- "