The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 18

The Real World - Steven Utley

Everything felt like a dream. The flight attendants seemed to whisper past in the aisle. The other passengers were but shadows and echoes. Through the window, he could see the wing floating above an infinite expanse of cloudtop as flat and featureless as the peneplained landscapes of the Paleozoic. I’m just tired, he thought, without conviction.

Ivan forced his attention back to the laptop. He had called up an did documentary in which he himself appeared. “Resume,” he said, very softly, and the image on the screen unfroze, and a familiar, strange voice said, “Plant life may actually have invaded the land during the Ordovician Period.” Is that really me? he thought. My face, my eyes, I look so unlived-in. “We know about two dozen genera of land plant in the Silurian,” and the screen first showed a tangle of creeping green tendrils at his younger self’s feet, “such as these, which are called psilophytes,” then a glistening algal mat. “The big flat things you see all over the mudflats are Nematophycus. The point is-”

His earphone buzzed softly. “Pause,” he murmured to the laptop, and the image on the screen froze once more. He said, “Hello?” and heard his brother say, “How’s the flight?”

“Don. I hope you’re not calling to rescind my invitation.”

“Michelle’ll pick you up at the airport as planned. I’m just calling to warn you and apologize in advance. I just got an invitation I can’t refuse to a social event tomorrow evening.”

“No need to apologize.”

“Sure there is. This is a soiree of Hollywood swine.”

“I can use the time to rest up for Monday.”

“Well, actually, I’d sort of like to take you along. In case I need somebody intelligent to talk to. Unless, of course, you think you’d be uncomfortable.”

Ivan examined the prospect for a moment, then said, “On Tuesday I’m going to read a paper on Paleozoic soils at the Page Museum. Young snotnoses keen to establish their reputations on the ruins of mine will be there. In light of that, I can’t imagine how people who undoubtedly don’t know mor from mull could possibly make me uncomfortable.”

“Good. To the extent possible, I’ll camouflage you in my clothing.”

“What’s the occasion for the party?”

“The occasion’s the occasion.”

“Let me rephrase the question. Who’s hosting the party?”

“Somebody in the business who’s throwing himself a birthday party. None of his friends will throw one for him, because he doesn’t have any friends. If I hadn’t come within an ace of an Oscar last month-which by the way is the limit of his long-term memory-it’d never have occurred to him to invite a writer. If I was a self-respecting writer and not a Hollywood whore, I’d duck it. But, hey, it’ll be entertaining from a sociological point of view.”

“As long as I get to ogle some starlets.”

“Starlets’d eat you alive.”

“That would be nice, too. Look, please don’t think you have to entertain me the whole time I’m out there.”

“Oh, this place’ll afford you endless opportunities to entertain yourself.”

“I look forward to it.”

“See you soon.”

“Goodbye.”

“Resume,” he murmured to the laptop. “The point is.”

“The point is,” his younger self said, “they can’t have sprung up overnight, even in the geologic sense. The Silurian seas are receding as the land rises, and the plant invasion’s not a coincidence. But there were also opportunities during the Ordovician for plants to come ashore in a big way. Only theydidn’t. Maybe there was lethal ozone at ground level for a long time after the atmosphere became oxygen-rich. If so, a lot of oxygen had to accumulate before the ozone layer rose to the higher levels safe enough for advanced life-forms. Our-”

“Stop,” he said, and thought, What a lot of crap. Then he sighed deeply and told the laptop, “Cue the first Cutsinger press conference.”

After a moment, Cutsinger’s image appeared on the screen. He was standing at a podium, behind a brace of microphones. He said, “I am at pains to describe this phenomenon without resorting to the specialized jargon of my own field, which is physics. Metaphor, however, may be inadequate. I’ll try to answer your questions afterward.”

This is afterward, Ivan thought bitterly, and, yes, I have a question.

“The phenomenon,” Cutsinger’s image went on, “is, for want of a better term, a space-time anomaly-a hole, if you will, or a tunnel, or however you wish to think of it. It appears, and I use the word advisedly, appears to connect our present-day Earth with the Earth as it existed during the remote prehistoric past.

We’ve inserted a number of robot probes, some with laboratory animals, into the anomaly and retrieved them intact, though some of the animals did not survive. Judging both from the biological samples obtained and from the period of rotation of this prehistoric Earth, what we’re talking about is the Siluro-Devonian boundary in mid-Paleozoic time, roughly four hundred million years ago. Biological specimens collected include a genus of primitive plant called Cooksonia and an extinct arthropod called a-please forgive my pronunciation if I get this wrong-a trigonobartid. Both organisms are well-known to paleontologists, and DNA testing conclusively proves their affinities with all other known terrestrial life-forms. Thus, for all practical purposes, this is our own world as it existed during the Paleozoic Era.

However, it cannot literally be our own world. We cannot travel directly backward into our own past.”

Ivan looked up, startled, as a flight attendant leaned in and said something.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“We’ll be landing soon. You’ll have to put that away now.”

“Of course.”

She smiled and withdrew. He looked at the laptop. “The anomaly,” Cutsinger was saying, “must therefore connect us with another Earth.”

“Quit.”

Michelle met him as he came off the ramp. For a second, he did not recognize her and could only stare at her when she called his name. He could not immediately connect this young woman with his memories of her as a long-limbed thirteen-year-old girl with braces on her teeth; then, he had never been quite able to decide whether she was going to grow up pretty or goofy-looking. It had been a matter of real concern to him: he had first seen her cradled tenderly in her mother’s arms, eyes squeezed shut and oblivious of her beatific expression; baby Michelle was not asleep, though, but had seemed to be concentrating fiercely on the mother’s warmth, heartbeat, and wordless murmured endearments. Tiny hands had clasped and unclasped rhythmically, kneading air, keeping time, and when Ivan had gently touched one perfect pink palm and her soft digits closed on, but could not encircle, his calloused fingertip, the contrast smote him in the heart. He had no children of his own, and had never wanted any, but he knew immediately that he loved this child. He had murmured it to her, and to Don and Linda he said, “You folks do good work.”

The discontinuous nature of these remembered Michelles, lying unconformably upon one another, heightened his sense of dislocation as he now beheld her. She was fresh out of high school, fair-skinned, unmade-up, with unplucked eyebrows and close-cropped brown hair. It cannot be her, he told himself.

