A Gift of Time Read online

  I looked up to see Ell standing at the end of the case containing the rod. “James, I’d like you to meet Lovely Pebble. Lovely Pebble, this is my son, James.”

  Jimmy was almost fifty, six-two and two hundred pounds, but his eyes looked like when he was a kid and we took him to the circus and a passing elephant had taken a dump and splatted it on his bare leg. “Pop?” was all he could come up with.

  “Don’t worry, James. She’s not real.”

  “I’m as real as you two. It’s just that I live in a non-biological neural network and you live in biological ones,” she said without moving her lips.

  Jimmy’s eyes grew even bigger. Barbara had taught him the social graces, and I could see he was working hard on a salutation. I was anxious to see what it might be.

  “Pop,” he said again. “Where’re her clothes?”

  “James,” I scolded. “Where’re your manners. Would you rather she get dressed? She has a clown suit.”

  Jimmy looked first at me in utter confusion then back at Ell. “No, no. It’s okay. Sorry, ma’am.” He turned away in his guileless modesty then glanced back again. “You’re fine just the way you are.”

  “Good,” I said as I pushed up on one rickety knee then the other until I was standing. “Well, Ell, there’s your part. Let’s hope it works. James, would you grab that thing and carry it into the glider. And be careful. It’s milled to exceptionally close tolerances. Don’t ding it.”

  Just as Jimmy hoisted the rod, the gravelly blare of a loudhailer reverberated through the crater. “Drop the fission rod and raise your hands. We have an arrest warrant for Micajah Fenton and any unnamed accomplices found with him. We are authorized to use deadly force if you resist.”

  “What the hell, Pop?”

  “No time to explain, James. Just get that rod into the glider. Now! I’ll stay out here and talk sense to them. It’s all a big misunderstanding.”

  Jimmy scrambled up through the door just as a hail of lead clanged into the side of the glider and ripped up the ground around me. I found myself lying on the bullet-riddled earth staring at the sky. A sensation, warm and wet, spread out over my lower leg. Inside the glider, Ell was telling Jimmy to hold the rod into the proper installation position.

  “Just get it close and the glider will latch on to it and do the rest.”

  There were more orders coming from the bullhorn about not moving, but a moment later I found myself lying on the floor of the glider looking up at the crater rim. A line of helmeted men in dark fatigues fringed the edge, stock still, weapons pointed down at me.

  “It’s okay. The glider is back in operation so you can see through the walls. You’re not actually out in the open anymore.”

  The ground dropped away as we rose upward toward the bristle of armed men. Then there was a small lurch and the crater disappeared; replaced by the original terrain. It was as though the glider had never been there.

  “What do you want to do with the company helicopter?”

  “Can you bring it with us?” I managed to grunt. Pain was rapidly building in my lower leg.

  “Sure.”

  A moment later we were surrounded by stars.

  Chapter 7

  Jimmy emerged from the shock of finding himself sitting on a featureless platform somewhere in deep space just as I began my own descent into a trauma-induced bemusement.

  “What the hell’s going on, Pop?”

  I was considering how my foot stuck out at a near ninety-degree angle from the way it had been most of my life. Obviously, both the tibia and fibula were shot clean through. But Jimmy was still waiting for an answer. What could I possibly say that would explain it all? Finally overcoming the fascination with my foot, I recalled as a kid he had read a lot of science fiction. I mumbled, “You’re having a close encounter of the fourth kind, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy’s eyes darted about, but the glider walls and overhead were now transparent so there wasn’t much visible except its nondescript, gray deck awash in starlight. He finally turned back to me. “You mean ….”

  “Yeah,” I grunted as I continued to study my leg. That seemed to bring him back to reality, strange though it had become.

  “Pop. Your leg’s almost shot off. Stop looking at it. You’ll go into shock.” Finally galvanized to action, Jimmy removed his belt and made a tourniquet around my calf to stop the bleeding. Then he glanced around anxiously for Ell. Several more seconds passed before she reappeared.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting. I was searching for human medical data but we have nothing on human physiology or medical practice since we haven’t explored this side of the galaxy in much detail.”

  “This side of the galaxy?” Jimmy muttered under his breath.

  “I had the glider run a general scan of your biological systems, though. It’s working to stabilize you right now. You’ll feel much better in a moment.”

  I tried to thank her but coughed up blood instead.

  “Pop, what’s the matter? Are you hit somewhere else?”

  Jimmy sat me up. “You’re bleeding a little around a small hole in your shirt near the middle of your back. Looks like you might have picked up a piece of shrapnel from all those bullets ricocheting around out there. A piece must have lodged in a lung.” He looked around at Ell. “Do you have any way to stop the internal bleeding? It will kill him if it continues.”

  “The glider can change nerve cell responses. It’s designed to do that. So it can stabilize his vital signs to some extent, but it was never designed to replace destroyed tissue.”

  “But he’ll die if he doesn’t get medical help soon. Can you get us back to a hospital?”

  “I’ll try but I don’t know what effect the replacement rod has had on the navigation system yet. It may be thrown off in both the spatial and temporal directions by the impurities. That’s why I programmed this jump out well away from Earth to negate the chance of us ending up far below the earth’s surface through a navigational error. The pressure there would crush the glider.”

