The thug stood, clutching jewelry, his features fallen into their more accustomed places, his eyes stunned and blinking. “You’re so sure” he said, “so sure of everything.” He looked at the gun over which a necklace had been casually draped. “I never had your opportunities,” he said.
“But we all have opportunities now,” Tiffany said. “Don’t you understand?” She almost did. She was closing in on it all the time, she was on the verge of terrific insight. Insight was all you needed to function in this world now, all the rest was just stuff “It’s getting so easy it’s boring. It’s almost like it doesn’t count any more.”
“I count,” the thug said. Some people kept on insisting. Who could blame them?
“That’s because you think any of this old stuff still matters,” Tiffany said. She went through the window. This is a reasonable approximation of how it was, I think.
“Come away, Caroline,” Arnold said. His whisper, sepulchral and unexpected behind her, was a gunshot. She trembled, shook, turned toward him, saw his features suddenly grotesque and brutalized in the odd and terrible flickering light of the chronoscope.
“Get away!” she said. She felt fear course through her; oddly it energized rather than shriveled, she wanted to leap at him suddenly. If they could finally touch
He reached forward, touched her wrist, pulled at it. “It’s horrible, Caroline,” he whispered. “You must stop this, you can’t hide, you can’t go away, you have to face this-Carthage burned,” he said. “I know it now, they set fires, they killed-”
“Go away!” she said again. “I want to look-”
“She’s dead,” Arnold said. “I didn’t know it at first, I had to look too, yes I did, I went to the library even after everything I told you and I stared for hours, but there comes a time, Caroline, you have to let it go; she’s no longer ours, she’s no one’s, she’s lost to us, lost to everything but the machine. Caroline, we can’t be like so many, we have to get out of the room, we have to have a life”
He reached forward to disconnect the machine and she did something then, moved, began to deal with him as she must, but after this her recollection was not as clear and she did not want to use the machine to recover that moment, she would let it rest, let all of it rest, only Laurel, his Carthage, his burning…
You do not have to give so many details, they tell me. They have looked at this and in some ways they make the good sounds and in other ways the bad sounds but what they want to make most clear is that it is not necessary to be as precise as I have been-that is the word they use, “precise”-it is only important to give what they call “an overview.” “Give an overview,” they say. “We have no time, no space, no room for history, we have only an ever-living and continual present, but that present, although it serves us well, must have the slightest amount of justification. If you can give us this, you have given enough.” Who knows “enough”? I have my own plans and abilities.
I am the first and the last, the only one to give this history, they tell me, the only one to “write” as “writing” is understood in the oldstyle, but I must keep it tightly confined, must control. I do what I can. “Give an overview,” they say, but it is not the over but the under which possesses me, the weight of all that has happened almost obliterating (that is a tough word, “obliterating”) that tiny corridor of light I cast toward our history.
It took what remained of law enforcement (that which hadn’t gone crooked itself) quite a while to catch up with the outlaws, but when they did, it was all over for the criminal element. No unsolved crimes, no unresolved, unidentifiable remains. You couldn’t even skip school…that is, if your settlement still had access to instruction of any kind. They knew when you were sleeping. They knew when you were awake. They knew if you’d been bad or good.
“Late meeting. That Ryan account. Should have been here hours ago, I’m sorry. “
“Don’t tell me ‘Ryan account.’ Who is that blond bitch on the third floor of 242 Oak Street?”
“What? What?”
“For someone who says he can’t do a lot of things any more, you can do a lot of things, can’t you?”
“But the account-the Ryan meeting-”
“Forget it, Frank. You’re trying to live in a world which doesn’t exist any more. Buy a chronoscope and get out of the house. Because tomorrow the locks are changed and you can’t pick up that kind of detail work on any cheap set you ‘re likely to get. “
When the feelings passed, when she could focus again, see where she was, Caroline saw something had happened to Arnold, something dreadful had happened, he was lying on the floor in a quiescence she had never known him to have before. But even as she struggled with the impulse to kneel, comfort, hold, help him in some way, call for emergency aid, get the university services there, even as she thought of this, a small and infinitely wise voice within her said, He’s never looked this peaceful before, he has been granted perfect peace, the peace that Laurel has. Go to her, go to her again now, understand her peace and try to make it her own, and the voice was so utterly attuned to her own necessity, Caroline knew she could do no more, could do nothing for Arnold that had not perished long ago, in the fire, beyond the fire, and turned instead toward the chronoscope, the chronoscope where Laurel, infinitely young, tender, wise, patient
Where Laurel would tell her what; if anything, to do.
Procreation became limited, hurried, and-for those who persisted-bizarre. The governments, all of them, China and the Soviet Union and Burundi and Burma, South Africa and Zaire collapsed. Government of any kind was simply unimaginable. There was a futile attempt in some of the countries to confiscate chronoscopes, but that is when the murders began and, having made their point, soon enough stopped: the systems, such as they were, had become invested in the chronoscope, behavior had become circumscribed by its existence. Sixty years after Ralph Nimmo, uncle of the luckless Foster, had turned loose the plans, fled to Australia to successfully impersonate a keeper of aboriginal kangaroos (Foster meanwhile reinventing chronoscopy in custody, creating it over and over again), there wasn’t much public left, and that which lasted was old, decrepit, and resentful of medical facilities and research which had become bare holding operations. There were localities with severely deteriorated communications. There was, always, the chronoscope. “Here it is,” Foster said, handing scribblings to the attendants. “Take it. “
After a century and a quarter, only a few clots and clans existed in the southern regions of the northern hemispheres, the northern regions of the southern. For this remainder, subsistence level in a subsistence society wasn’t all that oppressive, and there was, of course, the chronoscope, whose limited range was nonetheless able to disclose in all of its fury and chiaroscuro beauty the collapse of Eastern and Western civilizations the century before, and all of the fragmentary, diminished copulation and confrontation associated with that collapse.
And so, hunched against circumstance, appalled by the news of her father’s death but nonetheless loving and filled with tenderness, Laurel reached out from the interstices of the machine, reached from the dark metal and said to Caroline, “I’ll tell you what to do, oh mother, I’ll tell you just what you need to do but you have to come closer, come closer-”
As Caroline crept down that corridor of informative light.
I am the first of a long line to come who again will be able to compose our history. But our history is tense and exhausting, narrow and dangerous, and I see now why they wished me to be explicit, to compress, to hurry along; there is only a little left to tell but nonetheless
“Remember how you loved him,” Laurel said. “Remember how it was when you came to him for the first time, remember that mantle of love and warmth-”
“What we’ll do,” said Joan, an impassioned sixteen-year-old, “is run away. “
“The others will see us. They’ll be able to watch every move.” Bill was eighteen, the levelheaded, farseeing part of the relationship. Or so he told Joan. There weren’t enough their age around to argue for much differences, though. Anyone between fifteen or twenty was mostly the same. Timorous. Except for Joan who had a kind of spirit which was unaccountable and who had plans.
“We’ll go so far away the old bastards won’t be able to get there. No one will even look, all they want to do is stare and remember, anyway. We’ll climb mountains.”
“No matter how far we go, they’ll still be able to watch anything we do. They’ll see everything.”
“I don’t care. Who cares? Let them watch! They can watch us until I die if they want to. I want kids,” she said passionately, looking at him in that way which so dangerously upset him. “I want a family. I want to have”-she paused-”abandoned sex. Real sex.”