The Secret Nature of Space and Time
by Joe Kosiewska

EXCERPT

THE MECHANICS OF PROPHECY

I suppose I should begin this with an apology. I am usually the straightforward type, in my personal behavior as well as in my science, and I don’t very much like the idea of playing games with someone’s head, no matter what the justification or cause. But in order to illustrate the exact nature of the problem facing us here, as well as set up the framework for its solution, I have been forced to stage and inflict on you the following little coup de theatre. It won’t take very long and isn’t very difficult -- we will simply be acting out a conversation between two men that in effect has already taken place -- and while I can’t guarantee you will like what it leads to, I am sure you will in the end grant the necessity -- and perhaps even the poetry -- of my approach.

And anyway, as you have no doubt guessed by now, you have no other choice.

Now the younger of our two protagonists, whose part, by the way, you will play, is an obscure physics instructor still in his vigorous mid-thirties, a believer yet in life’s possibilities, who at the moment we begin this is closeted in his room at a Manhattan Holiday Inn, putting the final touches on a lecture which he will give the next day at Columbia University and which he fully expects will not only make his reputation as a theorist but will change the very shape and direction of scientific inquiry. He is, in other words, about to arrive at a pivotal point in his career, and perhaps his life. Our second man, to be played by me, has by contrast already lived through several such moments. He is a gray-haired fellow, about sixty or seventy, maybe even older (it is hard to tell because he has kept himself in such good condition), and he has just called from the lobby for an interview. Now listen carefully: you, the rising young instructor, have to your knowledge never met me before, and ordinarily you would not want to be disturbed the night before a big talk, especially one as crucial as this, with your career riding on it, but something I mention to you over the house phone so intrigues you that this once you will make an exception and invite me up. My motivation, on the other hand, is cloudier: I have taken it upon myself to make sure that the lecture you are writing, of which I have secret knowledge, will never be made public.

So let’s set the scene. It is close to midnight in a dim hotel corridor. You have just, in answer to my knock, slid open the door to your room and are standing there in T-shirt and jeans, gazing out at me. Your eyes are a pale blue-green and every bit as alert and penetrating and skeptical as I expected them to be, and they study me impassively through the thin filaments of smoke rising from the cigarette between your lips. I, meanwhile, have my teeth on show automatically, my hand out to grab yours.

“A pleasure, Doctor,” I say, in awkward haste. “And an honor. I once read an article of yours, on the function of acetylcholine in the brain’s perception of time. Very impressive work.”

It is obviously just an icebreaker, a prepared opening remark, but you are pleased nonetheless. AAmazing. I published that, oh, five, six years ago. Have you really read it?”

“I can quote from it.”

“Even more amazing. And I suppose you really are who you claimed to be on the phone?”

I smile again, take out my wallet, remove several items -- driver’s license, credit cards, an old faculty ID -- and hand them over. You take your time examining them, lifting them one after another to the light, a suspicious policeman checking proof; and when at last you hand back the paraphernalia of my identity, you are smiling a little bit yourself.

AInteresting coincidence,” you say.

“I’d rather not put it that way, Doctor.” Repocketing my wallet. AI’d rather say that instead of something as undependable as coincidence there are certain lines of force -- call it fate, destiny, whatever -- that work their way as elaborate patterns through people’s lives.”

“Well, since our lines of force have evidently converged here, how about sharing a drink with me?” You gesture me into your hotel room, and our invisible camera, tracking along, follows us in.

Quick mise en scene: we are in a good-sized room with two full-sized beds, a writing desk and chair, a dressing bureau, a color TV set on a metal post, an armchair in one corner, and a window looking out onto the roof of another building. The desk and one of the beds are buried under masses of paperwork, and on one wall hangs a painted street scene from some yet to be determined European city.

“What would you like -- scotch?”

“Brandy, if that’s all right. I lost my taste for scotch some years ago.”

You arch one eyebrow, but good-naturedly, as you pick up the phone and dial room service. You are better looking than I in my vanity had hoped, the stoop in your shoulders not yet too pronounced, your hair still dark and thick, though there are streaks of gray just above either temple and in the forelock that hangs down across your eyes. In fact, you make quite the romantic figure, with that look you have of distracted concentration, as though you have just finished a conversation with God, and it is easy to understand why the ladies used to fall so easily for you.

