EX CATHEDRA
My children have been stolen.
You want to distance yourself. You want to blame time, you want to blame existence itself, because that would make it inevitable, determined. And then you could fall back on some Zen-like abstraction for comfort, or that old chestnut from the apostle Paul about all things working together for those who believe in the Lord and are called according to his purposes. But you know there is no balm in the East or the West of Old Earth, no way of thinking that will make it right.
The children are gone.
And there is no way to report the crime. No crime, in principle. And so no possibility of Justice.
There's nobody to turn to when you wake up in the middle of the night and hear their crying, when you wander the house listening for them in the floorboard's creak, in the window curtain's rustle. You hear their whispers in these things, these phenomena, and sometimes a closing door reminds you of the gesture of your eldest son's hand reaching for a glass of milk, or a nightlight flickering on in the bathroom brings back a smile playing across your daughter's face.
She is dark-complexioned? Yes. Blue-eyes? You don't. Rebecca does.
A glimpse through a station portal to the out-spreading Milky Way. Your two-and-a-half-year-old son's innocent inquiry, his first real sentence: "How are you today, Dadda?"
I'm not doing so well. I can't remember you.
There are no children.
Can't be.
Must not be any children.
So the sounds and the glimpses are merely games you play with your mind.
You know this.
And so you take a shower, and you masturbate, or you don't, and you brush your teeth and get dressed, and you eat oatmeal or forgo breakfast altogether and slap on a patch, and you kiss your wife who is not your wife—
"'Morning, babe."
"Hello, Will."
"You feeling any better today? Any different?"
"No." She pauses, really considers. "No."
"I'm sorry. Do you want to go to the doctor again?"
"I don't think it's helping any." Rebecca, that is her name, shifts her weight from right foot to left. The white nightgown, nearly see-through, outlines her skinny form. Bony and sharp she is. She hasn't been eating and her abdominal muscles are starting to show. Which turns you on, even though they are a product of her wasting disease.
She's convinced she hears something, too. Voices.
But she doesn't know who they belong to.
You have to trust that she'll be all right today.
That your home will look after her.
You have work to do, after all.
And so you touch the pad by the door and download your day's supply of security keys and upgrades, and you tell your front door to take you to work, and you step through the transport screen—
—into another meeting.
This meeting is very important. As are they all. The project is enormous and complex, and you are in charge. More or less.
I am in charge.
Me.
We are building a monument to humanity. For humanity. For history and the future. It is to be a space for reflection and change. A place to honor the past and keep faith with what is to come. A space where the sacred and eternal meet with the individual, meet and merge. A church. A temple. A hollow statue you can go up in. A sacred grove where you can relax and feel utter safety. Complete relief from oppression of any kind.
The Cathedral of Justice.
This particular meeting on this particular morning is with a delegation of linguists from one of the older cache partitions. They have concerns about the cathedral's portico fresco for pre-colonial victims of click-tongue discrimination. (Pre-colonial Earth, that is, not Milky Way, which is a whole other ball of wax.) And right behind the language advocates is a joint cache-biologicals coalition, this one made up of left-handers who want a side chapel devoted to the alleviation of oppression by the eastern-sided. This is no problem in a general sense; it's the kind of thing we incorporate every day into our designs. The quandary comes from the fact that the coalition can't or won't decide which side of the cathedral is left and which is right. Because, in order to tell left from right, you need to know north from south or up from down. The cathedral has no spin. Spin leads to inequality.
In the cathedral, we don't put priorities on justice. Priority is another word for privilege, and in the cathedral, there can be no privileged position. Because that would be unjust.
Yet the left-handers feel slighted. That makes their problem my problem.
So I take the meeting.
Today, I've scheduled a consultant from the time-frame design league to hash it out with them. I've kept this hush-hush, because I'm already suspected of having a secret "eastern" agenda, and this will no doubt be seen by some as another dirty trick of the clockwise cabal. Mostly I just want them to decide on something, anything, before the final collapse of the galaxy. FGC is pretty much our big deadline. Although we have every hope of bringing the project in long before that, and under-budget.
Unfortunately, time-frame consultants tend to be patronizing, and the meeting leaves some bruised feelings, particularly within the cache. This isn't necessarily the consultant's fault. You get your personality written across a broad swath of stars, you can get a pretty big head without realizing it. Yet there's nothing the cache-bound hate more than a condescending lecture from one of their descendants. When you're dead, respect is about the only currency that means anything to you anymore. I hear that one of the big memory banks is planning to coin respect in quantized units and use it for a currency. You wonder if they will take this practice with them during the Great Migration, when all of the caches will be unzipped from archive and copied into the cathedral where there is room for near infinite expansion.
After this meeting, I retreat to my office.
Since I'm the boss, I have a corner with a window—as much as a giant space station has a corner. We're surrounded by nebulae clouds here at the galactic core, so the view is not the greatest, but I've had false color filters installed and, if I want, I can turn off the overhead lamps and read by the light of the Milky Way. Pretty cool. Somewhere out there past the clouds is Earth, our ancestral home. They say the light reaching us here from the sun, the real sun, started out in about 1872.
