Millennium

20 The Night Land

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

Do whatever Sherman tells you, the time capsule message had said. The time capsule Sherman admitted he had cooked up in collusion with the Big Computer.

But what choice did I have? I had to feel as if I understood something first, and I'd stopped feeling that along about ... well, about the time I snapped the neck of that poor suffering drone. This is the nicest thing I'd done for anyone in a long time, I had thought then.

Sherman said we had to go back and interrupt the meeting between Smith and Mayer.

And we had to put on a hell of a show for them.

Well, P.T. Barnum could have learned a thing or two from us. The Gate often causes a lot of local weirdness when it arrives in the past. There are three dozen kinds of suppressors to cancel out these effects when we want to arrive in, say, the middle of a library. Sherman had Lawrence turn them all off, with the result that if we'd been planning to go to Times Square on New Year's eve we'd have been the noisiest show in town. Then we threw in a lot of extra razzle-dazzle to make them nervous.

I improvised from there. I think even Sherman might have been surprised when I cast him as a walking torture machine. But then, there were surprises all around that night. I, for instance, had pretty much believed it was important to get the whole stunner. But Sherman had other ideas.

"You didn't tell me the whole truth," I told him, as soon as we'd made it back through the Gate.

"I told you as much as I had," he said. "Now we go to my fall-back position. And in the meantime, our friends are suffering some disorientation."

He was right. Both Smith and Mayer were looking stunned. I thought Mayer was going to be sick.

There's not much you can do; they're either going to deal with the trip, or they're going to go crazy. It wasn't long until I was fairly sure they'd both be okay. When I thought Mayer would understand me, I knelt beside him and looked the bastard in the eye. "Okay. Do we have to bring your daughter in here, or will you tell me what I need to know? Let me remind you that I haven't go t much time to mount an operation, wherever or whenever you tell me to go to."

He looked dubious, but still slightly dazed.

"You wouldn't send me back?"

"What's the point? Sherman says he has something up his sleeve, anyway, but I want to go back and get the rest of that stunner."

"It's not necessary," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I never had it. The man who sold it to me had already gutted the machine."

"What did he do with the guts?"

Mayer was looking nervous. I don't blame him. Most of what I'd done in his office had been an act, but I think he'd swallowed at least some of it, and damn if I didn't feel like a dangerous person just then.

"The man was an artisan," Mayer said. "He operated a roadside souvenir stand, selling silver and jewelry. He told m., that when the ... the stunner stopped producing the pleasant tingling sensations, he broke up the insides and incorporated the more interesting parts into belt buckles and rings."

He moved away from me slightly. I don't blame him. I knew I had to either knock his head off, or laugh.

"I only said I knew where it was," he said. "I do. It is scattered al l over the continent.

And it is utterly harmless."

I laughed.

"Doc," I told him, "you've just shut down the Operations division of the Gate Project. I'm out of a job."

It seemed like the proper time to die.

It wasn't, not quite yet, but I began planning it.

There was the matter of Mayer's daughter, and my promise to him. I pressed the emergency assembly alarm on Lawrence's console. For a while, nothing happened. Then I got a tired voice.

"Yeah, what the hell is it?"

"Mandy, is that you?"

"Who the hell else would it he? Who the hell else would sit end the ready-room with three corpses that are a hell of a lot happier than I am, just on the off chance that my fearless leader would need me, when I could have been on my way to dreamland hours ago? How many hours have we got, by the way?"

"Mandy, are you drunk on duty?"

"Drunk? Drunk? Does a bear shit in the woods? Does a-"

"Good for you, Mandy. We have about twenty-four hours before we softly and suddenly vanish away. Are you still on duty? Or have you resigned?"

I thought she might have gone to sleep. Then she spoke.

"What's it to you?"

"I've got a goat here who wants to see his daughter. She's in the holding pen. I'll have the BC warm her up, if you'll run him over there."

Mandy Djakarta, the toughest operative I'd ever known, began m cry.

"God, l love a happy ending," she sobbed.

Mandy showed up soon to take Mayer away. I was left with Smith, Lawrence, Sherman, and Martin Coventry, who came in with Mandy. Bill was eyeing Lawrence, the last surviving member of the gnomish control team. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, then I looked at it from Smith's twentieth-century eyes and knew that Bill was squeamish at Lawrence's appearance. Lawrence ignored Bill totally, did not deign to acknowledge his existence. For just a second I felt closer to Lawrence than I had since ... since he'd fallen apart and been tied down to his console. Who was this lousy 20th to judge us? At the same time, I identified with Bill. I felt the same way he did, had felt that way all my life. This is you in a couple years, Louise ...

