FSF, February 2008 Read online

"Give them away...” I echoed, thinking of what these would bring at auction.

  "Of course,” Fechner smiled, “A good book is like a rare wine. It should be shared with friends."

  On another occasion I asked Fechner how he had known the copy of the De revolutionibus was a forgery and he had said Kepler never would have made the annotations that were in the margins. “The man did not think that way,” he said simply. “Those comments were not his.” In the future, after things changed, I would reflect on this assessment and marvel at the careful approach that had led Fechner to study an author so closely as to know the pattern of his thought. I would wonder if he had applied the same attention to the people he knew. If so, he had known me well and my loss was that I had known him hardly at all.

  My other discussions with the group as a whole were of a more lively nature. I remember one thread on books that might have changed history. The Iliad, The Social Contract, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Das Kapital were all examined in this category. McCaffrey claimed the same ideas had to be presented to a community over and over again in order for a change to truly “take.” As proof, he cited dissertations on a heliocentric universe from Aristarchos of Samos to Copernicus, and traced the literary lineage of emancipation from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Native Son and Strange Fruit to To Kill a Mockingbird. “It took all these books and more,” he said sadly, “to move us to a more equitable society and the ideal still hasn't been reached yet."

  Ariel, on the other hand, argued that one insight could create a fissure that could change the world. “Look at The Origin of Species,” she said. “Look at Einstein's Theory of Relativity."

  The conversation I remember most, however, as much for its fateful consequences as for the speculations it gave motion to, was initiated by Fechner. I remember the evening well. It had been snowing hard all day long, so hard the plows and the snow shovels couldn't keep up with it. By dusk, most people had simply given up and gone home, so I saw only a few stragglers struggling through the drifts as I plodded my way toward the bookshop.

  The stairwell leading down to the shop had disappeared in a slope of snow. I grabbed the pipe banister and worked my way down carefully. The bell on the door tinkled wildly as I shoved the door open against the snow.

  Stepping inside the store was like stepping into an oasis of warmth and light. As I unwrapped my soggy muffler and took off my coat, I could hear excited talking coming from the back room.

  "But,” said McCaffrey in his gravely voice, “you wouldn't want to let them know it was from a future time."

  "Why not?” asked Ariel. “Wouldn't you want to know if it happened to you? Wouldn't it just blow your mind?"

  I lost the rest of the conversation as I bent over to tug off my galoshes. I could smell the potpourri of hot, spiced wine and I was anxious to get a cup.

  "Ah,” said Fechner as I entered the room. “Here is just the man to answer our question."

  "What?” I asked, happily sinking into the brown, stuffed chair that had been reserved for me ever since I had cleared the stack of books from it. “Say, you guys have been at it for a while. There's a ski slope covering the stairwell with no prints in it but mine."

  McCaffrey waved his cup of wine expansively. “Tempus fugit when you're having fun."

  For some reason, Ariel seemed to think this was terribly funny and started laughing so hard she sloshed some of her wine on her shirt. She blinked owlishly at the stain for a moment and then said solemnly, “Oh well, hodie adsit, cras absit,” and burst out laughing again.

  I looked suspiciously at the wine Fechner was handing me. “What did you guys put in this stuff?"

  "Settle down, children,” Fechner said. “We must address the question.” But even he, too, seemed possessed by some levity, some high good spirits that ran just beneath the surface, for he fairly beamed when he asked me, “If you could give a book, any book, to someone who had lived before, what book would you choose and to whom would you give it?"

  "I'd give a biography of Christopher Columbus to Christopher Columbus,” I said promptly.

  "Aren't you afraid you'd change history?” Ariel asked. “We've been hashing over that problem for hours."

  "Why not change history? What's so good about the status quo? If Columbus had known he wouldn't find the spices and silks of Marco Polo's Orient, he would never have sailed, at least not West anyway. He would never have found the New World and the Native Americans would have been left in peace."

