Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read online

  In the incisive story that follows, Larry Niven shows us what may be the end of the Time Patrol itself . . .

  When Anthony Wells Doheny was recruited for the Time Patrol, he was just past fifty. That was in July of 2008, with (in Tony’s view) bad times coming. He’d seen enough movies: bad times always follow the first black president. Big Brother Government was already fighting two Mideast wars and throwing tax money away with both fists. Gas prices were going insane.

  Tony was recruited because he wrote science fiction. Some was brilliant; but some came too close to reality. Many writers wrote of time travel, but Doheny stumbled on too much detail. He wasn’t the first to be inducted for such a reason, after a faked death.

  He was recruited in spite of his phobia for getting lost.

  They made him an agent in place, covering Los Angeles County from 1900 to 2000, owning a little grocery store in Beverly Hills. He had pickup points for newspapers in various other years. He didn’t have to travel except in emergencies, and there hadn’t been any. He knew where danger would lie. Knowing the future meant no surprises; it gave him a wonderful sense of security.

  He played the stock market a little. Bet on Bill Gates; avoid Ponzi schemes; remember a few trends. He liked a few local restaurants which would disappear too soon. He could no longer write science fiction. What the Patrol had done to his mind prevented him from revealing anything a time traveler might know. From time to time he wrote a little fantasy.

  In a newspaper from August 1965, he found a weird photograph.

  Finally, a chance to meet another time traveler or two! Knowing the future meant no surprises; he’d come to realize that he’d chosen a dull life. He sent a message at once, jotted in careful block letters on a scratchpad. “Found a ray gun, August 1965. Please advise.” Rolled it up, shoved it into a tube and watched it vanish. He could track the ray gun while he waited.

  The tube had just left his fingers when a flickering blur appeared above his living room rug. Now it focused like a camera view and settled down to the usual bulky-looking wheelless timecycle. The rider—stayed blurred.

  A Danellian. Tony wasn’t expecting that! He stared . . . tried to stare. His eyeballs jittered. This wasn’t a fog; it carried too much information, as if he were seeing scores of men and monsters all superimposed. Ancient Hebrews must have seen such entities. Their angels were terrible to look upon and impossible to describe. Indian gods showed a blur of probabilistic arms. He smelled . . . ionization? Ozone?

  “Hello,” he said. “Welcome.” Sir? Danellians were at the far end of time.

  “Thank you,” the entity said. “What’ve you got?”

  The Los Angeles Times was spread over the coffee table. The article was on the fourth page, continued from front page headlines describing a riot in the Watts district, downtown LA. The riot would last six days.

  The photograph showed an alley, a peaceful scene. It looked flawed. Glare white cut across it along a narrow dashed line. At one end of the line a dark-skinned woman half-knelt with something in her hand. At the other was a little white glare point, and a big black cat levitating along a brick wall, claws raking.

  “Cat toy,” the Danellian said.

  “Yessir, but I never saw—”

  “Laser. It’s too early for lasers. Good call, Doheny. What have you done so far?”

  “Nothing. You got here fast.”

  “Time travel is like that. Let’s get to work. I think I recognize that item. It’s a weapons laser turned to low power. Best cat toy ever invented, barring the end strips on fanfold paper, but it can burn holes through bricks and men if you turn it high, and of course it’s too early for lasers. We’ll fix it.” The Danellian was fiddling with something on his timecycle. “Give me the date off the paper.”

  “August 11th, 1965.”

  “I’ll have it in a minute.”

  “Can I offer you anything?” Greatly daring, “Coffee?”

  “Yeah, thanks. Cappuccino if you’ve got it, or is that too early?”

  “You’d have to go to a restaurant. Romanoff’s is good. Chasens too. I don’t have a steam widget.”

  “Just coffee, then. And I smoke tobacco.”

  “A Danellian smokes tobacco?”

  The blur laughed, a crackling sound. “I’m older than I look. You like your air clean? Where’re you from?”

