INSIDE TIME

by Tim Sullivan

* * * *

Tim Sullivan lives in Miami with his companion, Fiona Kelleghan. His novels The Parasite War and The Martian Viking have recently been republished in electronic editions.

“My name’s Mae,” said the pretty brown woman, looking down at him. A luminous, violet ceiling was just over her head. “What’s yours?”

“Herel...” he said, uncertain of where he was. He was fastened to a flat, inclined surface. “Herel Jablov.”

“Herel Jablov?” Mae said. “You’re famous.”

“Am I?”

“Yes,” Mae said, handing him a water packet with a sucking tube sticking out of it. “Drink this.”

“Thank you.” He accepted the packet, noticing how nice Mae smelled, not perfumed but natural. “I’m very dry.”

“Do you remember anything?” Mae gently asked.

“Yes,” he said, after taking a long sip. “I remember being carried through the dark by ... I don’t know what it was, but it was unprotected out there.... And then I saw a star.”

“A star?”

“But it wasn’t a star,” he went on. “As we came closer I saw that it was an oval of light ... a window ... and then I saw someone watching me through it.”

“That was me.”

“I could see my rescuer in the light cast from that window.... It wasn’t human.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Where am I?”

“You’re in a time station.”

“A time station?”

“That’s what I call it,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s officially called.”

Herel looked at her. She wore a simple blue garment, a knee-length jersey. He realized that he was naked.

“I’m not dressed,” Herel said, embarrassed.

“The robot stripped you of your pressure suit and your thermal longjohns after it took you out of the Arrowhead and brought you inside,” she said. “Do you remember?”

“Yes, it examined me.... Am I okay?”

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “The disorientation won’t last long. Your parietal lobes are adjusting.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Here,” she said, freeing him from clasps that held him to the gurney. She handed him a yellow garment similar to the one she was wearing. He got up and found that he floated. He quickly slipped the jersey over his head. Mae helped him arrange it, and he was calmed by feeling her fingers through the fabric.

“Is anything coming back to you?”

“It’s starting to.” He remembered losing contact with the other members of the team as he fell. “Did anyone else show up?”

“No, just you.”

“There were four of us,” he said, “Park Li-Joon, Hess, Ertegul ... and me.”

“Yes, I know about the team,” she said.

“Did they make it?”

“They all came back, all but one.”

“Which one?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

What was she talking about? “But I’m here.”

“It will take a little while to explain,” she said.

Herel was confused and discomfited. It was better not to think about it right now. He gestured at the violet chamber. “Will you show me around the ... time station?”

“So soon?”

“I’d like to see it.”

“Sure. Come with me.”

* * * *

He drifted behind her through a low hatchway, propelling himself forward with handholds extruding from the walls.

“This is the kitchen,” Mae said. “Or the galley, if you prefer.”

Like the examination room they’d just left, there were no windows set in the galley’s luminous green walls. Packets of water and food floated, but otherwise it was empty.

“We’re near the station’s center,” Mae said. “There are four extensions stretching out from this point, two cells—staterooms, I call them—at the ends of three of them and the docking node at the end of the fourth.”

“So there’s plenty of room?”

“It doesn’t seem like it after you’ve been here awhile.”

“I suppose not.”

“We have everything we need to survive,” she said, handing him a food packet, “but very little else. How’s your memory now?”

“I remember falling after I lost contact with the others, but nothing else until the robot snagged me. Something must have happened in between.”

“It’ll be easier if you think farther back ... to your childhood, say.... You remember that, don’t you?”

“Sure.” He sucked a mouthful of brown stuff from the tube. The grainy texture was a little off-putting, a bit sweet for Herel’s taste, but otherwise it wasn’t bad.

“High school? University? Maybe graduate school?”

“And earning my engineering degrees ... my Arrowhead design being chosen ... and being selected by the Institute ... training for the project ... and the big day....”

“It’s what happened recently that you don’t remember, huh?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“This is going to sound odd to you, Herel, but the reason for the blank spot in your memory is that you’ve just come from the future.”

“The future...?” That did bring a lot back. “Yes, that’s what we were trying to do ... go into the future....”

“You succeeded, but you can’t remember what happened uptime.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, maybe because it hasn’t happened yet, so you’ve got no memory of it.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“Maybe so, but people who come from uptime never remember what it was like.”

He cast about for something to refute what she was saying, but he could remember nothing before the robot found him.

“You were dropped into a Kerr hole,” Mae said. “You emerged in the future, but no one can stay there for long.”

“Then this isn’t the future?” Despite his faulty memory, he knew that she was telling the truth.

“No, you were pulled back, sensors picked you out of the matter flowing from the white hole out there, and you were rescued by the robot.”

He felt as if he’d awakened from a dream about an amusement park ride. He had fallen and fallen and fallen....

“If this isn’t the future, where are we?”

Something lashed down from the ceiling and snatched his empty food packet before Mae could answer.

“What’s that?” Herel was startled as several more of the nearly transparent fibers flailed around them.

“I call them tendrils,” Mae said. “They’re part of the station’s maintenance system. They’re just cleaning up.”

“How do they work?”

“Autonomically,” she said, taking him by the hand and drifting with him into another room. “I used to find them disturbing, but I got used to them.”

