The Accidental Time Machine

15

“—Christ!”

“Oh, my,” Martha whispered. “It really works?”

“This is New Mexico?” Matt snapped the protective plastic dome back over the RESET button and stepped through the open door onto a manicured lawn. He turned to Martha, who stood staring. “It’s supposed to be desert.”

There was a white house that looked pretty much like a suburban rambler, though it wasn’t obvious what it was made of. The lawn was enclosed in a metal fence about shoulder high. On the other side of the fence, a nearly identical house, light beige, then a pale blue one, and so on, curving away in both directions. Behind them, a forest too regular to be natural.

The back door of the house slid open, and a man and woman of about middle age stepped out and looked at them warily, hands on hips. They were both wearing only shorts and sandals and were deeply tanned or of mixed race. Matthew assumed the latter, given a couple of millennia of intermarriage.

“How you do that?” the man said. His accent was odd but clear.

“Pushed a button,” Matt said. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, you’ll have to move it,” the woman said.

“Spoils the view,” the man said. “And it is our property.”

Matt looked over his shoulder. Twenty, thirty tons of bank vault? It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Where are we?” Martha said.

“East Los Angeles,” the woman said. “You aren’t dressed for it.”

“I’ll say.” Matt was stifling. He set the time machine down and pulled the rough robe over his head. He was wearing jeans and an MIT tee shirt.

“I can’t …” Martha said. Her face was turning bright red.

“We’ll find you something modest,” Matt said. “How far is town?”

“Los Angeles City?” the man said. “About four hundred kays.”

“Ah.” So they had landed close to the predicted place in New Mexico. It had just been annexed to Los Angeles, and suburbanified. “But if you just wanted to buy some women’s clothing?”

“Buy?” the woman frowned.

Matt gestured at the vault. “Money is one thing we have.”

She looked at her husband. “Money?”

He smiled at her. “You didn’t pay attention in school, Em. That’s what they had before bee shits.”

“Oh, I remember. Like dollars.”

“Bee … shits?” Matt said.

The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Where you from they still use money?”

“The past. We’re from the past.”

“Oh … key. From like when?”

“I started in the 2050s. Picked her up a couple of hundred years later.”

They just looked at him. Then Em broke into a broad grin. “It’s a movie! We’re in a movie, Arl!”

He nodded slowly. “Not supposed to say anything about it,” he murmured sotto voce. “That’s your time-travel machine? ”

“Yes, it is,” Matt said, then realized the man was looking at the incongruous bank vault. Concrete dust was still sifting from its sides. He hoped no one had been hurt when it disappeared; it probably was holding the ceiling up.

“Mind if we take a look?”

“No, I don’t mind.” Martha took a breath as if to speak; he silenced her with a look. See how this plays out. He put the actual time machine back into the bag and shouldered it.

The man and woman walked toward the vault door with exaggerated casualness, but then hesitated at the opening. “This thing won’t take off with us in it?”

“I’m sure it won’t, no. Not a chance.” Matt followed them in, Martha behind him. The four of them stood blinking in the semidarkness.

This part of the vault was mostly deposit boxes. They would be forced open eventually, but Martha found something more interesting—money bags.

“Look at this, Professor!” They were stacked like small flour sacks in a corner, four of them stenciled $2.5K IN Q and $10K IN D. Matt took out his Swiss Army knife and figured out which blade was an actual knife.

He cut the bag on top and quarters came cascading out.

They watched it with mild interest. “That’s what money used to look like,” Arl said. “Heavy stuff to carry around.” Matt scooped up a handful of aluminum quarters. Heavy?

“Can you imagine bee shits made out of metal?” Arl shook his head and smiled.

“So what’s a bee shit?” Matt said, thinking the answer should be “honey.”

Arl pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket and fanned them. Several different denominations, different colors. They all had the word BARTER ornately printed all over both sides. “A barter chit,” Arl said.

“Can I see?” Matt reached out, and Arl jerked the roll back protectively.

“He doesn’t know,” Em said. “They’re not like your old-fashioned money. They’re coded to the owner.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s like if you had a fish and I wanted it, but all that I had that you wanted was an apple. The fish is obviously worth more, so we bargain over how many B chits you get along with the apple. Say it’s five. I hand you the five, and when we’re both touching it, it knows it belongs to you. Until you pass it on to someone else.”

“How does it know?” Martha asked.

“Everybody’s DNA is different, you know? It just reads your DNA,” she said slowly, as if speaking to a child. She winked at Arl. Part of the movie.