  Tony started a hot plate up, filled a teapot with water, opened a cupboard and looked at half a dozen varieties of flavored instant coffee. “Twenty-ought-eight, West LA, till they put me here.” His mind was racing. Danellians were from far in the future, but how far? And when was this one born? Could he be billions of years old?

  “No wonder tobacco scares you,” the Danellian said. “There, I’ve got August 11th, morning. Got the right alley. There’s the cat. Fast forward . . . and here comes the woman. Now I’ll just follow her back.”

  “I never saw equipment like that.”

  “We don’t give every agent every tool we’ve got. This time I just brought what I had. I was working on something else when your call came through. Way outside Sol system, actually. Interesting world . . . there she goes, or here she came . . . .”

  Tony was behind the agent’s shoulder by now, staying safely away from the blur of what might have been a folded wing. In an oval frame he saw a timecycle pop up, the woman roll and throw herself aboard feet first, the timecycle gone. In the background a shattered grocery store window healed itself while a flaming vodka bottle hurled itself at a cluster of gangly teenagers.

  “I know her. Hot damn. It’s Rora Jee Vishwathy, the last Exaltationist. Playing with a cat. I didn’t know she had it in her.”

  The Danellian paused the frame, then began inching it forward. Here came the woman’s timecycle again. She left it in a jump, handstand, roll.

  “Pause,” the Danellian murmured. He reached a blurred appendage, one of uncountable several, into the frame and fiddled with controls. “There. It’ll go back to the Big Bang. Not what she’s expecting. Next—”

  The view unfroze. The cycle was gone. The woman picked herself up. Blue jeans and a leather jacket, tee shirt with a half-hidden message in black script, black hair in cornrows. She walked away with something like a mechanical pencil clutched in her right hand. Men robbing a gas station, filling bottles with gasoline, watched her pass and didn’t quite dare to approach her. Tony and the blur watched her in fast-forward until she reached the alley.

  The Danellian slowed its display to real time. They watched her play with the cat.

  She looked up once as a sudden glare lit the alley. The photographer was already in a shuffling run, clutching his bulky camera. She lifted the light weapon to point at him, thumbed a dial, thought it over and lowered her arm.

  “And that’s that. The paper’s got its photograph.” The Danellian zoomed on the woman as she approached the cat. He froze the view and got off the timecycle.

  “Doheny, you go after her.”

  Tony stepped back involuntarily. “Can’t you just reach into the frame?”

  “No, she’s got too firm a grip. You were trained.”

  “Well, yes, but dammit! Watts, and I’m white!”

  “Training is expensive. Have you defrauded us? I can’t go. I don’t look like anything Earthly.”

  Tony nodded reluctantly. He owed the Corps; payment was due. “What’s my mission?”

  The smells hit him hard. Photochemical smog, sewage, gasoline, gunpowder. A store was burning merrily. It was flickering firelit dark: streetlights had been smashed, and no moon penetrated the gaps between buildings.

  The man who had photographed the Exaltationist was running down the street, clutching his bulky camera. Rora Jee pointed the weapon at him, then dropped her aim. The cat approached her. She knelt, rubbed his back, then looked up at Tony.

  He aimed his stunner and pulled the trigger.

  She aimed the light weapon. White light burned through his cotton jacket and got lost on the superconducting cloth be
neath. He felt a touch of warmth. But the stunner wasn’t dropping her. Whining with fear, Tony raised the beam for a head shot.

  She fell. She must have been wearing something too, but not on her head.

  He eased the timecycle into the alley. Had anyone seen him, a white man attacking a black woman in Watts? No, he’d have heard shouting. He spared a moment of amused pity for the photographer, who had missed the shot of his life.

  With a grunt and a heave he draped the woman across the timecycle’s rear saddle. She was sweaty and limp as a noodle, and heavy. She was still clutching the weapon. He wrestled it loose and pocketed it. The cat watched.

  Tony boarded the timecycle and was gone. No witness but the cat. Did that count? Tony wasn’t sure. Quantum physics was mysterious.