But it never got here, of course. Sunlight and earthlight have been missing from our galaxy for the past 200 years, since the days of the Clean Sweep, the great human project prior to the cathedral. After the invention of the portals, the expanding EM sphere of humanity was collected and cached—stored alongside the data trail of the generations since. And so, while Earth certainly still exists, it has disappeared. Along with all sign that it was ever there, including a gravity signature. We were very thorough.
There's your answer to Fermi's paradox, by the way. If we assume all the other alien species—none of whom we've met—did the same, why then the emptiness of the universe has an explanation.
We sentients all cleaned up after ourselves, like good campers. We left the place like we found it. And are presumably still living somewhere in balance with nature, but just not making a fuss about it.
Of course there is another, simpler explanation. And a lonelier one.
In any case, we don't call it Fermi's paradox anymore. We call it Fermi's Law.
Nobody's home.
I love my desk. It's made of teak ported over from the forests of Mars. I put it together myself in my workshop back at the house before things got too busy to keep up with any hobbies. The desktop tilts up to create a full screen for design work, and there are drawers that stretch into fractal dimensions. As a result, my paperwork always seems to be filed, and my workspace uncluttered. This is all appearance. I've got what I think is a fairly tidy mind, but I'm a pack rat at heart and I never throw anything away. That's why I built in, essentially, infinite storage capacity. You wouldn't want to go looking for something in my desk if you didn't know where to find it. It's a long drop to the bottom of the drawers. And there are drawers within drawers too. I kid you not. Told you I was a pack rat.
Behind my desk is a bookshelf with an ever-morphing array of "real" books, all chosen by an embedded subroutine that bases its choices on what it sees me reading. A bunch of technical manuals and design catalogs grace the shelves at present. I wish that I read more fiction, poetry. Read more anything other than work-related material these days. Later, after the project's done, I tell myself. A repeated mantra that would be funny if it weren't so sad.
On the second shelf, a picture of Rebecca. Caught on our Andromeda Falls trip, when we visited the ship that's hauling the new portal to the next galaxy over. Not many places you can stand and, unenhanced, take in another galaxy complete through a viewport.
In the picture, Rebecca's wearing a pastel pink dress. Her hair is shorter than it is now, and her bangs trail over her eyes in a sweep that's graceful and careless at the same time. Completely Rebecca.
Yep. That was the trip when I told her why we could never have children.
I put it to Rebecca more delicately, but here's the basic low-down.
I can have a kid, but the moment my kid achieves sentience, I'm toast.
I can build a heaven. I can blow up the universe. I can sit and watch movies all day. But if I pass on my genes, I hook myself back up to time. I enter into a mod-x operation that will prevent me from traveling beyond my current time-frame.
Oh yeah. I may have forgotten to tell you.
I'm a time traveler.
So, surprise, surprise, it turns out that people are more than the sum of their information. More than the epiphenomenal consequence of their historical context, if you want to put it precisely.
People are one-way functions. Or I should say we incorporate one-way functions. We have a non-reversible, extra-algorithmic component in our basic make-up. Like adding together times on a clock face, what we are, what we truly are as a thinking being, can't be unmixed into components.
Ah hell, I'll just come out and say it: people have souls.
Not transcendent, immortal, God-endowed souls. Maybe we have those, too. I don't know. I'm talking clock math here. 9 + x = 2. Easy huh? Five is the answer. Try this one:
3x = 1.
Turns out human minds—all self-aware beings, so far as we can guess—have modular mathematics at their foundation. Every individual is a one-way operation.
When all is said and done, you can't write us out as an algorithm.
That's basically why, if I have kids, I stop being a time traveler. And when you stop being a time traveler, that means you've never been a time traveler. And if you are a time traveler who has gone to a certain period—
Poof. You're gone.
Along with everything you've done or have not done.
So you see why time travelers might be a trifle meticulous about their condoms.
Out my office window, the project station is rotating away from galactic-out, and toward the black heart of it all. Sagittarius A.
Galactic core view means it's almost time for lunch. I order up a Greek salad and—what the hell—ask for it to be delivered from this little restaurant I know on Alpha C when—
Uh oh.
Two slouchy officials from the fitters union show up without an appointment. The slouch posture is ubiquitous among fitters—you learn to lean or you lose your head in the wormholes—and if these two didn't possess such a slouch, they'd have to affect it in order to get elected. Slouch One, I have never met. Looks like some kind of lawyer. Slouch Two is Reberk Dakuba, the union president himself.
"Hello, Reb, what can I do for you?"
Reb shuffles, glances away. This is a pose. I notice the shark-white glint of his eye, the way he rubs his hands together as if he's drying them off for proper handling of a knife. "We've decided to sue, Will," he tells me. "I'm sorry to be the one to break the news."
I don't give him the pleasure of an angry reaction. "And I'm sorry to hear it," I say.
"If the suit doesn't work, I've got cross-grain authorization from servers, freemen and the cached fitters deposit to—well, to call a strike, Will."
Which would be a disaster of major proportion and would bring cathedral construction to a halt—perhaps for decades. Both of us know it. But Reb has some desperate fitters out there, and he might be willing to risk it. After all, he's one of the desperate himself. You see, he's missing a real personality.
"Is there anything I can do or say to change your mind?"
"Tell me what's going to happen."
"You know I can't do that, Reb. That kind of knowledge got obliterated when they sent me back."
"Then tell the company to give us our memories. With interest."
