The River of Time, Page 2

  A mind could find more than enough boggles, if it looked for them.

  Somehow we sorted things out. More people went fast or slow. We started dividing the cities into zones set aside for each speed. A barter economy developed, with computers used for communication.

  We counted on the fast ones for protection, and it appeared to be working. Speedo policemen watched over us. Speedo firemen kept us from harm.

  Hunter wasn’t optimistic, though, and I could see her point. At this rate, wouldn’t three separate races develop? How many generations would it take for the accelerated to forget their kinship with Normals, or Normals their responsibility to the Slows?

  She and I had only a couple of months to think about it. Soon word came “down” that Professor Wunkler had died, at age one hundred and two. Next the computers told us of a growing panic among our faster cousins.

  I swear, it never occurred to us that the process might continue!

  A certain fraction of the Fast were now leaping even faster along the timetrack! The practical jokes that began again were mostly visited upon the “merely Fast.” The new “Superfast” apparently thought it a bore to mess up statues who couldn’t react during their lifetimes, so they mostly left the Normals and the Slows alone.

  We had to invent new terminology. The new level of Speedoes was called Fastrack II. It took years, from our point of view, for our cousins in Fastrack I to negotiate an arrangement such as Hunter and I had negotiated with them. Then our cities were divided into fourths. When the Slows had their branching we divided again.

  A number of physicists, who had thought they’d figured out what was going on, went mad, committed suicide, or quietly changed professions.

  I have contemplated the possibility that the Universe at one time truly did circle around the Earth… that ancient philosophers were right in their cruder models of reality, with their simple crystal spheres and pinholes in a velvet sky. Perhaps there were powers which, once mankind was about to understand his cage and find out the rules, frustrated him by the simple expedient of expanding the range of the possible.

  It makes one wonder.

  Hunter and I have three children now. In an odd way we have what every parent who ever loved his kids secretly wanted. In Emma, Cassandra, and Abel we have a covey of dreams come true.

  Abel is our oldest child. He was twelve when he made the transition to Fastrack I, a full three weeks before his sister Cassandra, and Hunter and I, were caught up in our own shift to the same level.

  During those weeks he was brought up by some pleasant people and he became a fine man—strong, intelligent, and kind. After we joined him, he introduced us to our nearly grown grandchildren.

  I said Cassandra came with us, didn’t I? Yes, she’s a wonderful child… a lot of fun and always springing surprises on us. She’s aggravating and delightful and grows day by day before our eyes. Hunter and I are convinced she’ll always be with us… at least for the remainder of her childhood.

  Emma was the prettiest of our children. “Was” is a bad word, for she’ll be beautiful and seven for the rest of our lives. She was left behind when we made the shift. No one knows any way to control the passage among the timelines, so we had to accept it.

  No matter. One becomes philosophical. We carried her, with a note pinned to her sweater, to our friends the Neales, who are as nice as can be. We pop by, from time to time, just to look in on our baby. Whatever she does, her hair is brushed. Hunter insists, even when we find Emma sliding between bases in Little League. I sigh about “meddling,” but I know she likes to know we’re there. To her we’ll be around for so little time.

  Besides, the traffic goes both ways now, haphazard as it is. Someday Emmie too might leave the Main Timeline, and be reunited with us.

  Which is the Main Timeline? I wonder. We’ve tried to be careful to keep track, but can we be sure? By what units could we measure this change?

  Our worries over a tyranny of the Fast were mostly for naught. The new timelines seem to appear every decade or so, from the point of view of the line farthest “forward”… meaning they come into existence every few milliseconds from my present perspective.

  It makes no logical sense. None at all, by the old premises. But somehow there are people to populate the lines, and room for all.

  People flow back and forth across the streams like fish caught in different parts of the same river, some swept by swift currents, and others drifting slowly near the shore. We trade and cross-fertilize. The inventions that filter down are wonderful, but we always seem to have something of value to trade for them. Somehow we all seem to remain human.

  I consult for the Fastrack I government now. They think highly of me here. Something like a reincarnated Benjamin Franklin. There is even a small market for my science fiction, though the heyday of that genre appears to be past.

  Hunter and I go nowhere without each other. It may be superstition, but we feel that if you grab someone you love and hold him or her tight, when you feel the change coming on, you’ll shift time tracks together.

  I hope so.

  I have meditated long and hard on this, while we do our stints of guard duty together, protecting one of the slower sections.

  In my meditation I notice that a new way of thinking has begun to replace the old. I see the sun rise every morning. A mockingbird buzzes by my head whenever I wander past the tree that holds her nest. Each year the leaves change color and the Fastrack I farmers gather their harvest.

  How can a day be a day on each timeline? Does the same mockingbird buzz for my Fast and Slow neighbors, as well?

  How can the lines keep multiplying? Will there be a time when it all comes full circle? When the slowest of the Slow meet the fastest of the Fast, and send a chain of practical jokes rolling down the pike, growing in power and bad taste at every pass around the loop?

  These are questions the old logic might have asked, and I know they are false. For the river is legend. Its tributaries merge, far downstream from the glacier where once a trickle was all we knew.

  How smug we have all become, in our adaptability. We claim to understand, to be at home on the great river!

  Yet it widens, and deepens, as it flows.

  And eventually, there is the Sea.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Originally, its title was “Coexistence.” It is a little tale, one of my earliest, and the only one I’ve ever written almost precisely as it came to me in a dream.

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  Document creation date: 12.04.2011

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  Verdi1

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