  Tony Doheny rolled the woman off the cycle onto the thick rug, lowering her carefully. She still smelled of exertion and a missed bath or two. Good hard body, a hard pretty face, not at all alien. He slid a pillow under her head. He took the light-weapon out of his pocket and dropped it on the coffee table.

  The Danellian knelt above Rora Jee. Tony was looking at the blurred, many-limbed shape when the Danellian . . . focused.

  Tony must have gasped. The Danellian turned and found him staring.

  “Looking at me isn’t easy, is it?” he—clearly male—said kindly. “It’s a quantum effect. Is that my coffee? Good.” Six limbs: legs, huge wings, hands. One gnarly hand reached for the mug. He sniffed. “You lose some aroma when it’s instant. Well, what you’re seeing, Agent Doheny, is all of the possible paths that lead to me. With quantum physics, you don’t get your choice. You get everything that could have happened.” He sipped.

  Tony said, “Not any more.”

  “Say what?”

  “You look like a winged monkey. Shall I show you a mirror? Except for your face. I could swear I’ve seen you before.”

  “Mirrors don’t work. I don’t see myself blurred. But no quantum effect means—”

  “Manse Everard? You’re the man who recruited me!”

  The Danellian nodded. “I called myself Manse Everard for awhile. Long ago in personal time. Hello, Rora. How are you?”

  Only her lips moved. “Paralyzed. I suppose you think you’ve won. Frozen the universe.”

  “I suppose so,” the Danellian said.

  Tony persisted. “Why do you look like a winged monkey?”

  “Hah. Well. There’s this really interesting planet. Tony, Rora Jee, most rocky worlds are bigger than Earth, if they’re massive enough to hold an oxy-and-water atmosphere. A lot of them form out where water is normally ice, so the planet picks up a shell of water. Diomede has an ocean hundreds of kilometers deep. Islands that are all seaweed and coral, and winged almost-mammals the size of a man. I took a shape such that I could pass for one, not to the Diomedeans themselves but to some human traders on the surface. That was just in case I got into trouble. I could get help from Nick Van Rijn’s people in the Polesotechnic League without arousing much suspicion.

  “All of that should have been beside the point. I didn’t have an interest in the Diomedeans. The interesting part of Diomede is down below the ocean, where the pressure is so great that it gives you a shell of water crystal in the forms of Ice-7, Ice-10, and Ice-11. It’s white hot and solid. At the interface, you get an ecology.”

  “Life? Made of what?”

  “Well, mostly water, of course. Some contaminants, mostly from meteors. Metal is scarce. Energy comes from the heat-cold interface.

  “I was taking a break. I spend a lot of time on leave, more and more as time passes. No emergencies anywhere. I left my Diomedean body on the surface and moved my consciousness into a body shaped for the ice shell below. I lived with them for a time. I learned a lot. Hugely complex ecology. Interesting people, but extremely violent. And then your message pinged in.”

  “Sounds entertaining,” Rora said.

  Scary, Tony thought. “Are you bored a lot?”

  “Yeah.” The winged monkey sipped smoke from a pipe. The mixture was more interesting than noxious, and of course tobacco smoke was common enough in the 1960s.

  “See, there isn’t anything else in the hopper. We’ve been free of temporal emergencies since—” The Danellian switched to Temporal speech. Tony tried to follow it: a long time in personal time, lifetimes long. Rora Jee was nodding. “I’m bored near out of my mind. That hot-ice world below the Diomedean world is as exciting and exotic . . . and I was still looking for anything, anything to wake me up. And now it’s over.”

  “What’s over, Agent Everard?”

  “Tony, don’t you know what this means? Rora does.” He put a hard, powerful, inhuman hand on Tony’s wrist, and the other on Rora Jee’s cheek. “See? Time is stabilized. The quantum effects aren’t there any more. There aren’t any more emergencies. Rora Jee, we’ll put you somewhere where you can’t build another time machine. What do you like?”

  The woman said, “Late Polisotechnic League.”

