Collected Short Fiction, page 1466
“Is this not so, Laylah?” He was smiling. “Speak. Or have you lost your voice?”
Hoarsely she replied, “These are the things I meant to tell you tonight, yes. But how is it you know them already?”
“From your diary, of course.”
“My diary? How could you read my diary? My diary is in English!”
“Which is the main language of Earth. And Earth is a world of the Empire.” His tone remained gentle. He was not speaking as an Emperor might speak. “Do you think we’d annex a world and not learn its language? While you were asleep an expert in your language entered and read your little book. But tell me, Laylah: would you assassinate me?”
“No. Never. Never!” She was trembling. She could barely get the words out.
“I believe you,” he said, and he sounded sincere. “Yet that is what you came to Haraar to do. Is it because you find me so fascinating? Because you have fallen in love with me?” He was playing with her again, the lion toying with his prey. “Or because you have come to see the uselessness of killing me?”
“All of that,” she said. Some strength returned to her voice. “Killing you would have been pointless. The Empire has survived the deaths of hundreds of Emperors, and will go on and on regardless of who is on the throne. But why should we discuss this? The game is over, Majesty. Summon your executioner.”
“Not just yet. The other part, first: have you really fallen in love with me? With the archenemy of your people?”
His gaze grew fierce. She could not meet his eyes.
“I admit being fascinated by you. That’s not quite the same thing as love.”
“Agreed. I feel a fascination too. You know that, don’t you? Why else do I listen to you, night after night, when I have so much else to do? The lovely maula who risks her life to come to Haraar—who talks her way right into the Emperor’s presence—who tells him tales of her world that hold him helpless night after night—”
“I played a dangerous game, and I lost.” The trembling had stopped. She felt very calm. “Shall we end this little session now? I no longer wish to prolong our conversations.”
“But I do, Laylah. What if I were to offer you Earth’s freedom from Ansaar rule?”
She gasped. Once again he had caught her unawares and sent her reeling. “Earth’s—freedom—?”
“As an autonomous member of the Empire. An end to Ansaar occupation, and freedom for its citizens to travel in Imperial Space. Such a thing is within my power to grant. I saw these lines in your diary too, from one of your ancient poets: ‘Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things; the good of subjects is the end of kings.’ So I believe, Laylah: the good of subjects. I am no tyrant, you know. I will set your little world free.”
“This is an ugly joke. It’s cruel of you to trifle with me like this.”
“I’m neither joking nor trifling. The freedom of Earth is yours, Laylah.” And, after a moment: “As a wedding gift, that is.” His Ansaar hand reached for hers. “ ‘I would gladly go on speaking with him forever,’ you wrote. The opportunity is yours. You fascinate me to the point of love, Laylah. I invite you to become one of my Cherished Major Wives.”
When she could speak again she said, “One of how many, may I ask?”
“You would be the sixth.”
“Ah. The sixth.” She was past the first rush of astonishment, almost calm now. But not the Emperor. His eyes were retracted in tension, the vertical pupil-slits barely in view. “Cherished Wife Number Six! What a strange fate for a quiet girl from Earth!” She mused on it while he stared tautly, knotting and unknotting his fingers. “Well, we can discuss it, Majesty. Yes. We can discuss it, I suppose, in the days ahead.”
He nodded. “By all means. We can discuss it. I will come to you as before, and you will tell me your tales, and perhaps, by and by—”
“By and by,” she said. “Yes. Perhaps.”
She forced herself to maintain her eerie calmness, for otherwise she would break loose entirely from her moorings.
Sixth Cherished Wife! And Earth an autonomous world! Yes, but could she? Would she? By and by, perhaps. Perhaps. By and by.
“Tell me the next story, Laylah.”
Very well. I must tell you, then, Majesty, that from Costa Stambool I went onward to the forbidden world of Grand Binella, the planet of the Oracle Plain, of which they say that in its shapes and colors are the answers to all the questions that have ever been asked and many that have not yet been framed. Near the Plain are the mountains called the Angelon, where one walks on a carpet of rubies and emeralds. Farther on—almost at the horizon—one sees a body of motionless black water, the Sea of Miaule, with Sapont Island smoldering just offshore, a place of demons and basilisks.