“Refreshments will arrive shortly,” you announce, recradling the receiver and motioning me to the armchair. “In the meantime, let’s hear something about yourself. Do you still teach?”

“Retired,” I say. “I am an Emeritus at several universities in Europe. Just now I happen to be in New York on a special study project. My area of specialization, as you may have guessed, happens to be the same as yours.”

“Yes.” Leaning back in the chair you have just taken. Nodding your head. ASomehow I had the feeling it would be. How is it, though, I have never run across your work? I mean, with a name like yours . . . .”

I lift my shoulders, and my eyebrows, then drop them. “Let’s just say I was always more into the research end of things, and less concerned with the publication part -- though I suppose there is at least one essay of mine you would probably find intriguing.”

“What’s the title? Maybe I’ve heard of it.”

“I doubt that. It appeared a good deal before your time. I mention it because it happens to anticipate -- in a different way, of course -- the subject of your lecture there.” I nod at your desk, which is topped with open notebooks and sheets of heavily blue-penciled typescript.

“That’s impossible. You can’t know what my lecture is about.”

“Oh, to the contrary, I know enough about what’s written there to ask you to consider tearing it up -- which is in fact why I’ve come. It’s about the plasticity of Time, and how human consciousness impinges on it; about what you call chronokinesis -- the altering and reshaping of the flow of Time by simply thinking about it.”

Well, you are puzzled. You can’t quite believe what you have just heard. You lean forward in your chair, legs apart, and stare at me intently. AMaybe we should start this over. Who are you -- really?”

At this point, to break up the tension and help us over a difficult dramatic hump, let’s have room service enter with our tray of drinks. J&B for you, Napoleon Brandy for me. What stretches before us right now is the nut of the matter, and it will all go so much easier if our hands are holding onto something instead of just hanging useless and self-conscious at our sides. Since my part from here on in will be especially arduous, I remove a Havana cigar from the inside pocket of my jacket and begin casually undoing the wrapper.

“Well?” you say.

I shrug. “You’ve seen my ID. Maybe it’s a fake and I’m an industrial spy or the agent of some government. And maybe I’m exactly who I say I am. None of that really matters. What does is the content of your speech there -- the theory you will expound tomorrow, and the consequences of that theory.”

“And you’re here to show me my facts are wrong—”

“Oh, no. Quite the opposite. Your research has always been impeccable, Doctor. And your intuitive deductions from that research -- that Time is in some sense a function of perception, and that therefore the mind has an innate but latent ability to manipulate it -- are of course correct. Which is the real reason I’ve come here. Because chronorheal malleability, and all that that implies -- time travel, prophecy, evolutionary change -- is perhaps best left unlooked into.”

“And why do you say that?”

“Because such an ability, Doctor, will destroy us.”

“Oh.” You shift uncomfortably in your seat, looking at me. “Very economically put. You make it sound, though, almost as easy as rolling out of bed. I assure you that’s not quite the case.”

“Not now, perhaps. But that’s merely because no one has done it yet. As you and I well know, the still theoretical always seems more difficult than the already done. But sooner or later, assuming the validity of your work, someone employing the proper cognitive techniques and chemical enhancements is going to manage the trick, is going to travel through Time, unfolding it like a magic carpet. And when that happens, believe me, it will open a Pandora’s box we won’t be able to close.”

“You’re being a little alarmist, I think. Not everyone is going to have access to the proper training and technology. Precautions will be taken.”

“I’m sure they will. And I’m sure the first experiments will be carefully controlled and limited -- quick, non-intervention round trips to the Renaissance, the Dark Ages, the epoch of dinosaurs -- everything very neat and proper, operationally correct. But that kind of circumspection cannot be kept up forever, especially with something such as this. Ideas are bound to proliferate.”

“Is that necessarily bad? Adding to the world’s fund of knowledge is part of the job, after all.”

