My Favorites Page 9

  I made a little bow of my head in Wells’s direction. “This is my translation of Mr. Wells’s excellent story, The Time Machine.”

  Wells looked surprised, Albert curious. Kelvin smacked his lips and put his half-drained seidel down.

  “Time machine?” asked young Albert.

  “What’s he talking about?” Kelvin asked.

  I explained, “I have taken the liberty of translating Mr. Wells’s story about a time machine, in the hope of attracting a German publisher.”

  Wells said, “You never told me—”

  But Kelvin asked, “Time machine? What on earth would a time machine be?”

  Wells forced an embarrassed, self-deprecating little smile. “It is merely the subject of a tale I have written, m’lud: a machine that can travel through time. Into the past, you know. Or the, uh, future.”

  Kelvin fixed him with a beady gaze. “Travel into the past or the future?”

  “It is fiction, of course,” Wells said apologetically.

  “Of course.”

  Albert seemed fascinated. “But how could a machine travel through time? How do you explain it?”

  Looking thoroughly uncomfortable under Kelvin’s wilting eye, Wells said hesitantly, “Well, if you consider time as a dimension—”

  “A dimension?” asked Kelvin.

  “Rather like the three dimensions of space.”

  “Time as a fourth dimension?”

  “Yes. Rather.”

  Albert nodded eagerly as I translated. “Time as a dimension, yes! Whenever we move through space, we move through time as well, do we not? Space and time! Four dimensions, all bound together!”

  Kelvin mumbled something indecipherable and reached for his half-finished beer.

  “And one could travel through this dimension?” Albert asked. “Into the past or the future?”

  “Utter bilge,” Kelvin muttered, slamming his emptied seidel on the table. “Quite impossible.”

  “It is merely fiction,” said Wells, almost whining. “Only an idea I toyed with in order to—”

  “Fiction. Of course,” said Kelvin, with great finality. Quite abruptly, he pushed himself to his feet. “I’m afraid I must be going. Thank you for the beer.”

  He left us sitting there and started back down the street, his face flushed. From the way his beard moved, I could see that he was muttering to himself.

  “I’m afraid we’ve offended him,” said Wells.

  “But how could he become angry over an idea?” Albert wondered. The thought seemed to stun him. “Why should a new idea infuriate a man of science?”

  The waitress bustled across the patio to our table. “When is this Jew leaving?” she hissed at me, eyes blazing with fury. “I won’t have him stinking up our café any longer!”

  Obviously shaken, but with as much dignity as a seventeen-

  year-old could muster, Albert rose to his feet. “I will leave, Madame. I have imposed on your so-gracious hospitality long enough.”

  “Wait,” I said, grabbing at his jacket sleeve. “Take this with you. Read it. I think you will enjoy it.”

  He smiled at me, but I could see the sadness that would haunt his eyes forever. “Thank you, sir. You have been most kind to me.”

  He took the manuscript and left us. I saw him already reading it as he walked slowly down the street toward the bridge back to Linz proper. I hoped he would not trip and break his neck as he ambled down the steep street, his nose stuck in the manuscript.

  The waitress watched him too. “Filthy Jew. They’re everywhere! They get themselves into everything.”

  “That will be quite enough from you,” I said as sternly as I could manage.

  She glared at me and headed back for the bar.

  Wells looked more puzzled than annoyed, even after I explained what had happened.

  “It’s their country, after all,” he said, with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. “If they don’t want to mingle with Jews, there’s not much we can do about it, is there?”

  I took a sip of my warm, flat beer, not trusting myself to come up with a properly polite response. There was only one timeline in which Albert lived long enough to make an effect on the world. There were dozens where he languished in obscurity or was gassed in one of the death camps.

  Wells’s expression turned curious. “I didn’t know you had translated my story.”

  “To see if perhaps a German publisher would be interested in it,” I lied.

  “But you gave the manuscript to that Jewish fellow.”

  “I have another copy of the translation.”

  “You do? Why would you—”

  My time was almost up, I knew. I had a powerful urge to end the charade. “That young Jewish fellow might change the world, you know.”

  Wells laughed.

  “I mean it,” I said. “You think that your story is merely a piece of fiction. Let me tell you, it is much more than that.”

  “Really?”

  “Time travel will become possible one day.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” But I could see the sudden astonishment in his eyes. And the memory. It was I who had suggested the idea of time travel to him. We had discussed it for months, back when he had been working for the newspapers. I had kept the idea in the forefront of his imagination until he finally sat down and dashed off his novel.

  I hunched closer to him, leaned my elbows wearily on the table. “Suppose Kelvin is wrong? Suppose there is much more to physics than he suspects?”

  “How could that be?” Wells asked.

  “That lad is reading your story. It will open his eyes to new vistas, new possibilities.”

  Wells cast a suspicious glance at me. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  I forced a smile. “Not altogether. You would do well to pay attention to what the scientists discover over the coming years. You could build a career writing about it. You could become known as a prophet if you play your cards properly.”