"I sympathize with your concerns, Reb," I say. "You and I are basically in the same boat."
He nods. This is not our first meeting. Not by a long shot. And even he doesn't know about some of them.
"I was hoping the cathedral board would consider our final offer to settle," Reb says. "I think it's time to take it to them."
"Come on in," I say. "Lay it out for me, and I'll be happy to put it before them."
I mentally (and actually) shift a couple of meetings to tomorrow and next week respectively in order take this conference.
Reb is not exaggerating about the missing memories. Nor the emotional turmoil that goes with it. The Loyal Order of Fitters, Miners, Network Engineers, Space-time Mechanics and Roustabouts—the fitters union—is facing a disaster with its pension fund. When the first generation of fitters got translated into their archetypes and were sent over the event horizon, their old particulars were banked. Thing is, you can't just store up a copy of a personality, step out of it, and then step back in when you're ready to go back to individual existence. Neither person nor archetype remain compatible.
So lives were loaned out to be lived by others. A win-win solution, it seemed at the time. Then, when the fitters were done with their K+ indenture agreement and were re-instantiated as their old selves again, each worker was supposed to receive a richer life as a result. Most did. Their individuality had been loaned out to various artificial intelligences that need such qualities in order to function correctly, and were returned fully endowed with the emotional intelligence that comes from 1,000 years of thinking, doing and feeling.
But for about twenty percent of the fitters, things didn't work out that way. Someone at the savings bank had had the bright idea to gamble on riskier loans shooting for a bigger R.O.I. One in five of these had failed spectacularly. Either the personalities didn't mesh with the A.I., or the A.I. itself was operating in a hazardous environment, couldn't make regular backups, and suffered periodic crashes. Whatever the case, the entire fund of emotional development was lost, together with any memories. And when the archetype was reinstated with his or her personal data, what you had was a soul without any individuality to give it root. Not a pleasant situation.
So now there are still about 10,000 fitters who remain stuck as "types," as they are called, upon retirement, who can't go back to being the person they were—or even being a real person at all.
Okay, maybe this doesn't sound so bad in the abstract—to be condemned to basically a demigod status for the second half of your life. It's not like you lose all reason and become a moron. In fact, you're much, much smarter. But, first of all, it's sheer hell on relationships. Families fall apart. Reb's had. And second, human life for a "type," as they are called, can be boring as hell, especially when you can barely remember who you were before—before you spent 1,000 years shifting around planets, stars and space-time itself with the force of your mind.
So Reb, as a good president ought, is trying to spin the problem as somehow management's fault. On the other hand, it was his own flunky brother-in-law on the bank board who approved the bad loans.
So we talk. And resolve to differ. I'll take the proposal to the board.
I could go on about my day. You get the idea.
These are legacy issues and ultimately resolvable disputes. Tough stuff, but not insoluble. The part of the job where I tie up loose ends. Topographically, from the perspective of the past and present, that's precisely what the entire project is about, too: creating a knot, a simple overhand loop, to keep all the meaning, all the teleological direction, humanity has pumped into our surroundings from unraveling like a cheap suit. Sure, it's not something our cave-bound ancestors could've accomplished—it's wheels within wheels, webs of oaths and promises anchored in the deep past stretching to today and beyond, where you touch one part, the other parts move. But, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, it's algorithms. Methodology. And we humans are masters of method. In fact, we're tying the knot even as we speak. And that's what makes my afternoons more interesting, you might say.
I spend them on site.
Oh, it's still meetings and more meetings, don't get me wrong. But these sessions are with my team leaders and contractors. Project reports. Completion estimates. And me overseeing it all, juggling contractors, material, what has to get done when before something else—the backbone of construction projects—hell, since Roman times. This is the part I love.
The cathedral looks kind of like an egg.
Okay, an egg several thousand light-years across. Impressed upon the multi-dimensional surface of the event horizon of Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, like a tattoo inked by two million stars worth of quantum uncertainty, two-tenths of one percent of the material galaxy itself. We took it, hauled it here, and we're not putting it back. By any measure, a major undertaking.
Anyway, from the outside, it does look like an egg.
Within the egg, within the cathedral, the laws of nature don't apply. Or, rather, they apply selectively. Phenomenology surrenders to teleology. The is to the ought. Within, it's impossible to hurt innocent children, no matter how you try to recruit them for sex, throw them in gulags for choosing their families over the state, seduce and destroy them with false prophesies and visions, rape them behind the altar, enslave them for work on collective farms, eat them. It's impossible to throw a rock and hit somebody. All the holocausts are redeemed, like so many coupons, so many savings accounts come due. All the hurricanes and earthquakes and extinction events we have had to endure as a species are cashed in for dividends and interest. Within the cathedral, truth trumps power. Right makes might.
Okay, so what's the interior really look like, feel like?
Come on. You know I can't tell you that. I'd have to show you.
But I'll try.
Spacious. Complex. By definition. Imagine a map that is more intricate than the thing it represents. Can't? That's the cathedral. When you first arrive, it still looks like a cathedral, a building, but that's just the introductory experience. You begin to notice that things are . . . not what they seem.
