The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Read online

  Cantor dust. A fractal set, uncountably infinite, but with measure zero. There’s not one gap in my presence; there’s an infinite number, an endless series of ever smaller holes, everywhere. But –

  “How? You set me up, you kept me talking, but how could you coordinate the delays? And calculate the effects? It would take . . .”

  “Infinite computational power? An infinite number of people?” She smiles faintly. “I am an infinite number of people. All sleepwalking on S. All dreaming each other. We can act together, in synch, as one – or we can act independently. Or something in between, as now: the versions of me who can see and hear you at any moment are sharing their sense data with the rest of me.”

  I turn back to the dreamer. “Why defend her? She’ll never get what she wants. She’s tearing the city apart, and she’ll never even reach her destination.”

  “Not here, perhaps.”

  “Not here? She’s crossing all the worlds she lives in! Where else is there?”

  The woman shakes her head. “What creates those worlds? Alternative possibilities for ordinary physical processes. But it doesn’t stop there; the possibility of motion between worlds has exactly the same effect. Superspace itself branches out into different versions, versions containing all possible cross-world flows. And there can be higher-level flows, between those versions of superspace, so the whole structure branches again. And so on.”

  I close my eyes, drowning in vertigo. If this endless ascent into greater infinities is true –

  “Somewhere, the dreamer always triumphs? Whatever I do?”

  “Yes.”

  “And somewhere, I always win? Somewhere, you’ve failed to defeat me?”

  “Yes.”

  Who am I? I’m the ones who succeed. Then who am I? I’m nothing at all. A set of measure zero.

  I drop the gun and take three steps towards the dreamer. My clothes, already tattered, part worlds and fall away.

  I take another step, and then halt, shocked by a sudden warmth. My hair, and outer layers of skin, have vanished; I’m covered in a fine sweat of blood. I notice, for the first time, the frozen smile on the dreamer’s face.

  And I wonder: in how many infinite sets of worlds will I take one more step? And how many countless versions of me will turn around instead, and walk out of this room? Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I’ll live and die in every possible way?

  Myself.

  Anachron

  Damon Knight

  Damon Knight (1922-2002) was one of the architects of modern science fiction. This was not only through his many anthologies, especially the long-running Orbit series (1966–80), or his work in co-founding the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, or his work as the main impetus behind creating the Science Fiction Writers of America, or his work as one of the field’s major critics, some of which is included in the award-winning In Search of Wonder (1956; latest revision 1996). It’s also through his own fiction. He’d been selling science fiction since 1940 but he really hit his stride in the 1950s with such stories as “Babel II”, “To Serve Man”, “The Country of the Kind” and “Special Delivery”. The best of his early stories was collected as Far Out (1961) and there have been several collections since – check out One Side Laughing (1991). Amongst his novels his sequence CV (1985), The Observers (1988) and A Reasonable World (1991), where alien parasites try and bring some rationality to humankind, is well worth reading. The following is one of his early stories dealing with one of my favourite subjects, time paradoxes, and was specifically revised for this edition.

  The body was never found. And for that reason alone, there was no body to find.

  It sounds like inverted logic – which, in a sense, it is – but there’s no paradox involved. It was a perfectly orderly and explicable event, even though it could only have happened to a Castellare.

  Odd fish, the Castellare brothers. Sons of a Scots-English-woman and an expatriate Italian, born in England, educated on the Continent, they were at ease anywhere in the world and at home nowhere.

  Nevertheless, in their middle years, they had become settled men. Expatriates like their father, they lived on the island of Ischia, off the Neapolitan coast, in a palace – quattrocento, very fine, with peeling cupids on the walls, a multitude of rats, no central heating, and no neighbors.

  They went nowhere; no one except their agents and their lawyers came to them. Neither had ever married. Each, at about the age of thirty, had given up the world of people for an inner world of more precise and more enduring pleasures. Each was an amateur – a fanatical, compulsive amateur.