They left the busy tendrils to their task as she led him to the big oval window near the docking node. It was dark outside.

“This is where you watched them bring me in?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Other than saying we’re in a time station near a white hole, you haven’t told me where we are.”

“We’re inside.”

His own gaunt face and trim body were reflected in the window. “Inside what?”

“Inside time.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“As I understand it, we’re in a crossover loop between two branes, caused by a phase change that ties time in a knot.”

“A knot inside time?”

“Yes, the crossover stabilizes quarks into strangelets.”

“And we’re pulled back from the future into this ... strangelet universe?”

“Yes.”

“So time travel isn’t a one-way ticket.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said, “but sometimes the return trip is misdirected.”

“How do you know all this?”

“A physicist was stuck here for a while. We talked.”

“I see.” He stared at the darkness through the window.

“In our continuum, you were drawn through a rotating ring of neutrons,” she said. “That’s what makes it possible for matter to pass through the collapsing star without being destroyed.”

“Yes, some black holes have mass and angular momentum, but no charge.”

“You know all about it.”

“I should. I was one of the designers of the Arrowhead.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Yes, you and the others went through the Kerr hole and everyone but you came back to the precise time and place where you’d started. Some people called it a hoax, said none of you had ever gone anywhere. Conspiracy theorists claimed that you’d been killed because you wanted to reveal the hoax. I was a little girl when it happened.”

“But you’re a mature woman.”

“I’m thirty-five.”

“Only two years younger than me.”

“Time doesn’t mean much here.”

“There are no clocks?” he asked, trying to understand this strangelet reality.

“What good would they be?”

“They’d be useful for small tasks.” The lack of clocks disturbed Herel; he liked to quantify things.

“There aren’t any small tasks. Everything’s taken care of,” she said. “The station is sensitive to our needs.”

“How do you mean?”

“When you’re hungry, it will give you something to eat. Water is plentiful because the basic elements are everywhere. The atmosphere is similarly synthesized—nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and all the necessary trace elements. If you’re ill, your medical needs are attended to.”

“The time station understands all our bodily requirements?”

“Yes, but the mind is a different matter. We have readers, but not much else to pass the time.”

“Readers?”

“For viewing books, operas, films, plays, and the like,” Mae said. “You’ll find them all over the station.”

“And that’s all the entertainment there is?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Maybe we can learn about the future from these readers.”

“No, everything in them predates our time,” she said, “just as your epochal journey into the future predated my time.”

“You’re the only one who knows what happened to me....”

“I guess I am, and I’m grateful to you, Herel. I owe you my life for designing the Arrowhead. I would have died out there without it. How did you come up with such an ingenious design?”

“It was tricky, juggling space limitation, stress factors, and shielding while keeping costs down.”

“See, your memory’s coming back strong.”

“So it is,” Herel said. “I do remember emerging from the white hole.”

“Floating on the waters of Lethe,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s the river of forgetfulness in classical mythology.”

“I never had much time for literature,” Herel said. “Is the physicist you mentioned gone?”

“Lillian? Yes, she’s gone. People never stay long ... except for me.”

“Except for you...” He struggled to remember her name. “—Mae?”

“Yes.”

“How do people get out of here?”

“A ship comes and takes them.”

“Who pilots the ship?”

“No one, it’s completely AI.”

“Where does it go?”

She shrugged. “Maybe there’s another Kerr hole somewhere inside the time knot, an escape hatch, but I don’t know.”

“Did robots build the time station?”

“I think so, at the direction of the uptime people.”

“But the uptime people don’t come here themselves?”

“No, but they have a way of sending directives into the knot.”

“It was very humane of them to have this station built.”

“Well, that may have been their intention,” Mae said, “but the reality is something quite different.”

He looked at her sad brown eyes and realized how inane his comment must have sounded to her. She’d already told him she was stranded here. He looked away, flushed and embarrassed. That awkward feeling was all too familiar, as if he never knew how to say the right thing.

“Why can’t you leave?” Herel asked.

“Because I’m a criminal,” Mae replied in sweet tones that belied her words.

“What?”

“I protested the System War,” she said, “a struggle between the regime on Earth and colonists on Luna, Mars, and the gas giants’ moons.”

“You were against the regime?”

“Yes.”

“So this is a prison?”

“For me it is,” she said. “For others it’s a way station.”

“That’s unfair.”

“The court didn’t think so.”

“But how could the court even know this station had been built?” Herel asked.

“They couldn’t,” she said. “They didn’t care about that. The conventional wisdom held that there were too many people already, so they might as well get rid of the troublemakers.”

“They just dropped people into the Kerr hole and washed their hands of them, not knowing if they’d die?”

“When I first got here I thought someone would come for me. Then Lillian arrived and told me they couldn’t, maybe for the same reasons we can’t remember going up ahead.”

“How do they run this place from uptime?”

“They don’t. The station is self-sustaining.”

“And it’s all for us?” he asked, thinking of the tendrils.

“It’s a very lonely place.”

“Well, at least we have each other.”

“For now.”