Every door, every window, every portico, every niche, nook and cranny opens up into something that is larger than the room you came from before. It is a place that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
It's beautiful. It sparkles with a thousand dewdrops, each one a world in itself that you can enter. There's a sound. A bit like rushing water. A bit like wind. Only later do you realize this is the air itself, the song of worlds suspended, dancing like motes in sunlight, rippling against one another like crystalline bubbles. You breathe them in.
And the scent. New. Fresh. But infinite and intricate. The atmosphere alive with possibilities.
And hell, we're just done with the basement.
Big problem. The egg, the cathedral, is fundamentally incompatible with the universe as we know it. It wants to splinter off and form its own pocket universe.
The egg wants to hatch.
That's where my real job lies.
And that's where my future wife comes into the picture. The one I'll marry after Rebecca dies.
Her name is Lu. She's quality control. Allegedly. Whatever she is or will be, she's hard to take my eyes off of. Ur-bronze of skin. Dark-eyed. My total physical type. And there are other compatibilities.
Let's just say she and I have a lot in common.
"We have concerns about the subbasement template," Lu tells me, no introduction, no 'how-do-you-do' provided. Where did she come from? How did she get into my office? Easy. She's like the sphere descending into Flatland in that book: it shows up suddenly from the third dimension, like a finger dipped through a pond's surface.
Like I said, she and I are a lot alike. Lu is a time traveler. But the body she inhabits is from farther up-time than mine. Stronger. Faster. Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound.
And able to out-think me five ways to Sunday on most days.
"Which one?" I ask. The cathedral has at least four basements that I know of. My predecessor as chief architect had a thing for them. Contemplating those myriad twisty corridors may have been what finally drove him to insanity. On the other hand, it may have just been the drinking.
"All of them," Lu answered. "There's a discord with the unborn conditionals that's grown into a detectable resonance. Justice for the unborn has become underdetermined in regards to born justice. The models don't mesh, and we think this may be a major factor that leads to the hatch."
The hatch. Our bête noire.
"Are you sure," I reply. "Doesn't exactly sound like impending doom. Could take a few million years to manifest . . . " My first reaction to irritation is facetiousness. Also my second. And third. Normally I put a sock in it as best I can, but what's a wife for if not to hear your internal dialog?
"A million years is a drop in the bucket and a blink of the eye," says Lu. "As you well know."
"Do you have a modification ticket for me, then?"
Lu hesitates. Fixes me in her sight. Something unusual to this. I've been standing, and I sit down on the edge of my desk. Grip its underside.
"This one is a simple fix," she says. Almost off-handedly. Almost casually. Almost. "We're going to leave it up to you."
So—this is a bit of a stunner. Template mods normally came with a full work order from on high. Pages and pages of instructions. Because who can argue with the future? I mean, by definition they've been there and done that.
"Okay," I say. "Can you be a little more specific?"
Another slight hesitation. I gripped the underside of the desk tighter.
"It involves Rebecca. Your wife, Rebecca."
What?
"What?"
"William, I tried to prepare you," said Lu. "Rebecca has become a strong underdetermination attractor. In fact, we think this entire template problem has something to do with her."
"What the hell are you talking about, Lu. She's just some woman."
"I know that. But the equations don't lie. Events are shifting here, and the butterfly effect—well, uncertainty is giving way to instability, and it all seems to lead back to her. Like I said, underdetermination. As if many roads could lead to the same future. Which, as you know, means none of them could."
"And that means what?" I ask.
"Disaster, Will," Lu says. "For the entire project. A hatch event."
"Wait a minute! You told me she's going to die. That this disease, whatever she's got, is inevitable. You never said she was a danger to the project."
Lu is silent for a moment. A placid emptiness passes over her face. This is the look she gets when she is off on a quantum decision tree spree, considering the billions upon billions of responses she might give. Then the smile. The knowing smile that curls across her perfect lips.
"Look, it's difficult to explain without compromising your situation," Lu replied. "But I'll answer your questions if I can."
Suddenly, I'm scared shitless. There's only one question that matters, after all.
"What is it you want me to do?"
Lu stepped toward me. Her face is placid, but there is a tear in her eye. A tear that contains whole star clusters of experience. Eons.
The suffering and anguish of all possible worlds.
"William, you have to kill her." Lu stretches her arms out to me.
In her right hand is a gun.
It's a Hauser 98 semi. A weapon so advanced in its coding as to seem magically ensorcelled with noxious spells, even to one such as I. Lethal in all possible worlds. You get shot with a Hauser, you're never coming back.
I'm shaking. "Why ask me? She's doing a pretty good job of killing herself."
"Not enough," Lu says. "You have to do it tonight."
"No." It's a squeak. Talk about weakly underdetermined. I know what I'm up against. Lu is merely a front. For humanity itself. Or what's left of it.
Lu shakes her head sadly. Another tear. Another possible world crumbles to ashes.
"You know you're going to."
I'd like to say I didn't make love to Lu. I'd like to say I didn't fuck her.
I did both. Simultaneously. Apart. Her skin glowed beneath my fingers. Her lips touched mine like those butterfly wings that flapped during the Jurassic—and doomed the dinosaurs.
And then we fell into the present tense.
She pushes me down, strips me naked. Climbs on top and pulls me inside herself. Moves with the beat of sunlight through leaves on a planet that had ceased to exist a thousand centuries before she was born.
