Lifehouse Lifehouse
Wally and Moira had, in a sense, spent
most of their adult lives training for the advent of the naked bald man. That didn't help
them much.
Happy round people in their mid-forties,
they were hard at work at 11 P.M. on Halloween night, side by side at their respective
computers in the study of their Vancouver home--popularly known as The Only Dump In Point
Grey--when a short sharp silent blast of very bright light burst in the big window behind
them and momentarily washed out their screens. As it faded, they saw that they were both
hung, their mice impotent; each rebooted at once, then used the brief interval of startup
to adjust their blood-sugar levels, Wally with a bird's nest cookie and Moira with coffee.
"More Halloween nonsense?" Wally
suggested as he chewed.
Moira frowned. "Thought we paid off
the last of the little thugs hours ago."
"Maybe we should have given that Ace
Ventura chocolate instead of rice cakes."
"It was instinctive. I see Ace
Ventura: I think bowel movements: I reach for the fiber." She gulped coffee and
glared at her monitor. "No, a smart-aleck kid going to that much trouble would pick
something with bang, not flash. Why waste that much magnesium to not annoy somebody very
much?"
"Right. Got to be a fan or fen, then.
Dr. Techno, or one of the Latex Goddesses."
She shook her head. "Any other time
of the year, I'd say sure. But this close to VanCon, all the fans bright enough are too busy.
Like us. At least, they'd better be."
Wally finished his cookie hurriedly; his
system was back up. "Maybe we should duck and cover," he suggested, typing
furiously.
"Eh?"
"Maybe somebody just nuked Coquitlam.
Or points east."
"Huh." She gave it half her
attention; her own desktop had finally come up and typing with a coffee cup in one hand
took some care. "Nah," she decided, reopening her application, "if the
sound wave hasn't gotten here by now, we're okay. I gotta get this thing uploaded."
"Damn," he said. "It didn't
save." He poked futilely at his own keyboard. "I lost the whole flippin'
file."
Moira smirked and kept working. "You
should get a Mac."
"I hate obsequious machines," he
said automatically, and let it go. Mixed marriages can work, with enough good will.
"You're right: if it was a nuke, it was way out in the Okanagan somewhere. Come
Spring we'll have peaches the size of pumpkins."
"And use them for lawn
lanterns," she agreed. "Seriously, what the hell do you suppose that was?"
Wally typed twelve lines before her
question caught up with him, then shrugged. (She saw it; they knew each other's rhythms.)
"Bright. Short. Sharp; no perceptible waxing or waning. No sound at all that I heard.
Magnesium . . . big laser . . . searchlight, maybe. None likely in our alley, even on
Halloween." He typed some more, then cycled back again. "No, I don't come up
with anything that makes sense. Except fannish humor, and you're right: there's no
punchline to this one."
Moira finished a flurry of her own, played
back his answer, and frowned. "So . . . what? Elvis has just entered the
building?"
"No, he was here four hours ago--and he
got a Mars Bar. Seriously, hon, my honest best guess is that Captain Kirk just beamed down
to ask for directions." He resumed typing at top speed.
Moira frowned fiercely now, and actually
stopped typing for several seconds, even though she was paying connect time again by now.
This was a perfect example of one of the Great Differences on which her twenty-year
marriage to Wally was founded. He found the irrational, the inexplicable, amusing. She
found it barely tolerable. "We ought to take a look out the window, at least,"
she muttered, and resumed netsurfing.
"Sure thing," he said, and kept
typing. "Just as soon as I upload my column for the LMSFSazine, finish that web-page
upgrade for the SCA, answer all the e-mail rumors on the new Beatles stuff, and--oh,
yes--download about twenty megs of current VanCon traffic and route it to the proper
serfs, I'll join you there at the window. Save me a seat."
She didn't bother to recite her own litany
of tasks; she had already dismissed the matter and was deeply engaged in a rather tricky
attempt to hack her way into NASA and sniff out information regarding the first live
guitar jam--the first musical interaction--ever to be performed in space (scheduled,
according to rumor, to occur aboard Mir, during the next visit by the shuttle Atlantis;
a Canadian and a Russian trading off on acoustic and electric). It was her intention to
obtain the best possible recording of the event, and play it at VanCon, the annual
Vancouver science fiction convention she and Wally helped run.
He was editing his column, and she had
just settled on a promising line of attack, when they heard the wail.
It came clearly through the window behind
them: the unformed sound of a baby in distress. Odd that they both thought
"baby" the instant they heard it--for both the volume and pitch of the sound
were unmistakably adult (though the gender was indeterminate). But that cry was not even
an attempt at a word.
"There is a baby the size of a
football player in our alley," Wally said calmly, fingers poised over his keyboard,
"on Halloween night."
Moira caught herself trying to use her own
keyboard as a breed of Ouija board. "One of us should really look out the
window."
He began to tap his keys without quite
typing them, a nervous mannerism she was sure she would learn to accept in no more than
another decade at most. "That's the requisite number," he agreed, and poked a
key tentatively.
Her face clouded up . . . then smoothed
over. "And babies are my department. I see." She disconnected from the net,
treating her mouse with elaborate gentleness, and rose from her seat.
