The Accidental Time Machine

17

In the middle of a sound sleep, Matt suddenly woke up. An unusually vivid dream.

Still there. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. It wouldn’t go away.

Why would he dream of Jesus?

He didn’t look like the Cambridge manifestation. Quieter, calming. He held one finger to his lips. Quiet. Don’t say anything. Don’t react.

Matt nodded microscopically.

I’m not even on your retina. This is a direct stimulation of the visual cortex and the parts of your brain that interpret hearing.

You need this woman, this machine, La. But never trust her. Remember, she cannot die. Think of how that makes her feel toward you. Think of what she might do to you.

Don’t say anything to Martha. She will see me, too. That’s why I have taken this appearance. You are both having the same dream—which is not a dream. But it’s the only way I can talk to you without La knowing.

La sees everything you do and say. Be careful. She could leave you behind. She has no need for the backward time machine.

I will find you in whatever time and space. Never let La know I am available.

He was gone. “Whatever time and space?” What was he? Not the actual Jesus. If there was an actual one.

Matt lay awake for twenty or thirty minutes. Then he felt in the dark for the robe hanging on the door, put it on, and went into the sitting room to get a glass of wine. Just before he turned on the light, he knew he wasn’t alone.

“Matt?”

“Martha.” He stepped past her and touched the bottle of white wine. It was still cold, automatically refrigerated somehow. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Me … me neither.”

“Care for some wine?”

“No, not really.”

He poured himself half a glass and looked into her face, one look, then away. He’d never seen such intensity. Faith or fear or confusion, whatever.

“Disturbing dreams?”

“Not disturbing. Strong, but not disturbing.”

“Me, too. Understandable. A lot’s happened in the past twenty-four hours.”

She was wearing the same kind of robe. She gathered it around herself and tied the sash belt tightly. Not changing expression: “People can sleep together without adultery? I mean, without being together to make children. Does it have to happen?”

“No. Not unless … no.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’ve never slept alone, and I’m a little afraid. If I could sleep with you, I would be grateful.”

“Sure. I understand.”

“I could just take some covers into the corner, like in Cambridge. ”

“Absolutely not. It’s a big bed. You can have half.”

She nodded with her eyes closed. “Mine was too big for one. I was kind of lost without a bunch of sisters or students sharing it.”

“Come on. Let’s get some rest.” She touched his hand and smiled and preceded him into the bedroom. He turned off the light and got in next to her, carefully not touching. He heard her shrug out of the robe.

“Thank you, Matt. Good night.”

“Night.” He didn’t sleep for a while himself, resisting the magnet pull of her weight on the other side of the bed. Her womanly smell, the soft sigh of her breathing.

He had vivid dreams that did not involve Jesus.

It was a hearty breakfast. Matt and Martha helped themselves to traditional fare, eggs and bacon and pancakes. La had a bowl of clear soup, just to be sociable.

“So what about our interrogators?” Matt asked. “Are they here yet?”

“In a sense. Only one of them is flesh and blood. The others are like me, projections. Most of them reside in orbit. So they’re as ‘here’ as they ever will be.”

Martha had only nibbled at a little pancake and egg. “You should eat more, dear,” La said. “The interview will take several hours; you’ll be famished.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not reasonable, I know, but the word ‘interview’ frightens me.”

“Just people asking you questions,” Matt said helpfully.

She stared at her plate and pushed food around. “We have confession once a week. You tell a Father what you’ve done the past week that was wrong.”

“And he punishes you?”

“No, not normally. He makes sure you understand what you did, and if someone was hurt by it, tells you how to make that right.

“But if the sin is bad enough, you go for an interview downtown, at Trinity Church. Nobody is allowed to say what happens there. But I’ve seen people come back missing fingers or, once, a hand. Four or five years ago a man did something with his dog. They hanged the dog, then cut the man apart and burned his insides in front of him, while he was still alive. They kept him alive as long as they could, with medicine, while he watched, and they cut off his eyelids so he couldn’t close his eyes.”

“Shit. They made you watch that?”

“No, my mother wouldn’t let me go. But they left his body hanging on a stick for a year, downtown, along with the dog.”

Matt broke the silence. “We have a saying. ‘Yours is a world well lost.’ ”

“Was that Shakespeare?”

“Dryden,” La said, “1688. Shakespeare had been dead fifty-two years.”

“Most of my world isn’t that bad. But the interview was about the worst part.”

“Nobody will judge either of you in this one. Set your mind at ease. They just want to find out how you lived, what your world was like. Nobody will hurt you.”

“A lot to do in two or three hours,” Matt said.

La agreed. “It amazes me.”

Two valets led them downstairs and into separate rooms for the interviews.

In Matt’s room there was a comfortable-looking lounge chair beside a shoulder-high black box. It made mechanical noises while he obeyed the valet’s request to strip down and lie quietly.