  “How long will it take to figure out whether the nav system is working properly?”

  “I already know it’s not working properly. The glider isn’t picking up any radio signals from the direction of Earth. I programmed a jump only across space, not time. But it looks like we ended up in a period when earth didn’t have radio. Could be a hundred years in your past. Or a million. Or even the far future. The glider is working on the star and planetary positions now to determine whether we’re in your future or your past. Should have some data in a few seconds but it’ll still take a good while to program a new set of navigational tables to work with the replacement rod.”

  “That may be too late.”

  “I can upload his entire consciousness to one of the seven extra crew slots in the glider, but it will take several hours. And I can’t do both that and work on the navigational issue. It will take almost all of the glider’s remaining resources to handle the upload. I’ve done lower level creatures for study but never a human—or any other intelligent lifeform for that matter. So I’m only guessing on the time required. That means we have to decide now which way to go.”

  “No. I don’t want your standard upload,” I managed to gasp. “It would just be a copy. After we talked about it, though, I’ve thought about that problem. If I understand what you told me, there seems to be a way around it if the glider can handle it.”

  “Well, let’s hear it.”

  Each breath drained more of my energy as blood seeped into my lungs. I struggled to continue. “You mentioned you transfer yourself across your networks … and don’t run into the duplicate copy problem. Why is that?”

  “I’m always in the Network. When I stream from one place to another I’m still being processed as a single being in both the upload and download locations. Even though parts of me end up for a time en route to a new location, both locations are still working in concert across the system. There’s no copy being made. I just live at a little slower pace for
a moment or two.”

  “Can the glider do that with me?”

  “No. You aren’t yet a part of the Network.”

  “But suppose, like you, I could remain aware of the transfer as it was happening. Suppose the glider fed the experience of the uploaded portion back to the original me as it was happening.” I paused trying to keep my thoughts together. “As if I were part of the Network. With a feedback loop, there wouldn’t be two separate Cagers. Both the real and virtual me would remain as one entity ... just like you when you move about in your network. I would be aware of both worlds the whole time as though I were one person. Two different worlds; one person.”

  I paused to catch my breath and coughed up more blood. Warm rivulets trickled down my cheek. I wiped at my face. My hand came away slick with gore. Another cough sprayed blood across Jimmy’s sleeve. I continued.

  “When I was done there would be no conscious me left here. I would leave behind only my body ... quite dead.” I began wheezing and discovered I no longer had the energy to continue speaking. I laid back and thought of the cat crossing the electrified fence in Cat’s Cradle. Before he was finished he, too, was dead but he was on the other side. I dredged up some inner strength to ask a final question. “Could the glider do that?”

  “I’m not sure. It would be a first. But this whole experience with you has been a first.”

  “Pop, we’re wasting time. Is that what you want to do?”

  I lay gazing up at those cold, unblinking stars scattered across the desolate blackness outside the glider’s walls. I was too old and battered now to try hanging on to my body any longer. Better dead than old and cripple too. But hadn’t that been my plan all along? I nodded my affirmative.

  Ell knelt down by my head. “Good choice.” I could hear her conversation with the glider as she worked but it made no sense to me. A moment later the stars spiraled outward as my mind began to unravel.

  I struggled to retain consciousness as memories shuffled about, shifting positions, organizing into queues until, like the stars, they too were flung outwards beyond my grasp. The disintegration of my mind pushed me into a perceptual paralysis for one long, unbalanced moment until to my great relief my life flew back together again. The pieces flocking, reassembling, forming a new me from the murmuration of my scattered self. After a time I became aware of being in two places at once. In one world I lay racked in pain but in the other I stood on a high escarpment overlooking a landscape so bizarre that for a time I could not grasp exactly what was unfolding before me. Ell waited at my side, anxious, watching, yet I could see her leaning in over me in the glider too. Then Jimmy and I locked eyes briefly before I forced myself to turn away. For, if I carried out what I was contemplating, I was looking into the eyes of my son who would never be born.

  Chapter 8

  I don’t know how long the transfer took. There had been no beat of passing time as my memories reassembled in fits and starts. Every event of my life swirled about the center of my transitory existence as they sorted out one by one in long, loosely linked concatenations. Then finally, like an old engine pulling away from the platform, couplings clanking taut, jolting each car down the line into motion, my world slowly lurched forward again until I found myself complete in a very different place with a very different mind. I could now operate the glider.

  With a final tug, I pulled the last remaining residue in my old biological neurons across that strange chasm I had just traversed. I stood frozen in amazement that, like Elijah and Enoch before me, I had slipped Death’s implacable snare.

  I had crossed over to a place where minds dwelled in machines for there was no life here to host a mind. But where there was no life, there could be no death. Then it struck me there could be no humans either and I wondered what I now was. What of me had crossed that divide? It couldn’t have been my soul. If I’d had one. Souls didn’t live in machines. Or did they? I was pretty sure nothing had come across but memories. But memories are cold comfort when you find yourself changed beyond recognition and utterly alone in a bewildering, unfamiliar existence.