Martha looked totally lost. “What’s DNA, Professor?”

“It’s in most of the cells in our bodies. I’ll explain. But it’s like fingerprints; everybody has a unique pattern.” He turned to the woman. “What, it analyzes the oils on your skin, your fingers?”

“How should I know?” she said defensively. “It’s just DNA.”

Matt gave a handful of coins to Arl. “These have to be worth something. Aren’t there coin collectors?”

He laughed. “You can find someone who collects almost anything. I don’t know anybody myself. You probably have to go all the way to LA.”

“Maybe we could barter you something,” the woman said innocently. “Take a hundred or so in case some collector shows up.”

“We could take a whole bag,” Arl said. “You’re not going to be carrying them around.”

That made Matt a little suspicious. Why would he want ten thousand one-dollar coins if they were worthless? “What would you want to exchange?”

He shrugged. “Come look at our stuff?”

They stepped outside, and Arl asked whether Matt wanted to close the door. “I think it’s safe here on our property. But you know people.”

“No; I don’t have the key.” He wasn’t sure the heavy thing would close anyway. “Nothing in there but worthless old money.” Arl nodded with lips pursed, perhaps calculating.

He wiped his thumb across the door plate—interesting that they locked up to go out into the backyard—and held it open for them.

“Stuff” it was. Most of the house was one huge warehouse room. Motorcycles and bicycles seemed to be specialties. Above a neat row of parked motorcycles hung a row of bicycles dangling from hooks, all looking new and shiny. Three walls were full of paintings and holos and one was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with hundreds of books, maybe a thousand. Martha stared at them; probably more books than she had ever seen outside of a library.

On the floor were obvious things like lawn mowers and vacuums, lamps, and fans, and many things whose functions were not obvious.

A door slid open as Arl approached it, and he stood in the doorway to let the others through.

This was a kitchen and pantry. Except for one wall with a window that looked out on the front lawn and street, every wall was covered with hanging pots and pans and utensils, and shelves of foodstuffs. There were hanging baskets of onions, potatoes, and fruit. A refrigerator and huge freezer, both with transparent doors.

Martha stared wildly around the room. “I’ve worked in the MIT kitchen, but I’ve never seen anything like this. You could feed a hundred people.”

“We must get almost a hundred people when Arl sets up the grill out front. He’s famous for his chicken.”

He clapped his hands together and grinned. “You could’ve counted almost a hundred last Sadday. They were all over the front lawn with their stuff.”

“What do they bring?” Matthew asked.

“Most of them straight barter for food and drink. Like you bring seven pieces of chicken; I cook six and keep one. Two whole chickens for a bottle of good wine.” He looked at Martha with interest. “What’s an MIT kitchen?”

“Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy.”

“Oh, wow—I should’ve known from your outfits. That’s in the old Christ Dominion?”

“I suppose. We call it the World of Christ.”

“They let you out?”

“Well, we sort of escaped,” Matt said.

“I guess you did,” Arl said. “How long ago was that?”

“Couple of thousand years.”

Arl nodded slowly, brow furrowing.

“It’s still there?” Martha said. “MIT?”

“Who knows? Nobody’s tried to cross the Mississippi since forever. They’ve got killer satellites waiting day and night with lasers. You don’t want to fly within a hundred kays. Was it that way back in your time?”

“I was only there for a few days.” He looked at Martha. “Do you know?”

“I don’t know what a killer satellite is,” she said in a small voice. “History says that the Lord’s Avenging Angels can smite invaders from their place in Heaven, above the sky. I’ve seen a moving picture of it happening, in the Museum of Theosophy, and some melted metal from a flying machine.”

“Could they still work, after a couple of thousand years?”

“Sure,” Arl said. “I’ve seen it on the news. Every now and then, they try to fly a robot plane over there. Pow, every time.”

“Hard to see how an automatic system could keep going for more than two thousand years. They must be replacing or repairing the satellites, or at least their sensors and lasers.”

Arl looked puzzled. “What do you mean? Machines repair themselves all the time.”

That gave Matt pause. “Not really old ones.”

“Well, I guess they’ve replaced the old ones with self-repairing ones. More than a thousand years ago, they could do that.”

Matt suddenly realized how far into the future he’d actually come. He’d been lulled by the similarities between these people and the ones at home; much less strange than Martha’s people. It was even easier to understand their speech.

“Seems funny that we can understand each other,” He put the thought to words. “If we’d gone backward two thousand years instead of forward, we couldn’t. It must be the cube.”