Although their workstation was large by
most home standards, so were Wally and Moira; she could not move her chair out of her way
unless he got up too, so the only way she could get a look out the window was to kneel up
on the chair and lean forward until her cheek pressed against the chilly pane. She did so.
Several seconds passed. Wally typed, but
his heart clearly wasn't in it.
"What do you see?" he asked
finally.
"Bad news," she replied slowly.
"I think I'm getting a zit."
"Oh, for--" He got hold of
himself, and saved his changes. "Right. Sorry. You're quite right: we do have
to take up the tacks before we can take up the carpet." He darkened both monitor
screens, extinguished both gooseneck lamps, levered himself up out of his own chair and
went to dial the overhead light down. He waited there by the rheostat, in near darkness,
watching his wife look out the window and down into the alley. "It's Captain Kirk,
right?" he said.
More seconds passed.
He was beginning to become irritated by
the time she stirred slightly and spoke his name; but then his irritation vanished at
once, for there was something wrong with her voice. "Yes, Moira?"
"We've spoken of my ongoing ambiguity
with regard to certain of the so-called assigned gender roles, right?"
"Yes, dear. And I am sworn not to
break your stones about it."
"Thank you. With all due respect to
sisterhood, I think this is one of those times when a Y chromosome is called for. He's
naked, and he looks dead, and he's bald--so for all I know he is Captain Kirk, but
this is definitely not my department, okay?"
"Our side of the fence, or
Gorsky's?"
"Our side."
His pidgin, then. He sighed. "Wait
here in the cave. Now, where did I leave that stone ax . . . ?"
She turned away from the window.
"Wally, seriously--"
He halted in the doorway. "Woman, you
have invoked the Y chromosome--now run for cover and get the bandages ready. No, better
yet, go to the phone, dial nine one, and wait for my scream." He grinned and left the
room, feeling like a Heinlein hero. A Secret Master of Fandom and Permanent Secretary of
the Lower Mainland Science Fiction Society had, after all, certain standards to maintain.
And how tough could a nude bald corpse be?
She turned her Mac into a voicephone and
did just as he had suggested, then went back to the window--moving both chairs out of the
way this time--telling herself that at the first sign of funny business she would punch
that last digit into the phone and then put a chair through that window and . . . and . .
. and rain coffee cups and lava lamps on the naked bald man until he surrendered, that's
what.
* * *
Wally did take the time to change to
better footgear, put on a light jacket, and slide a short length of rebar up one sleeve
before leaving the house by the back door. It was a typical Vancouver October night, save
that it was not raining; the jacket was useful only as camouflage for the weapon. He
rounded the corner of the house cautiously, staying far from the building and crouching
slightly. Even with his own den lights extinguished, there was still enough light from the
streetlights out front, the moon overhead, and spilling over the fence from the detestable
frosted windows of the Gorskys (Gorskies? Gorski?) next door, to illuminate the alleyway
with reasonable clarity.
There was unquestionably and no shit a
naked bald Caucasian male lying there on his back, just below the den window.
Dead, however, he was not. He was in the
slow process of trying to lever himself up from complete spread-eagled sprawl to a sort of
sitting fetal position. Wally had plenty of time to see clearly that the naked man was not
merely bald but completely hairless . . . and uncircumsized. Wally guessed him to be about
twenty-five, and in excellent shape, well muscled and trim. He noted absently that the
nude intruder was surrounded by a roughly circular patch of scorched grass, and that the
circle of scorching was wide enough to mark both Wally's own house and the fence as well.
He further noted, and filed, the depth of the impression the stranger had left in the
soggy earth; as if he were made of lead . . . or had somehow fallen onto his back
from . . . ah, doubtless from the top of the fence: that explained it. Considering that
the fence was made of chain link topped by savage little twists of jagged steel, and that
the stranger was nude right down to his soles, he must have wanted to leave the Gorsky
property quite badly. For the first time Wally warmed to him slightly. (Like nearly
everyone else in the district except Wally and Moira, the Gorsky clan lived in a
million-dollar stucco-and-plaster steroid monstrosity that looked like the box a real home
had come in--and did not trouble to hide their disgust at the property-value-lowering
presence of Wally and Moira's shabby human dwelling in their midst. In retaliation, Wally
had befriended his crabgrass.)
The naked man saw Wally for the first
time. His eyes widened comically, and he gasped, a sound so loud and sibilant it was
nearly a shriek. He drew up his knees, buried his head between them, and wrapped his arms
around them to keep them secure, like a turtle withdrawing into his shell.
Wally moved, cautiously, to try and get a
glimpse of Moira in the study window, thought he saw her wave a hand. He let the chunk of
rebar slip out of his sleeve and into his palm, and tapped the stranger with it.
As a lifetime science fiction fan, Wally
feared little so much as the prospect of appearing stupid in retrospect. He chose his
words with care, and was rather proud of them. "Excuse me," he said gently,
"but do I correctly understand that you are Blanched Du Boy, and you have always
depended on the blahndness of stranguhs?"
