John Varley - Millennium

Do you believe a drowning man sees his entire life flash before his eyes? I didn't; I still don't. I've talked to too many people who thought they were about to die, and then survived, and while they recalled some scattered images and went through some experiences that might be called religious, there was no sequential review, no actual reliving of anything.

Nevertheless, something a lot like that happened to me then. It didn't take more than a second. I was clearheaded as I reviewed where I had been, where I was now, and what I might expect from the future.

Then I stood up, and as Mayer finished saying, Then I'll tell you what I know, I said, "I want to go, too."

Louise did not seem surprised. I suspected it was impossible to surprise her at that point; I supposed she had seen everything that would happen here this night, and was going through this conversation for reasons unfathomable to me. I was right-she could no longer be surprised -- but I was also wrong, as I found out later; she didn't know what was going to happen. She proved it by turning to Sherman with a helpless look.

"What do I do now?" she asked him.

I think Mayer was as startled by this as I was. Suddenly, things shifted around, and I don't know if any of us really knew who was in charge.

Unless it was Sherman. You don't know what inscrutable is until you've tried to figure out what a robot is thinking. Mayer seemed to have the same thought. At least, when he went on with his pitch, he aimed it at Sherman, not Louise.

"What's the difference?" he said, with a pleading note }n his voice. "You've got three alternatives. You go back with the insides of that stunner, and you leave me here. You go back without the stunner, and you leave me here. Or you go back, take me, I tell you where the stunner's insides are, you come back to get them-"

"We don't know if we can do that," Sherman reminded him. "There may not even be enough time for another trip."

"That's your problem," Mayer said. "l want you to tell me what happens. What are the results of my actions?"

"Immediately? Nothing at all. We will leave, and you and Mister Smith will go back to your lives. They have been disrupted, but you will never notice a thing. Life will continue to seem as it always has done; reality will not be altered for you. Eventually you both will die."

It's funny how one word will bring something home that you may have understood intellectually but haven't yet felt in your gut. Louise and Sherman came from a place where I had been dust for a thousand years.

"As a result of the changes introduced into your lives by the things you have seen and heard in the last month or so, you will each do things much differently than you would have done in what we like to think of as the "preordained" order of things. Those changes will affect the lives of others. The effects will spread over the years and centuries. It is probable, approaching certainty, that these events will wipe out our time machine. And, of course, Louise and myself and all our contemporaries, but that isn't important.

"The important thing for you, Doctor Mayer, is that if Louise didn't exist, then she never went back to 1955. She never boarded that airplane -- at considerable risk to her own life, I might add and never rescued your daughter. It would mean that your daughter did indeed die in the Arizona desert."

Mayer was shaking his head.

"And yet you said you have her, alive, right now."

"'Now' is a rather slippery concept in this context."

"I can see that. But you didn't tell me what difference it would make. If the paradox is already here, how can my telling you about the stunner change anything? And on the other hand, how can my disappearance from this time make things any worse? People disappear all the time."

"Yes, but we know why. It's because we've taken them. And we know ... " Sherman paused, and seemed to reassess "Very well. I'll be honest. We don't know whether it would be worse to take you or leave you here."

"I thought not. And in that case, I stand firm. You see- ... when you get right down to it, I don't believe you have my daughter. I won't until I see her. And having seen her, I won't believe I could lose her again."

Sherman looked at him for a long time.

"The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve."

"I know that, too. I've spent my life accepting the answers I've found in the universe.

Until I began to investigate and to really think about the nature of time. And then something changed. I don't believe ... I don't believe there is nothing behind it all. Maybe I'm saying I believe in God."

"And he's on your side. Is that it?"

Mayer looked abashed.

"I put it badly. I -- "

"No, don't apologize," Sherman said. "Oddly enough, I do too." He looked from Mayer, to Louise, to me. By then I was feeling like a relatively unimportant member of the peanut gallery, there to applaud when the sign flashed.

"Do you believe in a god, Mister Smith?"

"I don't know. I don't believe reality is as fragile as you're trying to say it is. And I still want to go."

He looked at Louise, who was shaking her head hopelessly.

"Very well," Sherman said. "Let's all go back."

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

Do whatever Sherman tells you, the time capsule message had said. The time capsule Sherman admitted he had cooked up in collusion with the Big Computer.

But what choice did I have? I had to feel as if I understood something first, and I'd stopped feeling that along about ... well, about the time I snapped the neck of that poor suffering drone. This is the nicest thing I'd done for anyone in a long time, I had thought then.

Sherman said we had to go back and interrupt the meeting between Smith and Mayer.

And we had to put on a hell of a show for them.

Well, P.T. Barnum could have learned a thing or two from us. The Gate often causes a lot of local weirdness when it arrives in the past. There are three dozen kinds of suppressors to cancel out these effects when we want to arrive in, say, the middle of a library. Sherman had Lawrence turn them all off, with the result that if we'd been planning to go to Times Square on New Year's eve we'd have been the noisiest show in town. Then we threw in a lot of extra razzle-dazzle to make them nervous.

I improvised from there. I think even Sherman might have been surprised when I cast him as a walking torture machine. But then, there were surprises all around that night. I, for instance, had pretty much believed it was important to get the whole stunner. But Sherman had other ideas.

"You didn't tell me the whole truth," I told him, as soon as we'd made it back through the Gate.

"I told you as much as I had," he said. "Now we go to my fall-back position. And in the meantime, our friends are suffering some disorientation."

He was right. Both Smith and Mayer were looking stunned. I thought Mayer was going to be sick.

There's not much you can do; they're either going to deal with the trip, or they're going to go crazy. It wasn't long until I was fairly sure they'd both be okay. When I thought Mayer would understand me, I knelt beside him and looked the bastard in the eye. "Okay. Do we have to bring your daughter in here, or will you tell me what I need to know? Let me remind you that I haven't go t much time to mount an operation, wherever or whenever you tell me to go to."

He looked dubious, but still slightly dazed.

"You wouldn't send me back?"

"What's the point? Sherman says he has something up his sleeve, anyway, but I want to go back and get the rest of that stunner."

"It's not necessary," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I never had it. The man who sold it to me had already gutted the machine."