Chapter Thirty-three
Tom was gone the next morning, but he'd left me a note saying that he would be away for a while. The girl served a gorgeous breakfast with maple syrup and real Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. After that, there were books to read that I hadn't written myself, a good stereo system, and a fine videotape library. Heaven after so many years in the wilds.
I tried repeatedly to strike up a conversation with the serving girl, but no luck, aside from getting her name, which was Maude. She was always smiling, but it was the fixed, artificial sort of smile that you see on a salesman or waitress, not a show of genuine pleasure. At first I thought it odd that Tom should choose such a strange person for a companion. Eventually I realized that she was not a companion in the ordinary sense but just another accessory in this place. She was certainly pretty and very useful, but she seemed to have about the personality of a tape deck. Still, I tried hard to be nice to her, even if she did seem to be emotionally handicapped. As the days went on, I discovered that she responded best when I treated her like Anna, my old mount, with lots of compliments and friendly banter. In time I even tried scratching her behind the ear the way Anna liked, and she smiled with a sort of twinkle in her eye that told me that she was really happy. Although she stayed naked, even of pubic hair, she never made any overt sexual advances, and while I thought that she would not reject mine, I felt it best simply to keep it friendly.
I spent seven days with her in the strange, windowless sealed-off apartment, reading up on all the bits of technology that I had needed and had forgotten or had never learned, listening to good music, and watching all the movies I had missed. It was a marvelously restful vacation, and it gave me time to think.
I got to considering the events of the past ten years, and it slowly sank into me how incredibly successful I had been in modernizing medieval Poland. I had started a primitive country on the way to industrialization and had done it without coercion, without fanaticism, and almost without pain. Looking back, I think we all had a good time doing it.
Compared to the bloodshed and suffering that Russia or almost any other country went through in turning a nation of peasants into a modem society, what I had done had been astoundingly easy and painless. I had gotten us going in ten years, not the fifty or seventy-five years that all the other nations had needed in trying to modernize. And I had done it without any outside help but a pocketful of seeds and the little knowledge that I had in my own head.
I had formulated no dogma, told no one of my long-term plans, and made as few speeches as possible. That is to say, I had made no promises. I had just gone ahead and done the best I could, and that had made all the difference.
When other people tried to change the world, Lenin and his crowd, for example, they started by publishing grandiose promises, outlining their program and claiming that all sorts of wondrous things would come of it if everybody went along in lockstep. They claimed that soon everyone would work only a few hours a week, because these silly academicians thought that work is something that no would want to do. Yet with their program, everybody would have free food, free medical help, free vacations, and so forth. They would move mountains, though nobody seems to have asked why a mountain should want to be someplace else.
Well, people are smart enough to notice after a while that magic doesn't happen. If you want more things, you have to make and distribute more things, and that means that at least for the first few generations you have to work harder and more efficiently.
I just offered people a low-paying job with long hours and hard work and did what I could to make that work seem meaningful to them. Once a good man or woman sees that what he is doing is good and important, work becomes a pleasure, one far more enjoyable than any silly game or amusement. The only promise I made was that we would all eat the same, and I didn't really even promise that. I just did it, and enough people responded to get the job done.
I never tried to get everybody into the program. I just took on those who wanted to help and never wasted any energy on the rest. In so doing, I made very few enemies, and I never had to set up a huge, expensive, and hated police force to coerce those who didn't want to take part. The guilds, the nobility, and the Church all went their own ways with my blessings, except for those few occasions when they got in my way. My father told me that it takes all kinds, and I've always believed that.
I never published a vast scheme of things, so I was never blamed for anything when things didn't go right. I made a lot of mistakes, but very few people noticed them, while my successes were fairly obvious.
I am convinced that the reason why things have gone so well is not so much the things that I have done but rather the things that I haven't done.
I've just been an engineer, a simple man with a job to do.
Tom returned one day in time for supper, which was a pile of fresh Maine lobsters with all the trimmings. The apartment had a time locker that was used as a sort of refrigerator. It not only kept things fresh, it could keep them alive. The girl was an amazing cook, even if she couldn't carry on a conversation.
"Where have you been, Tom?"
"Nowhere. I just went into stasis for a few days to give you a small vacation in a bit of the modem world."
"Thank you. I've really enjoyed it, but it's time to talk some more. A few days ago you said that you couldn't come to get me until after the time you saw me at the Battle of Chmielnick. Well, I wasn't at the Battle of Chmielnick. There wasn't any Battle of Chmielnick! I was at the Battle of Sandomierz, and when I was there, I saw you get killed. There was a Mongol spear that went right through your eye and out the back of your helmet. You weren't breathing, and you didn't have a pulse. Do you want to explain these things?"
"It's like I said, the shredding around the battlefields was the worst. Yes, that really was me, and I really did die. It was a me from some other subjective timeline, I hope, although it could possibly be a me from my own subjective future, so I avoid that time slot. As to whether the Mongols were killed at Sandomierz or Chmielnick, well, in a thousand years it won't make any difference. Maybe the historians will argue about it, maybe not."
"Isn't it confusing with a lot of you running around?" I said.
"No more than it is for you. There was one of you at Chmielnick, after all. And none of this shredding was ever noticed until you came along."
"Is that why you waited a year after the battle before talking to me? To wait for the shredding to settle down?"
"Yes, of course," he said.
"Then why do you come now on the eve of another battle? Won't that cause problems?"
"This thing with the Crossmen isn't a battle, it's an execution, and they were all dead before you got back to your trailer. But now, if you are through with that chocolate eclair, we'll give you a medical checkup."
In a side room that had been locked before there was a thing that looked like Spock's coffin, with an attached keyboard. In it was a frightening number of mostly concealed tubes, needles, and little knives.
"Are you sure that you know how to work this thing?" I said.
"Relax. It happens that among other thing, I'm a doctor of medicine. In nine hundred years you become a lot of things. Get in."
I didn't love the idea, but I'm supposed to be a hero, so I got in. The lid came down on me, and it got dark, and then the lid came up, and I got out.
"There, that wasn't so bad, was it?" Tom said.
The first thing I noticed was my eyesight. I could see as well as I could when I was a teenager. I put a hand over my left eye, and I could see out of my right. I wasn't half-blind anymore!