John Varley - Millennium

"What did he do with the guts?"

Mayer was looking nervous. I don't blame him. Most of what I'd done in his office had been an act, but I think he'd swallowed at least some of it, and damn if I didn't feel like a dangerous person just then.

"The man was an artisan," Mayer said. "He operated a roadside souvenir stand, selling silver and jewelry. He told m., that when the ... the stunner stopped producing the pleasant tingling sensations, he broke up the insides and incorporated the more interesting parts into belt buckles and rings."

He moved away from me slightly. I don't blame him. I knew I had to either knock his head off, or laugh.

"I only said I knew where it was," he said. "I do. It is scattered al l over the continent.

And it is utterly harmless."

I laughed.

"Doc," I told him, "you've just shut down the Operations division of the Gate Project. I'm out of a job."

It seemed like the proper time to die.

It wasn't, not quite yet, but I began planning it.

There was the matter of Mayer's daughter, and my promise to him. I pressed the emergency assembly alarm on Lawrence's console. For a while, nothing happened. Then I got a tired voice.

"Yeah, what the hell is it?"

"Mandy, is that you?"

"Who the hell else would it he? Who the hell else would sit end the ready-room with three corpses that are a hell of a lot happier than I am, just on the off chance that my fearless leader would need me, when I could have been on my way to dreamland hours ago? How many hours have we got, by the way?"

"Mandy, are you drunk on duty?"

"Drunk? Drunk? Does a bear shit in the woods? Does a-"

"Good for you, Mandy. We have about twenty-four hours before we softly and suddenly vanish away. Are you still on duty? Or have you resigned?"

I thought she might have gone to sleep. Then she spoke.

"What's it to you?"

"I've got a goat here who wants to see his daughter. She's in the holding pen. I'll have the BC warm her up, if you'll run him over there."

Mandy Djakarta, the toughest operative I'd ever known, began m cry.

"God, l love a happy ending," she sobbed.

Mandy showed up soon to take Mayer away. I was left with Smith, Lawrence, Sherman, and Martin Coventry, who came in with Mandy. Bill was eyeing Lawrence, the last surviving member of the gnomish control team. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, then I looked at it from Smith's twentieth-century eyes and knew that Bill was squeamish at Lawrence's appearance. Lawrence ignored Bill totally, did not deign to acknowledge his existence. For just a second I felt closer to Lawrence than I had since ... since he'd fallen apart and been tied down to his console. Who was this lousy 20th to judge us? At the same time, I identified with Bill. I felt the same way he did, had felt that way all my life. This is you in a couple years, Louise ...

At least I didn't have to face that anymore.

"Will you be needing me for anything else, Louise?" Lawrence asked. The implication was clear. I was about to tell him to go ahead and turn himself off.

"For a short time, Lawrence, if you please," Sherman said.

"Okay. But when the crunch is about ten minutes away, I'm signing out. I've given it a lot of thought, and I decided I'd rather die than ... whatever's going to happen. Better to live and die, than never to have lived at all. Does that make any sense, Sherman?"

"It does. I respect it. Please hang on for me."

Bill had been coughing a lot. The wonder was no blood was coming up. He'd been breathing our air for half an hour before Martin came up with a gas mask that would give him pure oxygen.

Sherman took the four of us out on the balcony overlooking the derelict field. Bill looked out at the detritus of our operations; it was easy to see he was impressed. "

"Lawrence's choice has been a popular one," Martin told me. "I believe I have had the shortest tenure on the Council, which is a notoriously transient body. They're all dead."

"Even Phoenix?"

"Even he. In a sense, I suppose I am the Council."

"That should simplify ... Hey, just how many people are left?"

Sherman looked thoughtful, which meant he was interfacing with the BC. The BC answered for him, from thin air, which startled Bill.

"Discounting the three hundred million wimps, which are technically alive, and the two hundred thousand goats in suspended animation ... the population of the Earth now stands at two hundred and nine. Correction: two-oh-sigh-correction, two-oh-seven."

"I get the picture," I said. "So Mandy was probably the last operative I had left."

"In a sense," the BC said. "She has taken a drug that is invariably fatal, but which will give her six hours of pure pleasure."

"Good for her," I said.

Bill hadn't heard us. He was looking at the sky. I use the word "sky" in the figurative sense; it was over our heads, so it had to be the sky. But I know it wasn't what he was used to seeing when he looked up.

"You people sure made a mess of things," he commented.

I couldn't believe my ears.

"We?" I said. "We made a mess of things? You can't believe we managed to do all this."

"Then how did it happen?"

"It started with your great-grandfather and the industrial revolution. But it was you, you unspeakable son-of-a-bitch, your fucking generation that really got things going. Did you really think there'd never be a nuclear war? There have been nineteen o f them. Did you think nerve gases were going to just sit there, that nobody would ever use them?"

"Easy, Louise," Sherman said.

The hell with that.

"CBN, you called it. Chemical, Biological, Nuclear. You made plans just as if the world could survive it, just like it was another you could win. Well, goddam it, we held out a long time, but this is what we came to.

"The plagues were the really cute part. Add laboratory-bred " microbes to a high level of background radiation, and what you get is germs that mutate a hell of a lot faster than we can.

We've done our best, we've fought them with everything we have. But your great-

grandchildren came up with genetic warfare. So now the plagues are locked up right in our genes. No matter how hard we fight them, they change. Did you think we started the Gate Project for fun? Can't you see what it is? It's a last-ditch, hopeless effort to salvage something from the human race. And it isn't going to work."

"It will work, Louise," Sherman said.

"Okay, Sherman," I said. "Here's the big question. Here's where you tell me the last thing you held out on me, or I sign out and let the rest of you zombies handle the world from now on. How does it work?"

"You remember I spoke of perspective."

"I remember."

"That Bill Smith believes he is in the future, when in actuality, he is in the present, as are you and L"

"You're not telling me anything new."

"The answer is simple. We will send all the people we have collected into the future."

I opened my mouth to answer. That's as far as I got.

"That's stupid," I finally managed to say. "The Gate won't go to the future."

"Not quite correct," the BC said. "The Gate exists in the future. It brings people to the future every time it retrieves one of your snatch teams."

"Yeah, but I was told we can't go forward from here. From this instant."

"That is almost true," the BC said. "To send anything uptime from here would destroy the Gate. Some side effects of this process would also destroy this city, and leave a crater in the earth's surface twenty miles deep. In other words, travel from an arbitrary present to a theoretical future is something that can be done only once, as the Gate would no longer exist after the trip."

"That's what I said. You can't ... "

And I stopped. If there has been a constant in my life, it has been the Gate. An earlier generation would have spoken of the constancy of the stars in the sky, or of the regularity of the sunrise. I had much less confidence in these phenomena than I had in the Gate.