* * * *

It was a dull life, just as Mae had warned him. Without any means of calculating the passage of time, Herel whiled away the hours with interactive dramas, reading, and watching the tendrils creep out of the walls, floor, and ceiling to clean and maintain the enclosed environment. He guessed that they were nanowire fashioned from potassium manganese oxide, easily able to absorb oil and grease, but that didn’t explain their independent movements. At first he followed them and tried to find out where they came from, where the mechanisms that controlled them were stored.

The air was circulated through wall slashes so thin he couldn’t insert a finger between them.

He searched the premises thoroughly. Other than the airlock hatches in the docking node, he found no entryway into the time station’s guts. Holes opened like mouths to receive the empty food and drink packets, and then closed again seamlessly. The tendrils seemed to grow right out of the solid walls, disappearing when they finished a job until the next time they were needed. They fascinated him, but once he’d seen them working a few dozen times he lost interest. After a while, he hardly noticed them, except for the occasional frisson provided by catching their movements in his peripheral vision.

He spent hours drifting through the time station, making observations, never giving up on finding out what made it all hum. He noted that the pastel walls consisted of soft material and that there were no sharp corners, no tools or knives and forks. Herel estimated the time station’s interior at just over 2,000 square meters—2,028, as nearly as he could tell without precision instruments.

He made it his purpose, his work, to learn about it. When he tired, he sought out Mae, because her company was the only genuine pleasure he derived from his new surroundings.

“I feel rather frustrated,” he confided to her in the galley, “expending all this effort and learning so little. I have no idea what powers this place or how it reacts to our needs.”

She nodded. “The time station seems to be alive, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, almost as if it’s been endowed with consciousness.”

“Maybe it has.”

“That would explain a lot, but I don’t see how it’s possible.”

They talked often about their earlier lives. Herel got to know Mae. He thought she was wonderful—literate, kind, intelligent, and warm. They were nearly the same age, or had been when they were dropped into the Kerr hole. He was thirty-seven and she was thirty-five, even though he was born twenty-eight years before her. He admired her heart-shaped face, her dark eyes, her diminutive figure, the mole on her cheek. He enjoyed listening to her soft voice. She often read to him. He felt protective toward her.

“Why didn’t you pay your taxes?” he asked during one immeasurable day as they chatted.

“It was a matter of principle,” she said. “I was an activist in the peace movement.”

“How did you get involved in that?”

“I was part of a triad marriage, and we were all in it together—or so I thought.”

“What happened?”

“Suzanne and Lodzi, my partners, relented and paid their taxes. They got suspended sentences, but I wouldn’t do it. I never heard from either of them again.”

“I’m sorry, Mae.”

“I was foolish enough to believe what my attorneys told me.”

“What did they tell you?”

“That I’d get probation. They didn’t count on the court’s hard line,” she said, tears coming to her eyes. “The state made an example of me.”

“But why you?”

“Because the court thought everyone would see that if they’d do this to a nonviolent person, they’d do it to anyone. It cost a lot to wage war on the colonies. Imagine if billions of people refused to pay their taxes.”

“So they cast you into the darkness.”

“You could say that,” she said, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. “But I’d like to know more about you, Herel.”

“I volunteered.”

“Yes, I know, but why?”

“I wanted to lead the way through the Kerr hole.”

“You’re an idealist,” she said.

“No, I’m a mechanical engineer.”

“And an explorer,” Mae said with an admiring smile.

“Call me Magellan.”

She frowned. “You should be proud of what you did.”

“Why, because I stumbled on a new kind of prison?”

“It could be worse.” She shrugged. “There’s only one prisoner so far.”

“I know, Mae, but it’s you.”

Mae looked at him with appreciation. “Thank you, Herel,” she said. “But I have my function here.”

“Caring for lost travelers,” he said, his heart pounding so violently that it hurt. “Yes, I suppose it is important, and you’re the perfect woman for the job. They made you into an example, all right, a beautiful example.”

Their eyes met, reminding Herel of lines from a poem, “The Ecstacy” by John Donne, that Mae had read to him several times:

* * * *

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes, upon one double string;

So to entergraft our hands, as yet

Was all the means to make us one,

And pictures in our eyes to get

Was all our propagation.

* * * *

He took her warm hand in his. She didn’t look away. It was then that Herel knew he loved her. He hoped to consummate that love very soon.

* * * *

It still hadn’t happened when a man was brought to the time station.

The robot was much taller than a human being and more slender. Herel felt as if he were seeing a figure from his falling dream when it came through the airlock carrying the barely conscious man in its long, segmented arms. The examination room was right off the airlock’s inner hatch.

Four gleaming hands stripped the traveler of his pressure suit and thermal underclothing, calipers extended from slender fingers to measure him, and other instruments slid in and out of its hands and torso to pierce him and tweak him, to take blood, stool, and urine samples, to swab the inside of his mouth and to record his temperature. Tests were quickly administered to determine the condition of his organs, nervous system, circulation, and respiration. Herel identified with the robot’s efficiency. Watching it work was like observing some superior species.

When the robot finished the job, it silently made its way to the airlock and went back outside, firing jets built into its elbows and heels to direct it back toward the white hole’s tractor radius.

The new guest was a stocky young fellow with titanium plates embedded in his temples and bas-relief tats adorning most of his body. He gaped, his head lolled on his thick neck, and his eyes were unfocused. His head was shaved but the rest of him was hirsute. Herel didn’t like seeing the young man’s muscular, nude body.