  They had been born out of their time.

  Peter’s passion was virtu. He collected relentlessly, it would not be too much to say savagely; he collected as some men hunt big game. His taste was catholic, and his acquisitions filled the huge rooms of the palace and half the vaults under them – paintings, statuary, enamel, porcelain, glass, crystal, metalwork. At fifty, he was a round little man with small, sardonic eyes and a careless patch of pinkish goatee.

  Harold Castellare, Peter’s talented brother, was a scientist. An amateur scientist. He belonged in the nineteenth century, as Peter was a throwback to a still earlier epoch. Modern science is largely a matter of teamwork and drudgery, both impossible concepts to a Castellare. But Harold’s intelligence was in its own way as penetrating and original as a Newton’s or a Franklin’s. He had done respectable work in physics and electronics, and had even, at his lawyer’s instance, taken out a few patents. The income from these, when his own purchases of instruments and equipment did not consume it, he gave to his brother, who accepted it without gratitude or rancor.

  Harold, at fifty-three, was spare and shrunken, sallow and spotted, with a bloodless, melancholy countenance on whose upper lip grew a neat hedge of pink-and-salt mustache, the companion piece and antithesis of his brother’s goatee.

  On a certain May morning, Harold had an accident.

  Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove; Archimedes took a bath; Becquerel left a piece of uranium ore in a drawer with a photographic plate. Harold Castellare, working patiently with an apparatus which had so far consumed a great deal of current without producing anything more spectacular than some rather unusual corona effects, sneezed convulsively and dropped an ordinary bar magnet across two charged terminals.

  Above the apparatus a huge, cloudy bubble sprang into being. Harold, getting up from his instinctive crouch, blinked at it in profound astonishment. As he watched, the cloudiness abruptly disappeared and he was looking through the bubble at a section of tesselated flooring that seemed to be about three feet above the real floor. He could also see the corner of a carved wooden bench, and on the bench a small, oddly-shaped stringed instrument.

  Harold swore fervently to himself, made agitated notes, and then began to experiment. He tested the sphere cautiously with an electroscope, with a magnet, with a Geiger counter. Negative. He tore a tiny bit of paper from his notepad and dropped it toward the sphere. The paper disappeared; he couldn’t see where it went.

  Speechless, Harold picked up a meter stick and thrust it delicately forward. There was no feeling of contact; the rule went into and through the bubble as if the latter did not exist. Then it touched the stringed instrument, with a solid click. Harold pushed. The instrument slid over the edge of the bench and struck the floor with a hollow thump and jangle.

  Staring at it, Harold suddenly recognized its tantalizingly familiar shape.

  Recklessly he let go the meter stick, reached in and picked the fragile thing out of the bubble. It was solid and cool in his fingers. The varnish was clear, the color of the wood glowing through it. It looked as if it might have been made yesterday.

  Peter owned one almost exactly like it, except for preservation – a viola d’amore of the seventeenth century.

  Harold stooped to look through the bubble horizontally. Gold and rust tapestries hid the wall, fifty feet away, except for an ornate door in the center. The door
began to open; Harold saw a flicker of umber.

  Then the sphere went cloudy again. His hands were empty; the viola d’amore was gone. And the meter stick, which he had dropped inside the sphere, lay on the floor at his feet.

  “Look at that,” said Harold simply.

  Peter’s eyebrows went up slightly. “What is it, a new kind of television?”

  “No, no. Look here.” The viola d’amore lay on the bench, precisely where it had been before. Harold reached into the sphere and drew it out.

  Peter started. “Give me that.” He took it in his hands, rubbed the smoothly finished wood. He stared at his brother. “By God and all the saints,” he said. “Time travel.”

  Harold snorted impatiently. “My dear Peter, ‘time’ is a meaningless word taken by itself, just as ‘space’ is.”

  “But, barring that, time travel.”

  “If you like, yes.”

