REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME
Lawrence Watt-Evans

He stared at the student in shock.

“You think it’s a typo?” he said.

“Well, yeah,” the boy said, shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other. “W is right above S on the keyboard; it’d be easy to type ‘wet’ instead of ‘set.’ And ‘set’ makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Williams said, his voice not entirely steady. “It changes all the imagery completely, don’t you see that? ‘He wet the blade on the floor’ is the essential clue that he’s killed her, that the floor’s covered in her blood…”

“So maybe it isn’t,” the boy said. “Maybe she really is asleep, and he’s decided to forgive her.”

“But that’s a completely different story!”

The boy shrugged. Williams stared at him in horror—didn’t this smartass kid realize what he was trying to do? Williams had built his career on the careful analysis of Dorrie Ledbetter’s short stories—hell, he’d written his doctoral dissertation on this very story, ‘A Sleeping Kiss,’ and had used it in class as a model for all his students to follow! His whole reputation had been founded on it. And now this…this punk dared to suggest that all the subtleties Williams had read into the story, based on that one final image of the protagonist wetting his knife in his wife’s blood, were the result of a typographical error?

When the silence threatened to become awkward, Williams cleared his throat.

“It’s an interesting theory,” he said, “but for now, we’ll just have to deal with the story as it was originally published, all right?”

The kid shrugged again. “Okay,” he said. “I just thought I’d ask. ‘Set’ seemed to make so much more sense.”

“Well, things don’t always make obvious sense,” Williams said. “Now, run along, I need to lock up.”

The boy turned, gathered his books, and trotted up the aisle, out of the classroom. Williams stared after him.

Then he pulled out his own battered copy of Seven Endings and thumbed it open to “A Sleeping Kiss” and began reading.

At supper that evening he poured out the whole thing to Dr. Garrand, his regular dinner companion. She was in the physics department, but pleasant company all the same.

“One word!” he said. “One letter, and it’s an entirely different story!”

“That’s fascinating,” Garrand said. “A classic example of a sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. I’d never thought that would have applications in your field—though I suppose I should have; chaos theory certainly does seem to turn up everywhere once you start looking…”

Williams blinked. “Chaos theory?”

“Of course.”

“Isn’t that a mathematical thing? What’s it got to do with literature?”

“It’s mathematical in nature, yes. Chaos theory is a way of looking at systems too complex to predict by ordinary means…”

“What?”

Garrand sighed. “It’s like this,” she said. “In physics, or any other science, we look for models that will predict what will happen under certain conditions. Then we create those conditions and see what happens, and see whether our prediction is correct. If it is, that’s good; if it isn’t, we throw out our model and start over. But sometimes, there are things that are so complicated we can’t say what will happen, even if our models are right. There might be a situation where the tiniest little fluctuation can completely change the outcome—the classic example is the flap of a butterfly’s wing stirring the air at just the right time, in just the right place, to start a cascade. That one tiny movement means that a breeze is ever so slightly stronger, so a branch falls that wouldn’t have, and that changes something else, and it builds up and builds up until you have a hurricane that wouldn’t have happened if that butterfly hadn’t been there.”

“For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.”

“Something like that, yes,” Garrand agreed. “Ordinarily, the flap of a butterfly’s wing would be lost in the noise, canceled out by other events; but if everything’s just right, it can tip the balance and change everything. That’s a sensitive dependence on initial conditions—your starting set-up determines what effect that butterfly has.”

“And that one letter is the butterfly.”

“Yes!” Garrand nodded. “If the letter is W you have the story you always thought was there, about a grief-stricken murderer; if it’s S, then you have a story of forgiveness and redemption.”

“But how do I know which is right?”

“Well, if this were quantum mechanics I’d say you can’t know, that the Heisenberg principle is in effect—but it isn’t physics, it’s literature. You can open Schroedinger’s box and see if the cat’s alive or dead by contacting the author and asking her whether she meant to say ‘set’ or ‘wet.’”

Williams had no idea who Heisenberg or Schroedinger were, or what cats had to do with anything—Ledbetter hadn’t been one of the Beat writers, she was after that. He did, however, understand Garrand’s basic suggestion.