But Mae didn’t mind. She rubbed his wrists and fetched him water, explaining to him that he’d been yanked back from the future and spat out of a white hole. He looked at her as if she were speaking in tongues.

“What’s your name?” Mae asked.

“Conway.”

“I’m Mae and this is Herel.”

“We inside?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly high and light.

“Yes,” Mae said. “How did you know?”

“I been inside before,” he said.

“You have?”

“Uh-huh, third time.”

“You mean you’ve been in prison three times?” Herel said.

Conway’s sleepy blue eyes regarded him. “Yeah, what else?”

“I thought you meant inside time,” Mae said.

“I don’t blink.”

Herel didn’t understand what Conway meant, but Mae kept on trying to explain the time knot to him.

“Just three of us here?” Conway asked, as if he hadn’t been listening to her.

“That’s right,” Mae said. “And Herel won’t be here much longer.”

Conway’s eyes cleared as he began to understand that he was not dead or sentenced to some hellhole, but alive in a safe place with a lovely woman, soon to be alone with her.

“What were you convicted of?” Herel asked, intending to make Mae see what kind of man this was.

“Armed robbery,” Conway said with an unmistakable sense of pride. “Chipped it true.”

Herel glanced at Mae, but he couldn’t tell what effect this admission had on her, if any.

“It was on Ogle,” Conway went on. “Had it skivved. Gonna slide right after the chip. Got slapped at Customs.”

No colony had existed on that massive world in Herel’s time. In fact, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb had barely been explored in those days.

“Yeah, heavy world,” Conway said, “I chipped a gravity case and slipped speedy. Headed back to Mars, maybe Earth. Live big and true.” He sighed. “But slip into slap instead.”

Mae and Herel didn’t speak. Conway’s eyes glanced furtively from one to the other.

“I hurt nobody,” Conway said, a whine creeping into his braggadocio.

“I thought you said it was armed robbery,” Herel said.

“I spill crediscs,” Conway said, “not blood.”

“What if someone had done something you didn’t like during the robbery?” Herel persisted. “Would you have killed her?”

Conway didn’t answer the question. He glowered, understanding that Herel was his enemy, but not fearing him at all.

Mae fetched a red jersey for Conway.

“Hungry,” he said, after she helped him put it on.

They took him into the galley to get him some food.

“Once you’ve eaten,” Mae said, “you’ll be fine.”

“I’m all right, just tired,” he said, taking a squeeze of brown glop in his mouth. “What’s this?”

“It’s synthesized food,” Mae said. “I know it doesn’t taste like much, but it’s good for you.”

“Sweet.”

They ate quietly for a few minutes.

Conway whistled when the tendrils came out of the walls and ceiling.

“They do all the cleaning,” Mae explained.

He laughed, pleased that he would have no chores in this prison.

“So where am I?” Conway asked, as if they’d never told him.

They explained it all to him again. He didn’t seem to comprehend what they were telling him, except for one salient detail.

“I’m here—” he said, “—forever?”

Mae didn’t say anything.

“Looks that way,” Herel told him.

Unexpectedly, Conway grinned at Mae, revealing filed incisors and canines. “And Conway thought this would be skiv.”

Feeling depressed, Herel showed Conway to his bunk after the meal, choosing the cell across the corridor from his own, all the way on the other end of the station from Mae’s stateroom. He intended to keep an eye on Conway.

Herel strapped Conway into the bunk and watched him fall asleep. He went to his room and brooded for a few hours. After thinking things over, he found Mae reading in her room and said to her, “We’ve got to talk, Mae.”

“All right,” she said, letting her reader float away, its projected words swimming above it. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Herel pulled himself inside her room and said, “I don’t like the way Conway leers at you.”

She shrugged. “He’s just a kid.”

“Young, yes, but he’s a felon, not a political prisoner.”

“Anyone can make a mistake.”

“He’s a sociopath.”

“A sociopath?” she said, laughing at the dated term.

“Look, I understand that you’re sympathetic, but Conway’s going to make trouble.”

“What trouble can he make here?”

“That’s what I don’t want to find out.”

“There’s nothing for him to steal, and there aren’t any weapons.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?” Conway asked from behind him.

Herel shut up as Conway hauled himself into the room to face him. He floated so close by that Herel could smell the stale sweat on him.

“So what is it?” Conway demanded, sticking out his chin.

“We were having a private conversation,” Herel said.

“About me.”

“Conway—” Mae said.

“Not blaming you, Mae,” Conway said. He never took his eyes off Herel. “He’s skivvin me.”

“No, it’s just—”

“I blink what’s just,” Conway said. He turned toward Mae, the plate on his left temple gleaming. “People skiv me all my life. Never give me true.”

“So it’s always someone else’s fault?” Herel said, failing to keep the sneer out of his voice.

“You blink,” Conway said, as if reciting lines from a melodrama. “Born in a whorehouse. Momma bad. She got slapped, and I chipped to live. Had to.”

“Did you ever try anything else?” Herel asked. “Did you make any attempt at bettering yourself, at educating yourself?”

Conway ignored the question. He stared straight at Herel, until Herel saw his own reflection in the blue eyes.