  "But you don't know how much you'd change things, or even if they would change the way you'd want them to. There'd be no telling. No, I'd give something insignificant, just for the fun of it,” Ariel said, decidedly. “I'd give Winnie the Pooh to Caesar when he was a little boy. I've always wanted to meet Caesar, only not the Caesar who was the general or dictator. I'd like to see what the child was like."

  I looked at Fechner. “What did you decide on?"

  "I haven't made up my mind yet, but McCaffrey has. Tell him what you settled on, Roger."

  McCaffrey knocked the ashes from his pipe and started tamping in a new mixture as he spoke. “At first, I thought I'd do something significant, like give the New Testament to Jesus, or Bleak House to Marie Antoinette, but then I got worried like Ariel that I'd change things too much, so I decided on something simpler, but elegant, I think. You know how I love Greek tragedy?"

  I nodded. McCaffrey had, in fact, declared that Aeschylus and Sophocles were gods and no writer had written anything equal to what they had written yet.

  "Well, I'd give Sophocles Death of a Salesman. I'd like to see how he'd deal with a small man falling, instead of a great one."

  And I thought then about Oedipus, how his confidence in what he took to be the certainties of his life had led him to destruction. And I thought of Willy Loman, a believer in the system and in the illusion of the system, that a life spent in service would amount to something more than just a life spent. And I thought of my own life, of how close I'd come to failure and how none of my friends in the auction world could trouble themselves to help me. “It's brilliant,” I said.

  Just then a great gust of wind rattled the windows and we all fell silent, ruminating, I think, about how a man can be used up and thrown away when his usefulness is over. “Attention must be paid,” said Fechner, echoing Willy Loman's wife.

  After that evening McCaffrey was the only one of my friends I ever saw again, and when I saw him I was a different person, not just different in the way that some people say they are when a schism in their lives has caused them to see things differently, or when the erosion of hard years has diminished their expectations, but different in a radical way in the sense that my life had been cut off from its continuum. For my friends had changed history, at least Ariel and Fechner had. They had literally gone back in time and set in motion some sequence of events that had altered the timeline and with it, the context of my life.

  I was not aware I was living a different life, however, until McCaffrey walked into my office. Until he came through my door I was simply an Assistant Counsel representing Britannia in the Hopi Navajo Circle. I took for granted that my life in the diplomatic corps would continue. It did not occur to me it could be other than it was.

  On the morning that McCaffrey jolted me out of my complacency, I was drinking my second cup of herbarium and writing an acceptance note for the Autumnal Circle when my secretary, Johnson, came in. He seemed a little agitated, which was highly unusual, for Johnson usually had the calm of a placid pond.

  "There's a Navajo elder here to see you, sir. I know he doesn't have an appointment, but he has a pipe and he's dressed rather oddly, so I thought...."

  "Of course,” I said. “You were right to alert me. Show him in."

  Johnson ushered the man in. The elder looked to be about sixty or sixty-five. He had on a shirt of some coarse material I couldn't identify. It seemed to be a patchwork of red and black squares and there was a ceremonial pipe sticking up out of his breast pocket. The elder seemed quite agitat
ed. His hair was awry and he was breathing hard and he looked like he was about to pounce on me.

  I cleared my throat nervously. “Um, Johnson, you may leave. Perhaps you could get Elder—,” The man didn't fill in the blank so I went on as smoothly as possible, “a cup of herbaria?” Some elders would never give out their names. It had something to do with their power. Johnson turned reluctantly toward the door. I knew he was as eager as I was to have the opportunity to talk with an elder and I hated to disappoint him. There was something about this elder, however, that made me feel our conversation should be private. “And Johnson?” Johnson paused. “Not a word of this to anyone."

  "Of course not, Councilman,” he said with his usual courtesy. Then he left, quietly closing the door behind him.

  The moment Johnson closed the door, the elder was upon me. He strode to my side of the desk and wrapped me in a bear hug. “Sam, I'm so glad you're still here!” he cried. I was a little surprised by this behavior, but elders have many reasons for their strange ways so I stood waiting in his embrace, patiently. Finally he stepped back, but he kept both of his hands firmly on my shoulders. He gave me a little shake. “Sam, don't you remember me? Do you remember anything at all?"

