Children of Infinity Read online

  9. Benjamin Lambert

  June 12, 1962

  Ben stared at his own name, the final one on the list. And at David Westgate’s, the third one. Or at least it could be David Westgate. The dates? His own was his birth date. He could only assume the others were also birth dates. David had said he was born in 975, but he didn’t know the day.

  Ben laid the paper down and covered his eyes with his hand. He knew it was futile to try to find correlation between the story of David’s sick mind and this scrap of paper his father had written for some unknown purpose. Perhaps it was a list of personages that had interested his father during the course of his historical studies. The fact that Ben’s own name appeared may have been just some stroke of vanity on his father’s part. Whatever the answer, it could not be taken as corroboration of David Westgate’s fantasies.

  David must have somehow derived his fantasies from the same source Ben’s father encountered in his studies. How David knew the source and how he was impelled to burn the papers in the attaché case were things that would probably never be explained.

  But then Ben was struck with a thought that was frightening in its implications. Had his father known David Westgate? Was there, by some incredible chance, a connection between them? But surely Ben would have known about it if his father had been acquainted with David. His father would inevitably have made some allusion to such a strange boy if he had known him, Ben thought.

  Ben felt he was almost beginning to hate the boy for the mystery he had brought into his life. Ben wanted nothing to touch the memory of his father and mother. And David Westgate was touching that memory in some inexplicable manner. His grubby fingers spread across the lives of Ben’s loved ones, and Ben wanted to hurl the little intruder out of the house before he touched any more that was sacred to Ben.

  In the morning. Just as soon as he could get hold of Reverend Golding, he would do it. He would find a way to rid himself of the invader.

  He dozed in spite of his determination to stay awake. The sky was brightening when he aroused. And then he realized he had been awakened by a sound from somewhere else in the house. The voice of David Westgate. It sounded as if the boy was calling his name.

  He went down the hall and opened the door of the boy’s room quietly. But it was obvious David was awake. He was calling, “Ben—Ben, I must talk to you. Ben, come to me—”

  The voice sounded strange. It wasn’t like the voice of the little boy who had related his bewildering fantasies last night. Ben stepped closer. David’s eyes were closed, and his face was deathly white. He moved as if in some uncertain pain.

  “Ben, can you hear me?” His voice spoke again, but his lips seemed scarcely to move. Then, with a chill, Ben recognized what was so strange about the boy’s voice. It sounded so much like the voice of Ben’s own father, even though it came from the throat of the boy.

  Ben could scarcely restrain the impulse to shake the boy furiously, to wake him up and get him out of the house at once. It was obvious the boy was in some kind of nightmare or psychotic trance.

  “Ben, answer me,” the boy said again. “Can you hear me?”

  Ben struggled with himself. Finally, he answered with mechanical deadness. “I hear you, David. Wake up now. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

  “Ben, listen to me. This is not David of Westgate speaking to you. This is your father. Please listen, Ben. Don’t let this frighten you or make you disbelieve. It is truly I, your father. I am having great difficulty in maintaining contact through David. You must listen carefully to what I have to say.”

  Ben stood frozen, unable to speak. A chill moved swiftly the length of his spine. He wanted to run. He wanted to silence that voice that spoke so blasphemously, claiming to be his father. But he could not move a muscle.

  “Ben, I know this startles and frightens you. Please believe there is nothing to fear. You have discovered things you were not meant to know. We are sorry, Mother and I, to burden you with this knowledge, but now it is necessary to ask for your help.

  “We who are your parents have borne your many brothers and sisters in many ages of time. You have a beautiful sister in Greece in the Age of Pericles. She is a wonderful poet and artist. You have a great physician brother in the time of Vesalius. You saw my list that was mislaid. It contains names of only a small number of our children in certain categories. I did not want you to find it, but now you have.

  “Your mother and I belong to no fixed time. We originated in an age far distant from yours, but time means nothing of what you think it to be. We live side by side with you in different rooms. We know how to move from one room to another and visit those who live there as easily as your culture moves through space.

  “We saw—the people of our age, that is—we saw that the condition of man and the probability of the survival of the human race could be much improved. There are many branches of time in which the human race does not survive. We are pruning them out, so to speak, so that the probability of survival increases constantly. I know you don’t understand this, but accept it as true, Ben.

  “One of the ways devised to carry out this work is for numerous couples, such as Mother and I, who possess superior genes with high survival factors—for us to move back into past ages and inject those genes into the human stream by bearing children who will remain there. This is difficult and delicate work, as you can perhaps appreciate. It must be done accurately to prevent dangerous distortion of temporal probabilities.

  “In the year four twenty-five we bore our first child, named Conway, who became a great leader in barbarian times. He helped much in reducing the darkness that spread over the earth in those days. This is typical of the work performed by many others of your brothers and sisters. Then in nine seventy-five we gave birth in England to your little brother, David of Westgate.

  “We moved on and on, bearing children, rearing them until they were firmly grafted in their own times. You are the most recent. You have a purpose. You will become a great influence in your own day for the survival of man. We cannot tell you what you will do or how you will do it, without destroying your effectiveness. But believe all this is so, my son Ben.

