She stepped onto the elevator with blended excitement and apprehension; she’d waited a lifetime for this moment, but that did little to assuage her fear of heights. She was so focused on gathering her courage that she didn’t even notice that no one else had gotten on until the doors has closed and her journey into the sky had begun.
She’d waited a lifetime, and really had no excuse. Forty-six years of campus life had included endless trips to the far north and south for field work, studying the sun from the neighborhoods of the poles as it careened through its 11-year cycle; but in the absence of anything interesting to measure from France, she’d never made it to this marvelous citadel, this spidery wonder reaching into the heavens above the city. She could have made a vacation of it long before now, but pleasure trips were never her thing; her work had been her life.
As the lift ascended, she distracted herself by looking for the moon. It was full tonight, and the entire point of ascending the Eiffel Tower was to experience the moon from the sky, on this very special night. The moon was the entire point; she couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been at the center of her dreams.
And on this very special night, a ship that had left one of the space stations two days ago would send a lander down to Mare Serenitatis, where three people – a woman and two men – would walk upon it. For the first time since before she’d been born.
I always watch from a distance...
The journey seemed to take forever, and as she couldn’t see the moon – it would now be too far above her – she shifted her focus to her destination: the private apartment of Gustave Eiffel, whose company had built it in 1889. Thomas Edison had been his guest there.
She reflected on the odd fact that she might be in Montreal right now; in 1960, secret talks had occurred between Charles de Gaulle and Montreal’s mayor, pursuing a plan to dismantle the tower, ship all eighteen thousand, thirty-eight pieces of it to Canada and reassemble it for the Universal Exposition.
That thought was interrupted by the opening of the lift door.
She was startled to find the apartment noisy and full – there had to be at least twenty people, all of them young, all of them energetic and boisterous. Twenty-plus people was pushing it a bit, in this small apartment. Music was playing – George Michael??? Her favorite, when she had been a young teenager. She hadn’t heard a song of his since the Twenties, at least; she’d long since immersed herself in classical music.
It was a party. People were drinking, laughing, having fun. She stepped into the room, overwhelmingly self-conscious, and a young woman with green eyes and golden hair smiled at her. “Welcome!” she said with a hug. The unexpected, uninvited hug made her bristle.
A tall young man with light brown hair approached, handing her a drink. “We’re so glad you’re here,” he said with a smile. He squeezed her shoulder amiably. She bristled again, and was suddenly aware that it wasn’t just her; across the room, another young man and woman were chatting and laughing, touching one another’s hands and elbows with almost every sentence. Two women on a nearby leather couch were holding hands; standing behind them, a pair of men were talking to a third, their hands on his shoulders.
This was one touchy-feeling group, she thought. She was a solitary woman; it made her uncomfortable.
She looked down at the drink in her hand.
“Amaretto sour,” the young man said. “I hope that will do?”
Her favorite drink. She nodded.
The young woman, hand on her elbow, guided her across the room to another leather couch – an empty one. The young man followed. As they arrived at the couch, a perky woman with red hair intercepted them with a glass tray covered with New England crab puffs. Her favorite.
As she took one and eased onto the couch, she noticed incense burning on the coffee table in front of them. Jasmine.
Her favorite!
“Can I get you anything else?” asked the redhead.
Her discomfort was dissolving into fear.
“I hope you won’t think me rude,” she began, but before she could continue, there was a sudden surge of blue light, seeping out of the bedroom door in front of them. Everyone turned.
“Here he comes!” someone shouted.
“Fashionably late!” someone else called out, and everyone laughed.
There was a sound like air whooshing through an opening door, followed by a loud crack! like the sound of a baseball being hit, and the blue light abruptly vanished. Suddenly the air smelled like ozone.
The bedroom door opened, and out stepped a tall, thin man with no hair. Unlike the others, who were all dressed casually, he wore a dark gray jacket – not formal, but certainly dressy. She’d never seen the style before.
