Bootstrapped

Never far from my mind was the mystery of the High Ones, and especially the mystery of their Time Gate. I became quite skilled in handling its controls, but I never acquired the foggiest notion of how it worked, or how it had been built. It seemed to me that the creatures who built it, in order to anchor the Gate to the structure of space-time, must necessarily have been able to stand outside the limits that confined me. The concept escaped me as badly as quantum physics would have escaped a fourteenth century alchemist.

What I suspected was that the controls I saw were simply the part of the machine that stuck through into the space we knew. The very Palace itself may have been no more than a three-dimensional section of a more involved structure--the tip of the quantum iceberg, lets say. Such a condition would help to explain the otherwise inexplicable nature of its architecture.

I became possessed of an overpowering desire to know more about these strange creatures, the "High Ones," who had come and ruled the human race and built this Palace and this Gate, and then gone away again--and in whose backwash I had been flung. To the human race they were no more than a sacred myth, a contradictory mass of tradition. No picture of them remained, no trace of their writing, nothing of their works save the High Palace of Norkaal and the Gate. And a sense of irreparable loss in the hearts of the race they had ruled, a loss expressed by their own term for themselves--the Forsaken Ones.

With controls and viewscreen I hunted back through time, seeking the Builders. It was slow work, as I had found before. A passing shadow, a tedious retracing--and failure.

Once I was sure that I had seen such a shadow in the miniature Hall depicted in the viewscreen. I set the controls back far enough to be sure that I had repassed it, then armed myself with food and drink, and waited.

I waited three weeks.

The shadow might have passed during the hours I was forced to take out for sleep. But I felt sure that I was in the right period; I kept up the vigil.

Finally I saw it.

It was moving toward the Gate.

When I pulled myself together I was halfway down the passageway leading away from the Hall. I realized that I had been screaming and I felt like screaming still. I had an attack of the shakes.

Sometime later--it might have been days, weeks, maybe--I forced myself to return to the Hall, and, with eyes averted, enter the control booth and return the spheres to zero. I backed out hastily and left the Hall for my apartment. I did not touch the controls nor enter the Hall for more than two years.

It had not been fear that had shaken my reason. It had been a feeling of intense sadness, infinitely compounded which had flooded through me at the instant, a sense of absolute tragedy. I had been flayed with emotions too many times too strong for my spiritual fiber to take. I was no more fitted to experience the presence of the "High Ones" than an oyster is to play a violin.

The shadow of that moment ruined my sleep for years, brought me sweating out of dreams.

* * *

As the end of my first ten years in Arcadia approached, I became more and more nervous, less and less certain of my design. Dammit, I thought, if Leda is going to show up it was high time she did so. I was anxious to come to grips with her, establish who was to be boss.

I had agents posted throughout the mid- and low countries, with instructions to arrest any woman unknown to them and fetch her forthwith to the Palace. The Hall of the Gate I watched myself.

From tedium and partly from curiosity, I attempted to see the other end of the process. I tried fishing the future for Leda, but with no luck. This end of the apparatus was anchored in the present it appeared; the Gate looked only into the past. Instead, I tried to relocate my original home, thirty thousand years in the past.

It was a long chore. The further the time globe was displaced from the center, the poorer the control became. It took patience and practice to be able to stop the image within a century or so of the period I wanted. It was in the course of this experimentation that I discovered what I had once so desperately wanted, a fractional control--a caliper, in effect. It was as simple as the primary control: twist the globe instead of moving it directly.

I steadied down on the twenty-first century, approximating the year by the models of automobiles, types of clothing and other gross evidence--no more McDonald's restaurants, for instance--and stopped in what I believed to be 2006. Careful displacement of the spatial controls took me to the university town where I had started--after several false tries; the image did not enable me to read road signs.

I located my dormitory, brought the Gate into my own room. It was vacant, no furniture in it at all.

I adjusted the time globe by a tiny increment. Success--my own room, my own furniture, but empty. I adjusted gradually back, looking for shadows. There!

There were three figures in the room, but the image was too small, the light too poor for me to be sure whether or not one of them was myself. I leaned over and studied the scene. Not yet convinced, I nudged the portal back what I hoped was perhaps an hour, and just as I did so I was startled by a dull thump outside the booth. I straightened up and looked over the side.

Sprawled on the floor was a limp human figure. Near it lay a baseball cap.

I stood perfectly still for an uncounted time, staring at the recumbent figure while the winds of unreason swept through my mind--and shook it. There was no need to examine the unconscious form to know who it was it. I knew of course. It was my younger self, knocked willy-nilly through the Time Gate.

I had known eventually that this would happen. I had fully expected to confront Leda when it did, demand a final reckoning, dispatching the older woman to the netherlands if necessary. Only now the introductory event had occurred and I myself hadbeen the only witness present!

I was Leda. I was the Leda. I was the only Leda!

I would never confront my nemesis, never have it out with her. I need never have feared the woman's arrival in the first place. There never had been, never would be, any other person called Leda, because Leda never had been anyone but me.