The stranger poked his head back out, and
stared fixedly--not at Wally, but at the house . . . or more properly, at the portion of
its foundation nearest him, about a meter away. His eyes seemed to be bulging out of his
head--or was that just the lack of eyelashes? No . . . no, he was genuinely terrified . .
. not of the large homeowner poking him with a piece of rebar, but of a cement wall. He
scuttled involuntarily away from it, until he fetched up against the fence.
"John!" he muttered.
"Unsnuffingbelievable! One more hackin' meter west, and--" He shivered
violently.
Wally thought it was about time; it wasn't
terribly chilly out here, this was after all Vancouver, but it shouldn't take much to
chill a naked man. "I say--" he began again.
The stranger whirled on him--not easy to
do from a sitting position. "What year is it?" he snapped.
Wally blinked. "The same one it was
when you decided to get drunk," he said.
The man was on his feet so suddenly he
seemed to have levitated; he sprang at Wally and took him by the lapels of his coat.
"What year?" he thundered.
Unused to naked men taking him by the
lapels in his own yard while he held a piece of rebar, Wally answered automatically, and
very quickly, "1995, it's 1995, I swear to God!"
The stranger released him as quickly as
he'd seized him, and the strangest thing happened. For just a moment Wally saw him begin
to panic utterly, just totally lose it . . . then, confoundingly, he felt his own naked
arms with his hands, felt his cheeks, and pulled himself back from the edge. Terror gave
way at once to towering rage: he smote himself mightily on the thighs. "Crot!"
he snarled. "Total snowcrash! Blood for this, my chop . . . grotty wannabes!"
The date clearly displeased him greatly.
On Wally, the light had just begun, dimly,
to dawn. This was the moment he had been waiting for since the age of six--here--now! He
opened his mouth . . . then glanced up at the window and closed it again.
"Look, cousin," he said after
some thought, "it's cool out here. Come on inside like I said, okay? Get some hot
coffee in you--you drink coffee? We got real good coffee--"
The naked man looked up at him and
instantly, visibly, became devious. "Sure, yes, hot caffy, very kind of you, caffy
would be optimal. I can . . . uh . . . I can explain all this--"
"Yes, I'm sure you can," said
Wally. "I'm looking forward to it." He gestured. "If you'll just walk this
. . . uh, in this direction." And then he waved and gestured for Moira's benefit,
before leading the way.
* * *
Wally watched the stranger carefully on
the way into the house. He was one of those people who looks good with his head shaved--in
fact, now that Wally noticed, he looked a little like a younger version of Captain Picard
from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He seemed alert, but some of the things that
interested him were interesting. He paid close attention, for instance, to the process by
which Wally opened, and then closed, the back door--but did not attempt to hide his
interest, as would a burglar casing the joint. He shielded his eyes with his hand from the
meager 40-watt bulb in Wally and Moira's back hall. He noticed the stack of newspapers and
the recycle blue-box full of waste glass and metal waiting for Garbage Night, and for some
reason they seemed to amuse him. The stove in the kitchen made him snort. Then they hung
the right into the study, and the stranger froze in his tracks, gaping.
Wally was aware that not everyone admired
large women as much as he; nonetheless this behavior seemed rude for a guest. Then he
realized that the stranger had not yet noticed Moira. He was staring horrorstruck at . . .
. . . a painting on the study wall. The
Jack Gaughan Analog cover, for a story called "By Any Other Name"--a
simple crouched figure seen from behind, brandishing a futuristic weapon at a number of
translucent fireballs. Wally owned many scarier paintings.
But the stranger had clearly never seen
anything so utterly terrifying in his life--not even the cement wall of Wally's
foundation. "Oh crash," he moaned. "It's worse than I thought!
You're science fiction fans, aren't you?"
Wally took a deep breath, and drew himself
up. "Sir, I'm afraid it is worse than that. My wife and I are SMOFs."
The stranger fainted dead away.
Wally gave Moira a meaningful look.
"The first thing he wanted to know was what year it was."
She stared down at the inert stranger,
then back up at her husband. "Oh, Wally, really?"
He nodded, unable to suppress the grin any
longer.
Her own eyes became large and round, and
for just a moment it looked as though she might pass out herself. Then she got control,
and smiled. "And the con's only a few weeks away!" she cried.
The two Secret Masters Of Fandom raced to
each other, joined hands, and began to dance.
* * *
When the hairless man opened his eyes,
it was in a white room which had no windows and only one door. The door had no knob
or handle or keypad or other obvious means of causing it to open, nor did it appear to
slide on tracks. There was a bare lightbulb in the ceiling, but its switch appeared to be
elsewhere.
The room contained no furniture or
decorations of any kind.
The balance of its contents were all
sentient beings. Specifically, the hairless man himself, Wally, Moira and the Buddha . . .
represented in this specific instance by a football-sized and -shaped bronze statue of him
which was, ironically, the only purely material object present. Everyone but the hairless
man looked generally the same: short, round and smiling beatifically.
He sat up slowly, took in his
surroundings, and the fact that he was no longer naked. He now wore an old grey sweatshirt
shrunken almost to normal-range size, a pair of sweatpants cinched tight at the waist but
with adequate room to store a pup tent and an inflatable raft in the legs, and odd foot
coverings that Wally was accustomed to refer to as "sockasins." He seemed to
find the coverings tolerable.
