He stretched out a hand. “It’s up to you. …”
“No,” I shook my head. “You’re the one who makes the decisions. I’m Danny, you’re Don. Besides, you’ve already — you’ve already done it. You know what it’s like. You know if it will… be good, or if we should… avoid it. I don’t know, Don; that’s why I have to trust you.” I looked at him. “Do we do it?”
Hesitation. He touched my arm. “You want to, don’t you?”
After a moment I nodded. “Yes. I want to see what it’s like. I — I love you.”
“I want to do it too.”
“Is it all right, though?” I held my voice low. “I mean, remember how troubled Don looked?”
“Danny, all I remember is how happy we were.”
I looked at him. There was a tear shining on his cheek.
It was enough. I pressed against him. And we both held on tight.
I put the papers down and looked at Don. “I had a feeling we were heading toward it,” I said.
He nodded. “Yes.” And then he smiled. “At least, now it’s out in the open.”
I met his gaze. “I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. …”
“Think about it,” he said. “It can’t happen until Danny is ready. Any Don can try to seduce him, but unless Danny wants it to, it won’t happen.”
“So it’s really me who’s doing the seducing, isn’t it?”
Don grinned. He rolled over on his back and spread his arms in invitation. “I’m ready.”
So was I. I moved into them and kissed him.
And wondered why previous versions of myself had been so afraid.
I wanted to do it. Wasn’t that reason enough?
Evolution, of course.
I had provided a hostile environment for those of me with doubts about their sexuality. They had excised themselves out of existence.
Leaving only me. With no doubts at all.
Survival of the fittest?
More likely, survival of the horniest.
I know who I am. I know what I want.
And I’m very happy.
If I’m not, I know what I can do about it.
—Hughes Mearns, The Psychoed
—only, the little man was me.
I keep running into versions of myself who have come back from the future to tell me to be sure to do something or not to do something. Like, do not fly American Airlines Flight 191 from O’Hare to LAX on such and such a date. (It’s a DC-10 and the engine falls off.) Or, do not go faster than seventy miles per hour on the freeway today. (The highway patrol is having radar checks.) Things like that.
I used to wonder about all those other Dans and Dons — even though I knew they weren’t, it still seemed like they were eliminating themselves. They’re not, but it seems that way.
What it is, of course, is that I am the cumulative effect of all their changes. I — that is, my consciousness — have never gone back to excise anything. At least I have no memory of ever having done so.
If they didn’t exist to warn me, then I wouldn’t have been warned and I would have made the mistake they would have warned me against, realized it was a mistake and gone back to warn myself. Hence, / am the result of an inevitable sequence of variables and choices.
But that precludes the concept of free will. And everything I do proves again that I have the ultimate free will — I don’t have to be responsible for any of my actions because I can erase them any time. But does the erasure of certain choices always lead to a particular one, or is it just that that particular one is the one most suitable for this version of me? Is it my destiny to be homosexual and some other Danny’s destiny to not be… ?
The real test of it, I guess, would be to try and excise some little incident and see what happens — see what happens to me. If it turns out I can remember excising it, then that would prove that I have free will.
If not — if I find I’ve talked myself out of something else — then I’m running along a rut, like a clockwork mechanism, doomed to play out my programmed actions for some unseen cosmic audience, all the time believing that I have some control over those actions.
The test—
—was simple. And I passed it.
I simply went back to May 21, 1975, and talked myself out of going to the races. ("Here todays paper,” I said. “Go to the races yesterday.” Danny was startled, of course, and he must have thought me a little crazy, but he agreed not to go to the races on May 21.)
So. I had excised my first trip to the track. In this world I hadn’t made it at all.
Just to double-check, I drove out to the race track. Right. I wasn’t there. (An interesting thing happened though. In the fourth race, Harass didn’t bump Tumbleweed and wasn’t disqualified. If I had been there to bet, I would have lost everything — or would I? The Don I might have been might have foreseen that too. But why had that part of the past been changed? What had hap-
pened? Something I must have done on one of my other trips must have affected the race.)
But I’d proved it to my own satisfaction. I had free will.
I had all of my memories of the past the way I had lived it, yet I had excised part of it out of existence. I hadn’t eliminated myself and I hadn’t had any of my memory magically erased. I remembered the act of excising.
There might have been differences — perhaps even should have been differences — in my world when I flashed forward again. Perhaps the mansion should have disappeared, or perhaps my fortune should have been larger or smaller; but both were unchanged. If there were any differences, they would have to be minor. I didn’t go looking for them.
The reason?
The mansion had been built in 1968, a good seven years before Danny had been given the timebelt. (I had done that on purpose.) Because it had already existed in 1975, it was beyond his (our? my?) reach to undo unless he went back to 1967. The same applied to my financial empire. It should be beyond the reach of any of my casual changes.
Of course, from a subjective point of view, neither the mansion nor the money existed until after I’d gotten the timebelt — but time travel is only subjective to the traveler, not the timestream. Each time I’d made a change in the timestream, it was like a new layer to the painting. The whole thing was affected. Any change made before May 21, 1975, would be part of Danny’s world when he got the timebelt. Unless he — later on — went back and excised it in a later version of the time-
stream. And if he did, it still wouldn’t affect me at all. It would be his version of the timestream and he would be a different person from me, with different memories and different desires. Just as there were alternate universes, there were also alternate Dannys.
My house already existed. My investments in the past were also firmly in existence. He could not erase them by refusing to initiate them, he would only be creating a new timestream of his own, one that would be separate from mine.
In effect, by altering my personal past, I am excising a piece of it, but I’m not destroying the continuity of this timestream. I’m only destroying my own continuity — except that I’m not, because I still have my memories.