The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (56 page)

Harry stared at the red-haired woman. He knew what was being asked of him, but he didn’t believe in it, it wasn’t real, in the same way weather going on in other countries wasn’t really real. Hurricanes. Drought. Sunshine. When what you were looking at was a cold drizzle.

“I think that of all the people I’ve ever known, Ann is the most together. The most compassionate. And the most moral.”

“Ummm,” Harry said.

“Popsy?”

Jackie was looking right at him. The longer he was silent, the more her smile faded. It occurred to him that the smile had showed her teeth. They were very white, very even.

Also very sharp.

“I... I... hello, Ann.”

“Hello,” Ann said.

“See, I told you he’d be great!” Jackie said to Ann. She let go of Harry and jumped up from the bench, all energy and lightness. “You’re wonderful, Popsy! You, too, Manny!

Oh, Ann, this is Popsy’s best friend, Manny Feldman. Manny, Ann Davies.”

“Happy to meet you,” Ann said. She had a low, rough voice and a sweet smile. Harry felt hurricanes, drought, sunshine.

Jackie said, “I know this is probably a little unexpected—”

Unexpected.
“Well—” Harry said, and could say no more.

“It’s just that it was time for me to come out of the closet.”

Harry made a small noise. Manny managed to say, “So you live here, Ann?”

“Oh, yes. All my life. And my family, too, since forever.”

“Has Jackie... has Jackie met any of them yet?”

“Not yet,” Jackie said. “It might be a little... tricky, in the case of her parents.” She smiled at Ann. “But we’ll manage.”

“I wish,” Ann said to her, “that you could have met
my
grandfather. He would have been just as great as your Popsy here. He always was.”

“Was?” Harry said faintly.

“He died a year ago. But he was just a wonderful man. Compassionate
and
intelligent.”

“What... what did he do?”

“He taught history at the university. He was also active in lots of organizations—

Amnesty International, the ACLU, things like that. During World War II he worked for the Jewish rescue leagues, getting people out of Germany.”

Manny nodded. Harry watched Jackie’s teeth.

“We’d like you both to come to dinner soon,” Ann said. She smiled. “I’m a good cook.”

Manny’s eyes gleamed.

Jackie said, “I know this must be hard for you—” but Harry saw that she didn’t really mean it. She didn’t think it was hard. For her it was so real that it was natural weather, unexpected maybe, but not strange, not out of place, not out of time. In front of the bench, sunlight striped the pavement like bars.

Suddenly Jackie said, “Oh, Popsy, did I tell you that it was your friend Robert who introduced us? Did I tell you that already?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” Harry said. “You did.”

“He’s kind of a nerd, but actually all right.”

After Jackie and Ann left, the two old men sat silent a long time. Finally Manny said diplomatically, “You want to get a snack, Harry?”

“She’s happy, Manny.”

“Yes. You want to get a snack, Harry?”

“She didn’t even recognize him.” 

“No. You want to get a snack?”

“Here, have this. I got it for you this morning.” Harry held out an orange, a deep-colored navel with flawless rind: seedless, huge, guaranteed juicy, nurtured for flavor, perfect.

“Enjoy,” Harry said. “It cost me ninety-two cents.”

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The term “visionary” is applicable to very few writers, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s
intellectually provocative fiction has earned her the accolade in general literary circles
as well as the fields of fantasy and science fiction. Though she has taken a variety of
approaches to a wide range of ideas, the cornerstone of her distinguished body of
fiction is her series of Hainish novels, set on different planets in a pangalactic empire.

The alien cultures on these planets share a common origin, but have developed
differently over time, in ways both striking and subtle. Le Guin juxtaposes alien and
earthly viewpoints in these stories with an eye toward showing the plurality of possible
perspectives on the themes they address. Her Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning novel
The Left Hand of Darkness
is set on a planet whose androgynous humanoids
unpredictably shift sexual identities, a process that undermines all preconceptions of
identity based on gender differences. In other Hainish novels, which include
Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, The Word for World Is Forest,
and
The Telling,
Le Guin has used contrasting civilizations to measure the impact of a variety of
science-fictional devices, including telepathy, instantaneous communication, and space
travel.

