John Varley - Millennium

Astronauts from Alpha Centauri. We had Ambrose Bierce and Amelia Earhart.

Sleepless nights, I used to wonder what sort of society mey'd form when they all got to New Earth.

Leading away from the holding pens was a rail line to the spaceport, just visible in the distance. Sitting there were a few dozen surface-to-orbit craft that were seldom used these days ... and the Ship.

The Ship was almost finished. Another two or three years and we'd have made it.

Sherman was waiting with no signs of impatience. His legs weren't in lotus position, but he managed to resemble The Buddha. I regarded him, wondered if he wanted me to ring some bells or light incense or something. But I'd been coughing pretty bad since my return from the glorious twentieth, and I made a beeline to the revitalizer. I sat down heavily. As I plugged the feedline into my navel it began to take its samples.

"What are your orders?" I asked.

"Don't take it like that, Louise," he said. "I didn't ask for this."

"Neither did I. But one takes what one gets, doesn't one?"

"One does."

"Henceforth, I shall regard you as The All-Seeing Eye. I shall presume you know everything about everything. I'll presume you know my thoughts before I think them. And you know what?"

"You don't give a shit."

I shrugged. "Okay, you talk to an infallible prophet, you never get to deliver your best lines. It must make it dull, knowing exactly what's coming."

"I wouldn't call it dull."

I thought about that, and managed to laugh.

"I guess not. You know that I've resigned?"

"I do. And that you broke security and told Bill Smith who and what you actually are, as best you could, and that he didn't believe it."

"Why did you want me to tell him I'd see him that night? I'd already been back, in the hangar. I couldn't go back to his hotel room."

"I wanted to insure he'd be in the hangar to meet you, as we knee, he had already done."

That one stumped me for a minute. The answer was obvious, but l didn't see it because all my training had forced me to look at the situation in a particular way. Then I saw.

"You were forcing the paradox."

"Correct."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Would you have done it?"

I couldn't answer that. Probably not.

"The Council would not have authorized the trip, either," he went on, "if I had told them its purpose was to be sure you and Smith did meet. Your meeting him was what caused the paradox situation to get out of-hand in the first place."

"Then what's the point? Why did I go back?"

He steepled his fingertips and was silent for quite a while. For a moment he looked startlingly human.

"All of us in the Gate Project are saddled with a certain perspective," he began, at last.

"We think of this moment as the, quote, present, unquote. When we move downtime, we think of it as going into the past, and of coming back as returning to the present. But when we arrive in the past, it is the present. It is the present to those who live there. To them, we have come from the future."

"This is pretty elementary."

"Yes. But I'm speaking of perspective. Running the Gate, as we do, we are unaccustomed to Bill Smith's perspective. We aren't used to the idea that there is a concrete future that is someone else's present."

I sat up straighter.

"Sure we are. I got a message from the future no more than an hour ago. It told me to trust you."

"I know. But who was it from?"

"From me, you know that. At least ... "

"From a future version of you. But you haven't written it yet."

"For that matter, I haven't written the first one yet, either. And I'm not sure I will."

"You don't have to. Look at these." He handed me two metal plaques. I knew what they had to be, but I looked anyway. I tossed them on the floor.

"Handwriting is easy to copy, Louise. The BC turned these out with very little effort.

They will be sent back in a few hours."

I sighed. "Okay, you've got me coming and going, I'll admit it You still haven't told me why one paradox is preferable to another."

"There are several reasons. In one paradox -- the one we would have caused had you not gone back and spent the night with Bill Smith -- you would have vanished the instant the appointed time arrived and you failed to step through the Gate. Because, seen from the future, you already had stepped through. It was part of the structure of events, as surely as the loss of the stunner was part of that structure."

"But it wasn't. That's what this has all been about."

"It was. I'm saying the paradox is built into the structure of time. That the events we have for so many years been observing is the illusion, and the new reality that is now working its way up the timeline is the real reality. And it doesn't include us."

He was making my head ache. Time theory had never been my strong point. I grasped that one word, and held on to it.

"I thought these were all theories. I thought we didn't really know what would happen in a paradox."

"They were. I've received new information that I have reason to believe is reliable." He spread his hands. "We're handicapped here by the language. We don't have a useful definition of "reality," for one thing. I believe that what is closer to the truth is that each series of possible events creates its own reality. There is the one we've been looking at, in which Smith never found the stunner, and it's tied up with the one where he couldn't have found it because it was never lost."

"But what we're dealing with here is the one in which it was lost and he did find it, and reality is rearranging itself. And it's going to leave us out."

"That's true, so far as it goes."

"I'm afraid it's as far as I can go. What you're saying is that it didn't ... doesn't matter whether or not I went back. If I didn't, I'd simply have vanished that much faster."

He looked at me with his much more expressive face, and I saw something that I couldn't identify.

"It may have little meaning in the long run," he said. "But I myself would prefer a universe where you were still here over one where you had already vanished."

I didn't know what to say about that. I ran it through the battered mechanism I was using for a brain, and came up with something. Two things.

"Thank you," was the first thing. "But did you really have a choice?"

"I don't know. If the information from my time capsule had told me I must eliminate you from the timestream, I'd prefer to think I would have resisted it. Luckily, my only course was to do what I did do, which was also what I wanted to do."

"Do we have free will, Sherman?"

"Yes." "

"You can say that, sitting there knowing what's about to happen, what I'm about to do?"

"Yes. I wouldn't be trying to convince you of what we must do if I didn't think we had free will."

I thought that one over.

"Don't try to shit me, Sherman. You know I've resigned, and yet you seem to be saying there's still something we can do. If we're going to do it, you're going to have to convince me to reenlist.

He grinned at me. I swear it.

"We do have free will, Louise. It's just that it's predestined."

"I'm tired of the word games. You know I'm about ready to join the majority and jump through that window over there. You also know there's only one way you can stop me, which is to tell me what you know, and what you plan to do."

So he told me.

By then I was sure the universe could no longer surprise me, nor interest me. I was wrong. It managed to do both in no more than ten minutes.

And while he told me, the revitalizer -- which had been pumping me full of drugs and nutrients while at the same time examining my physical condition -- spoke up with the confirmation.

My apartment building never a lively place at the best of times -- was grim as Sherman and I embarked on the slidewalk. Word had gotten out that the end of the world was coming.