“Sure,” Arl said. “We see movies all the way back to the twentieth century, and understand most of it. Though people did funny things back then.”

“We still watch Shakespeare,” Em said. “But he’s hard to follow.”

“He was for us, too.” Matt followed Em’s gaze and saw that Martha was silently crying, tears rolling down her cheeks. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m so lost.”

Em took her hand and patted it. “You’ll get used to it, sweetheart.”

“But I won’t! This is Gomorrah, isn’t it? This is Hollywood. ”

“Huh-uh,” Arl said, shifting nervously. “I don’t know about Gum-gumorrow, but Hollywood’s over in LA.”

“We’ve been there three times,” Em said. “Rides and all.”

“But you don’t live in God and Jesus.”

“Well, we’re not religious ourselves,” Em said, still patting, “but there are those who are.” She looked anxiously at Arl. “The Reynoldses, down the street?”

“Yeah, they’re Christers. Always off to church.” He scratched his chin. “Bunch of Muslims, downtown, and Unitarians and B’hai all over the place. Not like it was in the East, though, in your time.”

Em gave her a tissue. “Thank you. What about now, in the East? People still live and worship over there?”

“Not many left, I don’t think,” Arl said. He looked at Em, then back at Matt. “This isn’t really a movie, is it?”

“Never said it was,” Matt said. “We are what we say we are, scholars from the past. I guess we should find a university. ”

“None nearby. Have to go to Santa Fe or Phoenix. Maybe just go on to LA. That’s the biggest.”

“Too far to walk. How do you get there, fly?”

Arl paused. “That’s what you would do, in your day?”

“That or drive. Cheaper to fly.”

“You’d take the train now, for the same reason. Flying’s ten, maybe twenty times as much, even for a good barterer.”

“What, you even haggle for airfare?”

“Bargain for it, yeah. You didn’t?”

“No, the government set the prices.”

He laughed. “And that’s it? Boy, they’d love that!”

“They do set a price in B chits,” Em said, “but not even half the people pay it. People who don’t have any choice or are so rich they don’t care. Everybody else, you show up with your luggage and something to barter with. By law, they have to show which seats are available, and you bargain with the agent.”

“If there’s no competition for the seat,” Arl said, “you can fly anywhere for almost nothing. But you never know.”

“Sounds like a clumsy way of doing business,” Matt said. “Everything takes so long.”

“But so what? It’s time well spent. If you just pay and get on the plane, the flyport wins and you lose. Wait ’em out and you can fly for less than cost.” He grinned. “Worth an extra day, for the satisfaction.” Em nodded enthusiastically.

Of course, Matthew knew people like that, who would go through hoops for any bargain, but a whole culture? A culture predicated on haggling?

Matt’s stomach growled audibly. He hadn’t had a thing to eat since that pickled egg two thousand years ago.

“Oh, you poor things,” Em said. “I didn’t offer you anything to eat or drink.”

“We don’t have any B chits,” Matt said, not sure whether he was joking.

Martha looked into the bag. “We have bread and cheese.”

“And that’s not all,” Matthew said, reaching into the bag and bringing out the wine bottle with appropriate reverence. “Two-thousand-year-old wine.”

Arl stared at it, struck momentarily dumb. “MIT 67?”

“Bottled at the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy sixty-seven years after the Second Coming.”

“That … could be worth something.”

“I should think so. Probably the only bottle of it in the world. Do you collect wine?”

“Only in a small way. But I know people who really are serious about it. I could broker an auction for fif—twenty percent.”

“Ten.”

“Oh, all right. Fifteen.” He took the bottle carefully. “If I may.” He walked around the dining room table to a small raised platform. A mirrored holo image of himself shimmered in the air.

“This is a straight American auction for B-chit valuta,” he said in an announcer’s voice. “Categories food and wine, antiquities, and curiosities. Minimum bid ten thousand. It is now 1310 LA time; the auction will be over at 1410.

“This is a bottle of wine produced more than two thousand years ago, in M.E. 2247, at the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy, in their year 67.” He turned to Matt. “What variety is it?”

“Scuppernong?”

“Of the rare scuppernong variety. The bidding starts now.” He set the bottle down on the platform.

He stepped down and “BC 10,000” floated in green characters where he had been standing. Then “BC 10,100” and the number flickered and quickly increased to 12,000, with a chime and a red question mark blinking.

“Question?” Arl said. An old bearded man appeared, wearing a skirt, or kilt, with what looked like a tuxedo jacket and a diagonal sash full of medals. Floating next to him, the identification “Miki Ikiman, Curator, LA Museum of Consumables.”