  “As we left each age we, of course, did not die. We simulated death to permit our move to another time, leaving our families to believe we had simply passed away in death. This is true of the car accident in which you believed we died. You have not buried our bodies, only simulacra of them.

  “You might suppose we have achieved a kind of immortality in this juggling of time, and you are right from a subjective point of view. We live in an age, rear a family, then we move to another time. Always we adjust our subjective age to a youthful, childbearing age and live out another life. But it has to come to an end. You were to be our last child, Ben. The best of our seed is in you. We were going to retire after we left you.

  “Then the problem of David of Westgate arose, unforeseen. We discovered he had not been well anchored in his own time. Because of a slight miscalculation, we had to leave his age earlier than anticipated. As a result he was not adequately grafted, and he began following us involuntarily. He always arrived in an age shortly after we left it, never catching up with us, but always determined to do so.

  “We need your help in this problem, Ben. You’ve got to try to anchor David in your time. The situation will be all right if you succeed. But if he slips out and comes to this age where we now are, there will be an incredible disaster resulting. You must help us, Ben. Keep David there!”

  Ben struggled to find his voice and fight down the disbelief within him. “How—supposing all this is true—how can I keep him here?”

  “Let him be your brother—which he truly is. Love him. Let him absorb the culture so that it shapes his every thought and action. He must be persuaded that we are not to be found, that he cannot follow us anymore. If you can stabilize him as a member of your culture, our work will have succeeded. If he continues to slip out, it will be necessary for us to destroy ourselves and him t
o prevent the disaster that would follow his reaching us. In turn, this will wipe out our progeny in all the ages where we have lived. It will, of course, include yourself, Ben.

  “I can tell you no more than this. You want to know where and when we exist now; I cannot tell you. You want to know what the disaster I speak of will be; I cannot tell you. You want to know why David was directed to burn the papers you found. I cannot tell you, except to say that it was necessary.

  “This is all, Ben. I need you. Your mother needs you. Our lives and yours depend on you. The fate of the work of many generations of your family depends on you. You shall not hear from us again, my son. But we give you our love. Remember us. Cherish the memory of all those wonderful things we used to do. Your mother and I had a happier time in your day and in rearing you than we knew in any other age in which we lived. You have made us very happy. Now our destiny is in your hands.”

  The voice ceased. But the echo of it seemed to remain within the room, ringing in Ben’s mind. On the bed, David Westgate stirred. The color returned to his cheeks slowly, and he opened his eyes and saw Ben standing beside him.

  “Oh, Ben, I didn’t know you were there. I’m sorry I burned the papers. I don’t know why I did that. Don’t be mad at me, Ben. Please don’t be mad at me.”

  Ben sat on the edge of the bed. The fair blond hair of the boy and his brilliant blue eyes reminded Ben of his mother. But, instantly, he rejected the thought. The whole idea was insane. David Westgate was a psychotic waif who needed institutionalizing to keep him from burning property. He needed psychiatric help to cure his fantasies.

  But Ben could not take the chance. His reason screamed that nothing he had heard from the lips of the boy during the past two days could possibly be true. Yet there was always a sliver of chance.

  Those words of the past hour—they spoke so overwhelmingly of his father.

  And, of course, they could not be true.

  The psychotic David Westgate had been in some kind of trance that produced the unbelievable interview.

  That had to be it.

  But Ben knew he had no choice but to believe. He had to believe. He had to act as if he believed.

  He would never know for sure.

  But only one thing mattered.

  The safety of his mother and father.

  Wherever, whoever, whenever they were.

  He spoke to Uncle Henry and Aunt Catherine about David later in the day. Uncle Henry said, “It’s funny you should mention a thing like that, Ben. I had a strange dream last night. It seemed so real. Just like your mother was standing there talking to me, and she was so happy—just like people are supposed to be after they’re dead. She was talking to me and she said, ‘Henry, I want you to take care of Ben until he is grown. And I want you to adopt that little boy he’s got with him. David thinks the world of Ben; it would be a shame to separate them. Please do that for me, Henry.’

  “And I promised your mother I would, so that’s what we re going to do.”

  Ben looked at David and smiled. “It looks as if your wandering days are over. You’ve got a home at last, brother.”

  barry n. malzberg

  Conversations at

  Lothars

  “In the old days,” Lothar says, turning another page of his scrapbook, “not only did people often go outdoors, as I told you, they often lived by themselves or at least in places where they did not have to see other people, sometimes for days and days. And people of many different types and backgrounds could live near each other. Isn’t that interesting? What do you think of that?” He closes the book and looks intently at me from his strange, round eyes.

  Lothar is crazy. All of us in Domicile know that he is crazy; nevertheless, it is interesting to go to him once a week or so and listen to him talk about the past, which is Lothar’s only subject of interest. Sometimes he will talk about how terrible it is to live in Domiciles or what the Bureau has done to rob us of our lives, but these are only minor issues. Mostly he pulls out his scrapbooks full of pictures and clippings from the Hundred Years and discusses how it was. According to Lothar, it was always better.