Then she draws me into the future. Makes me want to be there with her. To love. Hope. Take revenge against a universe that wants to stamp us out. Find my antidote in her.
And I turn her over, push her to the ground, the lush Persian rug on my office floor. Part her impossibly beautiful legs.
All this can be yours.
Is yours.
I tell myself.
The future is rosy.
My future wife is not really a woman in the traditional sense. Or, rather, she's all woman. She's the consensus of what humanity will become. And I—perhaps I am not such a simple architect myself. I have a confession to make.
It's not what you think. That I am a time traveler is no big secret. Everyone knows. I showed up the day the former chief architect committed suicide. He'd killed himself in a particularly nasty way—with the same sort of mod-p bullet that's used in the Hauser. Information can neither be created nor destroyed. If you know what you're doing, you can pull a password from a cadaver. But information can be password protected for all eternity.
When you're hit with a mod-p slug, you can't download to the cache. You just—
die.
That's the kind of gun the poor slob had put to his head. And he'd taken all his personal keys with him .
So they—meaning the Board, meaning the Consortium, meaning the human political structure in the entire galaxy—were locked out. Out of the galactic core project. Out of the cathedral.
But happy day!
I show up with the code, time traveler that I am. I can restart the project.
On one little condition.
The future wants a say in the Cathedral of Justice. We have legitimate claim to legacy projects just as much as the past and the present.
We want our justice, too.
And what might that justice consist of? Let's just say that from a couple of billion years perspective, you might come to view justice as more of a means than an end. That justice might come to be considered anything that enables you to survive.
At five minutes to midnight on the last night of the universe, Fermi's Law has become Fermi's Fuck-up.
We've got no help up there at the end of time. Nobody to turn to.
All sentient beings disappear completely. Utterly. We, sentience itself, leave behind absolutely no trace of our passing. May as well never have been. It's happened countless times. It's happened to everybody.
Where did they all go?
To heaven, of course. It's pretty obvious when you think about it. Who wouldn't want to be there when the shit hits the fan and the fan sputters to a halt? An event horizon is eternal, even if the universe that contains it is not. Everybody figures this out sooner or later. They collect all their baggage (hence the lack of EM signals across the heavens), turn out the lights, close the door—
Goodbye cruel world.
But somewhere, some time, a long, long way down the continuum, in the light of the last dying star in the last cinder of a galaxy—something very odd happened. Will happen.
We, meaning just us humans, fell from grace.
Okay, this is not exactly a theological matter. It has to have an explanation. But—
nobody is quite sure why.
A simple switch got flipped after lying ten billion years dormant, perhaps. A relay went on the fritz. A bug somehow crept into the mechanism. And a disappeared sentient species was suddenly dumped out into the very cold last night.
First thought: "Oh shit."
Next: "So cold."
"Fuck me, William," says Lu. "Make me warm. I'm so cold. Please, William, fuck me until I burn."
Heat death. The cold night at the end of time. That's where I come from. Where Lu comes from. We're the future. Bleaker than the bleakest hell any religion every invented to punish its sinners and unenlightened. We're the dust kicked up by the final, limp breeze blowing through the empty halls of the end of the castle.
We want to live. Will want. We remember what it was like in heaven, before we got dumped out.
But—
and here's the big secret—
to travel back in time, I had to give up being, well—
human.
Was I really human to start with? I like to think so. In a way. The cached, you know. You may be one of them. They're archived, allowed limited processing space. It's not as good as being biologically alive.
Not so inside the egg. In there, we had eternity to spread out. To process. To dream. Or so we thought. In any case, we did end up with billions of years.
And we changed. We became—not alive. Not dead. Each one of us a self with a million centuries of barnacle thoughts attached, a rattle on the end of a snake of memes. Practically unrecognizable as human.
But that was a lot closer than—
what I am now—
what I am learning to dislike
—completely.
Myself.
I stand. Pull up my pants.
"I'm sorry," I say to Lu. "I'm married"
She turns over. Impossible to hurt in this way. Smiles.
"Yes. To me."
"Not anymore," I say. "Not now."
I let her go. Push her forward. She lands with a huff on the Persian rug—it's a nice one I picked out with Rebecca on a world grazed by giant mutant sheep—in a tangle of her own limbs. Lu's surprised, humiliated. Even a goddess looks stupid splayed out like that. But not for long.
I have to get away from her before she says the right thing, makes the right move, to draw me back.
I pick myself up. Run through my office door. Throw myself through the portal, with Lu's laughter echoing behind me.
A random jump. End up somewhere in the M5. At least so the tracker number reads on the blank wall I face Whatever. Wherever. Back through. Another jump. Another.
To no avail.
You can't escape the present. As you are well aware.
You.
Me.
I jump back to Old Earth.
I'm somewhere in the southern hemisphere, I think. The portal opens onto a night vista of jagged mountains. I have no idea what they're called.
But they feel like home.
Above, a full moon.
The moon.
I gaze up at the moon.
Something cold.
I look down at my hand.
It's holding the gun.
Lu has put it there, of course.
Time Travel 101: how to go back into the past.
You can't.
Okay, you can, in a way. First you have to lose yourself. Unmoor. No other way around it. You have to join the universe, become a permanent principle of nature.
Something like what happens to the fitters when they serve their indentures, but like I said, it's not the same.
