DE RERUM

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

lem . . . !

 . . . It's a word they use for the pudding at the universe's GO!  (Do not collect $200.)  I was there.  You were there too, along with hippopotami and Uncle Joe, all mixed up together, as the poet says, "discordia semina rerum."  You couldn't slide a feeler gauge twixt one thing and another.  My fanny was your jawbone, and your whimsy was the Duke of Earl or a sunrise on Oahu.  There wasn't any time yet in the ylem.  (Did I say "yet?")  The Laws of Nature weren't even out of the oven--step softly or they'll fall in!

That's where I was headed, straight into the soup, if the old man had his way.

I'm Beryl Molson, Chrononavigator for the Vooshkupf Corporation's flagship Dog; we name all our time-faring vessels after extinct animals.  I'm just trying as hard as I can not to have one named after me.

"You've got to do this for me, Beryl," the old man said.  Lionel Vooshkupf XVIII pushed up the cover of his dooby duct, a spring-hinged chrome plate on the wall at his back. The tube telescoped out, and he took a long, nervous suck.  Some of the smoke escaped, and the smell made me giddy.

"I've heard a lot of hooey in my day, boss," I told him, "but this takes the cake.  You want me to go back before the Big Bang?"

"That's right.  You've got to.  It's the only way to save the company."  Old Lionel had the frame of an ox, with shoulders as wide as the Crab Nebula and hands that could throttle two at a time.  He had a million dollar mug too (as they used to say back when that was real money), high jawbones, a broad forehead and luminous, blue-grey eyes under a mophead of silver hair.  And the threads, well--he was wearing more money than the rest of the planet could borrow.

It was in the guy's chest, somehow, that it all fell down.  He was caved in, beaten--you could tell that right off, and so could the sharks in the interplan cartels.

"Suppose I do what you want.  Suppose we take the Dog down into the ylem and rearrange things so that, fifteen or twenty billion years down the line, you get your contract and we all keep our jobs.  Who knows what else will be screwed up along with it?"

"That's all worked out.  The R&D boys are on top of this one, believe me . . . "--I didn't--" . . . and if you follow the plan, we'll all be winners, Beryl.  But you have to back into that first microsecond.  It's the only way."

"Okay," I said, "but Topsy comes with me."

Vooshkupf winced.  "I don't know if I feel comfortable with that idea."

Just then the room started stretching and shaking like a belly dancer in a funhouse mirror.  I could see through the window behind Vooshkupf's head that the whole city skyline was dancing along.  It didn't last long, but when the bumps and grinds were over, something felt very different.  The distant sky was filled with Zeppelins.  Somehow I was aware that my salary had been cut in half.  The dooby duct was crammed with chalk dust.  And Mr. V's suit was polyester.  He frowned at his terminal screen and brought up some columns of figures.

"You see that?" he shouted.  "You see that?"  He stood up, enraged, but quickly sat down again when he realized that one pants leg was now missing from mid-thigh down.  "They just did it again.  They went back there and screwed around the primordial chemistry.  The abundance of helium has changed, and they're right in there taking advantage.  Our market share is down thirty points!"

Vooshkupf was slightly more handsome than he'd been a minute before--if you can call that a minute--but he was in a much weaker bargaining position.  "Take Topsy," he said.  "Take Rin Tin Tin.  I don't give a damn.  Just do it."

"Who's Rin Tin Tin?" I said.

"Look it up," he fumed.

I turned to leave, but the door I had entered through wasn't there any more.  In fact, doors were no longer in use.  I pushed out through a glowing, gelatinous membrane.  I tried to give a brusque "Goodbye," as I exited through the gel, but my voice came out in a nasal contralto.

Helium, huh?

 

o how was I to know that Rin Tin Tin was the name of a timeship?  As the poet says, "Scio istarum rerum nihil;" I don't know from nothing.  I turned off my Gantzavelt Encyclopedia, the big one, and started in on Topsy again.  The intractable female, inky-skinned, even to the gums and eyes, was still leaning on her elbows on the bubble-domed porch of my pension.  As always, she was listening between the stations on her antique radio, the only thing she owned besides her trousers.  Topsy was listening to static, in other words, which she referred to as "relic background radiation."  It reminded her of home.  As for me, scio istarum rerum nihil.

"Will you turn it off?" I said.  "It's static."

"Three degrees Kelvin," she said, "and it's everywhere!  All around us, in us and out of us.  Somewhere in that static is where I came from."  Topsy, like the current high ratio of helium to hydrogen and my boss's truncated pants leg, was a sudden consequence of someone's meddling with prehistory.  She had appeared one day, fully grown, like Athena from Zeus's noddle, and with a brain full of memories that did not refer.  She was a chrono-anomaly, a time freak, an orphan of history.  "I want to go home, Beryl," she said.