“Dorrie Ledbetter’s dead,” he said. “She died before the story was published, in fact. Heart failure, at age forty-seven.”

“Oh,” Garrand said. Her face fell. “Maybe her editor? Or her heirs?”

“I can ask, I guess,” Williams said thoughtfully.

Two weeks later he and Garrand dined together once again after a longer hiatus than customary, and Garrand had to struggle to hide her dismay at Williams’ appearance. He hadn’t shaved for at least three days, and his hair, normally fussily neat, was uncombed. There were circles under his wild eyes.

“You want to know something awful?” he said. “Nobody knows. I’m not sure Ledbetter herself really knew!”

“Well, of course she did,” Garrand said soothingly. “She must have known what story she was writing.”

Williams smiled crookedly. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But I’m not sure. I tracked down the original manuscript, you see, and got a photocopy.”

“So which is it in the manuscript?”

Wordlessly, Williams pulled a paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

Garrand leaned forward and looked at it.

“Oh, my,” she said.

The manuscript was typed, not computer-printed—and the key word was spelled with both an S and a W, one typed over the other.

“And even the experts can’t tell which one was first,” Williams said wearily. “She used a non-correcting electric typewriter, and each letter was a single stroke, no white-out, no repeat. Maybe if someone did a microscopic fiber analysis of the paper, to see which fibers were stretched how by the impact—but Ledbetter’s niece won’t allow it.”

“So you aren’t the first person to wonder about this?”

Williams snorted. “No,” he said. “But it’s been kept quiet; the publisher doesn’t like to admit they might have made a vital mistake in one of their reliable sellers.”

“So nobody but Ledbetter herself ever knew which was the correct version?” Garrand asked, as she stared at the photocopy. “Huh. Or maybe she didn’t know, either—maybe she planned it both ways. Maybe she wrote the story as a wavicle, a quantum indeterminacy…”

“What?” Williams stared at her.

“I’m sorry, I’m just babbling,” Garrand said, as she slid back down into her chair.

“But you think she might have done it on purpose?”

Garrand shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe. Don’t writers do things like that sometimes? Maybe she couldn’t decide which version she liked better, and wanted to let it be determined by chance, like Marcel Duchamp and his standard curves.”

“Or she wanted to let it be determined by the typesetter,” Williams said morosely. “Making him an unacknowledged collaborator.”

“She trusted the universe to make the correct decision,” Garrand said. “Everything for the best, and all that.”

“Ha!”

“Oh, come on; what’s the problem? Everything will work out fine…”

“No, it won’t!” Williams burst out. “Don’t you see that? I’ll never know!”

Garrand hesitated. “Ledbetter didn’t leave a diary or anything?” she asked. “No correspondence with her editor?”

Williams shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “She was sort of secretive; she liked to wait until everyone had had a chance to read her stories before she said anything about them. Except she died before anyone read ‘A Sleeping Kiss.’” He sighed. “If only there were some way to go back and tell her to leave a note, that she wouldn’t live to see this one in print…”

Garrand bit her lip. “You know,” she began, then stopped.

“What?” Williams asked.

Garrand hesitated, started to speak, stopped again. At last she said, “There might be a way to tell her.”

“How?” Williams demanded. “She’s been dead for thirty years—are you planning to hold a seance or something?”

Garrand shook her head quickly. “No,” she said, “not a seance. But we’ve been working on something in quantum physics lately…”

Williams stared at her. “A time machine?”

Garrand grimaced. “Well, not in the traditional sense,” she said. “We can’t send matter through time—that’s not allowed under our current working model of spacetime.”

“Energy, then?”

“Energy and matter are the same thing,” Garrand said.

Williams frowned. “What else is there, besides matter and energy?”

“Information.”

Williams sat back in his chair and stared silently at her for a moment.

“Okay,” he said, “I give up. How do you send information without sending matter or energy?”

“We’re back to Schroedinger’s cat,” Garrand said. “Let us suppose you have a particle that decays into two other particles, one with a positive spin and the other negative…”

“Never mind,” Williams said, interrupting her. “I don’t want to hear about any cats or quantum stuff. I just want to know what form this information would take. It can’t be a piece of paper, or even a radio signal, right? So what would it be?”