“Not to question your veracity, Arl Beekins, but what outside authority will vouch for this bottle’s antiquity?”

“I have the man who acquired it here. A time traveler from that period.”

The finger pointed at Matthew. “That is him?”

“Yes. When were you born, Matt?”

“March 4, 2030. Modern Era.”

“Not very,” the curator said dryly. “Are you willing to make the purchase contingent on verifying the bottle’s age?”

“Absolutely,” Arl said.

“I’ll stay in for a while, then,” the curator said, and disappeared, replaced by the floating number. Every time a new bid came in, it was topped by a number ending in the digits 37.

“That 37 is the LA museum system’s traditional code number,” Arl said. “Everybody local knows who they’re bidding against.”

“He didn’t question the idea that a time traveler brought it?”

“No. What, did you think … oh, you thought you were the first.”

“What, does it happen all the time?”

“No, just a few times. Ten or twelve, to my knowledge. We don’t know how to do it ourselves.”

“Did any of them come back from your future?” Martha asked. “Traveling back in time?”

“Not that I know of,” he said. “I thought that was impossible. ”

Martha started to cloud up again.

“We don’t know,” Matt said quickly. “I think I have evidence of at least one.”

“The ones we know about kept going forward.”

“Except the Chinese fellow,” Em said, “a couple of hundred years ago.”

“That’s right; he stayed. But he didn’t have a machine as such.” The chime and question mark again. “Question?”

An attractive woman of indeterminate age, wearing something gauzy, more like smoke than cloth, appeared and looked at Matt with a frown.

“I am Los Angeles,” she said. “You are the real Matthew Fuller? The assistant to the physicist Jonathan Marsh?”

“That’s right.”

“The historical record says you stole that machine from Professor Marsh.”

“History has it exactly wrong, then,” Matt said. “I invented the machine, and Marsh stole it from me.”

She brushed that away with a delicate wave. “I’m not concerned with crimes two thousand years cold. I would like to talk with you for a while, though. Perhaps a business proposition.”

“You’re Los Angeles, the city?”

“The county, you would say. I’m the intelligence that animates it and controls it. The spirit of Los Angeles. Perhaps you could come see me after the auction.”

“I’ll be glad to. May I bring my assistant?”

“Please do.” She gave Martha a quizzical look. “You should find something to wear. That makes me feel like sweating, and I’m not even human.” To Matt: “I’ll send a conveyance as soon as the auction is over.” She disappeared.

“Does that happen often?”

“Only at tax time. She can argue forever, in everybody’s house at once.”

Em touched Martha’s elbow. “Let me find you something to wear, dear.”

“But this is what I wear. I haven’t worn anything else since I was seventeen.”

“It’s a different world, Martha,” Matt said. “Let’s save the robe for when you get back home.”

“You could afford a few hundred outfits,” Arl said. The auction had reached 21,037. “You want to look nice for the city. Show her what you have, Em.”

“All right,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her. “If I don’t have to show my chest.” Curious, Matt thought, that she could show her everything to him, getting ready for bed, but wouldn’t match the older woman’s degree of exposure. She probably hadn’t been in as many topless bars as Matt.

Arl went to the refrigerator and began taking out cheese and fruit. He pushed some buttons on a thing the size of a toaster; it hummed for a minute and produced eight round slices of what smelled like fresh bread.

“Are you two connecting?” he said. “Or whatever they call doing it in your time.”

“No. We’ve actually just met. And she thinks of me as much older than she is. Professor and student. But it’s really only a few years.”

“Were you serious about taking her back?”

“Haven’t thought it through, really. She’d like to go back to her time, but I’d find it pretty horrible. She wouldn’t like mine, either. Godless.”

“You do think you can go back?”

“There are physical models for it, none proven. But I think I already have gone backward, or will.” He smiled. “Tenses can be a problem. I think that I stopped off in 2058 just long enough to save my own skin. It could have been someone else, who looked something like me. But I left a message that almost had to be from a future me.” Get in the car and go!

“Open table,” Arl said to the floor, and part of it rose up and reconfigured into a table with two benches. The top covered itself in what looked like white linen, and he set out the plates of snacks. “Wine or coffee?”

“Coffee.” See whether two thousand years had improved it. “How much do I owe you?”

He cast an expert eye over the table. “It would be about 29 each. But we’re engaged in trading together, so don’t worry. I’ll take it into account when we settle up.”

He filled a carafe with water and it hissed, and the smell of fresh coffee permeated the room.