"Good news!" I said.  "That's exactly where we're going."

She turned off the radio.  "You're taking me back!"

"We're going all the way up God's privates," I said, "right up the cosmic Fallopians, smack into the primum ovum.  You're gonna meet your mommy, old Tops."

She sprang to her feet and kissed me.  I always tried to discourage that--not knowing, as I didn't, what, if anything was really betwixt her ant- and posterior--but it seemed appropriate at the moment.  And I certainly liked it.

"I can help you navigate," she said.  "I know the way.  I know the tides of gravity.  I know the Causal Ravines we can slide through, practically to the ylem itself.  We can slip between the threads of events, man.  We can sneak right up to the eve of Being.  No Law of Nature will ever see us.  I'm going home, Beryl!  I love you!"

"Sure thing, Topsy!"--taking a little lebensraum with a discrete backstep--"as the poet says, 'Tecto et domo invitaris.'  There's no place like home!"

 

he wrench and micrometer boys had the timeship juiced, lubed and ready, in spite of the helium situation.  Their spit and polish even extended to the brass registration plate under my control panel:

 

"A-1001--RIN TIN TIN."

 

We had just taken off, and the count-up to ignition was about to begin--God, I hate timeshipping!  I just hoped to hell that the Rinny would keep us in the moment.  Once, on a routine ancestor switch--Vooshkupf wanted a little more blue blood--the Gerbil had sprung a leak.  I was picking slivers of the seventeenth century out of my butt for the next (last? concurrent?) week and a half.  As the poet says, "Verbum sapientiae satis est!"  Don't cash checks that you can't sign.

Topsy and I were strapped into the Now, our Now, as the hours, then days, then years and centuries slid past on the step screen.  We had it on continuous scan until I started to feel sick to my stomach.  Let's face it: how many flowers folding back into the cotyledon and glasses of water going back up into the pitcher can you take?  "Deridiculum est, quaqua, omnibus,"  don't you agree?

So Topsy switched it over to step-wise.  That way we could watch things go in normal sequence within each phase, only with the phases going backwards, like ourselves.  Once we got going, Tops set the phase length to two or three hundred million years, give or take, and we got to see the dinosaurs hopping from continent to continent as they split and drifted--Always a big favorite!--followed by the formation of mountains, then the crazy kaleidoscope of ferns and bracken evolving, twisting and piling across the screen in layered patterns like autumn leaves on a skylight.

In the next sequence I got to watch some remote ancestors wiggle and bump willy-nilly from the slime, by generations, onto dry land.  I had hardly done laughing at the oafish indirection through whose mass effect I sit here pretty, when the screen winked to the next (previous, actually) step sequence.

From there, it was all sticks and stones to me--though Topsy was just starting to show some interest--so we switched her back to continuous and watched meteors shoot out from the earth and planets scatter into small rocks, flitting through space like baby brine shrimp.  Our solar nebula steamed away into fine diamond dust, and from there, for a good while, it was all geometry to me--Scio istarum rerum nihil.

We shut down the screen and coasted for a few billion years, occasionally checking the redshift of the surrounding matter to see when exactly we were; around ten to the third, things usually start to get interesting, but that was a few days away.  We were still in the single digits.

I put my feet up on the dead monitor and sang a tune I'd learned as a deck hand on the timeships Pterodactyl and Dodo, an old shanty from the salad days of Outer Time travel:

 

It's a thousand years an hour, boys,

When the stern's before the prow!

And the lass I left before me

Won't wait until it's now.

 

So heave her up by starlight!

You'll slave till the day you're born.

Who'll belly up to the bar might

See a night that follows morn.

 

Jumped ship in the Cenozoic,

And stowed in the Pleistocene!

I know just where I'm bound, boys,

But I wonder where I've been.

 

So heave her up by starlight

And don't forget to floss!

Your paycheck's in the mail, boys--

Back to the frigging boss.

 

Topsy was riding the dials and checking them against her charts.  She had found us a Grand Canyon of a causal ravine to slide down.  It was a disjunction that dated all the way back to pre-time.  At every moment along our way, the distance between the events to the right of us and those to the left was greater than the distance light could travel before the ravine widened even further; we were shimmying between event horizons, just as Topsy had promised.

After a couple days of highway bingo--Topsy always cheated, claiming to have spotted galaxy clusters a millenium or so before they had formed--we hit our first mark: a Bok globule, a cold, dark cloud shaped like a fat Buddha, about to squeeze out proto-stars.  I switched on the starboard servomechanisms to deploy the beam projector with which Vooshkupf's techies had rigged old Rinny.  Topsy and I watched it take aim at an exact spot in the globule, send out one small pulse, and then retract and fold back into the hull.

The phone rang.  Topsy picked it up.  "It's for you," she said.

