“I did this a year ago, subjectively. If that bothers you, just think of it as a movie. I could watch a movie of myself, couldn’t I?”
But what Ian noticed first was that while they were all outstanding at the performing arts, not one of them could do anything creative! There wasn’t a composer or a novelist or a choreographer in the whole bunch. Apparently, when you started out knowing everything that you were going to do in your whole life, it just wasn’t possible to think up anything new.
The Killers weren’t nearly as talented. A few played musical instruments, but most didn’t. Most of them could fix almost anything that was broken, but few were real engineers. If they used a paint brush, it was likely to be four inches wide.
In fact, most of the Killers had distinctly low-brow tastes. There were a few waterfront dives set aside for them, traditional smoke-filled dens that the Smoothies ran, but weren’t too happy about. There was even a go-go bar where the dancing girls were always new. This happened because the Smoothie women drew lots to see who had to do it next, and they figured that one night of it was enough for any girl. Apparently, it was part of their contract with the Killers.
The Bucket of Blood was my favorite low-life dive, since it took something about as far as it could go, and I’ve always been an extremist, on just about any subject. Ian wouldn’t go there a second time, but I got to be a regular.
The place was part bar and part shooting gallery. They didn’t throw darts, they threw knives. There was a pistol range in the hallway to the john, and it was unwise to walk out of the bathroom too quickly. There was a pit where you could take on another sportsman with bare knuckles, with quarterstaves, or with sword and shield in full medieval armor, if that was your pleasure. Or you could use anything else in the way of instruments of mayhem that might be mutually agreed on. The stock of strange weapons and armor filled a basement that was bigger than the drinking areas were above. They even practiced with javelins, out in back, and sometimes played a game involving teams that each consisted of a spear chucker and a spear catcher!
And yes, people did get hurt there, but they had a direct subway to the hospital so hardly anybody ever died. The only thing phony about the place were the Smoothie waitresses, who were trying hard to act sleazy when their hearts really weren’t in it.
The first night I was there, some of the guys talked me into giving them a demonstration of my temporal sword, and they all acted very impressed. But since they all used other aspects of time travel on a regular basis, I had a feeling that their interest was faked. I think.
Or maybe it was necessary for them to learn about the swords from me, even though they already knew about them, just so causality wasn’t violated. It’s as confusing as Hell.
* * *
Anyway, a few of the Killers were genuinely creative artists. Leftenant Fitzsimmon wrote some remarkably good poetry, and Captain Stepanski did something that might have been called carpentry, or wood carving, or sculpting, or cabinetry, or maybe none of the above, but he filled whole rooms with oddly shaped, joined, and polished pieces of wood that I found to be strangely disturbing at first. Yet somehow, after a few hours, it sort of grew on me, and I got to liking it. Whatever he was doing, it was certainly original.
The Smoothies were bothered by his stuff, too, but I found one of them carving, cutting, and sanding away, making an accurate copy of one of his pieces.
The Red Gate Inn was Ian’s favorite home away from home. It was run by some sort of social club, “The Guardians of the Red Gate,” and most of the members were Killers. Yet fully half of the clientele were Smoothies. A big place, it had some two dozen fair-sized rooms, and each of them featured a different sort of entertainment, from chess through movies past bagpipers and on to a full dance band.
I liked the place second best.
The island had a large, beautiful Gothic cathedral, in the French style, that was pretty much unused. The islanders didn’t seem to have much, if any, religion, and I personally never noticed any of the Killers being of that persuasion, either.
Ian occasionally went there on Sunday mornings, and he said that a Killer lay preacher spoke to perhaps two dozen people, most of them other Killers, in the huge building. He said that the few Smoothies who came had the look of sociologists. They took notes, photos, and recordings of the proceedings, but they didn’t look very prayerful.
Even more odd was the fact that the island boasted a full-sized university, with housing and facilities for ten thousand students. Completely equipped, it stood there empty, totally devoid of both faculty and students. The only people around were a small maintenance crew, who had no idea why the place had been built. Central Maintenance had assigned the area to them to keep in shape, and that’s all they knew. Its existence was a mystery, and either nobody knew why it was there, or everybody was somehow forbidden to talk about it.
My best guess was that it had been built by mistake, that the City Planning Committee had changed its mind about the desirability of a university, and had so informed the Committee for Personnel Allocation, but neither organization had gotten around to telling the Architectural Council or the Builders’ Guild about the change in plans.
Ian wouldn’t buy my explanation. His thoughts were that with complete foreknowledge, where those in the future could always tell those in the past about what went wrong, such mistakes were impossible.
My idea was that you couldn’t know about a mistake until it had already been made, at which time you were presented with a fait accompli. At that point, you could tear the place down, but you couldn’t make it “didn’t happen.” Once one of my three-dimensional strings was laid down on that sheet of four-dimensional paper, that was it. You shouldn’t be able to modify it.
“Or maybe,” I said, “The Committee for Telling the Past Where It Screwed Up forgot to tell the Committee for Listening To the Future about the screw up. Or maybe the Committee of the Second Part just forgot to listen in the first place.”
Ian didn’t like that one, either. He remained convinced that there was a purpose for everything.
* * *
For three weeks, Ian and I played in the sunshine. We were well entertained in the evenings, and our nights, well, our nights were generally spent simply wallowing in the ladies of our households, like a pair of contented pigs in their sties.
But wallow though I certainly did, still I found myself sleeping most comfortably when Barb was at my side. The best of the lot was at the beginning, and I began to think that my thoughts of that first morning were right after all. I really was going to have to marry that girl. But later, I told myself, once all the rest of these women ceased fighting their way into my bed.
* * *
More and more often, Ian and I found ourselves finding that it was more fun to tour through the factories and farms of the island, than to play with all of our expensive adult toys that were laid out for our pleasure.
Not that we were about to let Hasenpfeffer know that, since taking a formal tour of the place was the first thing he wanted us to do.
He was still coming by every morning, singing the same old song about how the two of us really ought to quit goofing off, and knuckle down to business, as he claimed he was doing.
Ian and I had already said everything we wanted to say about the matter, the first morning we’d been here, but Hasenpfeffer kept on harping on the same old strings.
I quit discussing the matter with him, by simply never paying the slightest attention to him when he was ranting and raving. The easiest way to do this was to pay more attention to the breakfast waitress. When he wouldn’t stop, I wouldn’t either. Flirting would give way to a kiss or two and some light-hearted petting, which would eventually escalate up to concentrated foreplay. On one occasion when we were breakfasting at Ian’s, it went as far as actual copulation right there at the breakfast table before Hasenpfeffer gave up and left, muttering to himself.
That day, I’d just finished up, and sent the smiling, if a bit tousled, girl out for more coffee, when Ian said, “That was quite a show.”