  His face took on the strangest expression I had ever seen: he did not want to believe me, and yet he did; he was suspicious, curious, doubtful, and yearning—all at the same time. Above everything else he was ambitious; thirsting for fame. Like every writer, he wanted to have the world acknowledge his genius.

  I told him as much as I dared. As the afternoon drifted on and the shadows lengthened, as the sun sank behind the distant mountains and the warmth of day slowly gave way to an uneasy, deepening chill, I gave him carefully veiled hints of the future. A future. The one I wanted him to promote.

  Wells could have no conception of the realities of time travel, of course. There was no frame of reference for the infinite branchings of the future in his tidy nineteenth-century English mind. He was incapable of imagining the horrors that lay in store. How could he be? Time branches endlessly, and only a few, a precious handful of those branches, manage to avoid utter disaster.

  Could I show him his beloved London obliterated by fusion bombs? Or the entire northern hemisphere of Earth depopulated by man-made plagues? Or a devastated world turned to a savagery that made his Morlocks seem compassionate?

  Could I explain to him the energies involved in time travel or the damage they did to the human body? The fact that time travelers were volunteers sent on suicide missions, desperately trying to preserve a timeline that saved at least a portion of the human race? The best future I could offer him was a twentieth century tortured by world wars and genocide. That was the best I could do.

  So all I did was hint, as gently and subtly as I could, trying to guide him toward that best of all possible futures, horrible though it would seem to him. I could neither control nor coerce anyone; all I could do was to offer a bit of guidance. Until the radiation dose from my own trip through time finally killed me.

  Wells was happily oblivious to my pain. He did not
even notice the perspiration that beaded my brow despite the chilling breeze that heralded nightfall.

  “You appear to be telling me,” he said at last, “that my writings will have some sort of positive effect on the world.”

  “They already have,” I replied, with a genuine smile.

  His brows rose.

  “That teenaged lad is reading your story. Your concept of time as a dimension has already started his fertile mind working.”

  “That young student?”

  “Will change the world,” I said. “For the better.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said, trying to sound confident. I knew there were still a thousand pitfalls in young Albert’s path. And I would not live long enough to help him past them. Perhaps others would, but there were no guarantees.

  I knew that if Albert did not reach his full potential, if he were turned away by the university again or murdered in the coming holocaust, the future I was attempting to preserve would disappear in a global catastrophe that could end the human race forever. My task was to save as much of humanity as I could.

  I had accomplished a feeble first step in saving some of humankind, but only a first step. Albert was reading the time-machine tale and starting to think that Kelvin was blind to the real world. But there was so much more to do. So very much more.

  We sat there in the deepening shadows of the approaching twilight, Wells and I, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts about the future. Despite his best English self-control, Wells was smiling contentedly. He saw a future in which he would be hailed as a prophet. I hoped it would work out that way. It was an immense task that I had undertaken. I felt tired, gloomy, daunted by the immensity of it all. Worst of all, I would never know if I succeeded or not.

  Then the waitress bustled over to our table. “Well, have you finished? Or are you going to stay here all night?”

  Even without a translation Wells understood her tone. “Let’s go,” he said, scraping his chair across the flagstones.

  I pushed myself to my feet and threw a few coins on the table. The waitress scooped them up immediately and called into the café, “Come here and scrub down this table! At once!”

  The six-year-old boy came trudging across the patio, lugging the heavy wooden pail of water. He stumbled and almost dropped it; water sloshed onto his mother’s legs. She grabbed him by the ear and lifted him nearly off his feet. A faint, tortured squeak issued from the boy’s gritted teeth.

  “Be quiet and your do work properly,” she told her son, her voice murderously low. “If I let your father know how lazy you are . . .”

  The six-year-old’s eyes went wide with terror as his mother let her threat dangle in the air between them.

  “Scrub that table good, Adolf,” his mother told him. “Get rid of that damned Jew’s stink.”

  I looked down at the boy. His eyes were burning with shame and rage and hatred. Save as much of the human race as you can, I told myself. But it was already too late to save him.

  “Are you coming?” Wells called to me.

  “Yes,” I said, tears in my eyes. “It’s getting dark, isn’t it?”

  Introduction to

  “Scheherazade and the Storytellers”

  Two points: One, science fiction isn’t confined to stories about the future. Two, science fiction writers are (for the most part) friends, comrades in the sometimes-bitter world of publishing, brothers-in-arms . . . er, make that brothers-in-pens (and sisters, of course).

  As the aforementioned John W. Campbell noted, science fiction is not restricted to tales about the future. The past is also part of our territory.

  Here is a tale of the storied past, of a cruel sultan and a beautiful, clever young woman—and of a ragged clutch of storytellers who are loosely based on my science-fiction-writing friends and colleagues.

  SCHEHERAZADE AND THE STORYTELLERS

  “I need a new story!” exclaimed Scheherazade, her lovely almond eyes betraying a rising terror. “By tonight!”

  “Daughter of my heart,” said her father, the grand vizier, “I have related to you every tale that I know. Some of them, best beloved, were even true!”

  “But, most respected father, I am summoned to the sultan again tonight. If I have not a new tale with which to beguile him, he will cut off my head in the morning!”