But then the corners of her mouth drew back, the firm, almost prim line of her lips fractured in a smile, and she delivered herself of pleasant, ringing laughter that had a most unexpected and wonderful effect on him: his head suddenly seemed inclined to float off his shoulders, and he found himself thinking that a man might want to bask for years in the radiance of that smile, the music of that laughter. Now he was convinced, and he let himself yield to the feeling of buoyant happiness. As a child she had had the comically intent expression of a squirrel monkey, but her father and her uncle had always been able to make her laugh, and when she had the effect was always marvelous. She closed with him and hugged him tightly, and his heart seemed to expand until it filled his chest.

As they headed into the hills north of Hollywood, she concentrated on her driving and he stole glances at her profile. He decided that the haircut suited her vastly better than the unfortunate coiffures she had been in the habit of inflicting upon herself. Well, he thought, you turned out pretty after all.

And he thought, I love you still, darling, and I always shall. Whether it’s really you or not.

Seated at the metal table, screened from the sun by the eucalyptus tree and with his book lying open on his lap, he admired the blue and orange blooms and banana-shaped leaves of the bird of paradise flowers in his brother’s backyard. He could look past them and the fence and right down the canyon on the hazy blur of the city. The morning had begun to heat up, and there was a faint ashy taste to the air. He noticed a small dark smudgy cloud where the farthest line of hills met the sky.

Michelle emerged from the house carrying two ice-flecked bottles of imported beer on a tray. She set it on the table and sat down across from him and said, “Daddy’s still talking to the thing that would not die.”

He nodded in the direction of the smudgy cloud. “I hope that’s not what I think it is.”

She looked. “Fires in the canyons. It’s the season.” She opened one of the beers and handed it to him.

“What’re you reading?”

Unnecessarily, he glanced at the spine. “The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant.”

She clearly did not know what to say in response.

“It’s about the lives of the great philosophers,” he went on after a moment, “and their thoughts on being and meaning and stuff.”

She made a face. “It sounds excruciating.”

“It is. I think the great philosophers were all wankers, except for Voltaire, who was funny. Nietzsche was probably the wankiest of the lot.”

“Why’re you reading it if you think it’s so awful?”

“Let’s just say I’m in full-tilt autodidact mode these days. Nowadays I carry the same three books with me everywhere I go. This one, a book about quantum mechanics, and the latest edition of thePeople’s Almanac. The almanac’s the only one I really enjoy.”

“What’s that, quantum mechanics?”

“Didn’t they teach you anything in school? Advanced physics. Probably just a lot of philosophical wanking set to math. But it interests me. Somewhere between physics and philosophy is the intersection of the real world. Out of our subjective perception of an objective reality of energy and matter comes our interpretation of being and meaning.”

“Whatever you say, Uncle Ivan.”

“Are you going to this party tomorrow night?”

She shook her head emphatically. “I’m going to a concert with my boyfriend. Anyway, I don’t much care for movie people. Oh, some of them are nice, but-I’ve never been comfortable around actors. I can never tell when they aren’t acting. No, that’s not it, it just makes me tired trying to figure out when they’re acting and when they’re not. The directors are mostly pretentious bores, and the producers just make Daddy crazy.” She gazed down the canyon. “The fact is, I don’t much like movies. But my boyfriend”-she gave him a quick, self-conscious glance-“my boyfriend loves ’em. And heloves dinosaurs. He says he judges a movie by whether he thinks it’d be better or worse with dinosaurs in it.”

“Did he have anything to do with that recent version ofLittle Women? ”

“No. He’s not in the industry, thank God. I wouldn’t go out with anybody who is. I wonder what genius thought of settingLittle Women in prehistoric times. Anyway, you’d be surprised how many movies flunk his dinosaur test.”

“Probably I wouldn’t.”

“He and Daddy like sitting around coming up with lunatic premises for movies. What they call high-concept. He cracks Daddy up. Daddy says he could be making movies every bit as bad as anybody else’s if he just applied himself.”

“Give me an example of high-concept.”

“‘Hitler! Stalin! And the woman who loved them both!’” They laughed together. Then she suddenly regarded him seriously. “I hope you’re not going to let yourself be overawed by these people.”

“People don’t awe me.” She looked doubtful, so he added, “They can’t begin to compete with what awes me.”

“What’s that? What awes you?”

He leaned sideways in his chair, scooped some dirt out of a flowerbed. “This,” he said, and as he went on talking he spread the dirt on his palm and sorted through it with his index finger. “When we were kids, teenagers, while your daddy sat up in his room figuring out how to write screenplays, I was outdoors collecting bugs and fossils. We neatly divided the world between us. He got the arts, I got the sciences.

Even our tastes in reading-while he was reading, oh, Fitzgerald and Nabokov, I’d be reading John McPhee and Darwin’s journal of the voyage of theBeagle. There was a little overlap. We both went through phases when we read mysteries and science fiction like mad. I’d readThe Big Sleep orThe Time Machine and pass ’em onto Don, and then we’d discuss ’em. But we were usually interested in different parts of the same books. Don was interested in the characters, the story. Who killed so and so. I loved Raymond Chandler’s, Ross Macdonald’s descriptions of the southern California landscape. I was like a tourist. My feeling was that setting is as vital as plot and characterization. A good detective-story writer had to be a good travelogue writer, or else his characters and action were just hanging in space. Don argued that a good story could be set anywhere, scenery was just there to be glanced at. If the plot was good, it would work anywhere.”

“Daddy says there are only three or four plots. At least he says that out here there are only three or four.”

“Well, anyway, your dad and I have art and science all sewed up between us. Science to help us find out what the world is. Art to-I don’t know, art’s not my thing, but I think-”

“Daddy says you’re trying to write a book.”

“Trying is about as far as I’ve got so far. I have all the raw material, but…” But. “I’m not creative.

Anyway, I think we have to have both science and art. Everything in the universe partakes in some way of every other thing.”

“What about philosophy?”

“Maybe it’s what links science and art.”

“Even if it’s a lot of wanking?”

“Even wanking has its place in the scheme of things. What about this boyfriend?”

“Interesting segue.”

“Is this a serious thing? Serious like marriage?”

She shrugged, then shook her head. “I want to do something with my life before I get into that.”

“What?”

“I wish I knew. I feel I have so much to live up to. Your side of the family’s all overachievers. My father’s a hot Hollywood screenwriter. My uncle, the scientist, has done just the most amazing things. My grandparents were big wheels in Texas politics. It’s almost as bad as having movie-star parents. The pressure on me to achieve is awful.”

“It was probably worse for the Huxleys.”

“Mom’s always felt outclassed. Her family’d always just muddled along. She felt utterly inadequate the whole time she and Dad were married.”