I didn't know what to do with the thing at first; it had not been there a second earlier.  Before that, I had only seen telephones in museums.  Following Topsy's example, I pressed the thing against the side of my face and said, "Hello."

"Is that what you say?" Vooshkupf answered.  It sounded like Vooshkupf, although I couldn't see him.  "Hello!  Well, so far, so good.  We've got some communication now, so to speak.  Actually, I said all this about nineteen billion years ago, but let that pass.  If we're talking like this, that Bok ray must have worked pretty good, set up a causal sequence where you hear me say things then that I want to have meant now--my now--though why it has to be by goddam telephone beats the hell out of me."

"It is a Princess," I told Vooshkupf, or something like him.

"A what?" he said.

"A Princess.  It says so on the bottom.  In cursive.  And it's pink."

"Charming.  Now listen up, Beryl.  Are you opaque yet?"

I checked the Doppler gauge--redshift ninety-nine thousand.  "Almost," I said. "Decoupling is just about to have not yet taken place.  The energy is sliding back into mass.  Wait a minute, I mean, one of our minutes."  I flipped on the step screen.  It was like watching rock candy form in a glass pot.  Pretty soon--our soon--the screen was dark with it, and there was no point in looking further.

Topsy shot out some causal dye as our ravine narrowed going back toward the Big Bang.  We didn't want to carom off some unremembered event wall into God-knows-what convoluted future.

"Okay," I said.  "We're opaque.  We're maybe eleven thousand years from the big one."

"Right.  It won't be long now before nucleosynthesis.  That's where those bastards mixed up the helium ratios and changed my suit to goddam polyester.  We're going to beat their pants off, Beryl.  Just leave everything alone till you get into the ylem, got it?"

"That's the plan, boss."

"Let's just hope we will have had this conversation once you're done.  You're doing great.  You're looking good.  How's Topsy?  Any trouble?"

"Naw, no problem.  She cheats at highway bingo, though."

"Right.  Listen.  She can't really stay there in the ylem.  You know that, don't you?"

"She can't?"

"No.  You have to take her back with you."

"I do?"

"It would screw everything up, Beryl.  We couldn't work it out."

"Holy cow!"

"I've got to hang up now.  Is that what you say--hang up?"

"I think so."

"Good luck."  I heard a click and then a humming sound.

"What did he tell you?" Topsy wanted to know.

"Sunt lacrimae rerum," I said.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," Topsy said.  "It's a dead language."

"Not for another nineteen billion years, it's not.  It's Vergil: 'Things cry.'"

"What things?"  Rinny was bucking and vibrating as we hurtled through nucleosynthesis into the annihilation of primordial particle pairs.  Electrons and positrons, then protons and anti-protons were wiping each other out.   We were back into very small fractions of the first second post-Bang.  I handed the pink Princess back to Topsy.

"You can't stay," I said.  "The boss says it would screw things up.  He wants you to come back with me."

"But I'm nearly home!"  She dropped the Princess and grabbed my shoulders, pushing her jet black face into mine, breathing black breath against me.  "You can't do this to me.  Not now.  Look, Beryl, when we get to the ylem, he's not your boss any more.  Nobody can tell you what to do.  Nothing exists then the way it will.

"All you do is slide open the inner bay door.  I walk out into the detemporizing chamber.  You close the door.  You open the hull door by remote.  That's it.  I'm gone.  Vooshkupf's wrong.  It won't affect anything.  I was never born in the first place, see?  Discordia semina rerum, that's all I'll ever have been!"

"Ovid, huh?  Wild seeds.  Read me the Doppler."

"Ten to the thirty-second power.  Particle creation.  Almost off the scale.  What are you going to do?"

The vibration was getting pretty bad.  Along with the rattling and buzzing at a dozen different frequencies, there began to be loud blasts of white noise coming from everywhere at once.  I looked at Topsy.  Suddenly, hearing that sound, she had forgotten all about me and Vooshkupf.  There was a blissful expression on her face.  That static was Topsy's lullaby, her telegram from home.

Then it stopped.  We were in a dead calm.  The meter readings were garbage.  Topsy squeezed my hand.

"Please, Beryl," she said, and she kissed me.  Vooshkupf couldn't kiss like that.

I opened the inner bay door.  Amor vincit omnia.  She walked out, and I closed it.  I opened the the hull door, waited a second, then closed it again.  Topsy was gone.  She had never been there in the first place.

I was starting to deploy Vooshkupf's gizmo when that brass registration plate crossed my eye:

 

"A-1001--MAN."

 

The phone was ringing, but I wasn't sure I wanted to answer it.  Scio istarum rerum nihil.

I opened the inner bay door and stepped into the detemporizing chamber.  I closed the inner bay door.  I opened the hull door and said hello to Topsy.  She was everywhere, but then, so am I-- As the poet says, "E pluribus unum!"--hippopotami, Uncle Joe, and you.