Le Guin’s other major story cycle is the Earthsea saga, which includes
A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea,
and
Tales from Earthsea
. These novels, which break the boundaries between adult and
young-adult fiction, comprise a coming-of-age story featuring Ged, an apprentice
magician who grows to maturity and faces many challenges as both man and mage over
the course of the saga.

Le Guin has been praised for her understanding of the importance of rituals and
myths that shape individuals and societies, and for the meticulous detail with which she
brings her alien cultures to life. She has written other novels, including
The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, Malafrena,
and
Always Coming Home
. Her short fiction
has been collected in
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,
and
Four Ways to Forgiveness
. Le Guin has also written many
celebrated essays on the craft of fantasy and science fiction, some of which have been
gathered in
The Language of the Night
and
Dancing at the Edge of the World
.

Set in the world of her Hainish stories, “Another Story” is an appropriate way to
close this book, with the idea of time travel viewed through a common theme of Le
Guin’s, that of local folklore, and combining elements of the past, present, and the
future into a seamless vision that also, as many of these stories have done, explores a
closely cherished dream of humanity: the ability to go back and correct mistakes in our
past.

by Ursula K. Le Guin

To the Stabiles of the Ekumen on Hain, and to Gvonesh,
Director of the Churten Field Laboratories at Ve Port:
from Tiokunan’n Hideo, Farmholder of the Second 
Sedoretu of Udan, Derdan’nad, Oket, on O.

I shall make my report as if I told a story, this having been the tradition for some time now. You may, however, wonder why a farmer on the planet O is reporting to you as if he were a Mobile of the Ekumen. My story will explain that. But it does not explain itself. Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows, no boat is safe.

So: once upon a time when I was twenty-one years old I left my home and came on the NAFAL ship
Terraces of Darranda
to study at the Ekumenical Schools on Hain.

The distance between Hain and my home world is just over four light-years, and there has been traffic between O and the Hainish system for twenty centuries. Even before the Nearly As Fast As Light drive, when ships spent a hundred years of planetary time instead of four to make the crossing, there were people who would give up their old life to come to a new world. Sometimes they returned; not often. There were tales of such sad returns to a world that had forgotten the voyager. I knew also from my mother a very old story called “The Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” which came from her home world, Terra. The life of a ki’O child is full of stories, but of all I heard told by her and my othermother and my fathers and grandparents and uncles and aunts and teachers, that one was my favorite. Perhaps I liked it so well because my mother told it with deep feeling, though very plainly, and always in the same words (and I would not let her change the words if she ever tried to).

The story tells of a poor fisherman, Urashima, who went out daily in his boat alone on the quiet sea that lay between his home island and the mainland. He was a beautiful young man with long, black hair, and the daughter of the king of the sea saw him as he leaned over the side of the boat and she gazed up to see the floating shadow cross the wide circle of the sky.

Rising from the waves, she begged him to come to her palace under the sea with him.

At first he refused, saying, “My children wait for me at home.” But how could he resist the sea king’s daughter? “One night,” he said. She drew him down with her under the water, and they spent a night of love in her green palace, served by strange undersea beings. Urashima came to love her dearly, and maybe he stayed more than one night only. But at last he said, “My dear, I must go. My children wait for me at home.”

“If you go, you go forever,” she said.

“I will come back,” he promised.

She shook her head. She grieved, but did not plead with him. “Take this with you,”

she said, giving him a little box, wonderfully carved, and sealed shut. “Do not open it, Urashima.”

So he went up onto the land, and ran up the shore to his village, to his house: but the garden was a wilderness, the windows were blank, the roof had fallen in. People came and went among the familiar houses of the village, but he did not know a single face.

“Where are my children?” he cried. An old woman stopped and spoke to him: “What is your trouble, young stranger?”

“I am Urashima, of this village, but I see no one here I know!”

“Urashima!” the woman said—and my mother would look far away, and her voice as she said the name made me shiver, tears starting to my eyes—“Urashima! My grandfather told me a fisherman named Urashima was lost at sea, in the time of his grandfather’s grandfather. There has been no one of that family alive for a hundred years.”