“With a little help from him, she made a beautiful daughter.”

She looked pleased by the compliment but also a little uncomfortable. “Thank you for saying that.”

“It’s true.”

“You used to call me Squirrel Monkey.”

Don came outside looking exasperated. “Ever reach a point in a conversation,” he said, “where, you know, you can’t go on pretending to take people seriously who don’t know what they’re talking about?”

“Are we talking rhetorically?”

Don laughed a soft, unhappy sort of laugh. He indicated the unopened bottle of beer. “Is that for me?”

“Just that one, Daddy.”

“I need it.” He said to Ivan, “Tell me the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard. I’m trying to put something into perspective here.”

Ivan thought for a moment. “Well, there was the low point, or maybe it was the high point, of my blessedly short stint as a purveyor of scientific knowledge to college freshman. I had a student tell me in all earnestness that an organism that lives off dead organisms is a sacrilege.”

Don laughed again, less unhappily than before. “Been on the phone with someone who makes deals and gives off movies as waste. He’s got the hottest idea of his life. He’s doing a full-blown remake ofThe Three Musketeers in Taiwan.”

Ivan felt his eyebrows go up. He made them come back down.

Don nodded. “That was my reaction. I said to him, I gather you’ve taken a few liberties with the novel.

And he said, Novel? By Alexandre Dumas, I said. You mean it? he said. Excuse me for a moment, and he gets on his AnswerMan and says, To legal, do we have exclusive rights to alleged novel by Doo-dah-duh. Dumas, I scream,Dumas, you dumbass!” He shook his head as though to clear it of an irritating buzz. “Well. I go on and tell him the novel’s in the public domain, Dumas has been dead for a little while now. He drums his fingers on his desktop. He screws his face into a mask of thoughtfulness.

He says, Well, it’s always best to be sure, because if what you say is true, we’ll have to see about getting it pulled out of circulation. I beg his pardon. He says, We don’t want people confusing it with our book based on the movie.”

Ivan said, “He’s going to novelize a movie based on a novel?”

“Sure. The novel based onPride and Prejudice was on the bestseller list?”

Michelle said, “Hooray for Hollywood,” and Ivan raised his bottle in a toast.

Don raised his as well. “Here’s to L.A., Los Angeles del Muerte!”

Then Michelle excused herself and went inside. Ivan said, “Every time I see her, she’s bigger, smarter, prettier, and nicer.”

“That’s how it works if you only see her once every few years. Move out here, be her doting uncle all the time.”

“Oh, I would love to. It would be good to see more of you, too. But-” To avoid his brother’s expectant look, Ivan turned toward the canyon. “Call me a crank on the subject, but I’ll never live on an active plate margin.”

“Christ.”

“Geologically speaking, these hills have all the structural integrity of head cheese. They piled up here after drifting in across a prehistoric sea from God knows where. One of these times, Don, the earth’s going to hiccup, and all these nice houses and all you nice people in them are going to slide all the way down that canyon.”

Don shrugged. “Mobility is what California’s all about. Everything here is from someplace else. The water comes from Colorado. These flowers,” and he extended his arm and delicately touched a leaf on one of the bird-of-paradise flowers as though he were stroking a cat under its jaw, “are South African.

The jacaranda you see all over town are from Brazil, the eucalyptus trees are from Australia. The people and the architecture are from everywhere you can think of.” He took a long pull on his bottle, draining it.

“That’s the reason California’s such a weird goddamn place. Because nothing really belongs here.”

“I think it’s fascinating. I wouldn’t live here for anything-not even for you and Michelle, I’m sorry. But it is certainly fascinating.”

“Oh, absolutely, I agree, it is. In a big, ugly, tasteless, intellectually numbing kind of way.”

“What do you do for intellectual stimulation?”

“I read your monographs.”

“Really?”

“No, but I have copies of all of them.”

Later, stretched across the bed with his eyes closed and the cool fresh sheet pulled up to his sternum, Ivan thought, Clever, talented Don. It had never occurred to him before that his brother considered his work at all…

He did not think he had fallen asleep, yet he awoke with a start. He was hot and parched. He slipped into a robe and eased into the hallway. In the kitchen, he filled a glass with cold filtered water from the jug in the refrigerator and sat down with his back to the bar to look out through the glass doors, at the lights of the city. There was a glowing patch of sky, seemingly as distant as the half moon, where the dark smudgy cloud had been that afternoon.

When he returned to his room, he sat on the edge of the bed and took his well-thumbedPeople’s Almanac from the nightstand. He opened it at random and read a page, then set it aside and picked up the laptop. “Where were we?”

The screen lightened. “That’s a good question,” Cutsinger was saying. He chuckled into the microphones. “I know, because my colleagues and I have asked it of each other thousands of times since the anomaly was discovered. Every time, the answer’s been the same. Simply traveling through time into the past is impossible. Simply to do so violates the laws of physics, especially our old favorite, the second law of thermodynamics. Simply to enter the past is to alter the past, which is a literal and actual contradiction of logic. Yet the fact is, we have discovered this space-time anomaly which connects our immediate present with what from all evidence is the Earth as it existed during mid-Paleozoic times. The only way the laws of physics and logic can accommodate this awkward fact is if we quietly deep-six the adjective ‘simply’ and run things out to their extremely complicated conclusion. We must posit a universe that stops and starts, stops and starts, countless billions of times per microsecond, as it jumps from state to state. As it does so, it continually divides, copies itself. Each copy is in a different state-that is, they’re inexact copies. A separate reality exists for every possible outcome of every possible quantum interaction. Inasmuch as the number of copies produced since the Big Bang must be practically infinite, the range of difference among the realities must be practically infinite as well. These realities exist in parallel with one another. Whatever we insert into the anomaly-probes, test animals, human beings-are not simply going to travel directly backward into our own past. Instead, they’re going to travel somehow to another universe, to another Earth which resembles our Earth as it was in the Paleozoic. Yes? Question?”

From offscreen came a question, inaudible to Ivan, but on the screen Cutsinger nodded and answered, “Well, it’s probably pointless to say whether this sort of travel occurs in any direction-backward, sideward, or diagonally.”

From offscreen, someone else asked, “If there are all these multiple Earths, when you’re ready to come back through this hole you’re talking about, how can you be sure you’ll find your way back to the right Earth?”

“To the very best of our knowledge, this hole as you call it has only two ends. One here and now, one there and then. Next question?”

You glibson of a bitch, Ivan thought.

