Lightspeed: Year One

He laughed. “They used to debate that, way back when. The experts all said chronine was a memory drug. But they never took chronine. Neither have you, Gary. But I know. I’ve timetripped. It’s not memory. It’s more. You go back, Gary, you really do. You live it again, whatever it was. You can’t change anything, but you know it’s real, all the same.”

He threw away what was left of his leaf, and gathered his knees together with his arms. Then he put his head atop them and looked at me. “You ought to timetrip someday, Gary. You really ought to. Get the dosage right, and you can pick your yesterday. It’s not a bad deal at all.”

I shook my head. “If I wanted to timetrip, would you let me?”

“No,” he said, smiling but not moving his head. “I found the chronine. It’s mine. And there’s too little left to share. Sorry, Gary. Nothing personal, though. You know how it is.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know how it is. I didn’t want it anyway.”

“I knew that,” he said.

Ten minutes of thick silence. I broke it with a question. “Winters bother you?”

“Not really,” he said. “He seems okay. It was just the uniforms, Gary. If it wasn’t for those damn bastards in uniform and what they did, I could go back. To my river, and my singing.”

“And Sandi,” I said.

His mouth twisted into a reluctant smile. “And Sandi,” he admitted. “And I wouldn’t even need chronine to keep my dates.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I didn’t say anything. Finally, wearying, Keith slid forward a little, and lay back under the tree. It was a clear night. You could see the stars through the branches.

“Sometimes, out here at night, I forget,” he said softly, more to himself than to me. “The sky still looks the same as it did before the Blast. And the stars don’t know the difference. If I don’t look east, I can almost pretend it never happened.”

I shook my head. “Keith, that’s a game. It did happen. You can’t forget that. You know you can’t. And you can’t go back. You know that, too.”

“You don’t listen, do you, Gary? I do go back. I really do.”

“You go back to a dream world, Keith. And it’s dead, that world. You can’t keep it up. Sooner or later you’re going to have to start living in reality.”

Keith was still looking up at the sky, but he smiled gently as I argued. “No, Gary. You don’t see. The past is as real as the present, you know. And when the present is bleak and empty, and the future more so, then the only sanity is living in the past.”

I started to say something, but he pretended not to hear. “Back in the city, when I was a kid, I never saw this many stars,” he said, his voice distant. “The first time I got into the country, I remember how shocked I was at all the extra stars they’d gone and stuck in my sky.” He laughed softly. “Know when that was? Six years ago, when I was just out of school. Also last night. Take your pick. Sandi was with me, both times.”

He fell silent. I watched him for a few moments, then stood up and brushed myself off. It was never any use. I couldn’t convince him. And the saddest part of it was, I couldn’t even convince myself. Maybe he was right. Maybe, for him, that was the answer.

“You ever been in the mountains?” he asked suddenly. He looked up at me quickly, but didn’t wait for an answer. “There was this night, Gary—in Pennsylvania, in the mountains. I had this old beat-up camper, and we were driving through, bumming it around the country.

“Then, all of a sudden, this fog hit us. Thick stuff, gray and rolling, all kind of mysterious and spooky. Sandi loved stuff like that, and I did too, kind of. But it was hell to drive through. So I pulled off the road, and we took out a couple of blankets and went off a few feet.

“It was still early, though. So we just lay on the blankets together, and held each other, and talked. About us, and my songs, and that great fog, and our trip, and her acting, and all sorts of things. We kept laughing and kissing, too, although I don’t remember what we said that was so funny. Finally, after an hour or so, we undressed each other and made love on the blankets, slow and easy, in the middle of that dumb fog.”

Keith propped himself up on an elbow and looked at me. His voice was bruised, lost, hurt, eager. And lonely. “She was beautiful, Gary. She really was. She never liked me to say that, though. I don’t think she believed it. She liked me to tell her she was pretty. But she was more than pretty. She was beautiful. All warm and soft and golden, with red-blond hair and these dumb eyes that were either green or gray, depending on her mood. That night they were gray, I think. To match the fog.” He smiled, and sank back, and looked up at the stars again.