So Urashima went back down to the shore; and there he opened the box, the gift of the sea king’s daughter. A little white smoke came out of it and drifted away on the sea wind. In that moment Urashima’s black hair turned white, and he grew old, old, old; and he lay down on the sand and died.

Once, I remember, a traveling teacher asked my mother about the fable, as he called it. She smiled and said, “In the Annals of the Emperors of my nation of Terra it is recorded that a young man named Urashima, of the Yosa district, went away in the year 477, and came back to his village in the year 825, but soon departed again. And I have heard that the box was kept in a shrine for many centuries.” Then they talked about something else.

My mother, Isako, would not tell the story as often as I demanded it. “That one is so sad,” she would say, and tell instead about Grandmother and the rice dumpling that rolled away, or the painted cat who came alive and killed the demon rats, or the peach boy who floated down the river. My sister and my germanes, and older people, too, listened to her tales as closely as I did. They were new stories on O, and a new story is always a treasure. The painted cat story was the general favorite, especially when my mother would take out her brush and the block of strange, black, dry ink from Terra, and sketch the animals—cat, rat—that none of us had ever seen: the wonderful cat with arched back and brave round eyes, the fanged and skulking rats, “pointed at both ends”

as my sister said. But I waited always, through all other stories, for her to catch my eye, look away, smile a little and sigh, and begin, “Long, long ago, on the shore of the Inland Sea there lived a fisherman...”

Did I know then what that story meant to her? that it was her story? that if she were to return to her village, her world, all the people she had known would have been dead for centuries?

Certainly I knew that she “came from another world,” but what that meant to me as a five-, or seven-, or ten-year-old, is hard for me now to imagine, impossible to remember.

I knew that she was a Terran and had lived on Hain; that was something to be proud of. I knew that she had come to O as a Mobile of the Ekumen (more pride, vague and grandiose) and that “your father and I fell in love at the Festival of Plays in Sudiran.” I knew also that arranging the marriage had been a tricky business. Getting permission to resign her duties had not been difficult—the Ekumen is used to Mobiles going native.

But as a foreigner, Isako did not belong to a ki’O moiety, and that was only the first problem. I heard all about it from my othermother, Tubdu, an endless source of family history, anecdote, and scandal. “You know,” Tubdu told me when I was eleven or twelve, her eyes shining and her irrepressible, slightly wheezing, almost silent laugh beginning to shake her from the inside out—“you know, she didn’t even know women got married? Where she came from, she said, women don’t marry.”

I could and did correct Tubdu: “Only in her part of it. She told me there’s lots of parts of it where they do.” I felt obscurely defensive of my mother, though Tubdu spoke without a shadow of malice or contempt; she adored Isako. She had fallen in love with her “the moment I saw her—that black hair! that mouth!”—and simply found it endearingly funny that such a woman could have expected to marry only a man.

“I understand,” Tubdu hastened to assure me. “I know—on Terra it’s different, their fertility was damaged, they have to think about marrying for children. And they marry in twos, too. Oh, poor Isako! How strange it must have seemed to her! I remember how she looked at me—” And off she went again into what we children called The Great Giggle, her joyous, silent, seismic laughter.

To those unfamiliar with our customs I should explain that on O, a world with a low, stable human population and an ancient climax technology, certain social arrangements are almost universal. The dispersed village, an association of farms, rather than the city or state, is the basic social unit. The population consists of two halves or moieties. A child is born into its mother’s moiety, so that all ki’O (except the mountain folk of Ennik) belong either to the Morning People, whose time is from midnight to noon, or the Evening People, whose time is from noon to midnight. The sacred origins and functions of the moieties are recalled in the Discussions and the Plays and in the services at every farm shrine. The original social function of the moiety was probably to structure exogamy into marriage and so discourage inbreeding in isolated farmholds, since one can have sex with or marry only a person of the other moiety. The rule is severely reinforced. Transgressions, which of course occur, are met with shame, contempt, and ostracism. One’s identity as a Morning or an Evening Person is as deeply and intimately part of oneself as one’s gender, and has quite as much to do with one’s sexual life.