"This is my meditation room,"
Moira said.
He nodded.
"If the beginning of this
conversation goes well," Wally said, "we can continue it in more congenial
surroundings. Over 'caffy.' But you did drop in without an appointment."
The stranger said nothing.
"We caught a burglar once,"
Wally said. "We left him in here for a week. Took the Buddha out, left him an empty
wastebasket. He was very very contrite when we let him go. We had to help him to the
sidewalk. Nothing much but solids in the basket by that point . . ."
"I understand," the hairless man
said. "Come, let us reason together."
"When are you from?" Wally
asked. "Originally, I mean."
The hairless man did a creditable
imitation of puzzlement. "What do you mean, 'when' am I from, Daddy-o? I'm
from Frisco; I'm part of a team of long-hairs hacking on a matter transporter at the
University of Frisco, and while I was there after hours there was this terrible--"
"It's possible to pipe sound in
here," Moira said. "Are you by any chance familiar with the work of the Gyuto
Monks?"
Beside her, Wally visibly shuddered. The
Gyuto Monks, chanting, sound very much like a sustained short in the circuit that powers
the world. Like the Grand Canyon: anyone will be impressed by them, but few can endure
them at any length.
The hairless man sighed, and his shoulders
drooped. He might not have known the Gyuto Monks, but he knew a threat when he heard it.
"In your reckoning it would be the year 2287."
Wally and Moira each outsmiled the Buddha.
"I'm Wallace Kemp, and this is my
wife Moira Rogers," Wally said.
"I am Jude," the time traveler
said.
Wally and Moira exchanged a glance.
"Hey," Wally said softly, making his Paul McCartney face, and she glared at him.
To Wally's surprise, Jude seemed to catch the reference too, and looked suddenly wary.
"What was your purpose in
time-traveling, Jude?" Wally went on, louder.
"The information would be of no value
to you."
"Let us decide that. Unless you're in
a hurry to get started meditating? We could get you a wastebasket--"
"I came back in order to drive a
taxicab, one time," Jude said. "There. That is the complete truth.
Satisfied?"
Wally digested that. "You know how to
drive a car?" Moira asked.
Jude sneered. "Primitive
mobile--myocontrol--how hard can it be?"
"Does it have to be a cab?"
Wally asked.
Jude's face fell. "The discussion is
pointless," he said. "My mission is a failure."
"Why?" they asked together.
He rubbed his forehead, where his eyebrows
ought to have been. "Because there was a major snowcrash--" He glanced suddenly
at Moira. "--pardon me, madam, a fuckup, and I undershot. This is the wrong ficton."
Wally nodded, pleased to have confirmed
that Robert Heinlein's term for a place-and-time, "ficton," would one day pass
into the language. "Yes, I got that. So it was necessary that your cab ride take
place in a ficton earlier in history than this?"
"Yes, by several years."
"What year?"
Jude looked stubborn.
"Look," Wally said reasonably.
"You must see our problem. I told you we are Secret Masters of Fandom. You are
obviously a time traveler. There can only be four kinds of time traveler: idiots,
fanatics, criminals and very careful historians--which last does not seem to describe you.
Anyone else would know it's too risky. Before we can let you go, we need to know which
kind you are."
Jude frowned. "In your terms, I
suppose I am a fanatic. I would call myself a religious martyr."
Wally nodded. "And you plan to alter
history, for theological reasons. By driving a taxicab. Even though that will annihilate
reality."
"My reality," Jude
pointed out. "Not yours. If I had succeeded, my ficton would have vanished
utterly, yes--but yours would merely have turned out somewhat differently."
"True," Wally agreed.
"Still, you're going to have to tell us about it, if you want to leave this
room."
Jude looked distinctly uncomfortable.
"May I first ask you a question? Matters of religion can be volatile. I know it is a
little early in history for this question to be truly meaningful, but . . . may I ask both
of you your views regarding . . . Elvis?"
Looking back on all this in years to come,
one of the small things Wally and Moira would be proud of was the fact that neither of
them cracked a smile at this juncture. They did exchange a momentary glance which was a
promissory note for a shared belly-laugh later, but Wally answered seriously, after only a
second's hesitation, "He has left the building. If he were alive, he'd have
stopped his daughter's wedding."
"And while he was here," Moira
said, "he was a relatively talentless nutbar who happened to get struck by lightning,
and didn't do anything important with the energy. Why?"
"Praise John!" Jude said
fervently. "Are you, then, by any chance . . . Fab?"
Wally and Moira exchanged another glance.
It was getting harder and harder not to grin. The idea that there would be a Church of
Elvis in the not-too-distant future had become something of a cliché in recent science
fiction--but until now only Wally, in on-line forums and in his column in LMSFSazine, had
ever suggested that it might and should be countered by an equally fervent cult that
worshipped the Beatles.
"I think you could say that,"
Wally agreed slowly. "Washed in the Juice of the Apple, you mean? I wouldn't call us
devout, strictly speaking--we're fen; we must remain skeptical on all matters of religion,
by policy--but I own the Black Album, and all the Christmas Fan Club Messages." He
saw that register. "And I was at Shea Stadium in '65, if that helps."