  “You’ll be quite famous.”

  “I expect so.”

  Peter looked down at the instrument in his hands. “I’d like to keep this, if I may.”

  “I’d be very happy to let you, but you can’t.”

  As he spoke, the bubble went cloudy; the viola d’amore was gone like smoke.

  “There, you see?”

  “What sort of devil’s trick is that?”

  “It goes back . . . Later you’ll see. I had that thing out once before, and this happened. When the sphere became transparent again, the viola was where I had found it.”

  “And your explanation for this?”

  Harold hesitated. “None. Until I can work out the appropriate mathematics –”

  “– Which may take you some time. Meanwhile, in layman’s language –?”

  Harold’s face creased with the effort and interest of translation. “Very roughly, then – I should say it means that events are conserved. Two or three centuries ago –”

  “Three. Notice the soundholes.”

  “Three centuries ago, then, at this particular time of day, someone was in that room. If the viola were gone, he or she would have noticed the fact. That would constitute an alteration of events already fixed; therefore it doesn’t happen. For the same reason, I conjecture, we can’t see into the sphere, or –” he probed at it with a fountain pen – “I thought not – or reach into it to touch anything; that would also constitute an alteration. And anything we put into the sphere while it is transparent comes out again when it becomes opaque. To put it very crudely, we cannot alter the past.”

  “But it seems to me that we did alter it. Just now, when you took the viol out, even if no one of that time saw it happen.”

  “This,” said Harold, “is the difficulty of using language as a means of exact communication. If you had not forgotten all your calculus . . . However. It may be postulated (remembering that everything I say is a lie, because I say it in English) that an event which doesn’t influence other events is not an event. In other words –”

  “That, since no one saw you take it, it doesn’t matter whether you took it or not. A rather dangerous precept, Harold; you would have been burned at the stake for that at one time.”

  “Very likely. But it can be stated in another way, or indeed, in an infinity of ways which only seem to be different. If someone, let us say God, were to remove the moon as I am talking to you, using zero duration, and substitute an exact replica made of concrete and plaster of paris, with the same mass, albedo, and so on as the genuine moon, it would make no measurable difference in the universe as we perceive it – and therefore we cannot certainly say that it hasn’t happened. Nor, I may add, does it make any difference whether it has or not.”

  “When there’s no one about on the quad’,” said Peter.

  “Yes. A basic, and, as a natural consequence, a meaningless problem of philosophy. Except,” he added, “in this one particular manifestation.”

  He stared at the cloudy sphere. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Peter? I’ve got to work on this.”

  “When will you publish, do you suppose?”

  “Immediately. That’s to say, in a week or two.”

  “Don’t do it till you’ve talked it over with me, will you? I have a notion about it.”

  Harold looked at him sharply. “Commercial?”

  “In a way.”

  “No,” said Harold. “This is not the sort of thing one patents, or keeps secret, Peter.”

  “Of course. I’ll see you at dinner, I hope?”

  “I think so. If I forget, knock on the door, will you?”

  “Yes. Until then.”

  “Until then.”

  At dinner, Peter asked only two questions.

  “Have you found any possibility of changing the time your thing reaches – from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, for example, or from Monday to Tuesday?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. Amazing. It’s lucky that I had a rheostat already in the circuit; I wouldn’t dare turn the current off. Varying the wattage varies the time-set. I’ve had it up to what I think was Wednesday of last week, at any rate my smock was lying over the workbench where I left it, I remember, Wednesday afternoon. I pulled it out. A curious sensation, Peter – I was wearing the same smock at the time. And then the sphere went opaque and of course the smock vanished. That must have been myself, coming into the room.”

  “And the future?”

  “Yes. Another funny thing, I’ve had it forward to various times in the near future, and the machine itself is still there, but nothing’s been done to it – none of the things I’m thinking I might do. That might be because of the conservation of events, again, but I rather think not. Still farther forward there are cloudy areas, blanks; I can’t see anything that isn’t in existence now, apparently . . . but here, in the next few days, there’s nothing of that.

