Up The Line

10.

I was troubled about those twenty-one extra Dajanis, but the smart alecks in the class quickly figured out why they hadn’t all jammed up together here in now-time. It had to do with the fundamental limitations of the Benchley Effect in achieving down-the-line, or forward, travel.

My classmate Mr. Burlingame explained it all to me after class. It was his quaint way of trying to seduce me. He didn’t score, but I learned a little time theory.

When you go down the line, he told me, you can come forward only as far as you had previously jumped up the line, plus the amount of absolute time elapsed during your stay up the line. That is, if you jump from March 20, 2059, say, to the spring of 1801, and spend three months in 1801, you can come forward again as far as June 20, 2059. But you can’t jump down the line to August, 2059, nor can you jump to 2159 or 20590.

There is no way at all to get into your own future.

I don’t know why this is so. Mr. Burlingame placed his pale palm on my knee and gave me the theoretical substructure for it, but I was too busy fending him off to follow it.

In fact, although Dajani later spent three sessions simply instructing us on the mechanics of the Benchley Effect, I still can’t say for sure how the whole thing works, or why, or even if. At times I suspect I’ve dreamed it all.

Anyway, there aren’t twenty-two Dajanis in now-time because whenever Dajani made the Crucifixion run, he always jumped back to now-time at a point somewhat prior to his next departure for the past. He couldn’t help himself about that; if you go up the line in January, spend a couple of weeks in an earlier era, and come back, you’ve got to land in January or maybe February of the year you started from. And if your next jump isn’t scheduled until March, there’s no way you can overlap yourself.

So the Dajani who escorted tourists to Golgotha was always the “same” one, from the point of view of people in now-time. At the other end of the jump, though, a couple dozen Dajanis have been piling up, since he keeps jumping from different points in now-time to the same point in then-time. The same happens to anybody who makes repeated jumps to one spot up the line. This is the Paradox of Temporal Accumulation. You can have it.

When not wrestling with such paradoxes I passed my time pleasantly in pleasure, as usual. There were always plenty of willing girls hanging around Sam’s place.

In those days I chased crotch quite a bit. Obsessively, even. The pursuit of cunt occupied all my idle hours; it seemed a night wasted if I hadn’t slid down that slippery slope at least once. It never occurred to me that it might be worthwhile for me to seek a relationship with a member of the opposite sex that was more than six inches deep. What they call “love.”

Shallow, callow youth that I was, I wasn’t interested in “love.”

On the other hand, maybe I wasn’t so shallow. For now I’ve tried “love” and I don’t see where I’m the happier for it. I’m a lot worse off than before, as a matter of fact.

Of course, nobody told me to fall in love with someone who lived up the line.