“I’d like to broker some of those old coins for you. Not too many; if people knew you had bags of them, the price would fall through the floor.” He poured coffee for both of us. “We’d better lock up the time machine before dark, though, or you won’t have any coins to barter.”

No need to tell him yet that the vault was not the time machine. “I’m not sure that we can close the door,” Matt said, “or open it again if we did.” He sipped the hot coffee and it was wonderful. “People would just sneak into your backyard and steal things?”

“Steal?” Arl gave Matt a mystified look. “If it’s not locked up, then it’s not stealing.”

Em and Martha came back. Martha was wearing a light blue shift with a gold chain around her narrow waist. The shift came to midcalf but was slit to well above the knee. She walked stiffly in an unsuccessful attempt to not look sexy.

“She shouldn’t hide so much,” Em said. “ ‘If you have it, advertise it.’ But she wouldn’t even show one mam.”

“We … we don’t do that,” she said.

“You didn’t,” Em corrected. “Now is not then. You ought to be comfortable.”

“Let me get used to this first,” she pleaded.

“If it’s any consolation,” Matt said, “you look wonderful. ”

“Professor!” She stared at the ground but did smile. There was an uncomfortable silence. She looked at the cheese plate doubtfully and broke off a small piece. She nibbled at it, made a face, and put it back. “I’m afraid it’s gone bad,” she said.

Arl stared at the piece she’d put back. “That’s a rare Italian gorgonzola!”

“Well, it tastes as bad as it sounds.”

“Gorgonzola!” Matthew snatched it up, rolling his eyes, and got a wedge of apple in the other hand, and took a bite of each. Martha stared.

“If you can’t lock the time machine,” Arl said, “can someone just step in and take it into the future?”

“Not possible, no. Only I can turn it on.” Well, it was true that only he had turned it on.

“Then we could simply move the money, and whatever else that might have value, into my storeroom for the time being. If you decide to move on, I could deduct a reasonable amount for storage. Assuming that the coins do turn out to have some value.” He leaned back and looked at the floating sum, which changed from BC 35,700 to BC 35,937. “You wouldn’t have another bottle of wine in that bag? Or some other ancient collectible?”

“No, it’s stuff I need for time travel—to make the time machine work.” Like a gun and a porn notebook. “Maybe the bread and cheese would be interesting to scientists. Presumably it would be chemically different from what you make now.”

“I don’t think we have that kind of scientist. But I could try, while it’s still fresh.”

“ ‘That kind’?” Matt asked. “What kind do you have?”

“Well, I’m a food scientist myself. I know thousands of recipes. And Em has a doctorate in shopping science.”

“Arl is just as good at it,” she said modestly, “even without a degree.”

“What about physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy?”

“Oh, it’s all there. You can look it up,” Arl said. “But it’s for machines, of course, the research. People don’t think fast enough. Can’t remember enough.”

Matt was speechless. He looked at Martha for support. She was frowning at Em and Arl in confusion. “How can machines think?”

“They’ve been doing it for thousands of years,” Em said.

“More than two centuries before you were born, machine intelligence transformed the world.” Arl said. “When religious fanatics took over your part of the world, they got rid of most thinking machines. They kept the ones they needed, evidently, like the killer satellites that keep us out of their airspace.”

“It’s not Avenging Angels, dear.” Em offered her some cheese and apple slices. “Just machines, like the one that brought you here.”

She stared blankly at the food. “Is there somewhere I could talk to the professor alone? Back in the bank vault … time machine?”

“Sure,” Arl said. “Auction won’t close for almost a half hour.”

When they were outside, she took his hand and rushed him silently to the vault. Inside, she sat down on the stack of dollar coin sacks and stared at him.

“I feel like I’m going crazy. Like I’m in a crazy dream, a nightmare, and can’t wake up. You have to explain what’s going on.”

“Okay. My time machine took us 2094 years into the future—”

“Before that. You were running away from Jesus.”

“Yes and no. I needed money for travel …”

“Well, you got that.”

“But I didn’t mean to rob a bank.” Steal a bank, actually. “I was just going to cash in some old money for a thousand or so, and take it back, with the time machine, to where Jesus appears. Then use the machine to take me and all the machines in that room up into the future.

“I didn’t mean to kidnap you. I’m sorry. It’s an awful reward for saving a person’s life.”

She shook her head. “You and I think differently about rewards. I think God rewards us for good works and punishes us for bad. He puts us in positions where we have to make choices.”

Matt could only shrug.

“You were going to use your machine to take Jesus away. The illusion of Jesus, you said.”