Herel turned and pulled his way out of the room. He was ashamed of letting Conway get to him, but he had to think this through. He went to the observation window near the docking node and stared out into the dark.

How many more like Conway would be sent here? Why were Mae and Conway the only two prisoners here, each from a different century? Was this place intended to eventually house miscreants from different eras, a means of thinning out the overcrowded population? Was it an experimental penitentiary, maybe the prototype?

It did him no good to speculate. All that really mattered was that Herel was going to be taken away when the next ship came, leaving Mae alone with Conway. Would she read poetry to this thug? Would she civilize him?

No, instead he would brutalize her in this most isolated of all places. She would be at his mercy, and he would break her down no matter how much she tried to make him understand compassion and beauty—just as she had failed to make the court understand that her principles were more important to her than the state’s power.

Herel knew he had to do something. But what? How could he stop it? He’d be gone soon.

He had to act before then.

* * * *

Mae spent more and more time with Conway, giving Herel the opportunity to do something he’d had little time for before—reflect. He’d never been good at dealing with people socially. He didn’t know how to talk to women, for one thing. His mother had died in childbirth and Herel had no siblings. He’d studied hard—structural analysis, chemistry, thermodynamics, kinematics, metallurgy—to please his father, who’d been proud of his accomplishments. The old man hadn’t lived to see Herel’s finest engineering accomplishment, the Arrowhead, or his subsequent selection by the Time Travel Institute.

After his father was gone, Herel had only his career to live for. Not only had he never married, he’d never had many relationships at all, certainly none that lasted.

As the years had passed, he’d told himself that he simply couldn’t find a suitable mate; that he was too dedicated to engineering for romance; that he wasn’t like other people, but a man of superior intelligence; he was nobly pushing humankind into the future, and his time was too important for ephemeral dalliances. He was obsessive about his work.

Like any good engineer, Herel prided himself on his ability to solve problems.

He began to plan something while he brooded in his cell. It was no different than outlining any other project: First you become committed to it, and then you arrive at a general method of achieving it. After that you begin to put flesh on its bones, adding details and refining the framework. You try whatever you think might work and discard whatever doesn’t contribute to the plan until it’s perfected.

He had to draw his blueprint carefully. There were variables. For example, Conway was strong and he’d have no compunctions about using violence. Ironically, that might give Herel an advantage. Conway wasn’t afraid of Herel, because he had no idea what kind of courage and determination it had taken to be one of the first to go into the future. How could an illiterate criminal imagine the level of competition that Herel had overcome? He wouldn’t expect Herel to do anything.

Or would he? Criminals were wary, and they believed everyone was of like mind: greedy, violent, narrow, controlled by base urges. Herel had to take that into consideration.

He observed Conway’s habits, looking for patterns.

While he watched and waited, he noticed a change in Mae. At first she tried to ignore Conway’s tales of lawbreaking in two solar systems, perhaps thinking the young man would take the hint. But as she became accustomed to his unfamiliar slang, his swagger drew her curiosity. Herel guessed that her own gentle sense of rebelliousness responded to Conway’s outlaw persona. He was a charismatic young man. Not only that, but he often made her laugh, something Herel couldn’t do. There was so little to occupy oneself with at the time station that it was understandable Mae had become attracted to Conway.

That understanding didn’t make it any easier for Herel to bear.

When Conway wasn’t boasting, his attention frequently wandered, sometimes right in the middle of a conversation. The only times he seemed focused were when he talked about his crimes or his sexual conquests. He wasn’t interested in literature or drama, no matter how often Mae tried to persuade him to read, but he loved to tell stories about himself.

He flirted with Mae with increasing boldness. His remarks to her became ever more crude.

“You want to slip-slide with me?” he asked Mae during dinner, flashing his sharpened teeth in a wolfish grin. “I thrust true and true.”

Mae laughed off the advance, but Herel let go of his food packet and hauled himself out of the galley, grinding his teeth in anger. He could hear Mae’s laughter fading behind him as he returned to his cell, where he angrily concentrated on his project. He wished that he could stay away from Conway until the time came to finish it, but he had to watch him as closely as possible. A behavioral pattern was emerging.

Conway could have just bided his time until Herel was gone, but he was too impatient to hide his intentions. He thought he’d soon have Mae to himself and he’d be able to do anything he wanted, and he was prematurely boastful about it.

His impatience would be his undoing.

* * * *

The opportunity came later than Herel had anticipated. He was beginning to fear that the ship would arrive before he could carry out his plan. But at last Conway said the words he’d been waiting for.

“Wanna go out?” Conway asked while Herel stared through the oval window.

“Out?” Herel said, aware of a catch in his voice.

“Out there.” Conway jerked his head toward the airlock. “I hike after we eat. Wanna come?”

Herel hesitated. He was careful not to appear too eager.

“You blink?” Conway persisted.

“Yes, I blink,” Herel said, his mouth dry. “Have you asked Mae?”

“Sure, but she said uh-uh.”

“I guess I could go with you,” Herel said, “just for something to do.”

The three of them dined together a little while later, Mae reading over her food.

“Mae,” Conway said to her as maintenance tendrils whisked away their empty food packets.