After the robot probes had gone and apparently come back through the space-time anomaly, the next step was obvious to everyone: human beings must follow. It was decided that two people should go through together. At the outset, in the moment it had taken the phrase “time travel to the prehistoric world” to register in his mind, Ivan had made up his mind-yes, absolutely, I want to go! “Presented with the opportunity to traverse time and explore a prehistoric planet,” he had written to Don, “whowouldn’t? ” In the weeks and months that followed, however, through all the discussion and planning sessions, he had never quite believed that he had a real chance to go. Partly it was a matter of funding: x amount of money in the kitty simply equaled y number of people who would get to go on any Paleozoic junket.

Partly it was a matter of prestige: given, practically speaking, an entire new planet to explore-everything about it, everything about the cosmos it occupied, for that matter, being four hundred million years younger, any scientist could make a case for his or her particular field of inquiry. Ivan did not, of course, despise his work in the least or see any need to apologize for it; moreover, he did not take personally-too personally, anyway-one or another of the likelier candidates’ feigned confusion over pedology, the study of the nature and development of children, andpedology, soil science. The first few times, he affected amusement at the joke fellow soil scientists told on themselves, which in its simplest form was that the insertion of a single soil scientist into Silurian time would result in that remote geological period’s having more scientist than soil. It was the sort of extremely specialized joke specialists told. Like any specialized joke, its charm vanished the instant that an explanation became necessary. Real soil would have only just started, geologically speaking, to collect amid the Silurian barrens; pedogenesis would be spotty and sporadic; rock could weather away to fine particles, but only the decay of organic matter could make sterile grit into nurturing dirt, and while organisms abounded in the Silurian seas, they would have only just started, again, geologically speaking, to live and die-and decompose-on land.

“Oh. I see. Ha, ha.”

The joke had escaped from the soil scientists at some point and begot tortuous variations in which twenty-first-century pedology overwhelmed and annihilated the reality of primordial soil: why (went one version), the weight of the terminology alone-soil air, soil complexes, associations and series, soil horizons, moisture budgets, aggregates and peds, mor and mull and all the rest of it-would be too much for such thin, poor, fragile stuff as one might expect to find sprinkled about in mid-Paleozoic times.

He had tried to look and sound amused, and to be a good sport overall, whenever he heard the joke in any of its mutated forms. After all, it was never intended really maliciously; it merely partook of a largely unconscious acceptance of a hierarchy of scientists. Physics and astronomy were glamour fields. Geology and paleontology were comparatively rough-hewn but nonetheless logical choices; moreover, they were perennially popular with the public, a crucial concern when public money was involved. Pedology was none of the above. He liked to think that he did not have it in himself to be envious, and so, with unfailing good humor, he agreed that there certainly would be a lot of geology at hand in the Paleozoic, mountains, valleys, strata, and the like. And, as for paleozoology, the Paleozoic would be nothing if not a big aquarium stocked with weird wiggly things and maybe a few big showy monsters.

And as for the crazy night skies, my oh my!

And even Kemal Barrowclough, paleobotanist, could get up and describe some harsh interior landscape enlivened only by the gray-green of lichens, “the first true land plants, because, unlike the psilophytes and lycopods we find clinging to the low moist places, close to water, always looking over their shoulders, so to speak, to make sure they haven’t strayed too far, lichens, by God,have taken the big step, ” and there would scarcely be a dry eye among the listeners, except for Kemal’s sister, Gulnar, herself a paleobotanist. Gulnar specialized in psilophytes.

Throughout the discussions, Ivan had felt that, in effect, DeRamus had but to point to his rocks and say,“Old!” or Gabbert to his sky and say,“Big!” and nothing,nothing, he could have said about microbiotic volume in the histic epipedon, or humic acid precipitation, or the varieties of Paleozoic mesofauna he expected to sift through a tullgren funnel, would have meant a damn thing. Rather than enter his saprotrophs in unequal and hopeless competition against thrust faults, sea scorpions, or prehistoric constellations, he would wait until all around the table had settled back, glowering but spent, then softly clear his throat and calmly explain all over again that the origin and evolution of soil ranked among the major events in the history of life on Earth, that soil was linked inextricably to that major event of mid-Paleozoic time, life’s emergence onto land.

It had been by dint of this stolid persistence that he had, in the minds of enough of his peers, ultimately established himself as precisely the sort of knowledgeable, dedicated, persevering person who should be a member of the Paleozoic expedition-and had also established, by extension, all soil scientists everywhere, in every geologic age, as estimable fellows. When finally, Stoll had announced who would go, Ivan stunned to speechlessness, could only gape as each of his colleagues shook his hand; almost a minute passed before he found his voice. “Wonders never cease,” he had said.

Almost the next thing he remembered was looking over the back of the man who had knelt before him to check the seals on his boots. Cutsinger had stood leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed and watched the technicians work. He smiled ruefully at Ivan and said, “Tell me how youreally feel.”

“Like the first astronaut to spacewalk must’ve, just before he went out and did it.”

“That guy had an umbilical cord,” said Dilks, who sat nearby, surrounded by his own satellite system of technicians. He did not go onto say the obvious: We don’t.

“Just don’t lose sight of the anomaly once you’re through,” Cutsinger said.

“Right now,” Ivan said, “getting back through the anomaly doesn’t concern me quite as much as going through the first time and finding myself sinking straight to the bottom of the sea.”

“We sent a probe in to bird-dog for you. The hole’s stabilized over solid ground. You’ll arrive high and dry.” Cutsinger nodded at Dilks. “Both of you, together.”

Ivan flexed his gloved fingers and said, “It’s just the suit,” and thought, It isn’tonly just the suit, but part of itis the suit. The suit was bulky and heavy and had to be hermetic. He and Dilks had to carry their own air supplies and everything else they might conceivably need, lest they contaminate the pristine Paleozoic environment and induce a paradox. The physicists, Ivan and Dilks privately agreed, were covering their own asses.

Cutsinger asked Dilks, “Anything you’re especially concerned about?”

Dilks grinned. “Not liking the scenery. Not seeing a single prehistoric monster.”

Cutsinger smiled thinly. “Careful what you wish for.”

“Time to seal up,” said one of the technicians. Another raised a clear bubble helmet and carefully set it down over Ivan’s head. The helmet sealed when twisted to the right.

“All set?” said the chief technician’s voice in the helmetphone.

“All set,” said Ivan.

Technicians stood by to lend steadying hands as the two suited men got to their feet and lumbered into an adjoining room for decontamination. They stood upon a metal platform. Their equipment had already been decontaminated and stowed.