“That, yes, but also to get out of Cambridge while I still had the option of escaping.”

She chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “So maybe God, or maybe chance, put me between you and that policeman. Why was he shooting at you?”

“Um … that’s a little embarrassing.” She just stared at him. “I went into the toilet to take a pee. The policeman was there, and he saw I wasn’t circumcised. Do you know what that is?”

She closed her eyes and shuddered. “They cut a part away from your thingie.”

“Well, the church I was born into required that. But my mother and father decided against letting them do it.”

“Really?” She smiled. “Me, too. My mother wouldn’t let them circumcise me, when I was a girl.”

“They circumcise women?”

“Unless the mother objects. Mother had to pay a fine and do penance for a year.”

“Why do they do it?”

“Well, why do they do it to you?”

“It’s just a custom left over from the old days, and it made some sense when men didn’t bathe regularly. But it doesn’t have the same effect as on women, on girls.”

“What is that supposed to be?”

“They didn’t tell you?”

“Nothing specific, not yet. That’s a big part of my next passage, when I turn twenty-one. Next month.”

“In some cultures, mostly before I was born, they did it to deny sexual pleasure to women.”

She shook her head in two small jerks. “I wouldn’t know anything about that, not yet. I’m not allowed.”

“You will be, after you’re twenty-one?”

“I don’t know. If they told you the secrets before your Passage, they wouldn’t be secrets.” Her blush indicated that she did know something. “So how did you make everything disappear? How did you turn this bank vault into a time machine?”

He lifted the machine out of the bag. “This is the actual time machine.” He tapped on the plastic dome. “If I push this button, it goes forward in time. And takes everything nearby along with it.” He held up the alligator clip. “If this little thing is in contact with a metal container, like this vault, then everything inside the container goes.”

“But just one way. You can’t go back.”

“I don’t know how, yet. But I’m sure it can be done. Not in my time and certainly not in yours. Another reason I had to move forward. But I’m sorry I dragged you along.”

“Don’t be. There’s a reason for everything.”

There was a whisper like a giant exhaling, and a vehicle drifted to a landing between them and the house. It was a sleek functional airfoil, as reflective as mercury, shimmering except for the solid blue block letters LA.

Matt checked his watch. “Auction should be closing now.”

She was hypnotized. “That’s what you fly in?”

“Nowadays, I guess so. If you can afford it.” As they walked by the thing, she gaped at her fun-house-mirror reflection. “It makes you look pregnant.”

She smiled. “That would have been right after the Passage. At least you saved me from that.”

Maybe so, he was thinking, and maybe not. I ought to keep an eye out for Safeluv patches, or whatever they use up here.

They looked at the thing for a minute, and nothing happened. “I guess it’ll tell us when it’s ready.”

The door to the house opened. Arl looked at the ship and didn’t react. “Congratulations. The museum got it for 62,037. Come in and look at your choices.”

“Choices?” They followed him back to the dining room. In the air over the platform there was a glowing list of about a hundred things and services with their BC value. An ancient Egyptian ring for BC 50,000—that would be practical.

“What, we can’t just take the B chits?”

“That would be, well, extremely impolite. Almost illegal. But you can maximize the valuta change by picking something of low value—though of course you do need 9300 in valuta for my commission.”

“There’s the cheapest thing,” Martha said. The label was Plastic dildo, late 22nd, no batteries, BC 400. She touched the line, and an enlarged holo appeared.

She jerked her hand away. “Oh my.” It was very realistic.

“Maybe,” Em said. “You probably want something small and tradable. But without batteries, I don’t know.”

“Maybe this.” Matt touched a line to make the embarrassing image go away. This one said German Fernglasmaschine circa 2200, 5X-500X, BC 1800. It looked like a small pair of binoculars with handgrips and a box like a battery case underneath.

“The Germans are good with those,” Arl said, “but I have a Chinese pair almost as good, even older, that I’d let go of for half that.”

Los Angeles appeared next to the glowing list. “Your chariot awaits, Dr. Fuller.”

“Professor,” he said automatically, not having a real doctorate. “Let’s take the binoculars?” he said to Martha.

“Please, let’s,” she said, either eager to leave or anxious that he might choose the other.

“This one,” Arl said with his finger on the line, which blinked twice and disappeared. “It will be here in a day or so.” There was a black box next to the platform. He opened it with a thumb-swipe. It enclosed stacks of BC bills; he carefully counted out BC 50,851 and handed the thick stack to Matt. “Minus my commission and the dress. Don’t worry about the cheese and coffee.”

