‘Mum,’ says Alice, ‘Mum, please—!’ And she sounds desperate and worried for herself as well as for me, and still not understanding what all this is about.
But then her expression… changes. It suddenly becomes determined and calm. ‘Mum, please don’t do this. I know we only have minutes—’
‘What? Did I tell you about—?’
‘No, this is an older Alice. I’m working on the same technology now. I’ve come back to talk to you.’
It takes me a moment to take that in. ‘You mean, you’ve found a way to change time?’
‘No. What’s written is written. Immediately after we have this conversation, and we’ve both left these bodies, you tell me everything about what you’ve been doing.’
‘Why… do I do that?’ I can feel the sound of my mother’s weakness in my voice.
‘Because after you leave here, you go forward five years and see me again.’ She takes my hands in hers and looks into my eyes. I can’t see the hurt there. The hurt I put there. And I can see a reflection too.
Can I believe her?
She sees me hesitate. And she grows determined. ‘I’ll stay as long as you will,’ she says. ‘You might do this to yourself, but I know you’d never let your child suffer.’
I think about it. I do myself the courtesy of that. I toy with the horror of doing that. And then I look again into her face, and I know I’m powerless in the face of love.
I’m looking into the face of someone I don’t expect to see. It’s David. Our experimental subject. The schizophrenic. Only now he’s a lot older, and… oh, his face… he’s lost such tension about his jaw. Beside him stands Alice, five years older.
He reaches out a hand and touches my cheek.
I shy away from him. What?!
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. We’re… a couple, okay? We’ve been together for several years now. Hello you from the past. Thank you for the last four years of excellent family Christmases.’ He gestures to decorations and cards all around.
‘Hello, Mum,’ says Alice. She reaches down and… oh, there’s a crib there. She’s picked up a baby. ‘This is my daughter, Cyala.’
I walk slowly over. It feels as odd and as huge as walking as a child did. I look into the face of my granddaughter.
David, taking care not to touch me, joins me beside them. ‘It’s so interesting,’ he says, ‘seeing you from this new angle. Seeing a cross section of you. You look younger!’
‘Quickly,’ says Alice.
‘Okay, okay.’ He looks back to me. And I can’t help but examine his face, try to find the attraction I must later feel. And yes, it’s there. I just never saw him in this way before. ‘Listen, this is what you told me to say to you, and I’m glad that, from what Alice has discovered, it seems I can’t mess up my lines. It’s true that you and Alice here fought, fought physically, like you say you and your mum did. Though I once saw her deny that to your face, by the way. She sounded like you were accusing her of something, and she kept on insisting it hadn’t happened until you got angry and then finally she agreed like she was just going along with it. Oh God, this is so weird—’ He picked up some sort of thin screen where I recognised something quite like my handwriting. ‘I was sure I added to what I was supposed to say there, but now it turns out it’s written down here, and I’m not sure that it was… before. I guess your memory didn’t quite get every detail of this correct. Or perhaps there’s a certain… kindness, a mercy to time? Anyway!’ He put down the screen again, certain he wouldn’t need it. ‘But the important thing is, you only see one day. You don’t see all the good stuff. There were long stretches of good stuff. You didn’t create a monster, any more than your mum created a monster in you. You both just made people.’ He dares to actually touch me, and now I let him. ‘What you did led to a cure for people like me. And it changed how people see themselves and the world, and that’s been good and bad, it isn’t a utopia outside these walls and it isn’t a wasteland, she wanted me to emphasise that, it’s just people doing stuff as usual. And these are all your words, not mine, but I agree with them… you are not Ebenezer Scrooge, to be changed from one thing into another. Neither was your mother. Even knowing all of this is fixed, even knowing everything that happened, even if you only know the bad, you’d do it all anyway.’
And he kisses me. Which makes me feel guilty and hopeful at the same time.
And I let go.
I slowly put down the crown.
I stood up. I’d been there less than an hour. I went back to my car.
I remember the drive home through those still empty streets. I remember how it all settled into my mind, how a different me was born in those moments. I knew what certain aspects of my life to come would be like. I had memories of the future. That weight would always be with me. I regretted having looked. I still do. Despite everything it led to, for me and science and the world. I tell people they don’t want to look into their future selves. But they usually go ahead and do it. And then they have to come to the same sort of accommodation that a lot of people have, that human life will go on, and that it’s bigger than them, and that they can only do what they can do. To some, that fatalism has proven to be a relief. But it’s driven some to suicide. It has, I think, on average, started to make the world a less extreme place. There is only so much we can do. And we don’t see the rest of the year. So we might as well be kind to one another.
There are those who say they’ve glimpsed a pattern in it all. That the whole thing, as seen from many different angles, is indeed like writing. That, I suppose, is the revelation, that we’re not the writers, we’re what’s being written.
I write now from the perspective of the day after my younger self stopped visiting. I’m relieved to be free of that bitch. Though, of course, I knew everything she was going to do. The rest of my life now seems like a blessed release. I wrote every note as I remembered them, and sometimes that squared with how I was feeling at the time, and sometimes I was playing a part… for whose benefit, I don’t know.
I remember walking back into my house and finding Ben just waking up. And he looked at me, at the doubtless strange expression on my face, and in that moment I recall thinking I saw his expression change too. By some infinitesimal amount. I have come to think that was when he started, somewhere deep inside, the chain reaction of particle trails that took him from potentially caring dad to letting himself off the hook.
But that might equally just be the story I tell myself about that moment.
What each of us is is but a line in a story that resonates with every other line. Who we are is distributed. In all sorts of ways. And we can’t know them all.
And then I felt something give. There was actually a small sound in the quiet. Liquid splashed down my legs. And as I knew I was going to, I went into labour on Christmas Day.
Ben leaped out of bed and ran to me, and we headed out to the car. Outside, the birds were singing. Of course they were.
‘You’re going to be fine,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be a great mother.’
‘Up to a point,’ I said.
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Paul Cornell
Art copyright © 2012 by Scott Bakal