Bootstrapped

"Cloe?" The older woman stopped. "I know no one named Cloe."

"You don't? She seemed to know you. Maybe you aren't the person I was supposed to see." I looked around, hesitantly.

"But I am. I have been expecting you for a long time, Trish." She tapped her lips lightly with the tip of a finger. "Cloe . . . Cloe--Oh! Cloe, of course! It had slipped my mind completely. She told you to call her that, didn't she?"

"Isn't that her name?"

Leda smiled. "It's as good a name as any, I suppose. Here we are." She ushered me into a small, but cheerfully bright room. It contained no furniture of any sort, but the floor was as soft and warm as human flesh. It made me want to enter on tiptoe--or back away. "Sit down. I'll be back in a moment."

I looked around for something to sit on, then turned to ask Leda for a chair. But Leda was gone. The door through which we had entered was gone. More worried now than ever, I was about to start groping the wall for a hidden entrance when suddenly a portion of the wall's surface directly before me dilated like a camera shutter opening; Leda reentered, carrying a carafe of pleasantly bubbling clear liquid, and a cup. She filled the cup and handed it over.

"Aren't you drinking?" I asked, suspiciously.

"Presently. I want to attend your wounds first."

"Okay," I said, although it wasn't okay at all. Nothing here was okay. Putting the glass to my lips, I sipped at the bubbling liquid and then held the glass away. It tasted good. It tasted almost indecently good. "What is this?" I asked, sniffing cautiously at the surface. "Wine?"

"No dear, it's water."

I frowned. "Not any water that I've ever tasted," I said, sniffing again. "What is it, really?"

Leda laughed. "I assure you, Trish, no ill will befall you drinking that liquid. Now go ahead."

I drank, but slowly. The liquid felt almost solid in its texture, like fine silk gliding across the tongue. I found it quite refreshing. "May I have another?" I asked, holding out the glass.

"Help yourself."

While I did, Leda worked deftly with a salve that smarted at first, then soothed gently. "Thank you," I said as the woman applied the salve to my throbbing lips. "You don't know how good that feels."

Leda never got to answer because, suddenly bone-weary, yawning deeply, I tried to set the glass on the floor. It slipped from my relaxing fingers and fell the final two inches to the surface, spilling liquid over the top. The woman held me by the shoulders as I fell sideways, helping me to the floor. I smiled at her as the mist swallowed her up. "Nite, nite," a voice said from very far off.

"Sweet dreams, my dear. You have such a day ahead of you."

Darkness came and wrapped me in its blanket of sleep.

* * *

I was in my dorm room. It was late afternoon and there was cheerful music drifting in through the open window from the quad below, some 70's blue-eyed soul tune I recognized but couldn't put a name to. I was stretched back in my swivel chair, legs flung far apart and one heel defiantly up on the corner of the desk. There was a bottle of Starbucks French Vanilla Latte in my right hand. I relaxed, eyes closed, letting the happiness snuggle deep into my body. This was such a fine end to the day. I had finished my damned thesis. Gregory was coming over to pick me up. There was the promise of good food and maybe good sex in my immediate future, and--

I sat bolt upright. The sight of the strange room brought me back into reality if not into self-possession. I had time to look around and time for panic to constrict my throat to the size of a pencil shaft when the door shuttered open and Leda stepped through. "Feeling better?" she asked.

I coughed in my confusion. "Yes, but what is this?" I demanded.

"We'll get to that. How about a little breakfast first?"

On Trish Wilson's scale of requirements that morning, breakfast rated just above being run over by a Mack truck. "Fuck food! I want to know what's going on!"

Leda graced me with a tolerant smile, folded her hands before her and stepped without speaking through the open door. Grumbling, I followed. We walked a short distance down the passageway to another room, half the size, but possessing a balcony hanging high over a green countryside. A soft, warm, summer breeze wafted through. There was a peculiar, octagonal table with five chairs clustered loosely around it near the balcony door. Each side of the table was a different length, and each chair was made in a different style and upholstered in a uniquely different pattern. We sat down and immediately maidservants entered to serve the meal. I tried not to stare.