"Twenty-three August, yeah yeah
yeah!" Jude cried excitedly. "Oh, thank The Four, some gear luck at last! You
must help me--it may yet be accomplished!"
"What may?" Wally asked, but his
eyes were already starting to gleam.
"The Reunification!" Jude said.
"The Healing . . . the Reforging of the Bond . . . the utter destruction of the
forces of Elvis!"
Suddenly Wally knew what he was talking
about. It all . . . well, came together, over him. "Oh my God," he
breathed, thunderstruck. For the third time he met his wife's eyes, and was startled to
see that she hadn't caught up yet. "Don't you get it, love? In the future, there's a
major showdown between the Church of Elvis and the Church of The Beatles--the anti-Asian
Christians versus the pro-Asian Pagans--and we're looking at a kamikaze samurai. God, the
most awful Beatles anecdote of all--and Jude here came back through time to change
it!"
Moira was lost, but game. " ' . . . most awful Beatles anecdote . . .' John's death? Or
something to do with Stu Sutcliffe?"
"No, no--you've heard this one, I'm
sure; I've told it a hundred times. John and Paul have buried the hatchet; they're sitting
around in the Dakota one night in '79, getting stoned and watching telly while the wives
chat in the kitchen. Lorne Michaels comes on the tube: it's the Saturday after Bernstein
offered the Beatles a million to reunite, and Michaels makes a counter-offer on the air,
live: if the Beatles will come down and play on Saturday Night Live, now, he's
prepared to pay them . . . union scale, a thousand bucks or so apiece. Rim shot. And
across town at the Dakota, John looks at Paul and Paul looks at John and they both start
to grin--"
"Oh my God, I remember now,"
Moira said, "And they called a cab--but it never showed up . . ." She
turned pale.
"One of the great Lost Moments of
history," Wally said, his voice trembling.
Jude broke the silence which followed.
"It's plaintext, right? If the cab had arrived, John and Paul would have appeared on Saturday
Night Live that night. The planet would have convulsed in its orbit, a generation gone
mad with joy. George and Ringo both would have been on the phone before the credits
rolled--and sooner or later, The Four would have gotten together again! John would
have gone back home to England, and that Presleyan crot would never have gotten a
shot at him there." His voice was rising. "And sooner or later, they'd
have learned the truth about Eppy's death, and in their holy wrath crashed the forces of
Elvis forever--"
Wally couldn't help interrupting.
"Wait a minute--are you saying that Elvis Presley was behind Brian
Epstein's--"
"Indisputable proof will be uncovered
in another eight years," Jude said, "but isn't it obvious? Faggot Jew Commie . .
. creator of the Anti-Elvis . . . pills as the instrument of death . . . did you
think it coincidence that Eppy died just as The Four were communing publicly with
an Eastern, non-Christian religious figure in India?"
"Elvis did approach J. Edgar
Hoover, and volunteer to spy on the Beatles for the DEA, that's documented," Wally
said softly. He was talking to himself. "And his daughter's flaky husband is the guy
who stole the Beatles' publishing rights out from under his mentor, Paul McCartney--"
"Elvis Presley made his evil plans in
full, the day he read John's Jesus Quote . . . and from beyond the grave, he
triumphed," Jude said in a vaguely chanting tone, clearly quoting from scripture.
Moira noticed that her hand hurt, from
crushing Wally's hand, but forgot it almost at once, distracted by horror. "You mean
. . . you mean He Whose Name We Must Never Mention really shot John as an agent
of--of--"
Jude nodded solemnly. "It will be the
chance discovery of his secret memoirs by a prison guard in 2003 that blows the story. I
meant to undo all of that--and with your help, I still can."
As unconsciously as they had mangled them,
Wally and Moira let go of each other's hands, and sat up straighter, hearts hammering.
"You've got the time machine on
you," Wally suggested. "Or in you. Implanted, or something."
Jude shook his ironically bald head.
"All the assets I have, you see."
"So you're going to automatically
slingshot back to the future, or something, and try again."
Another headshake. "Return to my
ficton is fundamentally impossible. Time travel only works backwards. Even if I had
another machine, I could not travel to the future--it isn't there yet."
"You're stuck in this ficton, then?
But then it's too late, right? John's been dead for fifteen years!"
Jude looked sly. "But there is
another time machine--in this ficton--and in this city."
"No shit," Wally and
Moira chorused. "I mean," Wally went on, "'speak on, sir, omitting no
detail however slight.' Where? And why?"
"Let me table the question of its
location for a moment," Jude temporized, "and address your last input first.
Authorized time travelers--as opposed to myself--are naturally hyperconscious of the
danger of corrupting history. Therefore a clandestine machine is maintained throughout all
periods of historical interest--so that if a researcher's cover story should collapse, at
worst they can make their way there and escape to an earlier ficton, aborting the
hang."
"Smart," Wally said. "So
all you really need is a ride across town somewhere?"
Jude sighed. "Well, no. I am not an authorized
time traveler."
Slowly, Wally nodded. "So then, what
you need is . . . ?"
Jude hesitated . . . then took the plunge.