  He looked at me intensely. His eyes were an unusual color of blue and I found them unsettling. He did seem a little familiar to me, but I couldn't quite place where I had seen him before. Perhaps at a conference or maybe a ceremony? Then I thought suddenly that I knew what he was after. Of course, we must have met in the Spirit Plane. If that was true, then I was finally advancing. The elder shook me again. “Think, man, think! What did you dream last night? It would seem like a dream to you."

  And then it came back to me. It was as though I'd had amnesia and had suddenly remembered a long forgotten life, a complete life with sensations and desires and memories of years gone by, to be laid alongside the one I already had. At one time I was both a minor counsel from Britannia and an agent in the rare manuscript business. Memories of negotiations with Hopi and Navajo elders for healing patterns were intermixed with auctions and client contracts. Long, peaceful afternoons practicing the Way of Beauty were jarred by the sounds of traffic and the drop of elevators in columns of steel. I sat down heavily. “How did this happen, Elder McCaffrey?” In my confusion, I still addressed him as an elder deserving of respect and trust.

  McCaffrey crossed back to the other side of my desk and perched himself on the edge of the chair. I noticed his hands shook a little as he took out his pipe and began to pack the bowl with tobacco. “How much do you remember?"

  "I don't know,” I said. “Everything's a jumble. How would I know what I have forgotten? It seems to me I loved books and you and Fechner and Ariel loved books and we lived in a place very far away from the spirit world. A place,” I said, slowly retrieving a phrase from the depths of another life, “'where no birds sang.’ I don't think.... I don't think the place was at all like what I know, what I think I know."

  McCaffrey nodded. “What you're experiencing, I think, is what Ariel's grandfather called the Overlay Effect. He speculated that if a time traveler caused history to change, a person who had lived in the former history would forget his old life and only remember his new one, unless his memory was jogged after the history shift. Then it would be as if two conflicting transparencies representing radically different personalities and world views were laid across the contours of the subject's underlying psyche. The poor devil would have to try to assimilate them both."

  McCaffrey lit his pipe and as the blue clouds of smoke drifted up, I remembered my uncle and his farm and the slow quiet evenings we spent on his porch, and I remembered the hushed, anticipatory quiet at the beginning of an elders’ spirit summoning ceremony. Just then, Johnson came in with a tray of herbaria. He threw one shocked look at McCaffrey smoking his pipe and fairly dropped the tray onto the desk. “Well, if that will be all, sirs,” he whispered and then quickly backed his way out of the room.

  "What'd I do?” McCaffrey asked.

  "Your pipe is for summoning spirits, real spirits."

  "Oh,” he said awkwardly and proceeded to knock the tobacco with its glowing embers out onto the tray.

  The casualness of this gesture was even worse. I looked around apprehensively. “You don't have both memories, do you? I mean, you don't have memories of our time, my time, the time that we're in,” I corrected miserably. “You're not experiencing the Overlay Effect?"

  "No.” McCaffrey contemplated the embers from his pipe. “I only have memories of the time before. I think it's because I was so close to the portal when it happened.” He looked at me appraisingly. “You are quick, but then, we always knew that.” He lifted a cup of herbarium and sipped. “Oh good, mint tea.” Then he settled back in the chair, holding his hands around the cup for warmth. “I'm afraid we weren't entirely honest with you, Sam. You see, we weren't just a group of friends discussing books. We did enjoy talking about books and we valued you as a contributor in our discussions, but our group was formed for an entirely different purpose.

  "Ariel's grandfather, Peter Fechner, was a physicist, as, you will remember, am I.” He raised his eyebrows inquiringly at me.

  I nodded.

  "Peter disappeared about ten years ago. No one ever found him or his body. When he was finally declared dead, it turned out he had left everything to Ariel. Ariel inherited his house, a rather large amount of cumbrous Victorian furniture, and a basement crammed full of apparatus and machinery. None of the equipment in the basement looked even remotely familiar to Ariel, but she did find a series of notebooks written in her grandfather's hand, describing the function of each apparatus. The one that interested her most was purportedly a time portal. So she called her great-uncle, Mortimer Fechner, and asked him if he knew anything about it. He didn't, but he told her he'd ask me about it.