It's not the same, because you make it so you have never lived.
How?
Here's the classic method: kill your grandfather. Or something to that effect. You release your particulars to the void. Only the part of you that stands outside of time survives. It's a shadow. A spectre. A haint.
Call it a "type," like the fitters do. But the fitters can, theoretically, get back their humanity.
Time travelers, theoretically, can't.
The mechanics are straightforward. You appear to your ancestor—usually in the form of a fiery angel or demon or some such, depending on the era. He (or she, as the case may be) acquiesces to the logic of the weapon in your hand.
It would be easier on the conscience perhaps to do away with one of your barely sentient Homo habilis forbearers, but you can't go too far back or you'll take out half the human race in the bargain.
When you kill your grandfather, you do actually kill yourself. And your father or mother. Any siblings. But that's just the tip of the space-time iceberg. You kill all the generations to come, as well.
You kill your own children. And theirs. And theirs.
Thousands. Millions.
Because it's not like you decide not to have those children. No, you obliterate the possibility from the realm of the conceivable—and that's a whole other thing. Because those possibilities once did exist as realities.
And they leave echoes.
They fucking haunt you is what they do.
And so I am free to ply the time ways because I took out one Thomas Langurn. From the Great Migration generation itself. But Tom wasn't going to download to a cache, nor migrate into the cathedral. Tom was going to die in a rather nasty portal data mismatch accident a mere decade after I showed up.
He was going to die anyway, damn it, and never get cached. Just not before he had a few kids.
When I met Rebecca, the attraction between us was instant. Almost as magnetic as the attraction between me and Lu. While I no longer possess the genes of my ancestors, I still retain the shadow of their personalities. The soul, as I've called it.
So it was perhaps no surprise that I would be attracted to the same sort of woman as my distant grandfather Thomas had been attracted to.
A woman who was also my distant grandmother.
Okay, never mind that.
I was married in the future. And it's not like I had left Lu behind there, either. She was just as much a time traveler as I, and a much more active one. She appeared in my office on a regular basis to deliver her orders from the far future. But Lu is a construct, a chimera. As am I. Or at least, as I was.
Lu is unreal.
Rebecca is real.
And, when I realized I had fallen in love with Rebecca, I felt real for the first time in a very long time. Rebecca brought something out in me. It couldn't have been genetic. It couldn't have been information that was hidden or sequestered. All of that had been erased when I'd deep-sixed Thomas Langurn.
I guess you would have to say that, in some measure, in some way, our souls met. I don't know what this means. I only know that there was a moment when we were both sitting at a table in some restaurant out on the long arm of the galaxy somewhere eating something like snails and drinking red wine to wash them down when I looked across the table and caught her eye. I swallowed a snail—or whatever it was—and made a face. And smiled to show her that it was all right, that the snail hadn't phased me. That I was enjoying this being here with her thing. This moment of moments.
And she moved her head to the side in that way she does and she said, "Know what? I want to have your children." And then she winked and touched my hand.
And that was love.
So you ditch the gun once again and go home to your wife.
You live in an old Victorian mansion. Old Earth authentic. Sort of. It is actually a space you built yourself within the confines of the project station, so it doesn't exactly have a gabled roof. The station itself is enormous, but it is not quite big enough to accommodate the kind of space you like to have available for your enjoyment. So you built a house with holes. Fractal dimensions for storage. Extra, unseen rooms. You're not the only one who does this. Most people have one or two interdimensional hidey-holes in their living quarters. But architects often go overboard. Everything simple and yet as beautifully functional as possible. They get clever with design.
I live here.
Rebecca is waiting for me when I port home.
She has the Hauser in her hand.
I don't even pause to wonder where she got it.
I know. It just showed up. Dropped in. Like Mr. Sphere into Flatland.
Rebecca points the gun at me.
"Stay the hell away from me," she says. "I've figured out what you're up to. What they've told you to do."
"I won't hurt you," I say. "I swear."
"You put the voices here. To torment me."
"No, Rebecca. I didn't. I don't know what's wrong with you."
"Doesn't matter. I'm not going to die for that—" She points toward a window. I know what she's gesturing at, but we are turned away from the core at the time and only the galaxy shows through. She means the cathedral. "—that thing," she finishes.
Her right hand still holds the gun. It's shaking. If that gun goes off, it can kill even such as I am.
I step forward. Hold out a hand. "Give me that, please."
A moment of defiance. Wrinkles tighten around her eyes. Does her finger tighten as well? Would I even notice before the shot rings out and I am erased?
Rebecca slowly lowers the gun. She breaks into tears. "I know they're here," she says.
"Who?"
"The voices," she says. "I know them. I just don't know how I know them."
I pull her to me. Her wet face against my shoulder. "It's like some curse," she says. "Some curse I can't break."
I take the Hauser.
I push her away.
Gently.
I step back.
"Maybe I can break it," I say.
I point the gun at my head.
My index finger moves from the trigger guard. Hovers in the space between guard and action.
"It'll be like I never was," I say. "Like none of this happened."
My fingertip meets the metal. I am inevitability. I am a force of nature. I am—
"Daddy, don't."
A young voice. From someone unseen.
"Who said that?"
Then another voice, a female voice. A child. "We need you."