As the room broke into applause and teasing remarks flew over the man’s tardiness, she looked around her. It suddenly occurred to her that all the clothing on all of these people was somehow unfamiliar, similar to contemporary styles but not quite right.
The new arrival accepted a drink from the golden-haired woman, who stood on her toes to kiss him, and he made his way toward the couch. Along the way, another man squeezed his arm. Another kissed his cheek. He was presented with the crab puff tray, and the redhead hugged him from behind as he sat down in the leather chair across from her.
She scarcely noticed George Michael morphing into something classical and quieter, until she realized it was Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto.
Her favorite!
Her spine went cold, and the fear gripping her heart was a vice.
She realized she was trembling, and that everyone had quieted and were gathering around, rearranging seats to encircle her. Several made themselves comfortable sitting on the floor.
“I need for someone to explain to me what is going on,” she said to the man in the chair with a shaky voice.
He reached out to touch her leg in comfort, but she recoiled. He withdrew.
“I’ve very sorry, Doctor,” he said kindly. “I realize how unusual all of this must-”
“How do you know who I am?”
A hand touched her shoulder warmly. She glanced back, saw that it was the tall young man who had handed her the amaretto sour. Surrounded – trapped! – she allowed the touch. There was no point is resisting.
The man in the leather chair leaned forward. If there was kindness in his voice, there was even more in his eyes. And something else...
Reverence.
“You are Doctor Hannah Mackenzie,” he answered, “one of the greatest physicists of your time. The world just doesn’t know it yet. You are recently retired – and you are here tonight to watch the moon, as humans return to it for the first time in almost seventy-five years.”
“How can you know that?”
He smiled that kind smile again.
“Because,” he answered casually, “you wrote it in your diary.”
Her mouth fell open as her eyes widened in astonishment.
“I wrote it this afternoon! How could you possibly-”
Fear was now becoming terror. She had the forlorn impulse to flee, which was of course impossible.
“I’ll explain,” the man said. “First, introductions: my name is Colin, and like you, I am a scientist. A physicist, even, though in a different area. Tara, next to you, is a poet; the man behind you is Galen, and he’s - well, he’s many things, most of them dubious.” Laughter from everyone.
“Who are you people, and how did you know I would be here, and what is all this?”
“We are... I think ‘fans’ is right? We are fans of yours, and we’re... not from around here.” More laughter.
“Doctor Mackenzie,” Colin continued, “we know about the moon and all of your favorite things because you’re a kind of... hero of ours. Where we come from, you are celebrated. It’s not just us; countless millions of people know your name, and they all speak it with great love and respect.”
“And where exactly do you come from?” Even as she blurted out the question, she knew the answer, though her mind struggled to reject it altogether.
“We’ve been coming here for a while now,” he answered, looking around Gustave Eiffel’s rooms. “Almost five years. It’s that long since we started using it to move back and forth.”
“‘Back and forth’?”
“Did you know that this tower was used to as a telegraph transmitter during the Battle of Marne, in 1914?” Colin remarked, “and that it was used later to both jam and listen in on German radio transmission?”
She did know that. Her research on the tower had been thorough.
“The Eiffel Tower is the only object of its kind in all the world, in this era, that could handle the first jump. The right location, the right metals, the right capacity. We’ve built receiving stations all over the place now, of course, but this one was the first. And still the most popular.”
“They almost moved it, you know,” she replied, just to be irrelevant, to push back against him without belligerence. “Can you imagine moving the Eiffel Tower?”
Her mind rejected it. It just couldn’t be...
“You can’t expect me to believe what you’re implying,” she whispered.
“Excuse me just a moment,” he said, shifting his attention to his left palm, which he turned upward.
The transparent image of a girl danced above his skin, speaking a few words in a language she'd never heard before. He responded in kind, and the image vanished as he closed his hand.
“Our other guest will be just a couple of minutes,” he told the room.
“I didn’t think holography was that advanced,” she said carefully, “but that certainly doesn't prove anything.”
