But not the Mistake of ’72; that one is not our fault—and can’t be undone; there’s no paradox to resolve. A thing either is, or it isn’t, now and forever amen. But there won’t be another like it; an order dated “1992” takes precedence any year.
I closed five minutes early, leaving a letter in the cash register telling my day manager that I was accepting his offer to buy me out, so see my lawyer as I was leaving on a long vacation. The Bureau might or might not pick up his payments, but they want things left tidy. I went to the room back of the storeroom and forward to 1993.
2200 VII—12 JAN 1993—Sub Rockies Annex—HQ Temporal DOL: I checked in with the duty officer and went to my quarters, intending to sleep for a week. I had fetched the bottle we bet (after all, I won it) and took a drink before I wrote my report. It tasted foul and I wondered why I had ever liked Old Underwear. But it was better than nothing; I don’t like to be cold sober, I think too much. But I don’t really hit the bottle either; other people have snakes—I have people.
I dictated my report; forty recruitments all okayed by the Psych Bureau—counting my own, which I knew would be okayed. I was here, wasn’t I? Then I taped a request for assignment to operations; I was sick of recruiting. I dropped both in the slot and headed for bed.
My eye fell on “The By-Laws of Time,” over my bed:
Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.
If At Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine Billion.
A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.
It Is Earlier When You Think.
Ancestors Are Just People.
Even Jove Nods.
They didn’t inspire me the way they had when I was a recruit; thirty subjective-years of time-jumping wears you down. I undressed and when I got down to the hide I looked at my belly. A Caesarian leaves a big scar but I’m so hairy now that I don’t notice it unless I look for it.
Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.
The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever . . . I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?
I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.
You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark.
I miss you dreadfully!
LLOYD BIGGLE, JR.
Tunesmith
Lloyd Biggle began writing science fiction in 1956 and his first novel, the extraplanetary adventure The Angry Espers, appeared in 1961. It was followed by All the Colors of Darkness, the first episode in the five-novel Jan Darzek sequence. Darzek, a former private detective, is the sole human participant in the Council of the Supreme, the ministers to a vast computer that establishes policy for the galaxy. Over the course of the other novels in the series—Watchers of the Dark, This Darkening Universe, Silence Is Deadly, and The Whirligig of Time—Darzek pits his intelligence and his humanity against the nonhuman interest of his fellow councillors, the bureaucracy of the governing body, and the resistance of alien cultures to assimilation into the Galactic Synthesis. The World Menders and The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets spun off of the series, chronicle the exploits of the Cultural Survey, whose task it is to certify worlds for inclusion in the Galactic Synthesis. Together, the two series comprise an acclaimed contemporary space opera in which vividly imagined alien worlds are brought to life, human motives and conceits are measured against those of alien life forms, and lives and worlds hang perilously in the balance. Biggle has been praised for the thoroughness of his imagined worlds, for his memorable characterizations, and for his facility at exploring complex social and political issues against a backdrop of conventional science fiction themes and motifs. His short fiction has been collected in The Rule of the Door and Other Fanciful Regulations, The Metallic Muse, and A Galaxy of Strangers. He has collaborated on the novel Alien Main with T. L. Sherred and has also written a number of detective novels, including the Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Quallsford Inheritance, and two contemporary crime novels featuring the exploits of detectives J. Pletcher and Raina Lambert, Interface for Murder and Where Dead Soldiers Walk.
EVERYONE CALLS IT the Center. It has another name, a long one, that gets listed in government appropriations and has its derivation analyzed in encyclopedias, but no one uses it. From Bombay to Lima, from Spitsbergen to the mines of Antarctica, from the solitary outpost on Pluto to that on Mercury, it is—the Center. You can emerge from the rolling mists of the Amazon, or the cutting dry winds of the Sahara, or the lunar vacuum, elbow your way up to a bar, and begin, “When I was at the Center—” and every stranger within hearing will listen attentively.
It isn’t possible to explain the Center, and it isn’t necessary. From the babe in arms to the centenarian looking forward to retirement, everyone has been there, and plans to go again next year, and the year after that. It is the vacation land of the Solar System. It is square miles of undulating American Middle West farm land, transfigured by ingenious planning and relentless labor and incredible expense. It is a monumental summary of man’s cultural heritage, and like a phoenix, it has emerged suddenly, inexplicably, at the end of the twenty-fourth century, from the corroded ashes of an appalling cultural decay.
The Center is colossal, spectacular and magnificent. It is inspiring, edifying and amazing. It is awesome, it is overpowering, it is—everything.
And though few of its visitors know about this, or care, it is also haunted.
You are standing in the observation gallery of the towering Bach Monument. Off to the left, on the slope of a hill, you see the tense spectators who crowd the Grecian Theater for Euripides. Sunlight plays on their brightly-colored clothing. They watch eagerly, delighted to see in person what millions are watching on visiscope.
Beyond the theater, the tree-lined Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard curves into the distance, past the Dante Monument and the Michelangelo Institute. The twin towers of a facsimile of the Rheims Cathedral rise above the horizon. Directly below, you see the curious landscaping of an eighteenth-century French jardin and, nearby, the Molière Theater.
A hand clutches your sleeve, and you turn suddenly, irritably, and find yourself face to face with an old man.
The leathery face is scarred and wrinkled, the thin strands of hair glistening white. The hand on your arm is a gnarled claw. You stare, take in the slumping contortion of one crippled shoulder and the hideous scar of a missing ear, and back away in alarm.
The sunken eyes follow you. The hand extends in a sweeping gesture that embraces the far horizon, and you notice that the fingers are maimed or missing. The voice is a harsh cackle. “Like it?” he says, and eyes you expectantly.