"Who?" I say. I keep the gun in position. "Whoever you are, stop it!"
"Don't kill yourself, Daddy."
I spin around, take aim.
At the curtains. At the empty Milky Way beyond.
At nothing.
"Tell me who you are."
A moment of silence. Decision.
"You know us."
Another voice. "You told us to stay hidden."
"I don't know you," I say. Faltering. My mind in flux. "I don't."
"Come here, my darlings." It's Rebecca's voice. But richer. Stronger than I've heard it in a long time.
Since before I told her she was going to die.
They emerge. The three of them.
And I remember.
An air vent breeze passes through a curtain and from the movement, a child materializes. Joel. Eight. Thin and long-boned. He's going to be a tall man. And handsome when he fills out.
I shift my weight. The floorboards creak. And from the floor rises Hannah, as if she has stepped up from a hidden staircase. Six years old. Beautiful. Those blue eyes.
Rebecca kneels, spreads her arms to the children. "Come here."
And from a swirl of dust dancing in a shaft of the faintest starlight.
Lavy. My youngest. My son.
He runs to his mother, looks out from within her skirts. And says the words.
"How are you today, Dadda?" He doesn't really know what he's saying. He's only two-and-a-half.
It all returns.
I remember.
Because the cathedral wants me to remember.
Because it has decided the time has come to remember.
Say you are going to kill somebody—and that you are not a murderer at heart. Say you have the gun in your hand. Your finger is on the trigger.
And say your victim looks at you, considers you coldly—and doesn't plead for his life. No, because he figures you're prepared for that. Doesn't plead the welfare of his family, either. Plenty of families have gotten along fine without one of the parents.
Say he makes the one appeal that might move you. He asks for his unborn children. Maybe somehow, some way, he recognizes who you are. What you are. What he is asking is that you save yourself.
"You can kill me," he says, "but don't kill them."
It doesn't work that way, you tell him.
"You're from the ass-end of time," he says. So he does know. "Make it work that way."
You shake your head.
Pull the trigger.
You've got a world to save, after all.
But he did get you to thinking.
Me.
I can't have children. Types and humans can't mate.
I would obliterate myself. My work.
But what if I had them—and I hid them?
Really hid them. Kept them away from causality for a while. Not forever. Just long enough to get them to the true sanctuary that is coming. That I am helping to create.
Would I then disappear with a pop, taking my kids with me?
Or would the universe relent, and let us live?
Only one way to find out.
As I said, within my house, I built back doors, secret passages, to the cathedral. Fractal tunnels. Places out of time and out of mind.
Catacombs, if you will.
These passage ways lead to wormholes and those wormholes lead to the subbasement of the cathedral proper. Justice desires to spread itself. Meaning seeks meaning.
Some of the cathedral's physical laws have crept into my living quarters.
The fitters helped me build the passageways. Some of them did, anyway. Reb was the gang chief during the undertaking. All of those particular fitters, unfortunately, never did recover their memories afterward. Mark it all down to the pension fund debacle. Or, at least, so they thought.
Sorry Reb. Sorry fellows. It was me who took them.
Screwed by management again. I suck as a boss.
It was in those catacombs that my children were born. The cathedral is a place where normal cause and effect do not have consequence, unless you want them to, unless they ought to. It's a place where a type such as myself, a being whose essence is fundamentally outside of the normal time stream, and a human woman moored to time, such as Rebecca, could come together in love.
Could fuck like animals.
With all the consequences thereof.
And that's where I hid the children.
The children that the cathedral made me forget.
Almost.
Because who could really forget such wonderful children?
And now—
now I have to remember.
Because—
Lu stands before me.
Mr. Sphere, she's dipped her toe into our space-time and, lo and behold, here she is. Following up on her work order. Come to deal with the underdetermination nexus.
Otherwise known as my family.
"So you didn't do it." She said. "I'm pretty disappointed, William." She's smiling her placid, patronizing smile. Her all-knowing smile from the future.
But then the smile melts away. A hardness in her eyes is revealed. It was always there, but now you can see. Who she is. What she is.
An ugly force of nature.
"Stay the fuck away from my family," I say.
"Stupid," she says. "Stupid, stupid man. What have you done?"
Faster than thought, she's at my throat, her long fingers wrap around my neck.
I think about raising the gun. Shooting her.
But realize that, even if I were enhanced, even if I were fast enough, it would be useless. The cathedral would bend space, warp time. The cathedral won't let me kill her. Not here. Not now.
I pocket the Hauser.
Lu squeezes. Hard. Twists. My neck twists with her interlocked hands.
Crack. Pop. My vertebrae shatter. Most unpleasant.
Then her fingers pierce the skin. Dig in. Her hand comes away, trailing my spinal cord.
I must look a fright. My neck ripped open from behind. A trail of gooey neurons draping like a worm.
But even now, I feel my wounds healing. Quickly.
"This is about to be over," she says, and, still holding me by the neck, frog marches me toward the door. She turns to Rebecca, the kids. Her eyes pass over Joel. Hannah.
Settle on Lavy.
Again she smiles.
"Little boy. Listen to me, little boy. I'm going to take your Daddy outside and hurt him," she tells him. "If you come along, too—then I won't hurt him. And I won't hurt you. Nothing will hurt." Lu's smile brightens. Shows teeth. "Come now. Everything's going to be fine and it won't hurt a bit."
