Killing Time

CHAPTER 47

Quick as I have tried to be about telling this tale, I can be quicker still in bringing it to a close — for events during the last twelve hours have suddenly made it certain that no one will believe what I have written. All of us live in a different world from the one that existed just fifty-odd hours ago: the one that I inhabited when I first sat down to record my account. Just how different this world is I do not yet know; I have seen only a small piece. But if that piece is any measure, those of us aboard this ship may well be the only humans on earth who are aware of the startling transformation that has taken place. Everyone else cannot help but accept this new reality as the way things have always been, and therefore the record I have written will seem not only implausible but insane.

I say "aboard this ship" because that is, somewhat surprisingly, where I am: aboard the great electromagnetic vessel that until yesterday morning I considered Malcolm Tressalian's most remarkable invention. Larissa sleeps next to me on the bed in my quarters as I write, exhausted, as are we all, by the task of trying to comprehend what has happened. That task has not diminished the joy of being with her again, of course, nor of discovering that in fact my friends were not out for my blood. But it is consuming enough to have made this happy time take on the trappings of unreality, and I expect at every moment to wake up back in Chief Dugumbe's camp, to the sounds of food being prepared and weapons being readied. Perhaps that is why I cannot sleep — why I will not sleep — until I have made a record of this last episode: for if indeed this new world still exists when next I wake, I may need to refer to these pages to remind myself of how it came to be.

Mutesa and I lost the few men who were in our party not twelve hours after leaving camp. The sight of Malcolm's ship, when it finally did appear on the horizon behind us, was simply too much for them to bear, as it nearly was for me; but Mutesa was as stalwart as ever and, finding us shelter in the hollow of a giant baobab tree, prepared to help me make what was presumably going to be my last stand. At his insistence that I arm myself I reluctantly took out the rail pistol, incapable of fully comprehending that I might have to turn it against Larissa and the others and wondering if it might not be better all the way around to simply surrender myself.

This I decided to do, much to Mutesa's dismay. As the ship approached the tree in which we were hiding, he insisted that he escort me out onto the grassy patch of flatland that surrounded it, to make certain that I was not simply shot down like a dog. How exactly he intended to prevent this was unclear, but I welcomed his company on what I genuinely thought might be my final walk across any part of this Earth.

Mutesa's bravery took on a bewildered quality as the ship slowly descended in our direction until the bottom of the hull brushed the tips of the waving grass. Then the little green lights began to flash amidships and the hatch flew open, revealing Fouché and, behind him, Larissa. My heart leapt at the sight of her, terrified though I was: she seemed more beautiful than ever, so beautiful that I didn't at first notice that she was screaming to me over the din of the ship's engines in a voice filled with desperation. It took several more minutes to make out just what she was saying, and when at last I did my smiling face went utterly straight:

Malcolm, she was saying, had vanished.

As Larissa and Fouché continued to wave me aboard the ship, I tried to make some kind of sense out of the situation. But sense was waiting on board the vessel, not out there on that grassland. I turned to Mutesa to say good-bye and found him already smiling: I had told him about Larissa (though not about the ship), and, having now seen her, he had apparently reached the conclusion that I was going to be all right. I hugged him tightly, and he told me that I mustn't feel at all bad about returning to my world, for his really wasn't any better — a fact that he suspected I had already learned. I smiled and nodded, then ran for the ship, leaping inside and into those arms that had for so long formed the stuff of my waking and sleeping heartaches.

After getting an additional hug and nearly as many kisses from Fouché, I headed with the pair of them to the nose of the ship, where Colonel Slayton and the Kupermans were waiting. More warm greetings were exchanged, my relief that my suspicions about them had been so wrong growing by leaps and bounds. But before we could enter into any serious discussion of what had happened, we needed to hide ourselves where we would be safe from the weapons of the various tribes of whom my friends had inadvertently been making enemies in their efforts to find me. Lake Albert seemed the obvious spot for such asylum, and soon we were beneath its surface, surrounded by all the military, human, industrial, and animal wastes that had been discarded there during the long years of Africa's decline. Night soon fell, mercifully taking this dismal panorama away; and we did not turn on the ship's exterior illumination as we talked at the conference table, partly for fear of being detected and partly to avoid the ugliness around us.

With Larissa's arm tightly entwined in my own, I began to listen to the story of Malcolm's disappearance, though the telling did not take long. The success of the Washington scheme had apparently driven him into a deep depression. Convinced that the hoax would be quickly exposed and finally force widespread acknowledgment of the dangerous unreliability of modern information systems, he had been stunned to watch it become, throughout the winter and spring, just another source of media fluff and academic revisionism. During the summer he had first stopped eating regularly, then at all, and he had come out of his laboratory so rarely that the others had begun to wonder how he was surviving. Finally, after he'd been locked away for three solid days, Larissa had taken her rail pistol and shot the door down.

Inside the lab was an apparatus such as none of the rest of the team had ever seen. It was impossible to tell what the original design might have been, for it was badly mangled: the result of either a furious destructive rampage or some kind of explosive malfunction. Whatever the case, there was no sign of Malcolm, nor of his body nor indeed of any blood; and this fact brought my warning about the possibility of Malcolm's attempting suicide back into Larissa's thoughts. For the next few days she and the others used the ship and the jetcopter to search the sea for any sign of him, and for several more days they wore out their wits trying to think where else he could have gone and how. Finally accepting their inability to solve the mystery, Larissa decided it was time to find me (a task that took them all of a week) and see if I might have any ideas as to where her brother's desperate mental state could have led him.