I made my way to this terrifying world, Sire, at my brother’s suggestion, because he felt that among those demons and basilisks I might learn certain useful things, things that would stand me in good stead if ever I found myself in the place where I find myself now. And so, upon my arrival there—
Against the Current
ABOUT HALF PAST FOUR in the afternoon Rackman felt a sudden red blaze of pain in both his temples at once, the sort of stabbing jab that you would expect to feel if a narrow metal spike had been driven through your head. It was gone as quickly as it had come, but it left him feeling queasy and puzzled and a little frightened, and, since things were slow at the dealership just then anyway, he decided it might be best to call it a day and head for home.
He stepped out into perfect summer weather, a sunny, cloudless day, and headed across the lot to look for Gene, his manager, who had been over by the SUVs making a tally of the leftovers. But Gene was nowhere in sight. The only person Rackman saw out there was a pudgy salesman named Freitas, who so far as he recalled had given notice a couple of weeks ago. Evidently he wasn’t gone yet, though.
“I’m not feeling so good and I’m going home early,” Rackman announced. “If Gene’s around here somewhere, will you tell him that?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Rackman.”
Rackman circled around the edge of the lot toward the staff parking area. He still felt queasy, and somewhat muddled too, with a slight headache lingering after that sudden weird stab of pain. Everything seemed just a bit askew. The SUVs, for instance—there were more of the things than there should be, considering that he had just run a big clearance on them. They were lined up like a whopping great phalanx of tanks. How come so many? He filed away a mental note to ask Gene about that tomorrow.
He turned the ignition key and the sleek silver Prius glided smoothly, silently, out of the lot, off to the nearby freeway entrance. By the time he reached the Caldecott Tunnel twenty minutes later the last traces of the pain in his temple were gone, and he moved on easily through Oakland toward the bridge and San Francisco across the bay.
At the Bay Bridge toll plaza they had taken down all the overhead signs that denoted the FasTrak lanes. That was odd, he thought. Probably one of their mysterious maintenance routines. Rackman headed into his usual lane anyway, but there was a tolltaker in the booth—why?—and as he started to roll past the man toward the FasTrak scanner just beyond he got such an incandescent glare from him that he braked to a halt.
The FasTrak toll scanner wasn’t where it should be, right back of the tollbooth on the left. It wasn’t there at all.
Feeling a little bewildered now, Rackman pulled a five-dollar bill from his wallet, handed it to the man, got what seemed to be too many singles in change, and drove out onto the bridge. There was very little traffic. As he approached the Treasure Island Tunnel, though, it struck him that he couldn’t remember having seen any of the towering construction cranes that ran alongside the torso of the not-quite-finished new bridge just north of the old one. Nor was there any sign of them—or any trace of the new bridge itself, for that matter, when he glanced into his rearview mirror.
This is peculiar, Rackman thought. Really, really peculiar.
On the far side of the tunnel the sky was darker, as though dusk were already descending—at five-ten on a summer day?—and by the time he was approaching the San Francisco end of the bridge the light was all but gone. Even stranger, a little rain was starting to come down. Rain falls in the Bay Area in August about once every twenty years. The morning forecast hadn’t said anything about rain. Rackman’s hand trembled a little as he turned his wipers on. I am having what could be called a waking dream, Rackman thought, some very vivid hallucination, and when I’m off the bridge I better pull over to the curb and take a few deep breaths.
The skyline of the city just ahead of him looked somehow diminished, as though a number of the bigger buildings were missing. And the exit ramps presented more puzzles. A lot of stuff that had been tom down for the retrofitting of the old bridge seemed to have been put back in place. He couldn’t find his Folsom Street off-ramp, but the long-gone Main Street one, which they had closed after the 1989 earthquake, lay right in front of him. He took it and pulled the Prius to curbside as soon as he was down at street level. The rain had stopped—the streets were dry, as if the rain had never been—but the air seemed clinging and clammy, not like dry summer air at all. It enfolded him, contained him in a strange tight grip. His cheeks were flushed and he was perspiring heavily.