  “It’s interesting,” I answer him, which is my usual reply. “It’s very interesting, but it all happened a long time ago.”

  “Of course it happened a long time ago!” Lothar says angrily. Although he is only my age, or possibly just a little older, his concern with the past has aged him. Sometimes he looks like a little old man equipped with wrinkles, rather than a Youther. “That’s the whole point; it was a mainly decent, humane, meaningful way to live, and it was all over long before our time. Is that all you can say? That it was interesting?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, trying to pacify him. His tempers are unsettling, although, of course, they pass very quickly and there is no physical threat to them. “At least I come and listen to you. How many in the Domicile even pay attention? I’m trying to understand you, Lothar, and look at your pictures and I don’t think that you have to talk to me that way.” I stand, feeling small twitches of pain through my stiffened limbs; I have been sitting in one position and listening to Lothar for almost fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes with him is a long time; now I want to leave. “Thank you for showing me your collection,” I say to him as I usually do. “I’ll come back again and we’ll look some more.”

  “Nonsense,” he says, shaking his head and standing uncomfortably himself, looking at me with ferocity. “You don’t care. No one understands what’s truly going on here. You come to visit me only as a curiosity; then you go back to your Domicile and make jokes. I know what you think of Lothar. Everybody thinks that Lothar is crazy because he sees a better time, knows of all the differences. But I don’t care. The past is more beautiful and important than anything we have today. It was a feeling, caring world, and even the ugly parts were meaningful because people had control of their lives then. Not like today. Go,” he says. “Just get out of here. I don’t mind if you never come back again. I’ll be alone with my scrapbooks, crazy Lothar, but at least I know the difference.”

  “All right,” I say, backing to the door and into the hallway. “We’ll talk about it some other time.” It is always this way. He seems incapable of seeing people without rage, but the real reason for this is that he feels I am rejecting his interest in the past, and to a certain extent this is true. The past does not matter. The world began in 2157, when I was born, and is now fourteen. In eighty or ninety years, when I die, the world will come to an end; and somewhere in this space of a century I must take total responsibility only for the present. This is what we have learned and I believe it. On the other hand, Lothar’s scrapbooks are not uninteresting and do, indeed, show a different way of life. Sometimes I wonder what it might have been like to have lived that way, but usually I do not, being content enough with my own situation and not being responsible for Lothar’s craziness. There are rumors that his scrapbooks are constructed—not true pictures and clippings from the past at all but clever inventions of his own—but this does not matter to me. The main reason I go to Lothar’s is to pass the time, and whether I pass it with lies or truth is all the same.

  In the corridors I locate the elevator to my Domicile and ascend five miles to the section in which we live: the other five and myself. The air in the chute and corridors seems a little foul today; ventilation breaks down in the Domiciles now and then. While the technicians repair the leaks and tend the machines, there is very little that we can do about it.

  “Where have you been?” Del asks as I come into the main quarters. He is the only one there; the others must be out running with the packs again on Free Day. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I went for rides in the chutes. Then I had to put in a diet request to Bureau.”

  “You’re lying,” he says to me. Del always knows when I am lying; for this and many other reasons he will be my assigned mate in about four years when breeding can commence. “You’ve gone off to see Lothar again. I can see it in your eyes. You’re
thinking about the past.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Lothar is crazy. Everybody knows that he’s crazy. He’s going to be exiled in a little while if he keeps this up. You should not see him.”

  “I can do anything I want to do,” I say, surprised at my anger. “In the old days people were permitted to see who they wanted to when they wanted to. They even were allowed to live with people out of their Domicile and did not have to report everything to the Bureau.”

  “Is that what Lothar tells you? He is insane.”

  “Leave me alone,” I say, going to my own cubicle. “I have done nothing wrong. We are permitted during Free Day to see who we wish as long as we stay within the prescribed limits.” I do not like Del. This thought occurs very strongly to me. He is my assigned mate, and in four years we will be permitted to breed and will live together for seventy-five or eighty years, until one of us dies, but this was a decision that was not made by me, and I realize for the first time that I do not accept it. “You’ve been reporting to the Bureau,” I say. “You’ve told them that I’ve been seeing Lothar. Otherwise why would you talk about Exile?”

  “I can report to the Bureau,” he says sullenly. “This is permitted by anyone in Domicile. It’s for your own good. He’s tainting your mind. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” And so on and so forth.

  Del, when he feels under pressure or guilty in any way, will make a series of short statements and then become quiet. It is a hard thing to realize that we will be together until the end of his life or mine, but this is a decision made by the Bureau, who also prepared our Domicile in terms of our best interests, and I have no right to object. I have no right to object to anything.

  “You can do anything,” I remember Lothar saying to me during one of our discussions. “You can do anything you want to do if only you understand that they have no real control, that they only say they have it. You can live your life and break out of the Domicile and go into the outside if only you feel you can, because the Bureau does not exist if you will it not to. In the old times there was no Bureau.”