"Thank you dear," Leda said as the first girl stopped beside her, genuflected to one knee and removed a great tray of fruit from atop her head. The fruit was gorgeous and so was the girl. In fact, she was possibly the most beautiful young girl I had ever seen.

Leda took a bite from an apple and observed my wide-eyed amazement with some humor. She waved the girl away, then bade me to eat.

"This complex, the country now know as Arcadia, possibly the entire Earth," she said, "was the domain--the empire--of the High Ones. It is not certain where the High Ones came from nor where they went when they left. I am inclined to think they went away into time somewhere. In any case they ruled more than twenty thousand years and completely obliterated human culture as you know it. What is more important to you--and to me--is the effect they had on the human race. Are you listening?"

I started. My eyes were glued to an even more lovely maidservant that had just come in through the open door. Blue-eyed, with lustrous, golden hair in a series of complicated braids down her back, the girl was perhaps sixteen years old and blessed with a complexion that neither myself nor any friend I had ever had could have claimed at sixteen. She wore a simple crimson tunic that swept the floor as she walked and with sleeves that hid her long-fingered, flawless hands when she stood erect.

Realizing that my mouth stood open, I snapped it shut and blushed deeply. "I'm sorry," I said in a low croak. "I'm just not used to seeing women of such startling beauty."

Leda smiled benevolently at me. "She's not exceptionally beautiful as women around here go, Trish."

"That's hard to believe. I feel like I've dropped into in ancient Rome, in the time of the Ceasar's."

"She's yours if you'd like her."

"Excuse me?"

"She's a slave. They are all slaves by nature. If you like her, I'll make you a present of her."

I blushed even harder. "Uh, no. I'm not . . . that's all right, thank you."

Leda spoke to the girl in a soft, sing-song language. "Her name is Arma," she said as the girl giggled shyly. Lowering her head in deference, the girl moved in short, quick steps to where I sat, dropped on both knees to the floor beside me and lowered her face into her cupped hands. She waited.

"Touch her forehead," Leda instructed.

I did so. Arma arose and stood waiting diffidently by my side, her face a bright red, chest rising and falling with labored breaths. When it became clear that I had no idea what to do next, Leda spoke to the girl, then dismissed her with a flick of the wrist. The girl looked puzzled, but moved out of the room.

"I told her that, notwithstanding her new status, you wished her to continue serving breakfast."

"Thank you," I said, eying the doorway peripherally.

Leda resumed her explanations while the service of the meal continued. "It is necessary that you go back through the Time Gate at once. Your first task is to find and bring back a particular woman to me. Once your second task is complete, we'll be sitting pretty. After that, it is share and share alike for you and I. And there is plenty to share, Trish, believe me."

I fingered my swollen eye thoughtfully. "All right," I said. "When do we start?"

I had made up my mind some time ago--just shortly after Arma had become my "slave," in fact--that I would agree to anything to get back to my own time and out of this nightmare. If co-operation with this woman was the only means to that end, so be it. Besides, if all Leda wanted was for me to go back to some earlier time and persuade another woman to step through the Gate, I'd whack the silly bitch over the head if necessary. What could I lose?

Leda stood up. "Let's do it then," she said enthusiastically, "before you change your mind. Follow me." She set off at a brisk pace with me again hurrying to keep up.

"All you have to do," Leda said as we reached the Hall of the Gate, "is to step through the portal. You will find yourself back in your own time. Persuade the woman you find there to go through the Gate. We have need of her. Then come back yourself."

I was dumbstruck. Back to my own time? Was the woman mad? Struggling to keep the shock off my face, I said, "No problem," in an even tone. "Consider it done." I started to step through the Gate but Leda took my arm.

"I have to set the controls first," she said. She stepped behind the raised dais. Her head appeared above the side a moment later. "Be careful," she cautioned. "You are not used to time travel. You are going to get a bit of a shock when you step through. This other woman--well, you'll recognize her, Trish."

"Who is she?" I asked, eying the pencil-thin circle floating before me like like it was the Pearly Gates.

"I won't tell you because you wouldn't understand. But you will when you see her. Just remember this-- There are some very strange paradoxes connected with time travel. Don't let anything you see there throw you. Just do what I tell you to and you'll be fine."

"Paradoxes don't worry me," I said confidently. "Is that all? I'm ready."