“Yes,” she said, turning the reader off. The paragraphs faded from the air as she gave Conway her attention.

“Herel and me hike after dinner.”

“Oh.” She was indifferent, perhaps looking forward to being rid of them both for a little while. “That’s nice.”

“You’re welcome to come with us,” Herel said.

“No, that’s all right,” she said. “I’m enjoying this novel.”

Herel had been pretty sure she’d say that.

“What is it that’s got you so involved?” he asked.

“Something I’ve always meant to read, but never got around to,” she said. “Crime and Punishment.”

“Story of my life,” Conway said.

“Oh, yeah,” Mae laughed. “You’re a regular Raskolnikov.”

Conway looked puzzled, but for once he said nothing.

The two men walked to the docking node and suited up. Herel knew exactly what he was going to do. He’d worked it all out. He couldn’t trap Conway in the airlock and let out the oxygen. There was a breaker inside, and even Conway could figure out how to work it.

The inner hatch opened and they both went inside the airlock. Once they were sealed off, Conway flipped the switch that worked the outside hatch. It was a big switch, easily manipulated by gloved hands.

The outer hatch opened like the mouth of the leviathan.

“No stars?” Conway said, peering into the darkness.

“Just one.”

“Huh?”

“The white hole we came through.”

“Where?” Conway said.

“It’s out there, but you can’t see it.”

“Not white?”

“That’s just a term to contrast it with a black hole.”

“I blink.”

Conway gripped a handhold as Herel attached a tether to his own suit. He saw the Arrowheads that had carried them through the white hole limned in hard chiaruscuro, three coffin-sized projectiles fastened to the time station’s fuselage.

“Fired me out like a torpedo,” Conway said, looking at the Arrowheads. “Nitty slap ride.”

“Did you know I was the Arrowhead’s designer?” Herel asked.

“Oh, yeah? You lived a long time back, huh?”

“Long ago, yes.” Herel knew that Conway considered him old-fashioned and stodgy. That would make it all the easier. “Here, let me attach the tether to you.”

Once the tether was secured, Conway reached back to test its strength. Satisfied, he floated out through the hatch. Herel followed, but he didn’t let go of the handhold. It was strange to see empty space, no stars or gas clouds, nothing but black emptiness. If it wasn’t for the light cast from the window, the two men might have been nonexistent.

Herel knew there was a remote possibility that the robot would interfere with his plan, but it was a risk he was willing to take. He was betting that it was too far away, stationed at the point where a chunk of warm, living tissue could be detected amid particles flowing from the white hole. Without an Arrowhead, Conway couldn’t survive. There simply wasn’t enough oxygen in his tank to keep him going for more than a few hours, and his suit wouldn’t shield him for long from the hard, relentless radiation.

“Dark, huh, Herel?” Conway said, not as a friend but as a man who had grown accustomed to Herel’s proximity. Herel supposed it was like that in prisons everywhere. A convict didn’t get to choose his cellmate, so he talked to anyone who was there.

“That’s right.” Herel kept his words to a minimum, trying not to reveal his hatred or his fear.

“You blink what I do?” Conway said as he pushed off with his legs, launching himself away from the station.

“What’s that?”

“I tell Mae stories.”

“Are they true?”

“Not all.”

“You mean you’re not really so bad?”

“Bad enough. I do what I do.”

“I suppose that’s true of everyone.”

“Yeah, you blink my way, Herel,” Conway said.

“Do I?” Herel was beginning to wonder if he could follow through with his plan, now that Conway seemed to be speaking honestly for once.

“Yeah, we both blink,” Conway said, floating farther out on the tether. “Two men and one woman. Both slip-slide her. Airlock her.”

“Really?”

“True and true,” Conway said. “We take turns until you slap out. Like that?”

Herel was so angry that he couldn’t speak for a moment, but then he quietly said: “No, I don’t.”

“Mae gonna slip-slide me anyhow,” Conway said, unaware that he was about to be set loose. “Whenever I want. But you can have Mae before you go.”

“That’s very generous of you, Conway.” His heart pounding, Herel released the tether from its mooring.

“Yeah, I slip-slide with Mae no matter what.”

“She’s never known anyone like you,” Herel said, barely able to control his tone now that he was finally about to complete the project.

“Nobody has,” Conway said, getting smaller and smaller while his cocky voice retained the same volume over Herel’s helmet receiver.

“Haven’t they?”

“I thrust good, true and true. Women love Conway.”

“I see.”

“Slip-slide. Tie her down, switch bitch, rosy cheeks. Burn a little. Fun.”

Herel ground his teeth. He had never been so furious.

“Hey, how long’s this rope?” Conway asked, breaking off from his twisted sexual fantasizing.

“Long enough.”

Conway’s dwindling figure reached back to turn himself around, but the slack tether prevented it. It trailed behind him.

“What goes on?”

“You do,” Herel said. “Blink that?”

“Huh?”

“Good-bye.” Herel’s breathing was ragged. He took one last look at Conway disappearing into the eternal night and pulled himself into the airlock. He shut the hatch and began to pressurize the enclosure.

“Herel....”

Herel didn’t reply.

“Herel!” Conway’s panicky, piping voice cried over the hissing oxygen. “Pull me back!”