At least I didn't have to face that anymore.

"Will you be needing me for anything else, Louise?" Lawrence asked. The implication was clear. I was about to tell him to go ahead and turn himself off.

"For a short time, Lawrence, if you please," Sherman said.

"Okay. But when the crunch is about ten minutes away, I'm signing out. I've given it a lot of thought, and I decided I'd rather die than ... whatever's going to happen. Better to live and die, than never to have lived at all. Does that make any sense, Sherman?"

"It does. I respect it. Please hang on for me."

Bill had been coughing a lot. The wonder was no blood was coming up. He'd been breathing our air for half an hour before Martin came up with a gas mask that would give him pure oxygen.

Sherman took the four of us out on the balcony overlooking the derelict field. Bill looked out at the detritus of our operations; it was easy to see he was impressed. "

"Lawrence's choice has been a popular one," Martin told me. "I believe I have had the shortest tenure on the Council, which is a notoriously transient body. They're all dead."

"Even Phoenix?"

"Even he. In a sense, I suppose I am the Council."

"That should simplify ... Hey, just how many people are left?"

Sherman looked thoughtful, which meant he was interfacing with the BC. The BC answered for him, from thin air, which startled Bill.

"Discounting the three hundred million wimps, which are technically alive, and the two hundred thousand goats in suspended animation ... the population of the Earth now stands at two hundred and nine. Correction: two-oh-sigh-correction, two-oh-seven."

"I get the picture," I said. "So Mandy was probably the last operative I had left."

"In a sense," the BC said. "She has taken a drug that is invariably fatal, but which will give her six hours of pure pleasure."

"Good for her," I said.

Bill hadn't heard us. He was looking at the sky. I use the word "sky" in the figurative sense; it was over our heads, so it had to be the sky. But I know it wasn't what he was used to seeing when he looked up.

"You people sure made a mess of things," he commented.

I couldn't believe my ears.

"We?" I said. "We made a mess of things? You can't believe we managed to do all this."

"Then how did it happen?"

"It started with your great-grandfather and the industrial revolution. But it was you, you unspeakable son-of-a-bitch, your fucking generation that really got things going. Did you really think there'd never be a nuclear war? There have been nineteen o f them. Did you think nerve gases were going to just sit there, that nobody would ever use them?"

"Easy, Louise," Sherman said.

The hell with that.

"CBN, you called it. Chemical, Biological, Nuclear. You made plans just as if the world could survive it, just like it was another you could win. Well, goddam it, we held out a long time, but this is what we came to.

"The plagues were the really cute part. Add laboratory-bred " microbes to a high level of background radiation, and what you get is germs that mutate a hell of a lot faster than we can.

We've done our best, we've fought them with everything we have. But your great-

grandchildren came up with genetic warfare. So now the plagues are locked up right in our genes. No matter how hard we fight them, they change. Did you think we started the Gate Project for fun? Can't you see what it is? It's a last-ditch, hopeless effort to salvage something from the human race. And it isn't going to work."

"It will work, Louise," Sherman said.

"Okay, Sherman," I said. "Here's the big question. Here's where you tell me the last thing you held out on me, or I sign out and let the rest of you zombies handle the world from now on. How does it work?"

"You remember I spoke of perspective."

"I remember."

"That Bill Smith believes he is in the future, when in actuality, he is in the present, as are you and L"

"You're not telling me anything new."

"The answer is simple. We will send all the people we have collected into the future."

I opened my mouth to answer. That's as far as I got.

"That's stupid," I finally managed to say. "The Gate won't go to the future."

"Not quite correct," the BC said. "The Gate exists in the future. It brings people to the future every time it retrieves one of your snatch teams."

"Yeah, but I was told we can't go forward from here. From this instant."

"That is almost true," the BC said. "To send anything uptime from here would destroy the Gate. Some side effects of this process would also destroy this city, and leave a crater in the earth's surface twenty miles deep. In other words, travel from an arbitrary present to a theoretical future is something that can be done only once, as the Gate would no longer exist after the trip."

"That's what I said. You can't ... "

And I stopped. If there has been a constant in my life, it has been the Gate. An earlier generation would have spoken of the constancy of the stars in the sky, or of the regularity of the sunrise. I had much less confidence in these phenomena than I had in the Gate.

"We don't need it anymore," the BC said.

One trip. One big whammo trip to the future.

"You'd better make it a long ways into the future," I said.

"I shall," said the BC.