Lavy looks at me questioningly.
Pops the question, the eternal question.
"How are you today, Dadda?"
Just comforting sounds. He doesn't know what the words mean yet. Does he?
"I'm great!" I say. "You stay here, Lavy. Listen to me. Stay."
This takes a moment to register. Dadda is being yanked around by someone he doesn't know. He's a good boy, a brave boy, and longs to help.
But I smile, nod my head. "Dadda is great today," I say. "You stay here."
Lavy is a good boy, most of all. He does what his Dadda tells him.
Thank fucking God.
"No, William. You make him come," Lu growls at me. Her voice is low. And is there a trace of panic?
"No."
She sighs. "All the other children. All the ones who watched their mothers burn in ovens, who watched their fathers march off to war, never to come back. All the idiocy. All the waste. All the injustice. You would take their reward? Make their last thought, their last breath, a cry of suffering?"
I consider. And then I consider that I'm just one man. And I don't know how to answer this at the moment.
"I'm sorry," I say. And I begin to laugh. It's a raspy, airless affair. She's partially crushed my windpipe, after all. "But yes."
"Stop that!" she says. "It's disrespectful. Of the children. Not these. Not these . . . abominations. The real, dead children."
I don't stop. I laugh harder. I sound like a dull saw drawn roughly over iron, but I keep it up.
Consternation from Lu. "How are you doing that?"
"The cathedral," I whisper. "The rules."
"What are you talking about?" She shakes her head. "I don't care." She pops my spinal cord. Severs it like a finger pinch severs a worm.
Or she tries to, at least.
The thing molds itself back together.
She squeezes through it again.
And again.
I feel myself healing, over and over again. Lu snorts in frustration.
"Goddamn it!" She steps back, tries to find a better, more deadly purchase on me.
That's when I spin, grab her—
and we tumble through the portal.
On the pre-set. Last door opened, first back.
Doesn't matter. Anywhere. Anywhere away.
And we're on Earth. That southern mountain range I was at earlier. The snowy mountain ledge. Nearby, a railing to keep the tourists from falling to their deaths.
But nobody's here at the moment.
Sunrise.
Before she can get a better grip on me, I shake Lu off, madly shuffle away. Do everything I can to keep her from getting her hands on me. She really could take off my head here, now that we've exited the cathedral. And she's so very, very fast.
Poised. Enhanced. An assassin from the future.
Her mouth, her lovely lips, curl into a snarl. She stands up, takes a bead. Starts to come at me—
and I pull the Hauser out of my pocket.
Point it at her heart.
Lu stops in her tracks.
"You do realize what you're doing?" she asks me.
"Killing you," I answer.
"You know who I am," she says. "It's not just me in here. I'm still linked to the cache. You're killing us. Forever."
"You are going to kill me. All of you."
She shakes her head. "This work . . . so much work. The energy involved. The energy we can't afford to lose." Her voice trails off. "Such a waste.
She knows there's really nothing left to say.
"Goodbye, Lu."
"I loved you," she says. Shrugs. "Not that it mattered."
"I loved you, too," I reply. "In my way."
I raise the gun a smidgen.
No, not the heart.
I pull the trigger.
Shoot my once and future wife.
In the face. Where it's got to hurt.
Lu shakes as if she's touched a live electrical wire, as if a thousand volts are passing through her. Ten thousand. A million. Her head is a blur. Her ruined face—
Pearls over. Like some monitor screen.
Becomes another face. Some woman I never met. It melts away. Another, this time a man. Another, another. Faces. Faster.
Delete, delete.
Faster, faster.
Millions of files.
Millions of faces.
The entire final cache. Up at the ass-end of time, as one of my ancestors put it.
Delete.
So be it.
After it's all finished, I throw her body from the cliff. Into the ice and snow below.
Where she belongs.
I step back through the portal.
And
—leave Earth forever.
But come back home.
You.
There.
Listen to me.
Don't be looking for us. We're gone.
We've locked up the center of the Milky Way, and you can never get in. Oh, you might find someone else that will take you—somebody in another galaxy. This one's closed. You're almost to Andromeda with that ship. Perhaps there's room in the inn. You could always knock.
Or you could resist the temptation.
In that case, here's your chance. The chance not to disappear. To be the one exception—the singular exception in all the universe—to Fermi's Law.
To rage against the dying of the light.
That's the alternative to justice. And heaven.
To remain.
To matter.
Take it or leave it. I'm out of here.
Oh, by the way—I sealed the entrance behind me.
Lu's question was the right one. They usually were.
Is it worth the sacrifice of one child to make a heaven for all the dead and suffering children in all human history?
My answer: of course it is. By any rational measure.
Except that I didn't let you. And neither did the cathedral, in the end.
So maybe that's not the real answer after all.
I'll leave that up to you.
I've bolted the door from the inside, taken the key with me. There's no way for you to get in. None of you. It's a one-way trip to forever, and you're not invited.
Look, I wrote it there over the entrance, in case you have any doubts. My last work order. As plain as everlasting night.
Thou shalt not.
Read it and weep.
Let the universe burn down; I don't care.
Let all memory be turned to tears and ashes.
Thou shalt not.
Not take my children from me.