Herel listened to Conway scream while the airlock filled up.

“Herel! Herel! Herel!”

Conway kept screaming. Sweat stung Herel’s eyes. He could have shut off the receiver, but he didn’t.

Finally the airlock was pressurized. Herel pulled himself inside the time station and sealed off the airlock. He removed his helmet and carried it with him as he sprang the inner hatch. It took him a while to catch his breath, and then he quietly stripped off his suit and stowed it. He went to his room to lie down, pleased that he would never hear Conway’s voice again. He strapped himself into his bunk and snatched a reader he’d left on a line. Everything was quiet.

It was a job well and neatly done. He hadn’t really killed Conway; he’d just let the little bastard drift away.

He turned on the reader and ordered an interactive play, Othello. The Renaissance scenery and characters sprang up around him, but the actors’ words sounded like gibberish. He snapped off the play and ordered a novel, Rabbit Run, but he was unable to get past the first paragraph. He tried poetry, but it was no good. Not even Donne. He let the reader float away. The light dimmed.

He lay in the dark, waiting.

“Conway?” Mae was silhouetted in the doorway as she looked into the cell across the corridor.

“He’s not there,” Herel said, stung that she’d been looking for Conway instead of him. Well, that was all over now.

Mae turned toward him, her head and shoulders inside the stateroom, the rest of her floating in the corridor.

“Where is he?”

“He’s gone,” Herel said, wishing that he hadn’t been lying here when she found him.

“Gone?”

“He said he was getting out of here,” Herel said. “I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He just pushed off and disappeared.”

“What?” Her body stiffened.

“Don’t worry,” Herel said. “The robot will pick him up.”

“No, it won’t,” she said, her voice quaking. “He’ll be dead long before it can get to him.”

“Do you think so?”

“I know it.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“My God,” she said, tears in her eyes.

Herel unstrapped himself from the bunk. He got up and went to Mae, trying to touch her with his pale, freckled hands.

“Why did he want you out there?” she demanded, yanking herself away from him to back into the corridor. “If he was trying to escape, why did he ask you to go?”

“Because he knew you’d think something was wrong if he went alone.”

“I could have prevented it,” she said, sobbing.

“No, I don’t think so,” Herel said, pulling himself closer to her. “He never understood the difference between a white hole and a Kerr hole.”

“Yes, he did,” she said, backing farther away. “I made sure he understood.”

“No, he didn’t get it.”

She looked at him hard. “You’re lying.”

“What? Mae, I—”

“You’re lying,” she repeated, transfixing him in the fierce depths of her brown eyes.

“How can you say that?”

“Tell me it isn’t true, then.”

As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t lie to her anymore. She knew.

“You were jealous and you killed him,” she said, tears balling into drifting pearls that framed her face.

“No, Mae,” he said desperately. “It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?”

“He wanted to share you like a slab of meat—he was sadistic—he intended to tie you up, to burn your skin, to beat you,” Herel said, speaking very rapidly. “He wasn’t a decent person.”

“And you are?” She turned and quickly hauled herself down the corridor to her room. The light soles of her feet were the last he saw of her.

Herel felt paralyzed. He was suspended between the floor and the ceiling, the bulkheads closing in on him for what seemed an eternity.

“Herel!” Conway’s voice cried at last, shocking him.

Was he losing his sanity? How could he hear Conway now?

“Herel!”

He pushed himself through the corridor and heard the panicky voice again: “Herel, please!”

He entered the galley and heard Conway there too.

“Herel!”

And then he realized that Mae was broadcasting it all over the station.

“Herel, help me! I don’t want to die!”

“Oh, God,” Herel murmured.

“Herel!” the frightened voice echoed around him.

Mae forced Herel to listen to the doomed man’s voice until it weakened and faded away, leaving behind nothing but static.

It took a long time.

* * * *

Herel rarely saw Mae after that. She kept to herself, reading and exercising. She came out to eat only when she knew Herel was in his cell. He tried to talk to her the few times he saw her, but it didn’t do any good. She had shut him out.

Herel consoled himself by remembering that the ship would come sooner or later and he would go to a place where Mae’s accusing eyes would never light on him again.

He had hoped to make her love him. She’d been fine stranded here until he showed up and fell for her. She’d been resigned to spending the rest of her life in the time station, a peaceful enough existence, its monotony occasionally relieved by the arrival of a traveler. Now he had turned it into a place of death.

He’d thought he could save Mae from violence by what he’d done.

How could he have believed such a thing? It was like thinking you could pour water down the throat of a drowning man to save him. He’d thrown away Mae’s friendship, let alone any love she might ever have felt for him. He’d deprived her of companionship in this lonely prison after he was gone.

He reminded himself of what Conway had in mind for her. It didn’t help.

Until he’d come here, Herel had always managed to avoid looking inward, but he couldn’t do that anymore, not here in this claustrophobic place. He thought about his lonely life and the terrible thing he had done. In the distorted strangelet world he subsisted in, he stared into his own soul no matter how much he tried to fight against it. It was as black as the space outside the time station.

He hated himself for his weakness even more than he hated himself for murdering Conway.

He realized for the first time that he’d always secretly been afraid of where his emotions would lead him. He’d been right to be afraid.