“Memory,” Garrand said. “We think we have a way to record the quantum state of a present-day brain onto a brain somewhere in the past in such a way that the patterns in the receiving brain will duplicate those in the source brain, and that as a result the receiving brain will acquire the memories of the source brain. And since memories and brain patterns are all we are, it’ll be as if the personality of the present-day person were transported into the brain of the person in the past.”

“What, you mean they’d swap bodies?”

Garrand sighed. “No,” she said. “Not at all. The present-day person wouldn’t change at all; the information is being copied, not moved. And the recipient ought to acquire the sender’s memories and personality, but there’s no reason the recipient’s own mind would be affected. There’s plenty of room in a human brain for two personalities and two lifetimes of memories.”

“So it’d be like a split personality? Could they talk to each other?”

“I don’t see why not,” Garrand said.

“So you could send a copy of my memories back to her, to warn her?”

“That’s the theory. The fact is, though, we’ve been looking for some way to test it, but we ran into a lot of ethical issues…”

“But we want to warn her that she’s going to die! Surely that can’t be unethical!”

“Well, that would depend…”

“No, it can’t be.” Williams leaned forward across the table. “Don’t you see? You’ve got to do it!”

Four days later, as Williams lay motionless on the slab and the MRI scanner slid over him, one of the other researchers leaned over and whispered to Garrand, “Warn some poet that she’s going to have a heart attack? Why don’t we do something worthwhile, like warn the crew of the Titanic that there’s ice ahead?”

Garrand didn’t bother to correct the misstatement of Ledbetter’s chosen form; instead she shrugged. “This is safer,” she said. “We don’t know how much history might change if we did anything big. Even this wouldn’t get past the ethics committee if we’d bothered to ask them.”

“We didn’t ask…?”

Garrand smiled. “With great power comes great responsibility,” she said, “but I don’t think anyone’s responsible enough to resist testing this thing at least a little, no matter what the rules say.”

An hour later Williams sat up and reached for his shirt.

“Now what?” he said.

“That’s it,” Garrand told him. “Either Dorrie Ledbetter got a copy of your memories, or she didn’t. Now we just need to find some evidence of which it was.”

“What sort of evidence?”

“Whatever she remembers would get to you.”

* * * *

She woke up suddenly and stared at the ceiling, momentarily confused. She remembered lying on a platform in some sort of machinery—was that a dream? She was here, safe in her own bed…

But it wasn’t her bed, was it? The ceiling was the stained and flaking ceiling of her boarding-house room, but she lived in a pleasant little apartment just off campus.

She blinked. Campus? Apartment?

She lived in a furnished room in a crumbling Edwardian disaster of a boarding house, with her cat and her typewriter, and here she was.

But she also remembered a sunny room on the fourth floor of an apartment house, a little kitchen on one side, a tidy little bedroom on the other, and that didn’t come before the boarding house, before this she’d been in the basement apartment that always smelled of mildew, and before that she’d lived with her parents in the nasty little ranch house in Poughkeepsie—where did a fourth-floor apartment fit in?

She tried to remember. She’d taken the apartment when she first came to Queensbury College (she’d barely heard of Queensbury, had never been there!) right after the turn of the century, in March of 2001…

She blinked again and sat up.

It was 1978. She knew that.

But it was 2010, and she also knew that.

She looked around the room, at the digital clock and the faded curtains and the battered IBM Selectric. This was definitely 1978; there wasn’t a computer screen anywhere in sight, and a typewriter like that would be a museum piece by 2010.

So why did she remember lying down in 2010, on a sort of hospital table surrounded by machinery? And how did she know typewriters would be obsolete, replaced by computers, by the turn of the century?

A dream was the only explanation, but it was one hell of a dream, to have this kind of effect on her! Usually the hard part was remembering dreams, keeping them from fading away, but this one seemed to be getting stronger with every second she was awake, trying to crowd out real memories.

She got up and pulled on her robe, then headed down the hall to the bathroom. She used the toilet, then stood and turned to the mirror. Her hand reached automatically for her razor.