Colin nodded to a girl on the floor, cuddled in the arms of another. The girl got to her feet and walked over to the couch. She removed the light t-shirt she was wearing, not at all concerned about displaying her breasts, and ran a fingernail around the skin behind the bicep of her right arm. The skin went flaccid, and with a twist and sharp tug, the girl removed the arm and handed it to her.
She was almost afraid to touch it, but her astonishment was greater. The arm was clearly artificial, and the technology was utterly alien to her.
“Of course we can simply regrow lost limbs,” Colin said, “but often it’s advantageous to have limbs of uncommon strength.” The girl took back and replaced her arm.
She had no answer.
“Ah,” said Colin, “here she comes!”
The blue light bled through the cracks in the bedroom door again, accompanied by the whoosh and crack. A whiff of ozone, and out of the bedroom stepped the girl who had appeared in Colin’s hand.
She was barely a teenager, a mere whisp of a girl, with auburn hair and wide eyes. She seemed incredibly nervous as she approached the couch.
The girl knelt before her, placing her hands on her knees.
“Doctor Hannah Mackenzie,” she said in a trembling British accent. “I’ve waited all my life to meet you. I’m Doctor Hannah Mackenzie.”
There was a long silence.
“How far?” she asked in a quiet voice.
Young Hannah turned to Colin.
“Over seven hundred years,” he answered.
She looked at Young Hannah.
“And you are...?”
“I’m your granddaughter,” the girl replied, “thirty-two times over.”
“That’s not possible!” she recoiled. “I don’t have any-”
But she did. Her sophomore year in high school. Her parents had taken her to the farm for six months. A little boy. No one had ever found out.
And yet obviously everyone in this room knew. She fell silent.
“Through your son,” Young Hannah continued, “Jacob.”
Jacob!!!
They had taken him immediately. She’d never known anything about what happened to him after that. She had wondered ten thousand times who he had become, where he might be. She hadn’t dared to pursue the answers.
Jacob... what a beautiful, heart-filling name!
A tear slipped down her cheek, as the ancient ache returned.
“He lives in North Carolina, with his-”
“How are you ‘Doctor Mackenzie’?” she interrupted, changing the subject stiffly. “You can’t possibly be fifteen years old!”
“I’m actually nineteen years old,” the girl replied, “And it’s true we don’t really say ‘Doctor’ or ‘PhD’ or even ‘physicist’ anymore. But it’s the same thing. I study the workings of the universe, just as you do.”
“We’re all older than we look,” Colin said with a grin. “In the twenty-ninth, people live much longer. And, of course, are far healthier. I’m actually older than you are, Doctor.”
“That can’t be! I’m seventy-two, and you aren’t even forty!” Chuckles.
She took a sip of her amaretto sour.
“Oh, my,” she said, “that’s really quite good!”
The room exploded in laughter, and everyone applauded. Tara squeezed her arm, and this time she didn’t mind so much. She was finally beginning to relax.
“Tell me,” she asked her granddaughter, “how exactly is it that I am beloved by millions in twenty-eight-whatever?”
“You created the model that explained the odd knots in the sun’s magnetic field,” Young Hannah answered, “and that made you curious about electron density in the ionosphere. You roamed the poles, for years, gathering data. The result of which was the Mackenzie Equations, which changed everything.”
She scoffed.
“Nonsense,” she said. “I’ve published a great deal, but no one outside academia ever took notice of my work.”
“We did,” Colin said. “Your equations led to the refitting of the ionosphere, which made it possible, along with this tower, for us to build our bridge here.”
“You’re saying time travel happened because of my work?” Her tone was almost mocking.
“In more ways than one,” Young Hannah smiled. “Because of the new ionosphere, you were able to fix the sky.”
“And without that, none of us would be here,” Galen chimed in. “Humanity only had about twenty years left before it all would have gone to hell.”