Leda nodded and I stepped through the locus known as the Time Gate.

There was no sensation at all connected with the transition. It was exactly like stepping through a lion trainer's hoop; the only change was one of location.

I paused for a moment on the other side and let my eyes adjust to the dimmer light. I was, I saw, inside a room very much like my own. Before me sat a young woman at a tiny, cluttered desk, concentrating on the screen of a too-small computer monitor. The fingers of her left hand played distractedly with a spray of hair that had escaped from behind her left ear; a half-burnt cigarette was between the fingers of her right hand. She recited words in a low, dull voice that I could not quite make out. As the woman hunched forward over the keyboard and began typing, I stepped silently forward.

Leda was right: the woman did look vaguely familiar. Should I speak to her, cause her to turn around? I felt reluctant to do that until I knew who it was. I remembered my own fright at hearing Cloe's voice behind me. And being here now, I wondered just how in the hell I could persuade this woman to go through the Time Gate, even had I wanted too.

The woman at the desk continued typing, not pausing as she snuffed out the cigarette in a glass ash tray already populated by butts, then lighting another with a cheerily-yellow Bic lighter.

I knew that gesture well. I also knew that lighter.

Fear prickled down my back. I looked around the room. The room was mine. The posters on the walls, the frumpy and clothes-strewn furniture, the pyramid of empty Starbuck's French Vanilla Latte bottles stacked beside the sink. I felt the blood beating in my neck and in my temples. Sitting there with her back to me was myself, Trish Wilson!

I felt that I was going to faint. I closed my eyes and steadied myself on a chair back. "I knew it," I thought, "I'm crazy. I know I'm crazy. Some sort of split personality disorder. I shouldn't have worked so hard."

The sound of typing continued.

I pulled myself together, and reconsidered the matter. Leda had warned me that I was due for a shock, a shock that could not be explained ahead of time, because it could not be believed. "All right--suppose I'm not crazy. If time travel can happen at all, there's no reason why I can't come back and see myself doing something I did in the past. If I'm sane, that is exactly what I'm doing now. And if I am crazy, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what I do because I'm nuts anyway!"

I crept forward softly and peered over the shoulder of my double. "Time travel may be imagined and its necessities may be formulated under any and all theories of time," I read, "formulae which resolve the paradoxes of each theory."

"Right back where I started," I thought, "watching myself write my thesis."

The typing continued. Suddenly the other Trish yanked her hands away from the keyboard and cried disgustedly: "Damn it. I don't even know what I'm writing, anymore!"

"Don't bother with it then," I said on sudden impulse. "It's a lot of nonsense anyway."

The other Trish Wilson shrieked and spun around. Her expression of fright gave way to one of immense relief. "You scared me!" she exploded. Then: "What are you doing here?"

Without waiting for an answer she got up, went quickly to the door and examined the lock. "How did you get in?"

This, I thought, is going to be difficult. "Through that," I answered, pointing to the Time Gate. My double looked where I had pointed, did a double take, then advanced cautiously and started to touch it.

"Don't!" I yelled.

The other yanked her hand back. "Why not?" she demanded.

Just why she must not touch the Gate was not clear to me, but I had an unmistakable feeling of disaster looming when I saw it about to happen. I temporized by saying, "I'll explain that later. But first, let's have some of that latte."

What I wanted was a drink of something a whole lot stronger than Starbuck's latte, but that could wait until later. Right now I needed a clear head.

"Wait a minute!" protested the other Trish. "What are you doing here? And that's my latte!"

"Your latte," I repeated. I looked around the room. The hell with that! It was my latte. No, it wasn't; it was . . . ours. Oh, hell! It was much too mixed up to try to explain. "Sorry. You don't mind if I have one, do you?"

"Of course I mind," my double said indolently. "But please, just help yourself."

I felt a sudden wave of helplessness wash over me. Being sarcastic was second nature to me--especially as of late, when stress kept me awake half the night and made a battlefield of my stomach--but being on the receiving end of my own sarcasm made me want to cry.

Seeing my sudden discomfort, the other Trish relented. "All right," she grumbled in a dour tone. "But I don't have any clean glasses. You'll have to drink it out of the bottle or wash a glass yourself."

