"Not a bit," he said. "Not even as much as a hard drive remembers what was on it after a magnet gets rubbed on it. You'll be a, a whole new hard drive." He started to reach his right hand toward his wounded left shoulder, but let it fall back onto his lap after getting no more than halfway. "And so will I. I won't even appreciate not getting shot, since this experience won't be part of my lifeline. Today is a Tuesday in the August of Never."
Marrity relaxed in the car seat, and he realized that he had not relaxed since using Grammar's device to come back to 1987; in fact, it seemed to him now that he hadn't been really relaxed for years.
He ran a word in his head, and then permitted himself to say it out loud: "Good."
"Better than the Catholics' Confession, isn't it? You just snip off the sinful yards of tape and start over. No repentance required."
"Nobodaddy," said Marrity, to get past that subject. "Like in Blake?"
"Who's Blake?"
"Poet. Late eighteenth century, mostly."
"Oh, William Blake, sure. He wrote a poem about somebody called Nobodaddy? I thought it was beatnik slang, like Daddy-O."
"It was Blake's name for the demiurge, the crazy god who created the universe. Not the eternal God — that one's too remote to have anything to do with the universe."
Golze's sweaty face was expressionless, and his mouth opened and closed without speech. At last, "Rascasse," he said hoarsely. "That's who Rascasse kills?"
Marrity remembered wondering, in the boat on the lake in Echo Park half an hour ago, if Golze aspired to be in all places and moments at once, and if achieving that would make the fat man God.
Marrity shrugged, an action Golze couldn't perform. "If it was the Nobodaddy that Blake was talking about. Where did you get that term?"
"I think Rascasse was the first to use it." Golze looked around at the street and the houses and the old eucalyptus trees along the curbs in the sunlight, and Marrity thought he seemed to be frightened of the whole landscape.
"August of Never," Golze said, weakly but defiantly. "He's still… monitoring my vital signs, I can feel his attention inside my chest. It's as if Mr. A. Square of Flatland had somebody leaning down over him with a flashlight, peering at his innards. Worse than being naked. How does it work?"
Marrity thought it was a rhetorical question, but a moment later Golze shifted to peer at him irritably.
"How does it work?" said Marrity. "I don't know. I guess if he's working in a bigger group of dimensions—"
"Not Rascasse," Golze said. "I know how that works, don't I, Denis?" he added, addressing the headliner above him. "He can hear all of this. No, I meant how does the time machine work? Do you need to kill somebody, to get past the Aeons?"
"Well, I hardly traveled aeons—"
"I mean living things, living categories, called Aeons, didn't you study this stuff? Didn't you read the Pistis Sophia? All the old Gnostic and Kabbalist literature talks about the Aeons, time and space as demons. And they are demons, believe me."
Marrity blinked at him. "Well, I didn't have to kill anybody," he said.
Golze shifted on his seat as he tried to peer down at his wound. "It's gonna be a long drive to Palm Springs," he said tightly. "Maybe you become one of the Aeons, when you can travel in time. Maybe I sacrificed a guy to you last night. August of Never. So how does it work? "
"You — use up your accumulated mass energy, you spend it, to propel yourself right out of your predestined time line. Einstein said that gravitation and acceleration are the same thing — there's no difference between us sitting in this car with gravity pulling us down against the seats, on the one hand, and being away from any gravitating body in a car that's accelerating upward through space at thirty-two feet per second per second, on the other hand. Let go of a pencil, and it doesn't make any difference whether you say it rushes down to the floor or the floor rushes up to it."
Golze made an impatient beckoning gesture with the blood-spotted fingers of his right hand.
"So every person on earth," said Marrity, "has been accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second all his life. Before he was a year old he would have exceeded the speed of light, if that were possible; but of course he can't quite do that, so he's been accumulating mass energy instead. I spent all my accumulated momentum when I broke out of sequential time."
And it has left me feeling empty, he thought.
For several seconds Golze didn't speak, then, "I hope California still exists, nineteen years in the future," he said slowly. "It sounds as if you might have blown it off the continent, releasing that kind of energy."
"It was a, a shaped charge, it all went outward, out of our four dimensions — strike a match on a painting and you haven't really hurt the painting — with me riding it like a guy fired out of a cannon." Marrity smiled nervously. "Switzerland still existed when Einstein came back to it, after having exited this way, in 1928."
Golze seemed to have forgotten his gunshot wound. "You came back nineteen years. How far back could you have gone?"
"I don't know. Not farther back than my birth in 1952, I think, unless I could jump over to my mother's lifeline." His leg was aching, and he tried to shift to a more comfortable position in the passenger seat. "Certainly no farther back than whatever date it was when that configuration was assembled — the Chaplin slab and the maschinchen itself. I think Grammar put the machine together in 1931, and added the Chaplin slab in the 1950s."
The radio hummed, and then Rascasse's unaccented and unechoing voice said, "How did you work it, the maschinchen thing?"
Marrity reached for the microphone, but Golze shook his head. "Just talk," the fat man said. "He's just using the radio speaker now, he's not actually on the air."
"It's a—" Marrity sighed deeply, but he still felt empty. He took a deep breath and started again. "Among other things, it's a very sensitive voltmeter," he said, "and it amplifies tiny voltage differences. It's ten rotating condensors set up in series, so that each beefs up the voltage into the next, up to where you can feel the current, if you're standing barefoot on the two tiny gold posts that stick up through the bricks. They're set flush with the bricks on the floor, no bigger than nail heads. This is in Grammar's shed I'm talking about, and the condensors themselves are in a big dusty glass cylinder under the workbench — though I suppose those guys have it now! It was dusty in 2005, anyway, maybe Lieserl was Windexing it back here in 1987. And it looks fragile — the condensor plates apparently hang from a glass thread."
"And we could build this," said the flat voice on the radio. "Not so difficult."
Marrity shook his head. "I said 'among other things.' Anyway, what you do is, you press your hands into the chaplin handprints and then you send two astral projections of yourself to targets you've set up — one on a mountain, one at sea level or lower, while your body stays in the middle ground somewhere, standing barefoot on the gold electrodes. You guys know about astral projections, right? That way you're existing in three time shells at once — they're only slightly different, but the maschinchen amplifies tiny differences and imposes a combined-wave signal through the electrodes in the floor. You're not in any one time shell anymore at this point, see, you're smeared across three of them. And for your safety you need three of, of 'you' — to spread out the recoil that's coming up soon. Einstein only had two, in 1928: himself on a mountain in the Alps and a projection in the valley below him. It was enough to spread him across some time shells, but the recoil still nearly killed him."