Shocked but not entirely surprised by all this, I tried my best to come up with some alternatives to the blackest option. But the attempt was hopeless from the start, and as this became increasingly apparent the others began, one by one, to beg off and go to their quarters to absorb what seemed the only possible conclusion: that Malcolm, despondent over not only the Washington hoax but also the failure of his last technological creation, had smashed the device to pieces and then thrown himself into the sea. That no evidence of the suicide had been found was not surprising: the waters of the North Atlantic were vast, so vast that even the elaborate detection equipment on Malcolm's remarkable ship might have failed to find his body before it was torn up by predators or simply drifted down into some abyss.

Larissa, of course, had suspected that this worst possible conclusion was unavoidable; but given the unique and poignant nature of her shared background with her brother, that suspicion did little to ease the blow when it finally fell, and I was grateful that I could be there to soften it, if only a little. Such was perhaps not the romantic reunion that I had spent so many months unsuccessfully trying to keep out of my thoughts — indeed, we never left the conference table throughout the entire night — but as she drew steadily closer to me, I at least began to sense that she would survive the loss intact and that we did indeed have a future together. The approach of dawn found us both in that hazy, tearful state of exhaustion that often accompanies grief; and then, before either of us was really aware of it, something very strange began to happen:

The sun came gleaming clearly into the ship.

The waters of Lake Albert had been somehow cleansed of the filth that had been horribly evident the night before; and the sight was so miraculous that both Larissa and I could do little more than stand up, move to the transparent hull, and smile in wonder for several minutes. Then the others came barreling in, not one by one but in a noisy herd, shouting the news and asking — rather dimly, I remember taunting — if we'd seen what had happened. There was absolutely no rational explanation for the event: we had heard no sounds of machinery at work during the night, and besides, the technology to do such a thing didn't exist anywhere in Africa — quite probably in all the world. It really did seem nothing short of a miracle; but the shocks were just beginning.

After engaging the holographic projector, we rose back up above the surface to see that the western shore of the lake was utterly free of any signs of conflict. Moreover, animals were visible: the same species of wildlife that I'd read and then observed to be extinct in Africa were everywhere, making the area look much like the yellowed old poster I'd seen in the miserable bar in Naples. None of us could find anything to say, though this was not our usual horrified shipboard silence: this was, for once, a quiet delight, occasionally broken by laughter and quick, astonished cheers.

The question of what to do next arose comparatively slowly. I offered the suggestion that we make for the coast to see if, along the way, we couldn't find some clue as to what was going on. But the journey that followed was only more bewildering. Prosperous villages and towns now dotted the landscape where days before there had been only ghostly ruins left by war and plague. Still more wildlife abounded, along with an occasional luxury bus full of tourists. As we neared the coast, the signs of prosperous civilization grew thicker and more impressive, until finally we broke through to the sea to behold:

Zanzibar. The impoverished island of Zanzibar, in bygone eras a center of the slave trade and in more recent times a decrepit, disease-ridden relic of that evil past. But now? Now what loomed before us looked more like Hong Kong, or rather what Hong Kong would look like had it been designed by people with not only money but taste. A gleaming city stood at the center of the beautifully landscaped island, made up of high-rise buildings that accented the colors of the sea, the mainland jungle, and Zanzibar's pristine white coral beaches. It was, in short, an oasis of enlightened industry and beauty — one whose existence was impossible to explain.

Our ship now lies beneath the waves off that oasis. We still have no definite answers, of course, nor have the ship's communications and monitoring systems been of much help. We seem to be having trouble establishing and maintaining satellite links, and even when we do, we hear strange reports from around the world that make as little sense as what we've seen in East Africa. There are occasional tales of conflicts in parts of the world where there should be none, along with even more frequent and remarkable stories that indicate many previously war-torn parts of the world are enjoying peace and prosperity. All of it supports a seemingly impossible but no less obvious theory:

That Malcolm has actually succeeded in his quest to conquer time.

If this is indeed so, then his mechanism must have self-destructed after completing its task — indeed, it may have been designed to do so — and we therefore have no idea where, or rather when, he has gone. The list of possibilities is infinite, as we discovered when we tried over dinner this evening to determine precisely what place and point in history one would have had to reach, and what one would have had to do once there, in order to produce the effects we have witnessed and heard about. Nor have we yet determined the full range of those effects; assuming that the incomprehensible has in fact happened, we must now travel the world as Larissa once proposed to me that we do, living by our own law and observing what may well be the many signs of our departed friend and brother's handiwork in a further effort to unravel the riddle of his destination. But time and history are infinite webs, and the slightest touch on any of their innumerable filaments can provoke change beyond imagining; thus the truth may ever elude us.

If he has managed it, did he leave any clues? Notes? The others could find none, but certainly we must return to St. Kilda to search again. Yet even if we should discover such documentation, will any of us be able to understand it enough to repeat his experiment? Would we want to? More questions without answers. The one thing we can be sure of is that, whatever has happened, Malcolm will never come back. Nor do I think that he would wish to — even if he were dead. Improved as this new modern world may be, it is still the modern world, and it would likely suit Malcolm no better than it did before. Throughout his life, his terrible physical and emotional wounds made him a man to whom Time could offer no comfortable moment. Perhaps now he has returned the favor by destroying the very concept of Time; and perhaps in so doing he has experienced, if only for a fleeting instant, the kind of ordinary human contentment that so consistently and tragically eluded him in this reality.

As for the rest of us, we have all taken heart from even the possibility that Malcolm has achieved his final dream — no one more so than Larissa. She will of course miss the brother with whom she shared more secrets and sorrows than anyone should ever have to bear. But she knows that whether he has broken Time or been broken by it, he is finally at peace; and the torments that seemed to him so unending have been revealed as the transitory vexations of a troubled world — one that he may, in the end, have helped to make less mad.