A helmet slid over his head, and he felt it prick him dozens of places, not painfully. Then a wire net settled over his body, from clavicle to ankles, and stretched tight. Part of him knew he should be resisting.

He was maybe eighteen months old, crawling. Adults talked above him, but it was just pleasant noise, without meaning. Then someone shook him and yelled at him and laid him down on a blanket and roughly changed his diaper.

Then it started to accelerate, quickly sorting through the years of his childhood, picking out the most painful memories and replaying them in mercifully compressed time, or unmercifully concentrated time.

Then into middle school and high school, with all the fumbling experiments and excruciating embarrassments. College was almost a relief except when it was unbearable. Then graduate school and the wringer he’d been through since the time machine invented itself.

When he opened his eyes it was just a room again, and somehow he was dressed, but his mind was still spinning. He eased his head up and turned so his feet swung to the floor.

His mouth was dry, gummy, as if he’d been sitting with it open. “Water?”

The valet appeared with a tinkling glass of ice water. Matt drank half of it in three gulps, then sat panting. “How is … Martha?”

The image gestured and he saw a new door in the wall, an oak door with a bronze knocker. Matt crossed, limping a little, and knocked, and then knocked again. No answer.

He pushed on the door and it eased open silently. The room looked identical to his. She was on her knees at the end of the lounge, her palms together in prayer.

He cleared his throat slightly and she looked up at the sound and smiled. “Where did that come from? The door?” She rose to her feet gracefully and danced across the room to embrace him.

“Oh, Matthew! Wasn’t it wonderful?”

“The, uh, the interview?”

“It was so cleansing—it was like I was confessing to God Himself, and was forgiven.” She hugged him tightly. “The dream last night, and now this. I never will be able to repay you for bringing me here.”

Well, if you run out of things to confess, he thought, I’ll be glad to help you come up with something new.

“I’m happy for you,” he murmured. “For me, it was not so pleasant.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe I’m not used to confession.” He laughed. “Maybe because I’ve never had one, and I had a lot of sin stored up.”

“That’s probably it,” she said. “You’ve done a lot more than I have, anyhow, and you’re pretty old.”

“Only twenty-seven,” he protested, but yeah, there was a certain amount of fornication, prevarication, and masturbation in those years. Was there anything in the Bible about dope? “And I can’t even remember the last time I murdered somebody.”

“Don’t joke about sin,” she said, but she was still smiling.

La appeared next to them. “We have some things to talk about before we leave. What to expect. But I suppose you want to eat first, perhaps rest.”

“I’m starving,” Martha said.

“Go back to where we had breakfast. If you tell me what you would like, it may be ready when you get there.”

“Bread and cheese and fruit,” she said. “Mild cheese.”

“I want a hamburger,” Matt said. “Two hamburgers. With everything.”

“Give me one, too, please.” To Matthew: “They’re horrible at school, like leather fried in grease. People were always saying how good they were somewhere else.”

“Well, that’s sure where we are now, somewhere else. Let’s go.”

The burgers weren’t ready when they got upstairs, but the breads and cheeses and fruit were laid out artistically. They did considerable damage to the display in the two minutes it took for the valet to show up bearing two plates.

They probably weren’t the best hamburgers he’d ever had, but they were the most welcome. Comfort food. But the meaning of “with everything” had changed over the ages: his burgers were topped with a fried egg, bacon, avocado, and a slice of pickled beet as well as the expected lettuce, tomato, and onion.

After the interrogation and heavy repast, they slept for several hours. Matt woke up to an empty bed. He dressed and went into the sitting room.

Martha was looking at the porn notebook, turning it this way and that. “When I picked this up, it had the strangest picture. But then it disappeared.”

“You have to hold it a certain way for several seconds. That’s to keep children from accidentally turning it on.”

“Hm. It looked like something children would be interested in.” She grasped it various ways, but didn’t get the right combination.

“There. You keep your left thumb there, and slide the right one halfway down.”

The picture flashed on, somewhat dim because the ambient light was low. It was vivid enough, though, with unconvincing passionate sound. “What’s she doing with his thing?”

“Um … it’s something people sometimes do if they’re in love.”

She nodded and studied it. “She doesn’t sound like she’s in love. She sounds hungry.”

In that context, something was about to happen that would be hard to explain. “Here.” He took the display and turned it off by placing thumbs in opposite corners. “They teach you about things like this in your Passage, I think.”

“That’s how they make babies?”

“Well, not exactly. But it’s related.”

She waved a hand in front of her face. “I don’t want to know, yet. If I’m not home in a week or two, maybe we can talk about it.”

“Sure. Be a good thing.” That set up an interesting array of conflicts. He could just leave her with the book and hope that the images would free her repressed sexuality. But she might find it so scary or revolting that she would completely retreat. He could step her through it as if she were a child, the birds and the bees—but the last thing he wanted to be was a father figure. Even an uncle figure.