There were so many bits of evidence pointing to it, and yet it had never been obvious. Each point of similarity between myself and Leda had arisen from rational causes--usually from my desire to appropriate the woman's characteristics, thereby consolidating my own position of power and authority before her arrival. I had established myself in the very apartments that "Leda" had used--so that they would be "mine" first.

To be sure, the people of Arcadia called me Leda, had so for many years, but they called anyone who ruled by that title--even the little sub-chieftains who were my local administrators. I had designed a new wardrobe for myself, to set myself apart from the local inhabitants, had cut my hair short for the same reason--the females all had long, thick luxurious hair. I had even added gray highlights to my hair to enhance me prestige. I had never thought for a moment to question that my own appearance might coincided with that of "Leda."

I had remembered Leda's face as being lined, her hair gone mostly gray, her body under the purple loungewear middle age-soft. Perhaps an unbiased witness would believe myself to be her age. My face was lined--running a country, even a peaceful one like Arcadia, will worry a woman to death, keep her awake nights, to say nothing of the year she had succeeded too well in spying on the High Ones.

The woman on the floor groaned, but did not open her eyes.

Trish Wilson, now the infamous Leda, bent over her but made no effort to revive her. She was not seriously injured--other than maybe her sense of pride--and I did not wish her to wake up until I'd had time to get my own thoughts entirely in order.

I had work to do, work which must be done meticulously, without mistake. Everyone, I thought with a wry smile, makes plans to provide for their future.

I was about to provide for my past.

* * *

The Time Gate was perfectly positioned. The viewscreen showed a young woman slouched in a swivel chair before a computer, one hand holding a cigarette, the other worrying her hair. I had moved the portal just as the unfortunate first edition of myself had tumbled through. There would be no need to reset it now. Indeed, everything depended on the portal's remaining right where it was . . . for now.

Picking up the Maryland Terrapin's ball-cap, I looked at it with a pang of bitter nostalgia, tried it on and smiled at the way it felt. I had last worn that hat ten year's before--in Gregory Dane's apartment.

Of all the questionable things I had done that afternoon, and in the ten intervening years, nothing bothered me more than what I had done to Gregory Dane.

Flush with ambition and riding a wave of adrenalin higher than an earthquake-driven tsunami, desperate to get on with my mission, I had nonetheless forced myself to acknowledge that leaving "now" meant leaving everybody--Gregory Dane included--behind. Forever. I would never again see anyone from 2006.

The only way to end it safely with Gregory, I felt, was to make myself into some kind of psycho bitch, someone whom people could accept as coming unhinged enough to flip out and just boogie. I had spent roughly an hour and a half that afternoon blowing Gregory's mind--as well as something else--setting him up for the stress-induced paranoia/temper tantrums scheduled to follow. To this day I was still convinced that lust had been the lynch pin of your relationship--I had certainly lusted after him back then, and him I--but the ache at what I felt every time I thought of Gregory outlasted any other ache I had ever had.

And Gregory had been my last.

With a sigh, I removed the ball cap and placed both it and the little translator notebook I kept--judiciously recopied two years before, after dropping the original copy, dog-eared and tattered almost to illegibility, into a rocky stream--into the wing of the machine. I smiled sadly again, knowing that my coming pronouncement would be right: There are some very strange paradoxes connected with time travel.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

If God created the world, who created God?

The woman on the floor stirred again, sat up. I knew that the time had come. I bent over my alter ego and asked, "Are you all right?"

The woman looked dazedly around at her surroundings. She appeared not to have heard.

"Are you all right?" I repeated.

"I guess so," the younger woman mumbled. She put her hand to her bloody mouth. "My head hurts."

"I'm not surprised," I agreed. "You came through head first. I think you hit it when you landed."

My younger self did not appear to have fully comprehend the words. She looked around as if to get her bearings. Presently she said, "Came through? Came through what?"

"The Gate, of course." I nodded toward the Gate, knowing that the sight of it would help orient the still groggy, younger Trish.

Trish looked over her shoulder in the direction indicated, shuddered and closed her eyes. "Oh God," she said, "now I really am nuts." She opened them again only after what seemed to be a short period of prayer. "Did I come through that?"

"Yes," I assured her.

"Where am I?"

"In the Hall of the Gate in the High Palace of Norkaal. But what is more important," I added, "is when you are. You've stepped forward a little more than thirty thousand years."

"Now I know I'm crazy," she moaned. She got up unsteadily and moved toward the Gate.

I put a restraining hand on her shoulder. "Easy, Trish. Where are you going?"

"Back!"

"You can't go back. At least not yet. But you will, I promise you that. Let me dress your wounds first, and get you something the eat. And you should rest. Some explanation is due you, of course and there is an errand you can do for me when you get back--to our mutual advantage, Trish."

I paused and the smile lengthened on my face. I said, almost whimsically, "There's a great future in store for the two of us, Trish. A great future."

A great future, indeed.