"A substantial bribe."
"In what form?" Wally asked.
"Cash. Small bills would be best. . .
."
Wally boggled, shamelessly. He had been
very good for a long time, but this just didn't seem logical. "Cash? You mean,
1995 dollars? What the hell would time travelers want with cash?"
"Think it through," Jude
suggested.
Wally frowned fiercely. That one stung: a
science fiction fan should never need to be told to think it through. "Apparently I
lack data," he said stiffly.
"Okay. You're the guardian of the
time machine, stuck in this primitive ficton forever, and if The Fabs are good you will
have very little actual work to do: the need for your services had better be rare. Sooner
or later you go native. Now: what can I bribe you with? Money in 2287 dollars, that you
can bury for your descendants? Unnameable futuristic comforts and delights that you may
never even risk letting any local observe you enjoying? Or the means to render this Stone
Age existence as tolerable as possible?"
"But why can't I generate as much
cash as I want?" Wally said, falling into the Socratic spirit of the thing. "If
I'm from the future, surely I was smart enough to pack some market tips, memorize some
important dates--"
"--which you could only capitalize on
at the cost of altering history," Jude pointed out. "Calling that kind of
attention to yourself is precisely what you must not do. You must be a kind of
invisible man--yet you must earn a living, in a ficton with all the privacy of a large
bedroom, for altruism's sake. This is a recipe for bribery."
"Ah," Wally said. "I get
it. And you're willing to take the risk they aren't, to get money to bribe them with. If
you show up with a barrel of cash, they'll think it over and decide what's done is done,
and the smartest thing to do with that money is quietly slip it back into the system--by
spending it themselves. I guess if I were tending a time machine in the Court of Herod, I
might take a hundred goats to bend a rule. You might pull it off."
"If you will help me," Jude
agreed. "I need valid financial entities of this ficton to act as my agents. If you
will let me give you market advice, I will make us . . . let me see, '95, '95 . . . say,
two hundred thousand Canadian dollars, and give you half. And--Julia willing!--the joy of
having undone the anagrammatic Evils of Elvis and saved Saint Jock. Will you help?"
Wally's heart was beating very fast.
"Hold the phone. Check me out on this: you go back in time sixteen-odd years. You
show up at the Dakota in a Yellow cab. Johnny and Paulie make the curtain, and history
changes. And this ficton--here, now, sixteen years later--ceases to exist, right?
Moira and I and everybody we know all disappear like Boojums?"
Jude did not hesitate. "These avatars
of you, yes. But there will still be a Wally and a Moira. Have your lives been so good
since John's Murder that you would not have them different? In a world with four strong
Beatles to inspire it? Stack all the music recorded since 1972 against Rubber Soul
. . ."
Husband and wife both started to answer,
and fell silent. They had met, fallen in love and married well before the date in
question. It wasn't as though the proposed alteration in history would cost them their
marriage. Merely some dispiriting shared history . . . which would be replaced with--
"You live here; I don't. Is this
ficton, in your opinions, gear? Or grotty? When do you believe the Sixties died, and why?
Would you not see that undone, the Yellow Submarine relaunched?"
Wally found that tears were trickling,
silently and unobtrusively, down his cheeks.
"Please help me," Jude said
softly. "It is my destiny. I was born and named to do as Paul commanded: to make the
sad song better."
"We'll do it," Wally and Moira
both said at once, and took each other's hands again. They shared a grin that began as a
promissory note for a kiss, and began inflating in value almost at once. Perhaps they had
not been so happy since the day Moira proposed.
Jude, for his part, appeared to go into
something like religious ecstasy. He shivered all over, smiled hugely, and began rocking
gently from side to side, seeming to glow. "Then you shall live out the year,"
he said happily.
Through his own warm glow, those words
reached Wally. He stopped grinning long enough to say, "Beg pardon?"
Jude waved his hands in the air, as one
who would say, no, no, it's nothing. "Vancouver will be destroyed later this
year. Not a problem."
"The Big One?" Moira
squealed. "Juan de Fuca Fault? This year?"
"Yes, yes--but you will have a
hundred thousand dollars with which to flee. And I will tell you when. Save as many
friends as you like--as long as they are absolutely discreet."
An extraordinary cascade of thoughts went
though Wally's brain in a short time.
Jesus, they do say it's
overdue--the whole Pacific Rim's going up lately--
--Our home here in Point Grey sits on
the only rock around: the only part of the greater Vancouver area that would not
immediately liquefy and submerge in the event of a quake. Of course, we'd get some thirsty
by and by--
--After we agree to help Jude,
he gets around to mentioning cataclysmic earthquakes in the near future?--
Oh no, I see: he wanted us to be able
to know and honestly say that our choice was pure, wasn't based on selfish motives--
--except for a piddling hundred grand--
--ohmyGod, to have the Beatles back! How
many albums would they have put out between 1979 and now? Oh Jesus . . . imagine hearing
Tug of War without "Here Today"--but with John himself! Hell, those new tracks
we're supposed to hear next month could have been out fifteen years ago--
--get a grip, boy. Now which, if any, of
my friends can I trust to keep their mouth shut about this? Oh, shit--
--can I condemn the rest to death for
being gabby? Justice, perhaps, but rather harsh--
--is there some way to get them a
warning at the last possible moment? Or can I come up with some alternate explanation for
how I know for sure a quake is coming? A prediction I got from the Internet, maybe? Or--
--I'll miss this soggy town--
--where the hell will we go? Will
Vancouver Island survive? Go-to-the-States or tolerate-Canadian-weather is a choice it's
been nice not to have to make--
--no wonder Jude freaked when he
learned what year it is--
--that's funny . . . why did he calm
down, though, almost at once? He didn't even ask me the exact date: he just thought for a
second, and relaxed--
--oh my dear God, he's not from
Vancouver! And there's not much of 1995 left anymore--
"Jude," he said, enunciating
carefully, feeling his lips and tongue starting to go numb, "what is the date of the
earthquake?"