Matt put the thick wad into his pants pocket. “Thanks, um … see you soon.”

“La willing,” they both said.

Matt and Martha followed Los Angeles out the door. She didn’t bother to pretend walking, but drifted like a solid daytime ghost.

“ ‘La willing’?”

“They call me La,” she said. “Ell Ay.” Doors had opened in the craft, resembling the wings of a coasting seabird. La slipped into a swivel chair in the front.

Martha stepped into the craft and perched uneasily on the luxurious high-backed leather couch. Matt got onto the couch next to her and fastened a seat belt. “Where are we going?” Martha asked.

“To my palace. Fasten your belt.” Matt reached over and helped her with the mechanism. “You’ll be more comfortable there than with these people, I think. I’m equally comfortable everywhere, of course.”

“Not being flesh,” Matt said.

“No. I’m centuries away from needing that.”

“But those people”—he inclined his head toward the house—“they’re not projections. They’re regular people?”

“Very regular. Very typical.” As the doors eased shut, the ship became transparent. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever flown, Martha?”

“No,” she said with a rising inflection, looking all around. At least the floor was opaque.

“It’s safer than walking. But it might take you a few minutes to get used to it.”

The ship rose like a fast elevator, the ground dropping away, roofs shrinking. Martha clutched for Matt and buried her face in his chest.

Arms full of soft girl for the first time in a long time, Matt patted her back reassuringly. “It’s all right. It’s very ordinary.” But please don’t let go just yet.

“I know, Professor,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’ve seen pictures. But it’s so fast.”

La smiled knowingly at Matt. “She’ll be all right. I’ll keep it slow.”

“How fast can it go?”

“Mach 6 to 8, depending on the load and the altitude. But we’re not going far; I’ll keep it subsonic.”

The suburbs rolled on and on toward the horizon, then stopped. “Mountains,” Matt said with a little awe. He’d only been west a couple of times in his life. “Look, Martha.”

She carefully lifted her head and whispered, “God,” not in blasphemy.

“No buildings,” Matt said.

“All these mountains are protected. About half of the area west of the Mississippi has been more or less artfully ignored, and has gone back to its natural state. A few people live in the protected areas, antisocial or sick of the modern world. But the law says they have to live in a primitive way, and they usually tire of it soon.”

“You said those two, Arl and Em, were typical? That level of prosperity?” Not to say excess.

“They’re actually below average, the forty-second percentile in terms of total holdings. They’re not very good at horse-trading, as you would say.”

“Horses?” Matt had never heard the term.

“Bartering. They have a little less than the basic dole that people get at birth.”

“You know that much about everyone?” Martha said, not taking her eyes off the mountains rolling under them.

“Much more than that,” La said, “but that’s all I am, Martha—memories, perceptions, thought processes. I’m what’s evolved from a human committee and a machine that was constructed to keep this huge city running.”

“A city of millionaires,” Matt said.

She nodded placidly. “It’s been that way for centuries. Ever since we started getting free power from the sea, room-temperature fusion. Automated synthesis of consumables, distributed to a stable population of 100 million. Everybody rich and happy.” She smiled. “Also complacent and rather stupid, you may have noticed.”

“Arl said that people don’t do science anymore. It’s too complicated, and has to be done by machines.”

“What, are you worried about unemployment? There aren’t any jobs, as such, for anybody. Certainly none for physics professors two millenniums out of date.”

“But you do have universities. She had a doctorate, they said.”

“The universities are like social clubs, I’m afraid. They give each other pieces of paper; it keeps them happy. Out of trouble.”

“No wonder people take to the hills.”

“You’d be surprised how few.”

“But there must be people doing the Lord’s work,” Martha said. “That takes education.”

“That depends on whom you’re preaching to.” La shook her head, perhaps in sympathy. “There’s not much organized religion. Not much religion at all.”

“The world has been that way before.”

La looked over her shoulder, in the direction of travel. “Getting close to home now.”

“We can’t have gone four hundred kilometers,” Matt said.

“Oh, I don’t live in the city proper. I hope you do like mountains.”

Matt leaned to his left and could see that they were approaching the “palace,” a delicate Disney fantasy of a place, resting on a pinnacle that couldn’t have been natural.

“But you’re not really ‘here’ the way we are. You don’t live in a physical place. Arl seemed to think you could be everywhere at once, at least at tax time.”

“Complaining again. Yes, I spread myself pretty thin that time of the year.

“But I do always have a locus. I can generate 100 million images that can all do something simple, like arguing over taxes. There’s still a ‘me,’ though, usually here in the palace.”