Ivan gripped the railing that enclosed the platform; he did not trust his legs to hold him up. This is it, he told himself, and then, This is what? He found that he still could not entirely believe what he was about to do.

The wall opposite the door pivoted away. The metal platform began to move on rails toward a ripple in the air.

Everything turned to white light and pain.

They considered their reflections in the full-length mirror. Don and Ivan were two solidly built, deep-chested, middle-aged men, unmistakably products of the same parents. Michelle stood framed in the doorway. Her expression was dubious. “Daddy,” she said, “they’ll never accept him as one of their own. No offense, Uncle Ivan, but you don’t have Hollywood hair and teeth. They’ll be horrified by what you’ve done to your skin. Daddy’s tanned and fit because he works out. You’re brown and hard and leathery because you work.”

Don said to Ivan, “Maybe they’ll mistake you for a retired stuntman.”

“Why retired?”

“What other kind is there anymore?”

“I feel strange in these clothes, but I have to admit that they feel good and look good. They look better that I do.”

“This is up-to-the-moment thread.”

“I look like a rough draft of you.”

“Whatever you do,” Michelle said, “don’t say you’re a scientist. ‘Scientist’ cuts no ice here.”

Don flashed a grin along his shoulder at his brother and said, “Absolutely do not say you’re a pedologist.

They won’t have any idea what a pedologist is, unless they think it’s the same thing as a pedophile.”

“Someone asks what you are,” Michelle said, “they mean, What’s your astrological sign?”

“I don’t know my astrological sign.”

She made a horrified face. “Getout of California!”

“Tell ’em anything,” Don said, “It doesn’t matter, they’ll run with it, tell you they just knew all along you were a Taurus or whatever.”

“Say you’re a time-traveler,” Michelle told him. “But don’t be hurt if they’re not even impressed by that.

It’s not like they’ve ever done anything real.”

The afternoon was warm, golden, perfect, as they wound their way along Mulholland Drive. Don had put the top down, though it meant wearing goggles to screen out airvertising. Ivan sat fingering the unfamiliar cloth of his borrowed clothing and admiring the fine houses. They turned in at a gate in a high stucco wall, passed a security guard’s inspection, and drove on. Around a bend in the driveway, Ivan saw a monstrous house, an unworkable fusion of Spanish and Japanese architectural quirks framed by the rim of hills beyond. Don braked to stop in front of the house and simply abandoned the car-if he gave the keys to someone, Ivan did not see it happen. Just at the door, Don turned to Ivan and said, “Let me take one more look at you.”

Ivan held his arms away from his body, palms forward.

Don laughed. “You’re the most confident-looking guy I’ve ever seen. You look like Samson about to go wreak havoc among the Philistines.”

“What’ve I got to be nervous about?”

They went inside and immediately found themselves in a crowd of mostly gorgeous chattering people, all seemingly intent upon displaying themselves, all dressed with an artful casualness. As he followed Don through the room, Ivan admired their physical flawlessness. The women were breathtaking. They were shorter or taller than one another, paler or darker, blond or brunette, but nearly all fashioned along the same very particular lines-slim and boyish save for improbably full breasts. On two or three occasions, Don paused and turned to introduce Ivan to someone who smiled pleasantly, shook Ivan’s hand, and looked through or around him.

Ivan was, therefore, taken aback when a lovely woman approached from his brother’s blind side, touched Ivan fleetingly on the forearm, and said, “I’m so glad you came, it’s so good to see you.” She wore a short skirt, belted at the waist. Her back, flanks, and shoulders were bare. The tips of her breasts were barely covered by two narrow, translucent strips of fabric that crossed at the navel and fastened behind her neck.

“It’s so good to see you, too,” Ivan said. She said, “I have to go get after the help for a second, but don’t you go away,” and vanished.

Ivan caught up with Don and said, “Who was that?”

“Who was who?”

A simply pretty rather than gorgeous girl paused before Ivan with a food-laden tray and smiled invitingly; he helped himself to some unrecognizable but delicious foodstuff. Before he could help himself to seconds, she was gone. He consoled himself with a drink plucked from another passing tray.

The singer fronting the combo was Frank Sinatra, who snapped his fingers and smiled as he sang “My Way.” According to a placard, the skinny, artfully scruffy young men accompanying him were The Sex Pistols. Although none of the real people in the room appeared to notice when the song ended, Frank Sinatra thanked them for their applause and told them they were beautiful. Ivan caught up with the girl with the food tray and had helped himself to a snack before he realized that she was a different girl and it was a different snack. She was pretty in her own right, however, and the snack was as mysterious and delicious as the first had been. The combo began playing again, somewhat picking up the tempo. As Frank Sinatra sang that he didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew how to get it, Don turned, pointed vaguely, and said to Ivan, “I see somebody over there I have to go schmooze with. I’d introduce you, but he’s a pig.”

“So go schmooze. I can look after myself.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“Okay. Ogle some starlets-I’ll be back in a mo.”

As though she had rotated into the space vacated by Don, a long tawny woman appeared before Ivan.

Her waist was as big around as his thigh. Her high breasts exerted a firm, friendly pressure against his lapels. He thought she had the most kissable-looking mouth he had ever seen. She said, “I’m sure I know you.”

Ivan smiled. “I was one of the original Sex Pistols.”

“Really!” She glanced over her shoulder at the hologram, then peered at Ivan again. “Which one?”

Ivan nodded vaguely in the band’s direction. “The dead one.”

She pouted fetchingly. “Who are you, really?”

He decided to see what would happen if he disregarded Don and Michelle’s advice. He said, “I’m a pedologist.”

“Oh,” she said, “you specialize in child actors? No, wait, that’s a foot specialist, right?” She looked doubtfully at his hands, which were big and brown, hard and knobby. “Is your practice in Beverly Hills?”

“Gondwanaland.”

“Ah,” she said, and nodded, and looked thoughtful, and lost interest. Ivan let her rotate back the way she had come and then sidled into and through the next room. The house was a maze of rooms opening onto other rooms, seemingly unto infinity; inside of five minutes, he decided that he was hopelessly lost.

Surrounded by small groups of people talking animatedly among themselves, he turned more or less in place, eavesdropping casually. He quickly gathered that most of the people around him believed in astrology, psychics, cosmetic surgery, and supply-side economics, and that some few among them were alarmed by the trend toward virtual actors. He overheard a tanned, broad-shouldered crewcut man say to a couple of paler and less substantial men, “What chance have I got? I’m losing parts to John Wayne, for chrissake! He’s been dead for decades, and he’s a bigger star than ever.”