Jude was still ecstatic. "Oh, we'll
have more than enough time, I should think, assuming you have any reasonable amount of
capital. Point two megabucks shouldn't take more than a few weeks. You do know . .
. um . . . a flexible broker?"
Moira started to answer, would doubtless
have expressed amusement at the notion that there could be any difficulty locating a shady
broker in the city which held the Vancouver Stock Exchange, but Wally overrode her: "Tell
me the date, Jude."
"Really, don't worry," Jude
assured him. "It's not until Fall."
Wally groaned.
"Wally, what is it?" Moira said.
He turned to her. "I told him it was
1995, and he freaked," he said. "And then he felt the air with his skin, and
relaxed . . . because it couldn't possibly be later in the year than late Summer. Don't
you get it, love? Either he isn't from Vancouver--or in his ficton, Vancouver is as cold
as the rest of Canada."
Moira's eyes grew round. "Oh my stars
and garters. Jude!"
"Yes, Moira?"
"This is Halloween Night."
He nodded. "I have read of it.
Anti-Christian ritual holiday, yes? Dress up, like Sergeant Pepper, take Magical Mystery
Tour. We have a similar ritual in late October. And your point is--"
"Halloween Night falls on 31
October."
Jude grasped the floor on either side of
him to keep from falling through it. "WHAT?" Gravity reversed itself; suddenly
he rose like a launched missile, clutching at the floor with his soles to keep from flying
away. "This is October?" Even internal gravity failed him: his trunk
repelled his hands, and they flew out to either side. "The end of
October?" He forced them to his will, brought them back in and beat them on his
thighs. "The LAST FUCKING DAY of October?"
"It almost never gets cold
here," Wally said apologetically.
Physics restored itself in Jude's
vicinity: he went inert, fell back into his seat, with a thud, and kept collapsing,
like a dropped dummy.
They gave him a moment with his despair.
They wanted to ask, but the question was too obvious. To ask it would have insulted all
three of them. Finally, Wally cleared his throat as discreetly as he could.
"Less than forty-eight hours,"
Jude said hollowly.
They both sat perfectly still. How
appropriate a place in which to receive the news, Wally thought. Except the clothes on
their backs, a statue of Siddhartha and a forty-watt lightbulb, there was not a single
material possession in the room.
All right, then: it was a good place to
think. Wally thought, as hard and fast as he ever had in his life. This time, even a
summary of the resulting cascade of cogitation would be impossible, but he was through
within a matter of perhaps ten seconds.
"All is not lost," he said then.
Jude nodded dispiritedly. "There is
time to save ourselves, yes. With your help, perhaps I can establish a cover identity that
will hold. I suppose it is possible that later, when things settle down and you rebuild
your credit standing, we might try to . . . but then the problem becomes vastly more
complex, you see. This time machine will be destroyed by the quake--and since its
replacement in Halifax will just be entering operation, enforcement of regulations will be
at its strictest: it'll be years before I'll even dare try to . . . oh crot,
if only I'd arrived even a week earlier--" He was near tears in his
frustration.
Wally turned and caught Moira's eyes.
"Tomorrow morning we can put eighty-seven thousand dollars in cash into your
hands," he said. Moira's eyes widened--and then slowly, she nodded. They turned back
to Jude.
Burned once, he was reluctant to let hope
back. "That . . . thank you, but I don't think that would quite be enough to--"
"You were always lousy at math,
love," Moira said to Wally. "The correct figure is ninety-six thousand, seven
hundred and fourteen dollars and fifty-two cents."
Wally nodded, mortified. In his haste, he
had neglected to include their own personal net liquidity in the equation. The figure he
had named represented only every penny presently in the Lower Mainland Science Fiction
Society's VanCon account, entrusted to him and Moira by a couple of thousand Pacific
Northwest science fiction fans. In his heart, Wally did not feel there was anything really
dishonorable about offering that money. There was not going to be a VanCon in two
weeks . . . and only a handful of chronic pains in the ass were ever even going to ask
for a refund. Nonetheless, he knew the moment Moira spoke that, having pledged both his
life and his sacred honor, he really should have thought to include his fortune as well.
He excused himself on the grounds that the sum was so negligible it might have escaped
anyone's attention. "Actually, darling," he said, anxious to redeem himself,
"we could hit a few cash machines, and get another two grand before we max out. So
the correct figure is ninety-eight-seven and change."