I hold up my cigar. “Allow me to sketch a brief scenario of what will happen. Really, it’s just a simple logical progression. Let’s say you continue to perform more experiments, again very limited, but again very conclusive; and let’s say you eventually publish your results, or someone leaks them, it does not matter how. Snap. The next day the government has taken over your little program, made it top secret, and laid on a big budget and lots of high-tech security.”

“That’s rather fancy extrapolation.”

“It’s common sense. Do you really think the Pentagon types are going to pass on such an opportunity? Just think about the political and military advantages, how much easier it will be to deal with troublesome world leaders if their assassinations can be arranged when they are still young boys or girls. And when members of the loyal opposition begin to object to the moral bankruptcy of your methods, all you need to do is adjust the past a little and, hey, no more loyal opposition.”

The smile on your face has thinned out to a bloodless line. What I have just laid out for you has crossed your mind before, but in the heat of speculation, in your anxiety to find out if the thing is possible, you have pushed it to a backroom somewhere, buried it under a mountain of secret files, studies, test reports.

“Okay,” you say. “I’m not quite the cynic that you seem to be, but I must grant you that. It’s got an excellent chance of happening that way.”

“Absolute power, Doctor, corrupts absolutely. It’s the fourth law of Nature. And when something goes bad, it continues to go bad with ever-increasing momentum. Every power-hungry tyrant on earth will be after that secret; and that secret, as all secrets do, will leak. You can imagine, of course, what this will lead to.”

“International chaos, no doubt.”

“Precisely. Whole systems of government will disappear without a trace overnight. Wars and revolutions will be fought and won in the blink of an eye. And, unnoticed, discrepancies will begin cropping up in history textbooks: Napoleon winning at Waterloo, say, Caesar not crossing the Rubicon -- alia non iacta est -- or even the Titanic failing to strike its iceberg. You see the possibilities.” I gesture casually with my free hand. “Eventually, of course, it will all get out of control. Start ringing in changes and you won’t be able to stop them. Agents and counter-agents, their loyalties destabilized by a world shifting constantly beneath their feet, will make certain fatal errors. The process will seep into the general population. And then, I’m afraid, great rifts and gaps will begin opening in the ordinary continuum of what we fondly think of as everyday life.”

You feel you must say something at this point, must stop me with one of the hundred logical objections already rising in your mind, but you are caught up in the fabula of my argument and cannot bring yourself to interrupt. You carefully tap out another cigarette, your eyes never leaving mine.

I sit in my armchair, placidly sipping my brandy. “What will evolve out of all this,” I continue, my forefinger circling idly the rim of my glass, Ais a new type of human being: capricious, incoherent, vindictive, with the lifespan of an eternity -- or an eye blink. And a new level of experience as well. A level where the logic of linear cause and effect will no longer apply, where everything will be in constant and hopeless metamorphosis, impossibly accelerated, landscapes and cityscapes shifting like water, where the very fabric of history itself will be twisted and wrenched out of shape, stretched and bifurcated, folded over, reversed, canceled out -- and ultimately exhausted. Indeed, where the only things remaining solid and dependable will be our own fears and nightmares.”

You stare at me, your head cocked to one side. AAnd how is all this supposed to end?”

I finish my brandy, put down the empty glass, and lift my shoulders in a little shrug. "We live in an entropic universe, Doctor. Everything winds down or collapses in the end. All the permutations run out. Presumably even Time can be stretched to the breaking point.”

"Preposterous.” You are shaking your head now. "You can’t run out of Time as if it were coal and oil. You can’t just use up history!”

"I think you can. You know, someone once wrote that when every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned. I suggest, Doctor, that you and your theories are about to throw us out of Eden. And I don’t want that to happen.”

Your reaction is some time in coming. You close your eyes, and all expression leaves your face, everything turns inward, and you stand there for maybe a full sixty seconds, silent and immobile, before your eyes finally come open again and you look at me.

"A very impressive nightmare,” you whisper, almost to yourself. AThat much I admit. And on that basis you expect me not to deliver my lecture?”

"I am hoping you won’t. I am also hoping you will destroy all your research.”

"A lifetime’s work. And I don’t even know with any certainty who you are.”

"Check the items in my wallet again. Look closely at the dates this time. Extrapolate.”

