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

She nodded. “Is this,” lifting a hand in the general direction of the town, “connected with the problem at home? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“I think so.” Cabbage was cooking somewhere. I told her about Shel, how he had died but was still alive. Her colors changed and she moved closer to me. When I’d finished, she only stared straight ahead.

“He’s still alive,” she said at last.

In a way, he’ll always be alive. “Yes,” I said. “He’s still out there.” I explained about the funeral, and how he had reacted.

I could see her struggling to grasp the idea, and to control her anger. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know how,” I said numbly.

“You can take us back, right?”

“Home? Yes.”

“And where else?”

“Anywhere. Well, there are range limits, but nothing you’d care about.”

A couple of kids with baseball gloves hurried past. “What you’re saying,” she said, “is that Shel should go back and walk into that fire. And if he doesn’t, the black fog will not go away. Right? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s what I think . Yes, Helen, that’s what he should do.” “But he’s said he would do that? Right? And by the crazy logic of this business, it shouldn’t matter when.”

“But something’s wrong . I think he never did go back. Never will go back. And I think that’s the problem.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” she said.

“I know.” I watched a man with a handcart moving along the street, selling pickles and relishes. “I don’t either. But there’s a continuity. A track. Time flows along the track.” I squeezed her hand. “We’ve torn out a piece of it.”

“And—?”

“I think the locomotive went into the river.”

She tried to digest that. “Okay,” she said. “Grant the time machine. Dave, what you’re asking him to do is unreasonable. I wouldn’t go back either to get hit in the head and thrown into a fire. Would you?”

I got up. “Helen, what you or I would do doesn’t much matter. I know this sounds cold, but I think we have to find a way to get Shel where he belongs.”

She stood up, and looked west, out of town. The fields were brown, dried out from the summer heat. “You know where to find him?”

“Yes.”

“Will you take me to him?”

“Yes.” And, after a pause: “Will you help me?”

She stared at the quiet little buildings. White clapboard houses. A carriage pulled by two horses just coming around a corner. “Nineteen-five,” she said. “Shaw’s just getting started.”

I didn’t push. I probably didn’t need her to plead with him. Maybe just seeing her would jar something loose. And I knew where I wanted to confront him. At the one event in all of human history which might flay his conscience.

“Let’s go home,” I said. “We need to do some sewing.”

“Why?”

“You’re going to need a costume.”

She looked at me and her eyes were hooded. “Why don’t we just shoot him?” she said. “And drag him back?”

“It seems that what you are really asking, Simmias, is whether death annihilates the soul?” Socrates looked from one to another of his friends.

The one who had put the question was, like most of the others, young and clear-eyed, but subdued in the shadow of the prison house. “It is an important matter,” he said. “There is none of more importance. But we were reluctant—.” He hesitated, his voice caught, and he could go no farther.

“I understand,” said Socrates. “You fear this is an indelicate moment to raise such an issue. But if you would discuss it with me, we cannot very well postpone it, can we?”

“No, Socrates,” said a thin young man with red hair. “Unfortunately, we cannot.” This, I knew, was Crito.

Despite Plato’s account, the final conversation between Socrates and his disciples did not take place in his cell. It might well have begun there, but they were in a wide, utilitarian meeting room when Helen and I arrived. Several women were present. Socrates, then seventy years old, sat at ease on a wooden chair, while the rest of us gathered around him in a half-circle. To my surprise and disappointment, I did not see Shel.

Socrates was, on first glance, a man of mundane appearance. He was of average height, for the time. He was clean-shaven, and he wore a dull red robe. Only his eyes were extraordinary, conveying the impression that they were lit from within. When they fell curiously on me, as they did from time to time, I imagined that he knew where I had come from, and why I was there.

Beside me, Helen writhed under the impact of conflicting emotions. She had been ecstatic at the chance to see Shel again, although I knew she had not yet accepted the idea that he was alive. When he did not arrive, she looked at me as if to say she had told me so, and settled back to watch history unfold. She was, I thought, initially disappointed, in that the event seemed to be nothing more than a few people sitting around talking in an uncomfortable room in a prison. As if the scene should somehow be scored and choreographed and played to muffled drums. Then she had grown interested while Socrates and his friends weighed the arguments for and against immortality.

“When?” she whispered, after we’d been there almost an hour. “When does it happen?”

“Sunset, I think,” I said.

She made a noise deep in her throat.

“Why do men fear death?” Socrates asked.

“Because,” said Crito, “they believe that it is the end of existence.”

There were almost twenty people present. Most were young, but there was a sprinkling of middle-aged and elderly persons. The most venerable of these looked like Moses, a tall man with a white beard and expressive white eyebrows and a fierce countenance. He gazed intently at Socrates throughout, and periodically nodded when the philosopher hammered home a particularly salient point.

“And do all men fear death?” asked Socrates.

“Most assuredly, Socrates,” said a boy, who could have been no more than eighteen.

Socrates addressed the boy. “Do even the brave fear death, Cebes?”

Cebes thought it over. “I have to think so, Socrates.”

“Why then do the valiant dare death? Is it perhaps because they fear something else even more?”

“The loss of their honor,” said Crito with conviction.

“Thus we are faced with the paradox that even the brave are driven by fear. Can we find no one who can face death with equanimity who is not driven by fear?”

Moses was staring at Helen. I moved protectively closer to her.

“Of all men,” said Crito, “only you seem to show no concern at its approach.”

Socrates smiled. “Of all men,” he said, “only a philosopher can truly face down death. Because he knows quite certainly that the soul will proceed to a better existence. Provided he has maintained a lifelong pursuit of knowledge and virtue, and has not allowed his soul, which is his divine essence, to become entangled in concerns of the body. For when this happens, the soul takes on corporeal characteristics. And when death comes, it cannot escape. This is why cemeteries are restless at night.”

“How can we be sure,” asked a man with blond hair who had not previously spoken, “that the soul, even if it succeeds in surviving the trauma of death, is not scattered by the first strong wind?”

It was not intended as a serious question, but Socrates saw that it affected the others. So he answered lightly, observing that it would be prudent to die on a calm day, and then undertook a serious response. He asked questions which elicited admissions that the soul was not physical and therefore could not be a composite object. “I think we need not fear that it will come apart,” he said, with a touch of amusement.