“This is ridiculous!” she almost shouted. “Even if my work led to the changes you speak of, they haven’t happened yet! So if they really were the basis of... time travel, I can’t believe just said that! - you couldn’t be here!”
“Your government also took notice of your work,” Colin explained. “The ionosphere’s been quietly changing for years now.”
She was running out of objections.
“How is it you’re able to get away with all of this?” she demanded. “If this place really is a train to Hogwart’s, how is it no one has noticed?” She looked back at the elevator door. “For that matter, how is it that no one on the ground has noticed the elevator never went back down?”
Colin smiled. “We have... friends, let’s say, in local management.”
She shook her head. It was all too much.
“It’s time!” called out someone from the floor. Colin jumped up.
“Yes it is!”
Young Hannah took her hand and Galen helped her off the couch, and they led her to the east window, where the moon had drifted into view. There were hands on her arms and shoulders – loving hands, from what was clearly a more loving human era – and she reflected on the coldness of her private world, a solitary, unpeopled world where her dreams emanated from places far away. That beautiful silver orb had been a constant, lighting her darkness since she’d been a girl.
They all kept a respectful silence as she looked up into the Paris sky at the brilliant silver orb, with its endless oceans of dust, millennia of romance, and three new visitors.
Colin turned up his palm, and a transparent lunar module appeared. And the room was suddenly filled with the voice of Commander Molly North, one of her heroes, as she came through the hatch of the lander Hera and started down the lander’s ladder.
“Houston, Serenity Base,” she said, “I am through the hatch and descending to the surface.”
A tense moment passed.
“Today we pass through all our yesterdays,” her voice crackled through her headset, “and step into all our tomorrows.”
The room broke into wild applause, as fireworks erupted all around them in the Paris sky.
Tears flowed.
She could be watching the video feed of Molly North’s first steps, as six billion others were doing right now - I always watch from a distance! - but she preferred this view. And she was grateful for these young (and not so young!) people surrounding her, who had given her the most unexpected of gifts – the knowledge that her solitude had been worth it, that her life had counted for something. That she had been there for someone.
The thunder of fireworks boomed outside.
“You know,” she said to the quiet room behind her, “Since I was a little girl - I always wanted more than anything to go there!” She laughed and cried at the same time.
Of course, they all knew that, and they laughed and cried with her.
She turned and started to make her way back to the couch. Colin paused in front of her.
“Hannah,” he said, taking her hands in his, “we didn’t just come here to meet you.”
She waited for him to continue.
“Would you like to see the world you created?”
It took her a moment to grasp what he was suggesting.
“And family,” Young Hannah added. “It’s not just me, of course; you and Jacob have more than three hundred and fifty thousand living descendants!”
“Is it possible?” she whispered.
Colin nodded and smiled.
“But... where will I end up?”
“Right back here, in the Eiffel Tower,” Young Hannah said with a laugh, “This place goes straight to itself – but in the future. It even looks mostly the same!”
No more watching from a distance...
Young Hannah took her hand.
“Let’s go, the two of us,” she said, kissing her grandmother on the cheek. “Come and have a look around!”
There were murmurs of encouragement behind her. Colin nodded.
She suddenly hugged him, tears flowing again. He held her as if she were his mother. Others reached out to touch them both.
Trembling once again, she took Young Hannah’s hand and was led into the bedroom. With a whoosh, a crack! and a flash of blue, they were gone.
Colin stared thoughtfully at the bedroom door for a long moment.
Tara wrapped an arm around him and led him back to the window as the party music restarted behind them.
“We could save her,” Tara said softly.
“You know the rules.”
There was a long, quiet moment.
“Should we have told her?” Tara asked.
Colin smiled ruefully. “About the embolism?” He shook his head. “On the last day of your life, would you want to know it?”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Tara said. “Should we have told her that seven hundred and eighty years from now, the Eiffel Tower isn’t in Paris anymore? Should we have told her where it is, where she’s really going?”
“And spoil the surprise?”
They both looked up at the glowing, magical moon, and he chuckled softly.
留言