  "I, of course, told Mortimer that time travel was impossible, that the energy required to produce such an effect would be forever beyond our reach. I was curious, however, about the apparatus and Fechner's underlying thesis. Peter Fechner had had a solid reputation in the physics community. So I asked Mortimer to have Ariel bring the device.

  "It took Ariel three days to drive across country with it. She had loaded it in the back of her grandfather's old truck, without any crating or protective material. At the time I was apprehensive she might have damaged it. Now I think it would have been better if she had.

  "I pored over Peter Fechner's notebooks for days and, although I was able to determine that Fechner had posited time travel through quantum entanglement, I was never able to understand his theorems or his proofs. It was as though he had written in a foreign language and I was only able to recognize a word or two out of pages and pages of script.

  "Eventually I decided we should just test the portal, for Fechner had left pretty straightforward instructions for the mechanics of its use. Actually, all we had to do was to set the thing up and type in a time and place. Fechner had claimed the portal could transport a subject to anywhere and anywhen in the past using the space-time continuum. His only caveat was that whoever or whatever was sent back would be taking a one-way trip, because the portal could not exist in a time before it was invented.

  "After much discussion, Ariel, Mortimer, and I decided to send a small jade statue of Buddha back to ninth-century Honshu, Japan. We figured if someone actually saw the appearance of the statue, the phenomenon would be something the observer might not find too conflicting with his or her world beliefs. None of us thought the portal would work, really, but we made the experiment a festive occasion. Mortimer bought a bottle of champagne and we toasted each other and Ariel's grandfather. I remember it almost seemed like a wake for poor Fechner, for Ariel and Mortimer sat around telling stories about her irascible progenitor for quite some time. Finally, when we were all a little tipsy from the glow of the stories and the wine, Ariel solemnly placed the jade in the portal. I typed in two p.m. March 5, 895, and specified Honshu, Japan. ‘What specific coor
dinates?’ The words flashed up on the console. I hesitated. I had not come prepared to provide a particular location, though I realized instantly that such specificity would be required. ‘Would you care for one of these coordinates?’ the computer asked. Well, yes I would. I picked one of the coordinates at random, set the time delay for thirty seconds, and stepped out of the portal.

  "There was no sound, no flash of light. One moment the statue was there and then it simply wasn't anymore. At that point I was pretty certain about what had happened to Peter Fechner and I was just as certain I wasn't going to follow him. Mortimer and Ariel, however, thought they might like to try it. They just weren't ready yet. It takes courage to leave your home and friends and the world you've known, when you know you'll never be coming back."

  He sighed and then continued as though the task of telling had become a burdensome weight, dragging him down.

  "We tried a couple more experiments, just to be sure. We sent one of those paperweights with the snow falling in it back a year in time to the bookstore. After a thorough search we found it covered with cobwebs in the corner of the broom closet. We sent a Liberty silver dollar three months back to Ariel's apartment and she discovered it in her desk drawer. One thing we were worried about and spent a long time discussing was whether a person going back in time might materialize in a wall or underground. But Fechner's notes said he had written in fail-safes to prevent this from happening, and we ultimately decided to trust he had managed this."

  McCaffrey absentmindedly took out his pipe and started packing it with tobacco again. He caught my apprehensive glance and put the pipe back in his shirt pocket. “Sorry,” he said, “old habits die hard. This morning Ariel and Mortimer decided to take the plunge, and it seems I inadvertently took a different sort of plunge with them. Before Ariel and Mortimer left, I had given a lot of thought to what it would be like to live in the past, friendless in a culture I was unfamiliar with, but it had never occurred to me that I might be placed in a similar situation if their actions in the past changed my present time. The world we live in today is nothing like the world we lived in yesterday, and I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.” He paused and took a ragged breath. “So that's why I need your help, Sam. I need you to help me change back history. I need you to help me put things right."