"But you said yourself it could all be a trick. You could be playing Mephistopheles to my Faustus.”

"If I am, then I’m here to renege on a bargain already struck.”

"I see.” You pick up your glass and sip at it absently, but the glass has been empty the last ten minutes and you give it a surprised look. You tap out yet one more cigarette.

"Here. Try one of these.” I hold out a cigar. "I think you’ll agree they’re so much better than those things.”

You look at my offered Havana a long moment, then shake your head.

"No.”

"You won’t do it?”

"I can’t. It’s not possible for me to accept a hypothesis without testing it, to turn my back on the truth. I’m a scientist.” You give me a meaningful look. AAnd somehow I suspect you knew I would say that.”

I nod.

"Then why the whole charade? Why bother to come at all?”

"Because I admire and respect you, Doctor. And because I needed to make sure.”

I get up from the armchair, stubbing out my cigar, and take out a pen to write something on a sheet of Holiday Inn stationary. "I believe it’s time for me to go. I thank you for the drink, and for listening. Here -- perhaps this will interest you. It’s the name of that essay I wrote so many years ago.”

I offer you the slip of paper and at the doorway we shake hands. You are not anxious to keep me -- there is a lot of hard work still ahead of you this evening -- but when you notice that I am reluctant to release my grip you look one more time into my eyes and see something there that both disturbs and puzzles you.

It is not until much later, when it is almost dawn, that you can bring yourself to read my note.

* * * *

The scene now shifts forward in time and space: it is twenty one hours later, and we are in the basement library stacks at Columbia University. Your lecture is scheduled to be delivered in less than forty-five minutes, but my ploy has worked (as I knew it would) and you have come down here (alone, you think) to this subterranean maze of books, where it seems no one has been in years, the atmosphere nothing but dust and cobwebs, the place more a storeroom than a real section of the library, to search for something you do not really wish to find. You suspect you are only wasting time, since the Central Index indicates that the essay was apparently published in a magazine already defunct for fifty years, in an issue that goes back even farther, and you know perfectly well that none of that can possibly be correct. But still the title matches, and the author’s name as well, and so you carry on because you have never been one to ignore the loopholes and loose threads of an argument. You are a scientist first and foremost -- and on that we are of course both depending.

Scientist or not, however, you cannot keep your hands from trembling slightly when you at last find the particular series of bound periodicals you want and gingerly take down volume number nine. The dates on the binding, 1985-1986, are not encouraging, but you ignore them. You blow off the dust and begin flipping slowly through the yellowed and fragile leaves, directed by the table of contents to page 115. You are very nervous now. You are experiencing all sorts of misgivings, a kind of heart-thumping anticipatory insanity, and before you can examine the piece I have placed here expressly for this occasion you have to fight the irrational urge to look behind you.

(that’s right -- someone is watching)

And then you turn back to the essay and read my apology in its first sentence and know immediately that you have walked into a trap.

And that you are not going to get out.

The rest, I’m afraid, is a little flat and perfunctory. You continue with the formality of mechanically reading on, easing your eyes past the introduction and into the main body of the text -- which as you expect turns out to be an exact verbatim transcription of a certain conversation -- but it is more out of a ritual sense of finishing what you have started than out of any real curiosity, for you have already figured out what is going on here (indeed, have known it unconsciously from perhaps the very first): that the man who last night gained entry to your room by showing you ID with your name on it is no imposter, and no mere onomastic accident, but in fact an older version of yourself, the man you are destined to become, and that he has traveled back out of the future not merely to engage his younger self in a hypothetical dialogue about the end of Time but to atone for a very real Promethean crime. And you know one thing more: that this man will stop at nothing in his atonement, will leave no loose threads, no loopholes, in its argument; that even now he is only a few feet from you, waiting patiently for the moment to close out this drama. And as you read on, skipping ahead now, anxious for the denouement, as you come to these very words in this very sentence and my finger tightens around a trigger in the dark, I hope you will take some comfort in this knowledge, hope you will perhaps begin to understand why what is about to happen must happen, why the world needs to be spared at least a while longer from your -- from our -- discovery.

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