  “It’s as if I were going away. Where do you suppose I’m going?”

  Harold’s abrupt departure took place between midnight and morning. He packed his own grip, it would seem, left unattended, and was seen no more. It was extraordinary, of course, that he should have left at all, but the details were in no way odd. Harold had always detested what he called “the tyranny of the valet.” He was, as everyone knew, a most independent man.

  On the following day Peter made some trifling experiments with the time-sphere. From the sixteenth century he picked up a scent-bottle of Venetian glass; from the eighteenth, a crucifix of carved rosewood; from the nineteenth, when the palace had been the residence of an Austrian count and his Italian mistress, a hand illuminated copy of de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine, very curiously bound in human skin.

  They all vanished, naturally, within minutes or hours – all but the scent-bottle. This gave Peter matter for reflection. There had been half a dozen flickers of cloudiness in the sphere just futureward of the bottle; it ought to have vanished, but it hadn’t. But then, he had found it on the floor near a wall with quite a large rat-hole in it.

  When objects disappeared unaccountably, he asked himself, was it because they had rolled into rat-holes – or because some time fisher had picked them up when they were in a position to do so?

  He did not make any attempt to explore the future. That afternoon he telephoned his lawyers in Naples and gave them instructions for a new will. His estate, including his half of the jointly-owned Ischia property, was to go to the Italian government on two conditions: (1) that Harold Castellare would make a similar bequest of the remaining half of the property, and (2) that the Italian government would turn the palace into a national museum to house Peter’s collection, using the income from his estate for its administration and for further acquisitions. His surviving relatives, two cousins in Scotland, he cut off with a shilling each.

  He did nothing more until after the document had been brought out to him, signed, and witnessed. Only then did he venture to look into his own future.

  Events were conserved, Harold had said – meaning, Peter very well understood, events of the present and future as w
ell as of the past. But was there only one pattern in which the future could be fixed? Could a result exist before its cause had occurred?

  The Castellare motto was Audentes fortuna juvat – into which Peter, at the age of fourteen, had interpolated the word “prudentesque”: “Fortune favors the bold – and the prudent.”

  Tomorrow: no change; the room he was looking at was so exactly like this one that the time-sphere seemed to vanish. The next day: a cloudy blur. And the next, and the next . . .

  Opacity, straight through to what Peter judged, by the distance he had moved the rheostat handle, to be ten years ahead. Then, suddenly, the room was a long marble hall filled with display cases.

  Peter smiled wryly. If you were Harold, obviously you could not look ahead and see Peter working in your laboratory. And if you were Peter, equally obviously, you could not look ahead and know whether the room you saw were an improvement you your-self were going to make, or part of a museum established after your death, eight or nine years from now, or –

  No. Eight years was little enough, but he could not even be sure of that. It would, after all, be seven years before Harold could be declared legally dead.

  Peter turned the vernier knob slowly forward. A flicker, another, a long series. Forward faster. Now the flickering melted into a grayness; objects winked out of existence and were replaced by others in the showcases; the marble darkened and lightened again, darkened and lightened, darkened and remained dark. He was, Peter judged, looking at the hall as it would be some five hundred years in the future. There was a thick film of dust on every exposed surface; rubbish and the carcass of some small animal had been swept carelessly into a corner.

  The sphere clouded.

  When it cleared, there was an intricate trial of footprints in the dust, and two of the showcases were empty.

  The footprints were splayed, trifurcate, and thirty inches long.

  After a moment’s deliberation Peter walked around the workbench and leaned down to look through the sphere from the opposite direction. Framed in the nearest of the four tall windows was a scene of picture-postcard banality: the sunsilvered bay and the foreshortened arc of the city, with Vesuvius faintly fuming in the background. But there was something wrong about the colors, even grayed as they were by distance.