  “Hah! No. How about here? Where there are still cats?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Think about it. I’m going to go get some equipment I need, and I might as well change too.” The winged ape boarded the timecycle and was gone.

  The Exaltationist’s eyes moved to Tony. “Servant,” she spat. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  He said, “Not really. What were you planning?”

  “I formed a gang, not a big one. I went down the line for some weapons. I took one to show The Rock, he’s their leader. The rest I left on the timecycle. We were going to invade Beverly Hills. Shake events up, see if there were still weak points in the continuum.

  “Now that’s over. I was the last uncertainty in time, and now it’s all frozen. You’ve brought about predestination, you fool. There are no more choices. No more need for a Time Patrol.”

  “I hadn’t thought that far.”

  “Would you like a companion?”

  Tony gaped at her. “What?”

  “He’s going to strand us both. Why not together?”

  The corner of Tony’s eye caught the Danellian returning.

  Rora Jee didn’t notice. “The only destabilizing force anywhere is the Time Patrol itself. He’ll end it all! I’ll have nobody to talk to in all the universe, and you won’t either!”

  The blur gained focus, first the timecycle, then a tall pale man, lean and fit, with big hands, a small nose, curly hair, blue eyes.

  Rora Jee gaped. “Who are you?”

  “Manse Everard is more an office than a single man,” the agent said. “Like James Bond in the movies, or Death in Piers Anthony’s work. I took the name for awhile, but this is how I started. This is how I’ll finish.”

  He lifted gear off the timecycle. A helmet with an Old Roman look went on Rora Jee’s head. There was a time of silence; then the tall man said, “That was a quick version of what we use to treat every agent in the Patrol. You’ll never again be able to speak of time travel to anyone who hasn’t traveled in time. Next—”

  More gear, this time a handheld machine that hummed as it roved over the woman’s head and neck. “Get up if you like,” the Danellian said.

  She patted herself down, then stood up. “Sit,” the Danellian said, and it wasn’t a question. “There.” The overstuffed couch whuffed dust as she sat.

  “And last.” Tony touched the timecycle keyboard and it was gone.

  That little too late, Tony picked up the light weapon. Everard looked around.

  Tony asked, “‘This is how you’ll finish’?”

  “Yeah. She’s right. The Time Patrol will have to stand down. Starting here, I think.”

  His mind hadn’t quite caught up, but Tony knew that the Danellian intended to end his current existence. When Everard finished cleaning up Time, what would become of Anthony Doheny? He held his aim.

  “And what will that gain you?” Everard asked patiently. “You’ll still be here. I can retrieve the timecycle, but you can’
t.”

  “I know.” Tony handed over the weapon. Rora Jee glared.

  “So,” said Everard. “Where would you like to end? Here? Rora Jee, you too. Where?”

  The woman asked, “Tony Doheny, do you live alone?”

  “Yeah. I was married for six years, but I couldn’t talk to her. You know why. Henrietta thought I was unfaithful.”

  “Do you like cats?”

  “Sure.”

  “You need a companion.”

  Huh? “I do get laid from time to time,” he said crudely.

  “Companion, mate, spouse. Children. I do want children. My genes and your hybrid vigor, how can you resist?”

  He looked at her. Lovely, and they were moving into a time when skin color didn’t matter so much, but—“Have you lost your mind? We’re enemies.”

  “Tony, he’s going to shut it all down! Who will you talk to about your real life, ever again? He’ll never let me meet another Exaltationist. There’s only me and you!”

  “I’ve been quiet about time travel for a long time,” Tony said, and realized that he hadn’t liked it. Keeping this great fabulous secret had been fun at first, but it had palled. He’d never been able to tell Henrietta.

  “Am I unsightly?”

  He remembered her leaprolling off the timecycle like an Olympic gymnast, very sexy indeed.

  “Can you take it that I’m stronger than you? Brighter? I was shaped to be a superior being.”

  He laughed. “I was a science fiction writer. Half the people I know are brighter than me. They hunt me down to do their daydreaming for them, because they don’t have the time, and maybe they can give me an idea or two.” Actually, he missed that.