The craft had been losing speed with a low rushing sound. It hovered over a lawn and descended. “This is where my physical memory is located—so I do feel more comfortable here. Even a hundred or so kilometers away, I can feel the femtosecond lag in response time.”

“We must seem pretty slow to you,” Martha said, which slightly surprised Matt. But she wasn’t dumb.

“Not really. I had flesh once. I have a feeling for the human passage of time.” She turned to Matt. “And the inhuman. Let me get you settled into your apartment, and then we can talk about that machine in your bag. The one you stole from poor Professor Marsh.”

An apparently human valet led them to a two-bedroom apartment, simplifying Matt’s existence while dampening his hopes.

The apartment was conservative twenty-first century, lots of wood and cloth and stucco. Lamps instead of glowing walls. Doors that apparently didn’t morph open. Matt had to show her how the toilet worked; it was the paperless kind, using jets of water and air. The first time she used it, she squealed and giggled in a satisfying way.

They both had large closets full of clothes. Martha sorted through hers and picked out slacks and a long-sleeved shirt.

“This is pretty,” she said, stepping out of the outfit Em had chosen, “but it’s too, you know, revealing. She wriggled into the shirt, otherwise nude, and noticed Matt’s expression. “This doesn’t bother you, Professor?”

“Oh no, no. I’m getting used to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re just not so casual about, uh, being naked where I come from.”

“Dressing? That’s silly.”

“I agree. I totally agree.”

“Well, you ought to change, too. You don’t mind my saying so?”

“No, no, that’s … fine.” It did pose a tactical problem, which showed no immediate sign of going away. He solved the problem by grabbing clothes at random and changing with his back to her. She probably didn’t see anything, but then she probably wasn’t looking.

The valet had shown them where to go when they were ready, a parlor room at the end of their corridor.

It looked old and French, delicate ornate furniture, ancient oil paintings on fabric-covered walls. La was softly playing on a harpsichord when they walked in.

“Welcome.” She stood up and gestured to where three chairs were arranged around a glass-topped table with a tea service and a plate of cookies and petits fours.

Matt moved the teapot to one side and lifted out the machine. “I take it that even now, you don’t have one of these.” La sat down staring at it, and shook her head. “And you don’t know how it works?”

“How? No,” she said. “It’s been clear for more than a thousand years why your machine works. But knowing why isn’t the same as knowing how. Knowing that E = mc² doesn’t mean you can take some kitchen appliance and turn it into a nuclear weapon.”

“So why does it work?”

“The part that’s broken is the graviton generator. But it’s not broken in four-dimensional space-time. That’s why they could build a thousand copies of the machine and never duplicate its effect.

“In ‘our’ space-time, as we affectionately call it, the calibrator works perfectly. One puny graviton per photon. But in some dimension five or higher, it spews out a torrent of gravitons.” She leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. “How can I put this in a way you can understand?”

Matt was growing excited. “I think I know what you’re getting at!”

She nodded. “In your primitive terms—they still used string theory?”

“Go on, yes?”

“In that way of thinking, our space-time continuum is a four-dimensional brane floating through a larger ten- or eleven-dimensional universe—”

“Wait,” Martha pleaded, “I don’t understand. A floating brain?”

Matt spelled the word. “It’s short for ‘membrane.’ ”

“They couldn’t just say membrane?”

“ ‘Membrane’ means something else. A brane is like … it’s like a reality. Like we live in one four-dimensional reality, but there could be countless others.”

“But where would you put them? Where could they be?”

“They’re inside a larger brane. Five or six or more dimensions. ”

“What would that look like?”

He shrugged. “We don’t know. We can only perceive four dimensions.” She nodded slowly, lips pursed.

“All right,” La said. “As Matt said, there are countless other four-dimensional branes, but what’s important are the five-dimensional ones that can be made to envelop ours. Your broken graviton generator attracted one of these beasts and apparently made a permanent connection. Permanent from our point of view. Instantaneous, hardly noticeable, in five dimensions.”

“But in ours,” Matt said, “it makes a closed timelike curve?”

“In a way. But that would only make a time machine that went backward in time. Yours moves forward, faster and faster. Something in that five-dimensional brane is connected to a huge singularity in our brane: the heat death of the universe. The end of time.”

“The End Times,” Martha whispered.

“It’s more than ten to the thousandth power years in the future. The stars die, the black holes evaporate, and finally everything stops moving.”

“I want to go find out whether I can die.” La’s smile was almost a leer. “I think we can help each other.”