“Costs less than ever, too,” said the wispier of the other two men, “and keeps his right-wing guff to himself.”

The broad-shouldered man scowled. “I don’t want what happened to stuntmen to happen to actors!”

“Oh, don’t be alarmist,” the wispy man said. “No one’s going to get rid of actors. Oh, they might use fewer of them, but-besides, stuntmen’re holding their own overseas, and-”

“Crazy goddamn Aussies and Filipinos!”

“-and,”the wispy man said insistently, “the films do have a significant following in this country. For some viewers, it’s not enough to see an actor who looks like he’s risking his life. They want the extra kick that comes from knowing an actor reallyis risking his life.”

The third man had a satisfied air and was shaped like a bowling pin; his white suit and scarlet ascot enhanced the resemblance. “Until that happens,” he told the broad-shouldered man, “better get used to playing second fiddle to John Wayne. Right now, I got development people e-synthing old physical comedians from the nineteen-whenevers. Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Jackie Chan. People still bust a gut laughing at those guys.”

“Never heard of ’em.”

“You will. Because I’m putting ’em together in a film. Lots of smash-up, fall-down. Sure, we use computers to give ’em what they never had before-voices, color-personalities! But when people see Buster Keaton fall off a moving train, they know there’s no fakery.”

“Who the hell cares if some dead guy risks his life?”

The bowling-pin-shaped man jabbed a finger into the air. “Thrills are timeless!”

Glimpsing yet another pretty girl with a food tray, Ivan exited right, through a doorway. He somehow missed the girl, made a couple of turns at random, and was beginning to wonder amusedly if he had happened upon another space-time anomaly when he suddenly and unexpectedly found himself outdoors, on the tiled shore of a swimming pool as big, he decided, as the Tethys Sea-Galveston Bay, at least.

There were small groups of people ranged at intervals around the pool and one person in the water, who swam to the edge, pulled herself up, and was revealed to be a sleekly muscular Amazon. As she toweled her hair, she let her incurious gaze alight fleetingly on Ivan, then move on; she was as indifferent to his existence as though he were another of the potted palms. She rose lithely, draped her towel over one exquisite shoulder, and walked past him into the house.

Ivan sipped his drink, thrust his free hand into his trousers pocket, and ambled toward the far end of the pool and an array of women there. At a table in their midst, like a castaway on an island circled by glistening succulent mermaids, a bald, fat, fortyish man sat talking animatedly to himself. A waiter stood at the ready behind a cart laden with liquor bottles. A large rectangular object, either a man or a refrigerator stuffed into a sports jacket, took up space nearby. Just as this large object startled Ivan by looking in his direction, the fat man suddenly laughed triumphantly, leaped to his feet, and clapped his hands. He pointed at bottles on the cart, and the waiter began to fuss with them. The fat man turned, looked straight at Ivan, evidently the only suitable person within arm’s reach, and pulled him close. “Help me celebrate,” he said, and to the large object, “Larry, get the man a chair.” Larry pulled a chair back from the table, waited for Ivan to sit, then moved off a short distance. The fat man introduced himself as John Rubis and looked as though he expected Ivan to have heard of him. Ivan smiled pleasantly and tried to give the impression that he had.

“I amreal happy!” Rubis pointed at his own ear, and Ivan realized that there was an AnswerMan plugged into it. “The word from the folks at Northemico isgo! ” He indicated the liquor cart. “What can I get you?”

“Brought my own. Congratulations.” Ivan toasted him, and they drank. Rubis smacked his lips appreciatively. Ivan said, “You work for Northemico?”

“Ideal with Northemico. Their entertainment division.”

“I didn’t even realize Northemico had an entertainment division.”

“Hey, they got everything.” He turned toward the waiter and said, “Fix me up another of these.”

“Sorry, I’m just a pedologist from Podunk.” Rubis looked perplexed. “Pedologist,” Ivan said, enunciating as clearly as he could.

“Ah.” Rubis listened to his AnswerMan again. “As in child specialist-or soil scientist? No, that can’t be right. Sorry about that, Doctor. Sometimes my little mister know-it-all gets confused. At least it didn’t think you said you’re a pederast, ha ha. So what is it, set me straight here, what’s your claim to celebrity?”

Ivan mentally shrugged and asked himself, Why the hell not? and to John Rubis he said, “I was one of the first people to travel through time.”

Instead of responding to that, Rubis held up a forefinger, said, “Incoming,” looked away, and hunched over the table, listening intently to his AnswerMan and occasionally muttering inaudibly. Ivan’s attention wandered. Light reflecting from the pool’s surface shimmered on the enclosing white walls. The water was as brilliantly blue-green as that ancient sea-and as he pictured that sea in his mind, he also pictured a woman like a tanned and buffed Aphrodite rising from the waters. And when he told her that he was a foot specialist, she heaved a sigh of exasperation and dived back into the sea.

Rubis turned back to him and said, “Sorry. You aren’t kidding about the time-travel, are you?”

“Well, I was part of the first team of time-travelers-half of it. There were just two of us. Afterward, I made other visits and helped establish a community of scientists in Paleozoic time. The base camp’s the size of a small town now.”

Rubis stared at him for what felt like a long moment. Then a light seemed to come on behind the man’s eyes, and he snapped his fingers and pointed. “Yeah. The hole through time. Back to, what, the Stone Age?”

“Um, actually, back to quite a bit before. Back to the Paleozoic Era, four hundred million and some odd years ago. The Siluro-Devonian boundary.”

“Yeah, that’s right! The Age of Trilobites. So, what, you’re out here pitching the story of your life to producers?”

“No, I’m just visiting my brother. He’s the screenwriter in the family.” That information did not seem to impress Rubis particularly, so Ivan added, “He was just up for a Best Screenplay Oscar. Donald Kelly.”

Rubis brightened. “My own fifteen minutes of fame are long past, and they really didn’t amount to all that much.”

“Mm. Any face minutes?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know, your face on the TV screen. Media interviews. Face minutes.”

“Ah. I turn up in some old documentaries. Everybody made documentaries for a while, until all six people who were remotely interested were sick of them.”

Rubis rolled his eyes. “Documentaries! Even I watched part of one. No offense, but it was like watching grass grow. The most exciting thing you found was a trilobite, and it’s basically just some kind of big water bug, isn’t it?”

“Yes, basically.”

“There’ve been bigger bugs in movies already. Like in-like inThem and I. AndThe Thief of Baghdad.

Seen it?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I thought the Indonesian settings were interesting.”

