Rewrite_Loops in the Timescape by Gregory Benford

Author:Gregory Benford [Benford, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07CL4LPD6
Publisher: Saga Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Part IV

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The Bridge of Sighs

Time is the greatest teacher, but in the end it kills all its students.

—Hector Berlioz

25 The rental car doesn’t handle very well, and Charlie isn’t accustomed to the tight side streets of Manhattan, with all their illegally parked cars and pedestrian traffic. Damn, he thinks, why didn’t I get a limousine? But he doesn’t want anyone to know what he is doing in New York City.

The flight was not optimal. He recalled that long-vanished era, when Kennedy was Idlewild and the MetLife Building atop Grand Central was the Pan Am Building, and winging across a continent felt like a marvel. He got to LAX late and so inched past seats filled with squalling babies, muscled guys in Stallone-style T-shirts, girls in flamingo-pink tank tops, obese armrest hoggers, divorce lawyers jabbering, women in owlish spectacles burrowing into their reading.

He prowls the jammed streets, punching the car’s radio. It begins playing:

He’s gonna recommend you

To the spirit in the sky.

He snaps it off.

Yes—there is the address, a large “42” in black iron on one of the two gray pillars flanking an imposing entrance. Amid the packed streets a parking place is empty only a block away—a New York miracle. It’s 1:46 p.m. Will they mind if I’m early?

He decides to wait it out in the car. The voice on the tape sounded exact, severe. His mind churns feverishly with memories, the car accident, coming back in 1968, reading Timescape, having Trudy for the first time all over again, the vortex of turbulent time. He checks his watch again: 1:51 p.m.; time is crawling. He has to get out of this car. He straightens his tie and picks up his jacket. Locking the car, pulse hammering, getting onto the sidewalk, and putting on his jacket take a few more seconds. He makes his way down Twentieth Street, absorbing the tang and bustle of the city. This is an older section, and everyone rushes by in a hurry with New York tightness constricting their faces. A lot of mice in this concrete cage. Haughty ladies parade past in their let-them-eat-cake creations, hand-stitched with gilt embroidery and trimmed with guiltless fur. Some are ornately wrapped stick girls straight out of Vogue. Within yards of these are hippies in their sacred squalor. Some are blank faced. They all carefully do not notice one another. Islands in a sea of graffiti, litter, menace, loitering, vandalism, boom boxes, sidelong glances.

He likes the contrast. He walks half a block and comes upon some more remnants of the 1960s, crouched figures murmuring some Hare Krishna chant. Charlie wonders if Hindu reincarnation might intersect with his weirdness. Is the point of life to attain nirvana and vanish from the endless round of lives? In the Hindu faith no one recalls their past lives, but Charlie can. If someone becomes enlightened, then, do they vanish from Charlie’s rewritten lives? Or are they replaced by some dead thing without the crucial soul, a robot who plays the part but cares nothing for the outcome? A chilling thought.

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