Deep breaths, yes. Calm. Calm. You’re only five blocks from your condo.
Only he wasn’t. Most of the highrise office buildings were missing, all right, and none of the residential towers south of the offramp complex were there, just block after block of parking lots and some ramshackle warehouses. It was night now, and the empty neighborhood was almost completely dark. Everything was the way it had looked around here fifteen, twenty years before. His bewilderment was beginning to turn into terror. The street signs said that he was at his own corner. So where was the thirty-story building where he lived?
Better call Jenny, he thought.
He would tell her—delicately—that he was going through something very baffling, a feeling of, well, disorientation, that in fact he was pretty seriously mixed up, that she had better come get him and take him home.
But his cell phone didn’t seem to be working. All he got was a dull buzzing sound. He looked at it, stunned. He felt as though some part of him had been amputated.
Rackman was angry now as well as frightened. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen to him. He was fifty-seven years old, healthy, solvent, a solid citizen, owner of a thriving Toyota dealership across the bay, married to a lovely and loving woman. Everyone said he looked ten years younger than he really was. He worked out three times a week and ran in the Bay-to-Breakers Race every year and once in a while he even did a marathon. But the drive across the bridge had been all wrong and he didn’t know where his condo building had gone and his cell phone was on the fritz, and here he was lost in this dark forlorn neighborhood of empty lots and abandoned warehouses with a wintry wind blowing—hey, hadn’t it been sticky and humid a few minute ago?—on what had started out as a summer day. And he had the feeling that things were going to get worse before they got better. If indeed they got better at all.
HE SWUNG AROUND and drove toward Union Square. Traffic was surprisingly light for downtown San Francisco. He spotted a phone booth, parked nearby, fumbled a coin into the slot, and dialed his number. The phone made ugly noises and a robot voice told him that the number he had dialed was not a working number. Cursing, Rackman tried again, tapping the numbers in with utmost care. “We’re sorry,” the voice said again, “the number you have reached is not—”
A telephone book dangled before him. He riffled through it—Jenny had her own listing, under Burke—but though half a dozen Burkes were in the book, five of them lived in the wrong part of town, and when he dialed the sixth number, which had no address listed, an answering machine responded in a birdlike chirping voice that certainly wasn’t Jenny’s. Something led him then to look for his own listing. No, that wasn’t there either. A curious calmness came over him at that discovery. There were no FasTrak lanes at the toll plaza, and the dismantled freeway ramps were still here, and the neighborhood where he lived hadn’t been developed yet, and neither he nor Jenny was listed in the San Francisco phone book, and therefore either he had gone seriously crazy or else somehow this had to be fifteen or even twenty years ago, which was pretty much just another way of saying the same thing. If this really is fifteen or twenty years ago, Rackman thought, then Jenny would be living in Sacramento and I’d be across the bay in El Cerrito and still married to Helene. But what the hell kind of thing was that to be thinking, If this really is fifteen or twenty years ago?
He considered taking himself to the nearest emergency room and telling them he was having a breakdown, but he knew that once he put himself in the hands of the medics, there’d be no extricating himself: they’d subject him to a million tests, reports would be filed with this agency and that, his driver’s license might be yanked, bad things would happen to his credit rating. It would be much smarter, he thought, to check himself into a hotel room, take a shower, rest, try to figure all this out, wait for things to get back to normal.
Rackman headed for the Hilton, a couple of blocks away. Though night had fallen just a little while ago, the sun was high overhead now, and the weather had changed again, too: it was sharp and cool, autumn just shading into winter. He was getting a different season and a different time of day every fifteen minutes or so, it seemed. The Hilton desk clerk, tall and balding and starchy-looking, had such a self-important manner that as Rackman requested a room he felt a little abashed at not having any luggage with him, but the clerk didn’t appear to give a damn about that, simply handed him the registration form and asked him for his credit card. Rackman put his Visa down on the counter and began to fill out the form.