  Then I saw Ell standing next to me.

  I finally shook free of my brief panic. There would be time enough later to sort through the incongruities of my new condition.

  “So did it work?” Ell’s question finally drew me fully into her domain.

  I answered with utter astonishment, “Yes, I think it did.” I held my hand out and flexed my fingers. “I’m me. Not a copy. I felt myself moving into this place. I didn’t just wake up here.”

  Ell looked as astounded as I felt. “I didn’t know there was a way to do that. I don’t think anyone did. Yet the glider handled it perfectly.” Now her lips moved as she spoke. I was in her reality and it was nothing like I had expected.

  As I acclimated to my new surroundings, a distant roar seeped into my awareness. I swung about to see floating mountains hanging in a firmament as clear and blue as Arctic ice. Waterfalls white with froth thundered off ragged cliffs to vanish into vapor clouds drifting over jungle canopy far below. Above us, erratic flocks of jungle birds flowed in undulating streams of green and red. Spiraling down, they settled into the foliage atop the nearest mountain. And beyond all that, flights of distant clouds streamed wakes of rain across the horizon.

  I finally shook myself away from the enchantment and turned back toward Ell. Behind her the local terrain rose precipitously. Banyan-like trees trailed roots from their branches holding them at precarious angles against the mountain’s face. A rocky trail wound steeply upwards into a primeval forest of ancient trees gnarled and hung with moss. I looked back at other mountains floating in the distance. Apparently Ell and I occupied an outcrop on one of their counterparts.

  “How do you like it?”

  “I have no words. It’s alien. Yet somehow familiar.”

  “The glider pulled those floating mountains from your memory. You must have dreamed of them at some time in the past and liked them.”

  “I think I saw fantasy paintings like that somewhere. And the colors. From that popular Maxfield Parrish painting perhaps. You even look like the standing girl in that piece. Daybreak. Is that how this works? The glider pulls up images from my mind and builds a world for me?”

  “Well, that’s one way. You have total control over your world, though, if you want to get involved.”

  “No. This one will do fine,” I said as an iridescent blue-on-cinnamon millipede glided across a flat rock at the edge of the forest. An instant later, a diminutive dinosaur with a brightly feathered head crest leaped on it and pulled it apart while regarding me with a pitiless, reptilian eye. Then it gave a small, bird-like cry and with a shake of its head scurried back into the undergrowth.

  “That was from your Triassic,” Ell noted. “Not everything you see came from you.”

  I nodded toward the path up the mountainside. “And up there?”

  “Your home.”

  “The glider reconstructed my old home?”

  “Better. It made a home like you might have built if money and technology were not factors. Want to see it?”

  The trail wound across mossy rocks and through sun-dappled, tree tunnels occasionally coming out of the jungle to skirt along a rocky cliff face with a view of more jungle a thousand yards below. The ascent was effortless and for the first time I noticed I inhabited a vastly fitter body. As I stopped to examine myself, Ell said, “I provided the details for your body. My original physiology is totally different from yours so, if I didn’t get the details just right, you can change it out. But I think you look quite nice.”

  “I always suspected you looked rather different from the image you display to me. How different are you anyway? Can you show me?”

  Ell hesitated for a moment then smiled knowingly as she jumped atop a boulder and turned toward me. “Trust me. You don’t want to see that me. And it doesn’t much matter. I’ve lived in this virtual world so long I don’t consider myself as having any particular form. I can show y
ou the figure I normally take if you want.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “The physicist’s solution to any problem involving a complex shape.” Ell floated in front of me as a silvery sphere. “I liked you better with all the curves.”

  As Ell reformed to her previous image, I recalled we had bigger problems than touring my house at the top of the floating mountain. “Maybe we getter get back to the real world before spending any more time here—wherever here is.”

  “Perhaps so. You now know, whether you are aware of it or not, how to project your image back into that world. So let’s go.”

  And we did. I wrapped myself in the same clothes I wore into work to try to soften the shock Jimmy would have at seeing his Pop in a younger body. It was as natural as breathing had been when I was still alive. I stood looking down on Jimmy as he sat next to my now lifeless real-world self. For all his bulk, he looked like the little boy I had never spent much time with. That was part of our connection problem I suspected. I had never made an effort to get to know him. My relationship with my son was another of my failures. Perhaps the worst of the long string. And yet he seemed truly saddened at my apparent death.

  “Don’t look so glum, kid. I made it across to a vacant crew slot and now live on a flying mountain somewhere in Never Never Land.”

  Jimmy gave a start and leaped to his feet. “Pop. Is that you?”

  “Well, not in the flesh, but, yes.”

  “Then you’re really your old self? Not a copy.”

  “Really me. Regrets and all.”

  “Regrets?” Jimmy finally caught on. “Oh, you mean me and Mom don’t you? I understand. You were working hard to make a life for us. There were good times though. And you built Fenton Industries up from nothing.”

  “And that’s now yours. All of the hard work is done. The company almost runs itself so spend your time getting to know your kids while you still can. Don’t do what I did.”