She stopped dead. Razor?

Well, of course, she had to shave, didn’t she?

Shave what? She’d stopped shaving her legs back in college, when she finally gave up any idea that she might someday play the ugly duckling and and turn out a swan instead of the fat pig she was.

What the hell was wrong with her? Why did she remember another face, a man’s face, that ought to be in the mirror? Had she suddenly developed a split personality, like Sybil?

But Sybil’s personalities hadn’t confused memories like this. She remembered being male—and a very strange, uncomfortable memory it was. She reached up and touched her shoulders, her arms crossing across her breasts, then looked down at herself.

She was unquestionably female. Dorrie Ledbetter, age forty-seven, weight a mortifying two hundred and fifteen pounds, critically acclaimed but dirt-poor writer, teacher of creative writing at the adult education center six blocks east, where she was paid two dollars per student per hour to tell little old ladies that their inept moral tales of heroic pets and naughty children showed real promise but still needed work.

But she remembered so very clearly being Richard Williams, assistant professor of English at Queensbury College, several inches taller and only slightly overweight, with a potbelly that he knew he could eliminate any time he was willing to work at it a little.

This couldn’t be a premonition; she didn’t believe in them, for one thing, but for another, how could she foresee being someone else? And a member of the opposite sex, at that—she wasn’t one of Le Guin’s Gethenians, able to choose her role; she was a woman, and would always be a woman.

Was this some bizarre hallucination? A flashback to her one experiment with LSD, back in ’69, perhaps? It didn’t seem anything like that experience of crawling colors and time distortion; the sink looked completely normal, white porcelain with greenish stains around the drain, and time seemed to be ticking past at the usual rate.

She was Dorrie Ledbetter—she had Dorrie Ledbetter’s body and was in Dorrie Ledbetter’s room—so why did she remember being Richard Williams?

What exactly did she remember? She leaned heavily on the sink and tried to think.

She had eaten alone the night before, sat up late reading, and gone to bed. But what had Richard Williams been doing last night?

She remembered lying on a table in a laboratory, and this huge machine like something out of “2001” moving across her. An MRI scanner, Garrand had called it…

And that was absolutely her last memory of Richard Williams; that was what had woken her up this morning, the memory of lying there while her/his memory was copied.

She’d been sent a copy of memories from the future.

Her mouth fell open, then snapped shut.

That was crazy; that was science fiction.

She stared at herself in the mirror.

Richard Williams had wanted to know what she’d meant in one of her stories, so he’d sent a copy of his memories back in time, into her sleeping mind, so she would leave him a message.

And why did she need to leave him a message? Because she was about to die! She wouldn’t live to see “A Sleeping Kiss” published.

She turned and stared out the bathroom door at the table against the wall, the little table where a manila envelope stood propped up, waiting to be mailed—an envelope containing the manuscript of “A Sleeping Kiss.”

“Oh, fuck,” she said.

Then it sank in, and she shouted it. “Oh, fuck!”

She was going to die, and this callous bastard Williams had told her about it just so he could find out what she’d meant in one of her stupid little stories?

She gripped the edge of the sink and steadied herself.

Wait a minute, she told herself. Just wait. Think about this. Memories from the future? And she believed that?

Well, she had to. The other possibility, that she was imagining the whole thing and was therefore going insane, wasn’t any better.

And what kind of an imagination could it possibly be that would spring this on her all at once? Why would these memories all appear full-blown like this? She could remember what it felt like to be a man—and a nasty, uncomfortable memory it was, too. She could remember the Gulf War, and the huge celebrations at the turn of the millennium, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Challenger explosion…how could she have made all that up overnight?

Something she—no, Williams—had said came back to her. “So it’d be like a split personality? Could they talk to each other?”

“Hello?” she said. “Anyone there?”

No one answered; no little voice spoke up in her head. It appeared Garrand had been wrong. If she were a split personality, suddenly manifesting this new, invented identity for the first time—which didn’t at all fit her understanding of how MPD worked, in any case—then why would she have all of Williams’ memories?