"Well," she said, "I
thought we might--"
"We can charge our plane tickets out
of town," he pointed out. "We can even put movers on plastic, to ship the books
and music to a safe place. There's enough walking-around money in the house." He
turned back to Jude. "Can you pull it off with ninety-eight-seven?"
Jude frowned in concentration--then all at
once, shockingly, he giggled. "I'll tell them I have to charge them G.S.T.," he
said puckishly.
Wally and Moira dissolved a lot of tension
in that burst of laughter. (Canadians in 1995 regarded the Goods and Services Tax with all
the affection Bostonians in 1776 had held for a similar levy on tea.) Each felt rather as
though they had gnawed a leg off to escape a trap--but there was a sort of dizzy calm in
that . . . and a quiet joy that the sacrifice would be sufficient after all. For think of
the prize! New Beatles songs--not a lousy pair of them, but albums and albums--conceivably
even some kind of tours again, with a living John Lennon, and stage technology the
Beatles had never dreamed of in their touring days. A world healed of disco. A
reconsolidation of the hopes and aspirations of the Sixties, tempered by experience--
--and it would be Wallace Kemp and Moira
Rogers, Secret Masters Of Fandom, Secretary and Treasurer of LMSFS, who had helped to
accomplish it! (Even if they never got to remember that . . . talk about your selfless
sacrifices . . . )
In less than an hour, Jude had been fed,
taken on a tour of the house and the hard drives, shown to a guest bedroom, taught to use
a primitive contemporary cable-TV remote and a flush toilet, and left alone to sleep.
Wally and Moira talked for another half an hour in bed, making plans, but they knew they
needed rest and it had been a long night; they put out the light at around midnight, and
were both asleep in a matter of minutes. Wally's last fleeting thought, before he slipped
over the edge and into Strawberry Fields, was the bemused recollection from a Catholic
childhood that, in that myth-structure, Jude was the patron saint of the impossible.
* * *
Realizing their total liquidity in
small bills the next day required some ingenuity as well as effort; fortunately Wally, a
professional hacker, had "social engineering" skills which proved useful. He and
Moira left Jude alone with the TV and Moira's Mac (to Wally's disgust, he was told that
the basic Mac interface would triumph in the future--as indeed it had already begun to do
in his own ficton), and Wally spent the day stalking money while Moira worked the phone.
By nightfall, just as movers were arriving to ship their most precious possessions to
Toronto at outrageously padded emergency rates, he was able to hand Jude a large Tourister
suitcase stuffed with cash.
"How does it feel," he asked as
he passed it across, "to be one of the beautiful people?"
Jude grinned. "Baby, you're a rich
man, too."
Wally handed over a bulky envelope.
"Just in case you fail--in case they won't take the bribe--here's a plane ticket to
Halifax, and cab fare to the airport. You can always sit on that cash until it's safe to
try again." He smiled. "Keep it in a big brown bag, inside the zoo."
Jude's eyes were misting. "What a
thing to do. Thank you, brother."
"Driving a cab is a little harder
than it sounds. Try and arrive a week or so early, give yourself time to practice. Watch
it done a few times, first. I typed out some tips; you'll find them on a sheet headed
'Baby, You Can Drive Their Car.' There's a tube of pepper spray in the envelope with it:
don't use it until he's stopped, on a dark street, then reach past him fast and turn the
key counterclockwise. Our temporary new number in Toronto is in that envelope, too. If we
don't hear from you in a few days, we'll assume you were successful." He caught
himself. "Excuse me. Dumb: if you succeed, we'll never know it. Never have known it.
Boy, that's a hard concept to get my mind around. And I'm going to hate to lose the memory
of the last twenty hours or so."
"I know it seems paradoxical,"
Jude said, taking his hand, "but I feel in my heart that if I succeed in my mission,
somehow, in some way, you will remember your part in it for all the days of your
life."
Wally did not agree, but it was a pretty
thought; he let it pass unchallenged.
Moira looked up from her sorting and
packing. "Get a move on, Jude. John and Paul are waiting. Give our love to Yoko and
Linda."
Jude nodded and left without another word,
threading his way through the movers.
"Have you noticed?" Moira said.
"He has a passing resemblance to Jean-Luc Picard. . . ."
* * *
His last words came back to them both
with great vividness and force . . . on the very next evening, as they sat up late into
the night, in the guest bedroom of a friend and fellow SMOF in Toronto, listening in
growing horror to a television and a radio and an Internet Reuters feed that all doggedly refused
to report anything whatsoever about an earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. They tried
desperately for hours to persuade each other that Jude had merely made some small error in
the date, or that the authorities were censoring the news to prevent panic, or . . .
But they were not stupid people, only
silly ones. By dawn, shortly after Wally realized and pointed out that only in the
unlikely event it finally provoked Canadians to open Boston-Tea-Party-style insurrection
could the G.S.T. reasonably have been remembered in history long enough for someone from
the year 2287 to have heard of it, they had both finally conceded that love is not all you
need.
Wally gave Moira the chore of booking
transport back home, while he went down to Bathurst Street and, with some difficulty,
bought a handgun.