Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Ashes to ashes—

I stood with hands thrust into my coat pockets, near tears. Look: I’m not ashamed to admit it. Shel was odd, vindictive, unpredictable, selfish. He didn’t have a lot of friends. Didn’t deserve a lot of friends. But I loved him. I’ve never known anyone like him.

—In sure and certain hope—

I wasn’t all that confident about the resurrection, but I knew that Adrian Shelborne would indeed walk the earth again. Even if only briefly. I knew, for example, that he and I would stand on an Arizona hilltop on a fresh spring morning late in the twenty-first century, and watch silver vehicles rise into the sky on the first leg of the voyage to Centaurus. And we would be present at the assassination of Elaine Culpepper, a name unknown now, but which would in time be inextricably linked with the collapse of the North American Republic. Time travellers never really die, he was fond of saying. We’ve been too far downstream. You and I will live for a very long time.

The preacher finished, closed his book, and raised his hand to bless the polished orchid-colored coffin. The wind blew, and the air was heavy with the approaching storm. The mourners, anxious to be away, bent their heads and walked past, laying lilies on the coffin. When it was done, they lingered briefly, murmuring to each other. Helen Suchenko stood off to one side, looking lost. Lover with no formal standing. Known to the family but not particularly liked, mostly because they disapproved of Shel himself. She dabbed jerkily at her eyes and kept her gaze riveted on the gray stone which carried his name and dates.

She was fair-haired, with eyes the color of sea water, and a quiet, introspective manner that might easily have misled those who did not know her well.

“I can’t believe it,” she said.

I had introduced him to Helen, fool that I am. She and I had been members of the Devil’s Disciples, a group of George Bernard Shaw devotees. She was an MD, just out of medical school when she first showed up for a field trip to see Arms and the Man . It was love at first sight, but I was slow to show my feelings. And while I was debating how best to make my approach, Shel walked off with her. He even asked whether I was interested, and I, sensing I had already lost, salvaged my pride and told him of course not. After that it was over.

He never knew. He used to talk about her a lot when we were upstream. How he was going to share the great secret with her and take her to Victorian London. Or St. Petersburg before the first war. But it never happened. It was always something he was going to do later.

She was trembling. He really was gone. And I now had a clear field with her. That indecent thought kept surfacing. I was reasonably sure she had always been drawn to me, too, just as she was to Shel, and I suspected that I might have carried the day with her had I pressed my case. But honor was mixed up in it somewhere, and I’d kept my distance.

Her cheeks were wet.

“I’ll miss him, too,” I said.

“I loved him, Dave.”

“I know.”

He had died when his townhouse burned down almost two weeks before. He’d been asleep upstairs and had never got out of bed. The explanation seemed to be that the fire had sucked the oxygen out of the house and suffocated him before he ever realized what was happening. Okay, I didn’t believe it either, but that was what we were hearing.

“It’ll be all right,” I said.

She tried to laugh, but the sound had an edge to it. “Our last conversation was so goofy. I wish I’d known—.” Tears leaked out of her eyes. She stopped, tried to catch her breath. “I would have liked,” she said, when she’d regained a degree of control, “to have been able to say goodbye.”

“I know.” I began to guide her toward my Porsche. “Why don’t you let me take you home?”

“Thank you,” she said, backing off. “I’ll be okay.” Her car was parked near a stone angel.

Edmond Halverson, head of the art department at the University, drew abreast of us, nodded to me, tipped his hat to her, and whispered his regrets. We mumbled something back and he walked on.

She swallowed, and smiled. “When you get a chance, Dave, give me a call.”

I watched her get into her car and drive away. She had known so much about Adrian Shelborne. And so little.

He had traveled in time, and of all persons now alive, only I knew. He had brought me in, he’d said, because he needed my language skills. But I believe it was more than that. He wanted someone to share the victory with, someone to help him celebrate. Over the years, he’d mastered classical Greek, and Castilian, and Renaissance Italian. And he’d gone on, acquiring enough Latin, Russian, French, and German to get by on his own. But we continued to travel together. And it became the hardest thing in my life to refrain from telling people I had once talked aerodynamics with Leonardo.

I watched his brother Jerry duck his head to get into his limo. Interested only in sports and women, Shel had said of him. And making money. If I’d told him about the Watch, he’d said, and offered to take him along, he’d have asked to see a Super Bowl.

Shel had discovered the principles of time travel while looking into quantum gravity. He’d explained any number of times how the Watches worked, but I never understood any of it. Not then, and not now. “But why all the secrecy?” I’d asked him. “Why not take credit? It’s the discovery of the ages.” We’d laughed at the new shade of meaning to the old phrase.

“Because it’s dangerous,” he’d said, peering over the top of his glasses, not at me, but at something in the distance. “Time travel should not be possible in a rational universe.” He’d shaken his head, and his unruly black hair had fallen into his eyes. He was only thirty-eight at the time of his death. “I saw from the first why it was theoretically possible,” he’d said. “But I thought I was missing something, some detail that would intervene to prevent the actual construction of a device. And yet there it is.” And he’d glanced down at the Watch strapped to his left wrist. He worried about Causality, the simple flow of cause and effect. “A time machine breaks it all down,” he said. “It makes me wonder what kind of universe we live in.”

I thought we should forget the philosophy and tell the world. Let other people worry about the details. When I pressed him, he’d talked about teams from the Mossad going back to drag Hitler out of 1935, or Middle Eastern terrorists hunting down Thomas Jefferson. “It leads to utter chaos,” he’d said. “Either time travel should be prohibited, like exceeding the speed of light. Or the intelligence to achieve it should be prohibited.”

We used to retreat sometimes to a tower on a rocky reef somewhere downstream. No one lives there, and there is only ocean in all directions. I don’t know how he found it, or who built it, or what that world is like. Nor do I believe he did. We enjoyed the mystery of the place. The moon is bigger, and the tides are loud. We’d hauled a generator out there, and a refrigerator, and a lot of furniture. We used to sit in front of a wall-length transparent panel, sipping beer, watching the ocean, and talking about God, history, and women.

They were good days.

Eventually, he had said, I will bring Helen here.

The wind blew, the mourners dwindled and were gone, and the coffin waited on broad straps for the workmen who would lower it into the ground.

Damn. I would miss him.

Gone now. He and his Watches. And temporal logic apparently none the worse.

Oh, I still had a working unit in my desk, but I knew I would not use it again. I did not have his passion for time travel. Leave well enough alone. That’s always been my motto.