“Our first idea was to actually shoot it in Baghdad. But not much of Baghdad’s standing anymore.

So-besides, Indonesia, Baghdad”-Rubis made a gesture expressive of some point that was not altogether clear to Ivan-“eh!”

“Once upon a time,” Ivan said, “if you wanted to make a movie about Baghdad, you built sets on soundstages here in Hollywood, right?”

“Aah, nobody makes movies in Hollywood anymore. Too expensive. Lousy unions. But this is still the place to be, the place to make deals. Anyway, like I was saying, about time-travel-I’ve always thought it’s a sensational thing. When you think about it, it really is just the biggest thing since the early days of space travel. I wish it could be used for something more interesting than studying bugs and slime a million years ago, but don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a real shame the time-travelers never caught on with the public like those first guys who went to the moon-Armstrong, Altman. Now those guys were celebrities.”

“It’s not like we could do a live broadcast from the Paleozoic. The view wouldn’t have commended itself to most people anyway. The Silurian Period looks like a cross between a gravel pit and a stagnant pond.

And we didn’t plant a flag or say anything heroic. In fact-” Ivan hesitated for a moment, considering.

“Still, it was all tremendously exciting. It was the most exciting thing in the world.”

The wall opposite the door had pivoted away. The metal platform had begun to move on rails toward a ripple in the air. Everything had turned to white light and pain. Ivan, blinded, felt as though someone had taken careful aim with a two-by-four and struck him across his solar plexus. There was a terrifying, eternal moment when he could not suck in air. Then he drew a breath and started to exhale, and his stomach turned over. The convulsion put him on his hands and knees. Too excited to eat breakfast that morning, he had only drunk a cup of coffee. Now burning acid rose in his throat. He felt cramps in his calf muscles. His earphones throbbed with the sound of-what was it, crying, groaning…?

Retching. His vision cleared, and he saw Dilks nearby, lying on his side, feebly moving his arms. For some reason, part of Dilks’s visor was obscured. Ivan threw his weight in that direction and half rolled, half crawled to the man’s side. Now he could see Dilks’ face through the yellow-filmed visor. Dilks had lost his breakfast inside his helmet. Ivan spoke his name, but it was quickly established that, though Dilks’ helmetphone worked, his microphone was fouled and useless. There was nothing to be done for it now: they could not simply remove Dilks’ helmet and clean out the mess; they were under strictest orders not to contaminate the Paleozoic.

Nearby, the air around the anomaly rippled like a gossamer veil. Ivan looked around at the Paleozoic world. He and Dilks were on the shingle just above the high-tide line and just below a crumbling line of cliffs. The sun stood at zenith in the cloudless sky. The sea was blue-green, brilliant, beautiful.

Ivan bent over Dilks again and said, “You’re in bad shape. We’ve got to get you back. Come on, I’ll help you.”

Dilks vehemently shoved him away. He looked gray-faced inside his helmet, but he grimaced and shook his head, and though he could not say what he meant, Ivan understood him.We didn’t come all this way only to go right back. Dilks patted the front of Ivan’s suit and then motioned in the direction of the water.

Ivan nodded. He said, “I’ll be right back.” He staggered to his feet, checked the instruments attached to the platform, activated the camera mounted on his helmet, and collected soil and air samples in the vicinity of the platform. Then, with what he hoped was a reassuring wave to Dilks, he lumbered toward the water. The shingle made for treacherous footing, and yet, as he looked out upon the expanse of water, he experienced a shivery rush of pleasure so particular that he knew he had felt it only once before, during boyhood, on the occasion of his first sight of the sea off Galveston Island. He had never been mystically inclined, even as a boy, but, then as now, he had responded to something tremendous and irresistible, the sea’s summons, had rushed straight down to the water and dived in happily.

Nothing moved along the whole beach, nothing except the curling waves and the tangles of seaweed they had cast up. The beach curved away to left and right. It must curve away forever, Ivan thought.

Hundreds, thousands of miles of perfectly unspoiled beach. He knelt on the dark wet sand and collected a sample of sea-water. As he sealed the vial, he saw something emerge from the foam about two meters to his right. It was an arthropod about as big as his hand, flattened and segmented and carried along on jointed legs. The next wave licked after it, embraced it, appeared momentarily to draw it back toward the sea. The wave retreated, and the creature hesitated. Come on, Ivan thought, come on. Come on. He entertained no illusions that he had arrived on the spot just in time to greet the first Earth creature ever to come ashore. Surely, a thousand animals, a million, had already done so, and plants before them, and microorganisms before plants. Nevertheless, he had to admire the timing of this demonstration. He crouched, hands on knees, and waited. Foam rushed over the creature again. Come on, Ivan commanded it, make up your dim little mind. It’s strange out here on land, not altogether hospitable, but you’ll get used to it, or your children will, or your great-grandchildren a million times removed.

Eventually, most of the species, most of the biomass, will be out here.

The arthropod advanced beyond the reach of the waves and began nudging through the seawrack. Eat hearty, Ivan thought, taking a cautious step toward the animal. He reflected on the persistence in vertebrates of revulsion toward arthropods. He felt kindly toward this arthropod, at least. Both of us, he thought, are pioneers.

As last he reluctantly tore himself away and returned to Dilks, who had sagged to the ground by the platform. Ivan propped the stricken man up and pointed toward the ripple. “We’ve got to cut this short,” he said.

Dilks indicated disagreement, but more weakly than before.

“You’re hurt,” Ivan said, holding him up, “and we’ve got to go back.” There was a crackle of static in Ivan’s helmetphone, and he heard Dilks speak a single word.

“…failed…”

“No! We didn’t fail! We got here alive, and we’re getting back alive. Nobody can take that away from us, Dilks. We’re the first. And we’ll come again.”

They got clumsily onto the platform. Ivan made Dilks as comfortable as possible and then activated the platform. The air around the ripple began to roil and glow. Ivan gripped the railing and faced the glow.

“Do your goddamn worst.”

Rubis had offered Ivan a cigar, which he politely refused, and stuck one into his own mouth, and Larry had lurched forward to light it. Now, enveloped in smoke, Rubis said, “Trilobites just never did catch on with the public. Maybe if you’d found a reallybig trilobite. On the other hand, trilobites didn’t make for very cuddly stuffed toys, either, and that’s always an important consideration. The merchandising, I mean.”

“Candy shaped like brachiopods and sea scorpions? How about breakfast cereal? Sugar-frosted Trilobites?”

Perfectly serious, Rubis nodded. “Now, if you’d’ve set the dial in your time machine for the age of dinosaurs instead.”