"That's fine," I assented. I wondered if my sudden bleakness showed in my smile. It felt like fractured glass. It was going to be much, much too difficult to explain this. As it was, I couldn't explain it fully to myself.

"Who are you?" the other Trish quietly demanded.

"You don't know?"

My other scrutinized me with confused and almost insupportable emotions. Couldn't she recognize her own face when she saw it in front of her? If she couldn't see what the situation was, how in the world was I ever going to make it clear to her?

It had slipped my mind that my face was barely recognizable in any case, being decidedly battered and puffy. Even more important, I failed to take into account the fact that a person does not look at her own face, even in mirrors, in the same frame of mind with which she regards the face of another. No sane person expects to see her own face being worn by a stranger.

Removing the caps from both bottles, I went to the kitchenette sink, removed the two lone glasses sitting in the basin, washed and rinsed them, the asked, "Still don't know?" as I filled them with latte.

"No!" the other Trish said petulantly. "I don't." Then, with less hardness in her voice she said: "At least tell me your name."

It was at this point that I realized that I was, in fact, "Cloe," the same Cloe I had encountered once before. That I had landed back in my room at the very time at which I had ceased working on my thesis I already perceived, but I had not had time to think the matter through. I was now slapped in the face with the realization that this was not simply a similar scene, but the same scene being repeated--save that I was living through it from a different viewpoint. Only that meant . . .

"No, no, no," I almost said aloud. The woman in my room had given her name as Cloe, but was I now going to repeat it based on that earlier event? If so, then you could forget about free will. It would be effect preceding cause, direction without choice . . . fate in other words, a concept I detested. There had to be another answer. I thought hard.

My aunt Sheila had been a science fiction nut. Once, when I was very sick and confined to bed with an outbreak of measles, she had lent me an anthology of old science fiction stories, written in the thirties and forties. Although I had thought science fiction strictly for the birds (or for boys, who were strictly for the birds, at least to ten year old Trish Wilson), I had read that book cover to cover, most of the time in the grip of a high fever. I had cherished the book ever since, or at least until the death of Aunt Sheila just the year before, when I had asked mom to let the book be buried with Sheila in her casket. I remembered my favorite story in the book was about time travel. The time-traveller's name had been Cloe.

"Uh . . . you can call me Cloe," I said.

Trish set down her glass down with a bang. "Okay, Cloe-whoever-you-are, I want an explanation right now or you can make your way right out that door." She pointed, as though I might not know where the door was.

I sighed. How did you go about telling another person that the two of you were a trifle closer than identical twins? I couldn't remember exactly what "Cloe" had said, not to the letter, but I was certain of things "Cloe" had not said. Like "Mary had a little lamb," for example, or "I'll be back," in a guttural, Austrian accent. All I had to do was speak such a thing to get off this fate-powered, repetitious damned treadmill. But under the unfriendly, suspicious eye of the woman opposite me, I found my mental processes stuck on dead center. I capitulated.

"Okay." I pointed at the gate. "That thing I came through . . . that's a Time Gate."

"A what?'

"A Time Gate. Time flows along either side of the Gate, only some thousands of years apart. Just how many thousands I haven't been able to determine yet. But for the next couple of hours, that Gate is open." I felt sweat breaking out on my forehead; I felt reasonably sure that I was explaining in exactly the same words in which the explanation had first been offered to me. I wiped my forehead and finished, "You can walk into the future just by stepping through it."

The other Trish tapped her foot.

I wondered suddenly if the other woman could be myself. The woman's stupid arrogant dogmatism infuriated me. Fine! I thought. I'll show her, then. I strode purposefully over to the unmade bed, snatched up her hat--my hat, Dammit!--and pitched it through the Gate.

"Hey! That's my--" The hat sailed right through the circle and was gone. "What the. . ."

The other Trish went around the backside of the Gate, walking with slow, careful steps. She looked like a woman who is a little bit drunk, but determined not to show it. "A neat trick," she applauded, after satisfying herself that the hat was gone, "now how do I get it back?"

I shook my head. "You don't. Unless you pass through yourself." I was pondering the problem of how many hats there were on the other side of the Gate.