  The grand vizier chewed his beard and raised his eyes to Allah in supplication. He could not help but notice that the gold leaf adorning the ceiling is his chamber was peeling once more. I must call the workmen again, he thought, his heart sinking.

  For although the grand vizier and his family resided in a splendid wing of the sultan’s magnificent palace, the grand vizier was responsible for the upkeep of his quarters. The sultan was no fool.

  “Father!” Scheherazade screeched. “Help me!”

  “What can I do?” asked the grand vizier. He expected no answer.

  Yet his beautiful, slim-waisted daughter immediately replied, “You must allow me to go to the Street of the Storytellers.”

  “The daughter of the grand vizier going into the city! Into the bazaar! To the street of those loathsome storytellers? Commoners! Little better than beggars! Never! It is impossible! The sultan would never permit you to leave the palace.”

  “I could go in disguise,” Scheherazade suggested.

  “And how could anyone disguise those ravishing eyes of yours, my darling child? How could anyone disguise your angelic grace, your delicate form? No, it is impossible. You must remain in the palace.”

  Scheherazade threw herself onto the pillows next to her father and sobbed desperately, “Then bid your darling daughter farewell, most noble father. By tomorrow’s sun I will be slain.”

  The grand vizier gazed upon his daughter with true tenderness, even as her sobs turned to shrieks of despair. He tried to think of some way to ease her fears, but he knew that he could never take the risk of smuggling his daughter out of the palace. They would both lose their heads if the sultan discovered it.

  Growing weary of his daughter’s wailing, the grand vizier suddenly had the flash of an idea. He cried out, “I have it, my best beloved daughter!”

  Scheherazade lifted her tear-streaked face.

  “If the Prophet—blessed be his name—cannot go to the mountain, then the mountain will come to the Prophet!”

  The grand vizier raised his eyes to Allah in thanksgiving for his revelation and he saw once again the peeling gold leaf of the ceiling. His heart hardened with anger against all slipshod workmen, including (of course) storytellers.

  And so it was arranged that a quartet of burly guards was dispatched that very morning from the sultan’s palace to the street of the storytellers, with orders to bring a storyteller to the grand vizier without fail. This they did, although the grand vizier’s hopes fell once he beheld the storyteller the guards had dragged in.

  He was short and round, round of face and belly, with big, round eyes that seemed about to pop out of his head. His beard was ragged, his clothes tattered and tarnished from long wear. The guards hustled him into the grand vizier’s private chamber and threw him roughly onto the mosaic floor before the grand vizier’s high-backed, elaborately carved chair of sandalwood inlaid with ivory and filigrees of gold.

  For long moments the grand vizier studied the storyteller, who knelt trembling on the patched knees of his pantaloons, his nose pressed to the tiles of the floor. Scheherazade watched from the veiled gallery of the women’s quarters, high above, unseen by her father or his visitor.

  “You may look upon me,” said the grand vizier.

  The storyteller raised his head but remained kneeling. His eyes went huge as he took in the splendor of the sumptuously appointed chamber. Don’t you dare look up at the ceiling, the grand vizier thought.

  “You are a storyteller?” he asked, his voice stern.

/>   The storyteller seemed to gather himself and replied with a surprisingly strong voice, “Not merely a storyteller, oh mighty one. I am the storyteller of storytellers. The best of all those who—”

  The grand vizier cut him short with, “Your name?”

  “Hari-ibn-Hari, eminence.” Without taking a breath, the storyteller continued, “My stories are known throughout the world. As far as distant Cathay and the misty isles of the Celts, my stories are beloved by all men.”

  “Tell me one,” said the grand vizier. “If I like it, you will be rewarded. If not, your tongue will be cut from your boastful throat.”

  Hari-ibn-Hari clutched at his throat with both hands.

  “Well?” demanded the grand vizier. “Where’s your story?”

  “Now, your puissance?”

  “Now.”

  Nearly an hour later, the grand vizier had to admit that Hari-ibn-Hari’s tale of the sailor Sinbad was not without merit.

  “An interesting fable, storyteller. Have you any others?”

  “Hundreds, oh protector of the poor!” exclaimed the storyteller. “Thousands!”

  “Very well,” said the grand vizier. “Each day you will come to me and relate to me one of your tales.”

  “Gladly,” said Hari-ibn-Hari. But then, his round eyes narrowing slightly, he dared to ask, “And what payment will I receive?”

  “Payment?” thundered the grand vizier. “You keep your tongue! That is your reward!”

  The storyteller hardly blinked at that. “Blessings upon you, most merciful one. But a storyteller must eat. A storyteller must drink, as well.”

  The grand vizier thought that perhaps drink was more important than food to this miserable wretch.

  “How can I continue to relate my tales to you, oh magnificent one, if I faint from hunger and thirst?”

  “You expect payment for your tales?”

  “It would seem just.”

  After a moment’s consideration, the grand vizier said magnanimously, “Very well. You will be paid one copper for each story you relate.”

  “One copper?” squeaked the storyteller, crestfallen. “Only one?”