Wells could have no conception of the realities of time travel, of course. There was no frame of reference for the infinite branchings of the future in his tidy nineteenth-century English mind. He was incapable of imagining the horrors that lay in store. How could he be? Time branches endlessly, and only a few, a precious handful of those branches, manage to avoid utter disaster.
Could I show him his beloved London obliterated by fusion bombs? Or the entire northern hemisphere of Earth depopulated by man-made plagues? Or a devastated world turned to a savagery that made his Morlocks seem compassionate?
Could I explain to him the energies involved in time travel or the damage they did to the human body? The fact that time travelers were volunteers sent on suicide missions, desperately trying to preserve a timeline that saved at least a portion of the human race? The best future I could offer him was a twentieth century tortured by world wars and genocide. That was the best I could do.
So all I did was hint, as gently and subtly as I could, trying to guide him toward that best of all possible futures, horrible though it would seem to him. I could neither control nor coerce anyone; all I could do was to offer a bit of guidance. Until the radiation dose from my own trip through time finally killed me.
Wells was happily oblivious to my pain. He did not even notice the perspiration that beaded my brow despite the chilling breeze that heralded nightfall.
“You appear to be telling me,” he said at last, “that my writings will have some sort of positive effect on the world.”
“They already have,” I replied, with a genuine smile.
His brows rose.
“That teenaged lad is reading your story. Your concept of time as a dimension has already started his fertile mind working.”
“That young student?”
“Will change the world,” I said. “For the better.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said, trying to sound confident. I knew there were still a thousand pitfalls in young Albert’s path. And I would not live long enough to help him past them. Perhaps others would, but there were no guarantees.
I knew that if Albert did not reach his full potential, if he were turned away by the university again or murdered in the coming holocaust, the future I was attempting to preserve would disappear in a global catastrophe that could end the human race forever. My task was to save as much of humanity as I could.
I had accomplished a feeble first step in saving some of humankind, but only a first step. Albert was reading the time-machine tale and starting to think that Kelvin was blind to the real world. But there was so much more to do. So very much more.
We sat there in the deepening shadows of the approaching twilight, Wells and I, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts about the future. Despite his best English self-control, Wells was smiling contentedly. He saw a future in which he would be hailed as a prophet. I hoped it would work out that way. It was an immense task that I had undertaken. I felt tired, gloomy, daunted by the immensity of it all. Worst of all, I would never know if I succeeded or not.
Then the waitress bustled over to our table. “Well, have you finished? Or are you going to stay here all night?”
Even without a translation Wells understood her tone. “Let’s go,” he said, scraping his chair across the flagstones.
I pushed myself to my feet and threw a few coins on the table. The waitress scooped them up immediately and called into the café, “Come here and scrub down this table! At once!”
The six-year-old boy came trudging across the patio, lugging the heavy wooden pail of water. He stumbled and almost dropped it; water sloshed onto his mother’s legs. She grabbed him by the ear and lifted him nearly off his feet. A faint, tortured squeak issued from the boy’s gritted teeth.
“Be quiet and your do work properly,” she told her son, her voice murderously low. “If I let your father know how lazy you are . . .”
The six-year-old’s eyes went wide with terror as his mother let her threat dangle in the air between them.
“Scrub that table good, Adolf,” his mother told him. “Get rid of that damned Jew’s stink.”
I looked down at the boy. His eyes were burning with shame and rage and hatred. Save as much of the human race as you can, I told myself. But it was already too late to save him.
“Are you coming?” Wells called to me.
“Yes,” I said, tears in my eyes. “It’s getting dark, isn’t it?”
Introduction to
“Scheherazade and the Storytellers”
Two points: One, science fiction isn’t confined to stories about the future. Two, science fiction writers are (for the most part) friends, comrades in the sometimes-bitter world of publishing, brothers-in-arms . . . er, make that brothers-in-pens (and sisters, of course).
As the aforementioned John W. Campbell noted, science fiction is not restricted to tales about the future. The past is also part of our territory.
Here is a tale of the storied past, of a cruel sultan and a beautiful, clever young woman—and of a ragged clutch of storytellers who are loosely based on my science-fiction-writing friends and colleagues.
SCHEHERAZADE AND THE STORYTELLERS
“I need a new story!” exclaimed Scheherazade, her lovely almond eyes betraying a rising terror. “By tonight!”
“Daughter of my heart,” said her father, the grand vizier, “I have related to you every tale that I know. Some of them, best beloved, were even true!”
“But, most respected father, I am summoned to the sultan again tonight. If I have not a new tale with which to beguile him, he will cut off my head in the morning!”
The grand vizier chewed his beard and raised his eyes to Allah in supplication. He could not help but notice that the gold leaf adorning the ceiling is his chamber was peeling once