“Sir?” the desk clerk said, after a moment.
Rackman looked up. The clerk was staring at his credit card. It was the translucent kind, and he tipped it this way and that, puzzledly holding it against the light. “Problem?” Rackman asked, and the clerk muttered something about how unusual the card looked.
Then his expression darkened. “Wait just a second,” he said, very coldly now, and tapped the imprinted expiration date on the card. “What is this supposed to be? Expires July, 2010? 2010, sir? 20101 Are we having a little joke, sir?” He flipped the card across the counter at Rackman the way he might have done if it had been covered with some noxious substance.
Another surge of terror hit him. He backed away, moving quickly through the lobby and into the street. Of course he might have tried to pay cash, he supposed, but the room would surely be something like $225 a night, and he had only about $350 on him. If his credit card was useless, he’d need to hang on to his cash at least until he understood what was happening to him. Instead of the Hilton, he would go to some cheaper place, perhaps one of the motels up on bombard Street.
On his way back to his car Rackman glanced at a newspaper in a sidewalk rack. President Reagan was on the front page, under a headline about the invasion of Grenada. The date on the paper was Wednesday, October 26,1983. Sure, he thought. 1983. This hallucination isn’t missing a trick. I am in 1983 and Reagan is President again, with 1979 just up the road, 1965, 1957, 1950—
In 1950 Rackman hadn’t even been born yet. He wondered what was going to happen to him when he got back to a time earlier than his own birth.
He stopped at the first motel on Lombard that had a vacancy sign and registered for a room. The price was only $75, but when he put two fifties down on the counter, the clerk, a pleasant, smiling Latino woman, gave him a pleasant smile and tapped her finger against the swirls of pink coloration next to President Grant’s portrait. “Somebody has stuck you with some very funny bills, sir. But you know that I can’t take them. If you can pay by credit card, though, Visa, American Express—”
Of course she couldn’t take them. Rackman remembered, now, that all the paper money had changed five or ten years back, new designs, bigger portraits, distinctive patches of pink or blue ink on their front sides that had once been boringly monochromatic. And these bills of his had the tiny date “2004” in the comer.
So far as the world of 1983 was concerned, the money he was carrying was nothing but play money.
1983.
Jenny, who is up in Sacramento in 1983 and has no idea yet that he even exists, had been twenty-five that year. Already he was more than twice her age. And she would get younger and younger as he went ever onward, if that was what was going to continue to happen.
Maybe it wouldn’t. Soon, perhaps, the pendulum would begin to swing the other way, carrying him back to his own time, to his own life. What if it didn’t, though? What if it just kept on going?
In that case, Rackman thought, Jenny was lost to him, with everything that had bound them together now unhappened. Rackman reached out suddenly, grasping the air as though reaching for Jenny, but all he grasped was air. There was no Jenny for him any longer. He had lost her, yes. And he would lose everything else of what he had thought of as his life as well, his whole past peeling away strip by strip. He had no reason to think that the pendulum would swing back. Already the exact details of Jenny’s features were blurring in his mind. He struggled to recall them: the quizzical blue eyes, the slender nose, the wide, generous mouth, the slim, supple body. She seemed to be drifting past him in the fog, caught in an inexorable current carrying her ever farther away.
He slept in his car that night, up by the Marina, where he hoped no one would bother him. No one did. Morning light awakened him after a few hours—his wristwatch said it was 9:45 p.m. on the same August day when all this had started, but he knew better now than to regard what his watch told him as having any meaning—and when he stepped outside the day was dry and clear, with a blue summer sky overhead and the sort of harsh wind blowing that only San Francisco can manage on a summer day. He was getting used to the ever-changing weather by now, though, the swift parade of seasons tumbling upon him one after another. Each new one would hold him for a little while in that odd enclosed way, but then it would release its grasp and nudge him onward into the next one.