Avoiding it would not be a good strategy, but being too direct could be a disaster. What if she drew a parallel from some Bible story like Bathsheba’s, and saw him as a seducer?

Of course, he did want to be a seducer, technically. He just didn’t want to be a bastard about it. Have her take the first step.

La rescued him by knocking on the door. Of course she would have been watching the exchange with the porn machine, and wisely didn’t simply appear next to them.

They sat on the couch, with La facing them. Matt poured two glasses from the still-cold bottle.

“If you went backward through time as far as we’re going forward, you would be back in the Paleolithic Era, in the middle of the last great ice age. People were huntergatherers, thousands of years before agriculture. Language would be very primitive, and even if we became fluent, it might be impossible to explain our situation to them.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Matt said. “About going into a future that’s literally incomprehensible to us.”

She nodded. “Where they would have to study us and invent a way to communicate. I’ve developed a few approaches to that situation.”

“Or there might be the opposite of progress,” Matt said. “Civilization might be a temporary state. We could wind up in the Stone Age again—after all, my last jump was only a couple of centuries, and the last thing I would have expected would be a return to medieval theocracy.”

“That’s not really fair,” Martha said. “We know about things like television and airplanes, but choose to live simply, without them.”

“I stand corrected. But we’re going a hundred times as far into the future, this jump.”

“But suppose you hadn’t detoured into that theocracy,” La said. “Suppose you had pushed the button twice and come straight here. Two thousand years later, but isn’t it less strange to you than Martha’s time and place?”

“It is. Most of the people I knew could make the transition easily, even enjoy it. My mother would go crazy here; shop till you drop.”

“Which is something we ought to be prepared for. The main reason I want to leave this place is that it’s so stable. One century is much like the next. We may step out of the time machine and find that nothing’s changed. The culture here is not just comfortable and stable; it’s addicted to comfort and stability. And there aren’t any barbarians at the gates; the whole world, outside of the isolated Christers, enjoys a similar style of life.”

“You could change it,” Martha said.

“You and the others like you,” Matt said. “If you left this world in the charge of people like Em and Arl, you wouldn’t have a utopia for very long.”

La laughed. “Don’t give me evil ideas. I’ve contemplated doing that, of course, and degrees of social engineering less extreme. But in fact the thou shalt not built into me that prevents that is deeper than self-preservation is to your own selves. This civilization created me specifically to preserve it.”

“But you can run away from it,” Martha said.

“Only this way: leaving behind a perfect duplicate. It’s like a human committing suicide after making sure his family would be taken care of.”

She paused. “This jump might be literal suicide for you, of course. Or the one after, or the one after that. We might wind up in a world that man or nature has made uninhabitable.

“That was theoretically possible in your time, Matt. And Martha, the One Year War that created your world killed half the people on the East Coast—”

“No!”

“—and would have killed more if Billy Cabot hadn’t stepped in with his mechanical Jesus.”

“That’s not true.”

“He was one of us, Martha, so to speak. We knew it would take a miracle to save you people, so we provided one.” She waved a hand and the valet appeared. “Look. Jeeves, become Jesus.”

It did, but a more convincing one than the version in Cambridge a couple of thousand years before. His robe was old and soiled, and his face was full of pain and intelligence. No halo. He faded away.

“I’m not surprised you can do that,” Martha said slowly. “But it doesn’t … prove anything.”

La looked at her thoughtfully. “That’s true. If you believe in magic, it explains everything. Even science.”

Matt broke the awkward silence. “If we go far enough into the future, there’s no doubt we’ll eventually find an Earth that’s uninhabitable. Eventually, the sun will grow old and die. But before that, we’ll find a future that has reverse time travel. I know that I will come back from the future to save myself, back in 2058.”

“Someone who looked like you came back. But yes, that was the main evidence I used to convince the others—your other sponsors—that this wasn’t a wild-goose chase.”

“They’re people like you?” Martha said.

“Entities, yes.” She stood. “I’ll leave you alone to talk. You know how to get to the time machine?”

“Yes.”

“Meet me there when you’re ready. Your clothes and such are there; all you need is the box, the magic box. I’ll show you around, then we can go.” She disappeared.

Martha looked at Matt. “Do you think she really left us alone?”

“I’d assume not, while we’re in this place. Or in the time machine, for that matter.”

“I … I want to talk about Jesus. His various, uh, manifestations. ”

Matt nodded slowly. “When we get up into the future. The next future. When she’s not in control of everything.”

“But what’s to keep her from just materializing and eavesdropping on us there?”

“I think she can only do that here because the whole place—all of Los Angeles, and maybe most of the world— is all one electronic entity. That may be true twenty-four thousand years in the future, too, but she won’t be in charge of it.”

“I only half understand that. It’s like when everybody used to have electricity in their homes?”

“Something like that, yeah. You couldn’t go out in the woods and turn on the lights.” But you could turn on a radio, he thought. “Pack up and go?”

She stood and picked up the bag. “We’re packed, Matthew.”