“There wasn’t actually a time machine. Just the space-time anomaly, the hole. And it just happened to open up where it did.”

“That’s too bad. And ain’t it the way it always happens with science? We spent a godzillion dollars sending people to the Moon and Mars, and the Moon’s just a rock and Mars’s just a damn desert.”

“Well, I don’t know anyone honestly expected-”

“Now,dinosaurs, dinosaurs’ve been hot sellers forever. Dino toys, VR-they had all that stuff when I was a kid, and it still outsells every damn thing in sight. And every two, three years, regular as laxatives, another big dino movie. But what’ve you got? You got nothing, I’m sorry to say.” He began to count on his fingers the things which Ivan did not have. “You got no big concept. You got no merchandisable angle. You got no crossover potential. Crossover potential’s very big these days. You know, like Tarzan meets Frankenstein. James Bond versus Mata Hari. But, most of all, you haven’t got dinosaurs, though.

Everybody knows if you’re going to tell a story set in the prehistoric past, there have to be dinosaurs.

Without dinosaurs, there’s no drama.”

“I guess not,” Ivan said, and took a long sip of his drink, and looked at the shimmering blue-green water in the pool. The slowly stirring air seemed to carry a faint smell of burning. He said to Rubis, “Let me bounce an idea for a different kind of time-travel story off you. Tell me what you think.”

“Sure. Shoot.”

“Okay. You have to bear in mind that when we speak of traveling backward through time, into the past, what we’re really talking about is traveling between just two of infinite multiple Earths. Some of these multiple Earths may be virtually identical, some may be subtly different, some are wildly different-as different as modern and prehistoric times. Anyway, what you actually do when you travel through time is go back and forth between Earths. Earth as it is, here and now, and another Earth, Earth as it was in the Paleozoic Era.”

Rubis murmured, “Weird,” and smiled.

“Now let’s say someone from our present-day visits a prehistoric Earth and returns. After a while, after the initial excitement’s died down, he starts to ponder the implications of travel back and forth between multiple Earths. He’s come back to a present-day Earth that may or may not be his own present-day Earth. If it’s virtually identical, well, if the only difference is, say, the outcome of some subatomic occurrence, then it doesn’t matter. But maybe there’s something subtly off on the macro level. It wouldn’t be anything major. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Confederate States would all’ve gone down to defeat. Or maybe the time-traveler only suspects that something may be subtly off. His problem is, he’s never quite sure, he can’t decide whether something is off or he only thinks it is, so he’s always looking for the telling detail. But there are somany details. If he never knew in the first place how many plays Shakespeare really wrote or who all those European kings were…”

Rubis nodded. “I get it. Not bad.” He chewed his lower lip for a moment. “But I still think it needs dinosaurs.”

Ivan chuckled softly, without mirth. “You should look up my niece’s boyfriend.” He turned on his seat, toward the burning hills.

They swept down Mulholland. Ivan said to Don, “Thanks for taking me. I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun.” Don gave him a curious look. “No, really. I had a very good time, a wonderful time.”

“Probably a better time than I did.”

Ivan made a noncommittal sound. “I needed this experience as a kind of reality check.”

Don laughed sharply. “Hollywood isn’t the place to come for a reality check.”

“Well, okay. Let’s just say I had a very enlightening and entertaining poolside chat with our host.”

“Johnny Rubis? Christ. He wasn’t our host. Our host was a swine in human form named Lane. He was holding court indoors the whole time. I went in and did my dip and rise and got the hell out as fast as I could. Whatever Rubis may’ve told you he was doing by the pool, he was just showing off. See what a big deal I am. There were guys all over the place doing the same thing-women, too. Dropping names and making a show of pissant phone calls. See what big deals we are. Whatever Rubis may’ve told you, he’s not that high in the food chain. A year ago he was probably packaging videos with titles likeTrailer Park Sluts. He’s an example of the most common form of life in Hollywood. The self-important butthead.

I know, I’ve worked for plenty like him.”

“Writing novels based on movies based on novels?”

Don shook his head. “Not me. Not lately, anyway?”

Ivan wondered if Don despised himself as much as he apparently despised everyone else in Hollywood.

He hoped it was not so. More than anything, he hoped it was not so. “Don,” he said, “I’m sorry I said that. I’m really terribly sorry.”

Don shrugged. “No offense taken.” He gave Ivan a quick grin. “Hey, big brother, I’ve been insulted by professionals. It’s one of the things writers in Hollywood get paid for.”

They rode in silence for a time.

Then Don said, “Do you know what a monkey trap is? “Pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but do you know how it works? You take a dry gourd and cut a small hole in it, just big enough for the monkey to get its hand through. You put a piece of food inside the gourd and attach the gourd to a tree or a post. The monkey puts his hand into the gourd, grabs the piece of food, and then can’t pull his fist back through the hole. He could get away if he’d only let go of the food, but he just can’t make himself let go. So, of course, he’s trapped.”

“Is the money really that good?”

“Christ, Ivan, the money’s incredible. But itisn’t just the money. What it is, is that every great once in a long goddamn while, against all the odds-remember, before all this happened, I worked in the next best habitat favorable to self-important buttheads, which is politics. While you were off exploring prehistoric times, I was writing like a sumbitch on fire and trying to get the hell out of Texas. I paid the rent, however, by working for the state legislature. Whenever a legislator wanted to lay down a barrage of memorial resolutions, I was the anonymous flunky who unlimbered the ‘whereases’ and the ‘be it resolveds.’ Every now and then, I wrote about forgotten black heroes of the Texas Revolution, forgotten women aviators of World War Two-something, anyway, that meant something. But, of course, in those resolutions, everything was equally important. Most of my assignments were about people’s fiftieth wedding anniversaries, high-school football teams, rattlesnake roundups. Finally, I was assigned to write a resolution designating, I kid you not, Texas Bottled Water Day. Some people from the bottling industry were in town, lobbying for God remembers what, and someone in the lege thought it’d be real nice to present them with a resolution. Thus, Texas Bottled Water Day. When I saw the request, I looked my boss straight in the eye, and I told him, This is not work for a serious artist. He quite agreed. First chance he got, he fired me.”

“Maybe you should’ve quit before it came to that.”

“Well, I’d’ve quit anyway as soon as the writing took off.” Don changed his grip on the steering wheel.

“But while I was a legislative drudge, I lived for those few brief moments when the work really meant something.”

His face, it seemed to Ivan, was suddenly transformed by some memory of happiness. Or perhaps it was just the car. The car cornered like a dream.