He rubbed his stinging eyes and tried not to think about it anymore.

* * * *

By the time the ship came he was a much older man. Decades had passed, centuries, millennia. Not inside time—which could not be quantified—but inside his tormented skull.

At first it was just a soft hum, something he might have imagined. And then he was sure he heard it, but he thought it was the power surging through conduits behind the bulkheads, something he’d never really listened to even if he’d heard it all along. He imagined electrons leaping from one orbit to another, forever fleeing their nuclei.

It got louder.

Mae emerged from her stateroom and he knew. The sound was a signal.

“Is it the ship?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, pulling herself past him through the corridor. He followed her.

“How long will it take to dock?” he asked, unable to hide the excitement in his voice. It sounded strained and raspy, almost as if it came from somewhere else.

“The ship will be here soon enough.”

Not soon enough to suit him. He could hardly believe it was finally happening.

At least she was talking to him now. He had to say what was on his mind before it was too late.

“Mae, I’m sorry.”

“Okay, you’re sorry.”

“I was trying to do the right thing.” Even as he spoke the words he realized how inadequate they were. “I wanted to protect you.”

“From what?”

“From Conway.”

She looked at him with pity. “He was just a foolish boy.”

“I was trying to help you.”

“Didn’t you think I could take care of myself?” she asked.

He stopped trying to justify himself to her. He hadn’t known then that she was stronger than him, stronger than Conway, stronger than both of them put together—but he knew it now.

He was grateful that it would all soon be in the past. But he had one more thing to say. “Mae, I’m in love with you.”

“Didn’t you know I like women?” she said. There was no malice in her tone.

Conway didn’t breathe for some few seconds. At last he exhaled.

All right, then. He’d never had a chance with her. All right. It was better this way.

The hum grew louder still, and they went to the window to watch the ship arrive. Peering into the darkness, Herel saw nothing.

“Are you sure it’s coming?” he asked, conscious of a stricture in his chest.

“Yes.”

The humming stopped. Herel could hear himself breathing. His vision shook with each of his heartbeats.

And then it was there. It seemed to emerge all at once into the light cast from the window. What he could see of it was sleek and strange, designed perhaps a thousand years or ten thousand years beyond his time. He was awestricken to think of how much its makers must have known—or would know....

Somewhere inside the time knot was another Kerr hole, and he would be dropped into it. It had to be. Would he go forward? Would he be drawn back to his own time? Or would he go somewhere and sometime he’d never dreamed of? It didn’t matter, as long as the ship took him away from the time station.

He got into his suit and went to the airlock. He put on his helmet and tested his air supply. This was it.

He slammed his palm against the switch and opened the inner hatch.

Entering the airlock, he faced the outer hatch. He opened it, taking pleasure in the sound of oxygen rushing in from the ship. The light coming from inside it was so bright it hurt his eyes. Its interior seemed tantalizingly familiar, but that couldn’t be. He couldn’t remember the future.

He saw shiny, unidentifiable objects. One of them came to life in the patch of brilliance cast into the airlock. It was a robot.

It stood and looked down at him, a slender, bronzed humanoid with the graceful lines of a racehorse, some three meters tall.

Herel pushed himself forward.

The robot effortlessly picked up a box, serpentine arms spanning its width. The box’s smoky sides did not hide what was inside it.

It was Conway.

He was desiccated, but his shriveled nakedness was recognizable inside his transparent coffin. His skin was gray paper glued to bones, his tats almost indiscernible from the leathery wrinkles. His lips were pulled back to bare his filed teeth in a terrible grin. He was curled up like a fetus.

Herel stopped, shocked to see the corpse. Conway was small, so very small.

Herel rebuked himself for hesitating. A dead man couldn’t hurt him. He moved forward again.

Something held him back.

He looked down to see tendrils lashing out and coiling around his arms and legs. The station’s maintenance system was restraining him.

The impassive robot watched as Herel was dragged back through the inner hatch. He struggled, but he was helpless as more tendrils slithered over his body. As thin as they were, their grip was steel.

The robot entered the time station and set the box down just inside the examination room. It stepped back through the airlock and returned to the docking node without turning around, like a film running in reverse.

“Good-bye, Herel,” Mae said. Her voice was muffled through his helmet.

“Mae!” he cried to her in terror as he was pulled farther and farther from the airlock. “What’s happening to me?”

“You’re staying here.”

He was carried past her. She was buoyant as tendrils helped her put on her pressure suit. They seemed to caress her. Scores of them, hundreds of them, swayed about her like seaweed in a gentle current.

“What are you doing?” he cried.

“I’m leaving.”

“But how?”

It was the first time he’d heard her laugh since he’d killed Conway.

“Looks like the rest of my sentence has been commuted,” she said, accepting her helmet from a waving skein of tendrils. “And yours is just beginning.”

“But they can’t do this!” he shouted, bound and helpless. “It’s impossible!”

“Is it?” she said, not bothering to put on the helmet.

“Mae—”

She was inside the hatch.

“Mae! Don’t go!”

She floated through the airlock.

“Mae!” he screamed, writhing in the grip of the tendrils. “Don’t leave me alone! Please!”

She didn’t look back.

“Mae!”

She was rising into the light when the inner hatch closed.