No, Garrand had been wrong. The memories were not the personality. Her brain was still entirely hers; she just had a lot more jammed into it now.

And it must be real. No other explanation made sense.

After all, why shouldn’t someone invent something like this, someday? Apollo 11 must have seemed just as unlikely to her parents.

So Williams’ memories were true. And she knew the future—or thirty-two years of it, anyway.

But she wouldn’t live to see it.

“Well, screw that,” she said, looking in the mirror again. “And screw you, assistant professor Richard Williams! You selfish, self-centered, egotistical, petty bastard! Why the hell should I care whether you know what my story’s about?” She stamped out of the bathroom, crossed the room, and snatched up the envelope, tearing it open.

She had to see whether she really had typoed that word; she hadn’t caught it.

And if she hadn’t, then she’d need to retype the last page; she couldn’t expect to get the S and the W lined up properly if she just put the existing one back in the typewriter. She’d make sure that son of a bitch didn’t know which she’d intended, not unless she was still alive to tell him!

She found the right page and scanned it. No typo. She’d had it right.

She began tearing the page into little pieces, which she would burn at the first opportunity; she could copy the carbon, and then she’d destroy that, too.

For a moment she considered destroying the entire manuscript—but she needed the money, especially now that she knew it would sell the first place she tried it, and besides, she wanted Williams to experience that horrible moment, years from now, when that smartass kid would point out the typo.

She sat down at her desk, sandwiched carbon paper between two fresh sheets of mimeo bond, and rolled them into the typewriter.

“Forewarned is forearmed,” she muttered to herself as she typed “Ledbetter/Kiss” and the page number at the top. “A heart attack, huh? Because I’m too goddamn fat? Okay, you son of a bitch, then I’ll stop being fat! You think I can’t? You think just because I’m a woman I’m too passive and stupid to do something about it? I’ll live, you bastard, and what’s more I’m going to be rich, because now, you moron, I know what’s coming! I’ll bet on Reagan in 1980, I’ll bet against the ’86 Red Sox—thank you, Bill Buckner! I’ll invest in Intel and Microsoft. You wait and see, Williams—one day I’ll show up on your doorstep and spit in your face!” She snorted derisively as she rapidly typed through the next sentence. “You went and wasted this on my stupid story? You didn’t warn someone about Adolf Hitler, or Pearl Harbor, or Vietnam? Someone gave you a time machine, and all you want to do is fix a typo? Jesus, that’s like, I don’t know—destroying the planet to send a message, or something. You don’t want to interfere, my ass—God, you deserve to suffer!”

She slowed, and carefully typed “set,” then backspaced and typed a W over the S.

“There,” she said. She spaced forward and continued typing.

Water and celery, she told herself silently. She would live on water and celery until she’d lost fifty or sixty pounds. She’d been meaning to lose weight for years, she’d known she ought to lose ninety, maybe even a hundred pounds, but she could never force herself to diet and exercise—it wasn’t as if she’d had all that much to live for, after all.

But now—now she knew she’d be at least moderately famous. Now she knew she could be rich. With that for motivation a few weeks of starvation would be nothing.

She laughed to herself as she typed “The End” at the foot of the page.

“I’ll show you, Dickie Williams!” she said. She ripped the page from the typewriter, and rummaged in the drawer for a new manila envelope.

Ten minutes later she dropped the envelope in the corner mailbox and jogged, panting, toward the park.

* * * *

The medical examiner shook his head. “Damned stupid fad diets,” he said, tossing the folder on his desk.

The police lieutenant glanced at him.

“This Ledbetter woman,” the ME explained. “She hadn’t eaten a decent meal in weeks! She was living on carrot sticks and water. Lost forty pounds, sure—but the strain on her heart was too much.” He leaned back in his chair. “She couldn’t afford a doctor—I guess no one warned her just how risky a crash diet like that can be!”

“She was still pretty hefty,” the lieutenant remarked. “She must’ve been really something, if she’d lost forty pounds.”

“Yeah,” the ME agreed. “She might’ve had the heart attack anyway.” He shrugged.

“I guess we’ll never know,” he said.

“I can live with that,” the lieutenant replied.