There was shooting as I neared the tube station that would take me to the Federal Building. A lot of laughter punctuated the shots. It sounded like some drones were having a gay old massacre.
I hung back. The puny weapons the BC allows drones are big enough to blow out the back of your head if you put the barrel in your mouth, but they were no match for my firepower. I was in no mood to slaughter a bunch of drones, even suicidal ones.
The sounds moved away, and I entered the station. There were six or seven bodies. One of them moved, and I went to her. I turned her over. She'd taken four or five bullets, was very bloody, and a little surprised.
"It hurts," she said. I nodded.
"You may last another couple hours," I told her.
"Oh, I hope not."
I nodded again, and put my arms around her head. She looked up at me and smiled.
"I like your dress," she said.
I broke her neck.
This time there was no audience at the Fed. I went to the one chair in the room and sat down. My second time capsule was waiting for me on the table across the room.
"There you are, Louise," said the BC. "I see you made it."
"In a punctual manner of speaking."
"Would you like to open it now?"
"is it time?"
"Close enough."
So I went to the table and took the shiny metal rectangle from the remains of the metal brick. Once again, it was in my handwriting.
No jokes this time, Louise. There is a way; all is not lost. Sherman is telling the truth. Do exactly what he says, no matter who tells you different. I'll talk to you again on the last day.
The message hadn't said anything about hurrying. It's a good thing; I wasn't in the mood to hurry, and I'd resigned from the Gate Project. I hadn't told anybody, not that is mattered.
I went to a high place on the edge of the city and looked down at what was left.
It had been a hell of a city at one time. There were buildings out there dating back forty thousand years. The Fed was the biggest one.
Then there were the newer items. The Gate had been there for thousands of years, but the structures we'd built to house it were only six hundred years old. Next to it was the derelict field. Stretching off in the other direction were a hundred square miles of wimp vaults: low warehouses with a hundred million cubicles, one of which held my child.
On the third side of the Gate complex was the series of temporary geodesic domes -- they'd only been there two hundred years -- which we called the holding pens. What they held were about two hundred thousand sleeping human beings and ninetythree very confused Roman centurions who would soon be asleep themselves, if anybody was still there to handle the process.
They were held in suspended animation, a few degrees above freezing. Their hearts barely beat. They floated in a blue solution of fluorocarbons and if you put one next to a wimp, you'd have had a hard time telling the difference. But that difference was all-
important. They had minds, and memories, and past lives.
God, what a carnival it would have been to have set them all down on a virgin planet and awakened them!
Their birthdays ranged from 3000 B.C. to 3000 A.D. They were soldiers and civilians, infants and octogenarians, rich and poor, black, white, brown, yellow, and pale green. We had Nazis, Huguenots, Boers; Apaches, Methodists, Hindus, animists, and atheists. There were petty thieves and mass murderers and saints and geniuses and artists and pimps and doctors and shamen and witches. There were Jews from Dachau and Chinese from Tangshen and Bengalis from Bangladesh. Coal miners from Armenia and Silesia and West Virginia.
Astronauts from Alpha Centauri. We had Ambrose Bierce and Amelia Earhart.
Sleepless nights, I used to wonder what sort of society mey'd form when they all got to New Earth.
Leading away from the holding pens was a rail line to the spaceport, just visible in the distance. Sitting there were a few dozen surface-to-orbit craft that were seldom used these days ... and the Ship.
The Ship was almost finished. Another two or three years and we'd have made it.
Sherman was waiting with no signs of impatience. His legs weren't in lotus position, but he managed to resemble The Buddha. I regarded him, wondered if he wanted me to ring some bells or light incense or something. But I'd been coughing pretty bad since my return from the glorious twentieth, and I made a beeline to the revitalizer. I sat down heavily. As I plugged the feedline into my navel it began to take its samples.
"What are your orders?" I asked.
"Don't take it like that, Louise," he said. "I didn't ask for this."
"Neither did I. But one takes what one gets, doesn't one?"
"One does."
"Henceforth, I shall regard you as The All-Seeing Eye. I shall presume you know everything about everything. I'll presume you know my thoughts before I think them. And you know what?"
"You don't give a shit."
I shrugged. "Okay, you talk to an infallible prophet, you never get to deliver your best lines. It must make it dull, knowing exactly what's coming."
"I wouldn't call it dull."
I thought about that, and managed to laugh.
"I guess not. You know that I've resigned?"
"I do. And that you broke security and told Bill Smith who and what you actually are, as best you could, and that he didn't believe it."
"Why did you want me to tell him I'd see him that night? I'd already been back, in the hangar. I couldn't go back to his hotel room."
"I wanted to insure he'd be in the hangar to meet you, as we knee, he had already done."
That one stumped me for a minute. The answer was obvious, but l didn't see it because all my training had forced me to look at the situation in a particular way. Then I saw.
"You were forcing the paradox."
"Correct."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Would you have done it?"
I couldn't answer that. Probably not.
"The Council would not have authorized the trip, either," he went on, "if I had told them its purpose was to be sure you and Smith did meet. Your meeting him was what caused the paradox situation to get out of-hand in the first place."
"Then what's the point? Why did I go back?"
He steepled his fingertips and was silent for quite a while. For a moment he looked startlingly human.
"All of us in the Gate Project are saddled with a certain perspective," he began, at last.
"We think of this moment as the, quote, present, unquote. When we move downtime, we think of it as going into the past, and of coming back as returning to the present. But when we arrive in the past, it is the present. It is the present to those who live there. To them, we have come from the future."
"This is pretty elementary."
"Yes. But I'm speaking of perspective. Running the Gate, as we do, we are unaccustomed to Bill Smith's perspective. We aren't used to the idea that there is a concrete future that is someone else's present."
I sat up straighter.
"Sure we are. I got a message from the future no more than an hour ago. It told me to trust you."
"I know. But who was it from?"
"From me, you know that. At least ... "
"From a future version of you. But you haven't written it yet."
"For that matter, I haven't written the first one yet, either. And I'm not sure I will."
"You don't have to. Look at these." He handed me two metal plaques. I knew what they had to be, but I looked anyway. I tossed them on the floor.
"Handwriting is easy to copy, Louise. The BC turned these out with very little effort.
They will be sent back in a few hours."
I sighed. "Okay, you've got me coming and going, I'll admit it You still haven't told me why one paradox is preferable to another."