There were a few procedural details for the last twenty-four hours. It also took some convincing. At this point, I don't know if I have been fed a bunch of lies.

Why won't the paradox still wipe them out, even if they go a million years into the future? The sleeping goats are still the result of operations that, because of the paradox, never took place, weren't they? Not so, said the BC. Not if we go far enough into the future. The resilience of the timestream is greater than we had thought. Fifty thousand years is the blink of an eye compared to the journey the BC was contemplating. Things would even out again, and it would be as if the goats had emerged from a different universe.

I wondered how long the BC had known this -- if, indeed, it really did know it- and why it hadn't mentioned it before. I was, at this point, mistrusting just about everything. All in the world I wanted to do was say a peaceful good night and here was the BC saying we still had a chance.

The BC was monumentally unenlightening about this point "I know," it said, and would not be moved from that simple statement.

I wanted to know how we were going to move two hundred thousand sleeping goats through the Gate in .the short time allowed. The BC said we'd simply load them aboard the ship. It was already doing so. While the ship was not capable of reaching a distant star, as we had originally planned, it was surely capable of flying across the city. All it had to do was fly into the Gate, and come out of the other end, three or four million years in the future. Then all the goats would be awakened and they co uld rake their best shot at making a world that wouldn't self-destruct in a couple thousand years.

So nice. So simple. Why did I feel I was being conned?

Bill Smith was another problem. He embraced the wild scheme with all his heart, and before long he was talking about this and that "we'd" do when "we" got there. The poor bastard really thought I could go.

Well, why should I spoil his party? I wasn't anxious to tell him how sick I really was, how what he saw was simply a skinsuit, and that I was .a child of my times: withered, pitiful, terminal. So h found myself assuring him that when it came time for the ship to leave, I'd be there at his side, slam-bang into the future with all the other goats.

I had not the slightest intention of doing so. There comes a time to draw the curtain. If they found a world they could live in, millions of years down the road, it would be a world that would kill me. I need a lot of things that are poisonous to the healthy bastards I'd spent my life rescuing. I might make it for a year in such an environment, but what was the point? Bill thought he was in love with me, that he couldn't go on without me, but I doubted it. !f he ever got a good look at me-at the real me-he'd get over his infatuation pretty fast.

And I spent my last hours doing what I'd done all my life: being a good girl. Sherman had told me and Bill that we must tell our stories. We must tell everything. Everything we'd seen and felt and thought. He'd been quite insistent, and I wasn't in a real hurry to end it, so I have done it. Here it is.

Bill is somewhere else, doing the same thing. I hope he's enjoying it.

So now I'm finished.

I was actually on the railing of the balcony outside my apartment when I was disturbed by the Call of Destiny. The story of my life.

I guess you'd call it a mailman. It was a robot, and it had come from the Post Office at the Fed, and it was carrying the opened time capsule inscribed to me with the instructions that it be opened on the Last Day.

"BC, on-line," l said.

"I'm here."

"Why did you send this over? I had decided not to mess with it."

"It's an interesting message, Louise."

"You've been reading my mail? Shame. But what the hell? You've been writing it, too."

"Guilty. Certain things had to be done in a certain way."

"I'm not complaining. I'm a good soldier to the end. But why should I read this? And why should I believe. it?"

"It's entirely up to you, Louise."

How curious can someone be who is two seconds from jumping ninety stories to her death? Fairly curious, I discovered.

The message read:

It's me again.

You'll be wondering how you can be getting a message from a future version o f yourself, considering what you were about to do when this message arrived. You will be concluding it is more trickery from Sherman, or from the BC, or maybe from a practical-joking God.

You'll think all those things, but I have reason to believe you will do what you had always done: be a good girl.

The BC isn't telling you the whole truth. It mentioned a trip of a few million years, when it is actually sending us much farther than that. The Earth is severely wounded, and needs a lot of time to heal.

But it will heal, and we will arrive.

I can't tell you much beyond that, as I am about to die. I also know that more details will only increase your agony of indecision. So I will say only this: The revitalizer is right. You are pregnant.

And you are right. You will last about a year here in this brave new world. I know it's not-

much time, but I guarantee you won't be bored. And you'll have one year with him, and three months with her. (It's a girl!) Your death will not be too painful-at least it hasn't been so far.

And on your deathbed you will have no assurances your daughter will survive you by very long. It is a hard life. But she will be here with you, she will be healthy, and you will be very happy. You will sit with her and write a last message to your poor, confused, earlier self, and wonder how in hell it ever got back to her. (I can't tell you, but what would life be without some mystery?) Get on the ship, Louise. Go with him.