Other Earths by Jay Lake, edited by Nick Gevers Page B

him to it, he didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t think they did, either—they were gathered around it in their protective suits like apes trying to figure out an internal combustion engine.
    “Don’t look directly into it,” the scientist beside him advised. “Those who have experience a kind of . . . disorientation.”
    Unlike the apes examining it, the two of them stood behind three feet of protective, blast-proof glass, and yet both of them had moved to the back of the viewing room—as far away from the artifact as possible.
    The machine consisted of a square housing made of irregular-looking gray metal, caulked on the interior with what looked like rotted beef; and in the center of this assemblage there was an eye of green light. In the middle of the eye was a piercing red dot. The machine was about the size of a microwave oven.
    When he saw it, he shuddered; he could not tell at first if the eye was organic or a metallic lens. The effect of the machine on his mind was of a thousand maggots inching their way across the top of a television set turned on but not receiving a station.
    He couldn’t stop looking, as if the scientist’s warning had made it impossible not to look. A crawling sensation spread across his scalp, his arms, his hands, his legs.
    “How does it work?” he asked the scientist.
    “We still don’t know.”
    “Does the adept know?”
    “Not really. He just told us not to look into it directly.”
    “Is it from the future?”
    “That is the most logical guess.”
    To him, it didn’t look real. It looked either like something from another planet or something a psychotic child would put together before turning to more violent pursuits.
    “Where else could it be from?”
    The scientist didn’t reply, and anger began to override his fear. He continued to look directly into the eye, even as it made him feel sick.
    “Well, what do you know?”
    “That it shouldn’t work. As we put the pieces together . . . we all thought . . . we all thought it was more like witchcraft than science. Forgive me, Mr. President.”
    He gave the scientist a look that the scientist couldn’t meet. Had he meant the gravity of the insult? Had he meant to imply their efforts were as blasphemous as the adept’s second sight?
    “And now? What do you think now?”
    “It’s awake, alive. But we don’t see how it’s . . .”
    “It’s what?”
    “Breathing, Mr. President. A machine shouldn’t breathe.”
    “How does it take anyone into the future, do you think?”
    The temperature in the room seemed to have gone up. He was sweating. The eye of the thing, impossibly alien, bored into him. Was it changing color?
    “We think it doesn’t physically send anyone into the future. That’s the problem. We think it might somehow . . . create a localized phenomenon.”
    He sighed. “Just say what you mean.”
    The pulsing red dot. The shifting green. Looking at him. Looking into him.
    “We think it might not allow physical travel, just mental travel.”
    In that instant, he saw adept Peter’s pale face again, and he felt a weakness in his stomach; and even though there was so much protection between him and the machine, he turned to the scientist and said, “Get me out of here.”
    Only it was too late.
    The sickness, the shifting had started the next day, and he couldn’t tell anyone about it, not even his wife, or they would have removed him from office. The Constitution was quite clear about what to do with “witches and warlocks.”
     
    At this point, his aide would hand him the book. They’d have gone through a dozen books before choosing that one. It is the only one with nothing in it anyone could object to; nothing in it of substance, nothing, his people thought, that the still-free press could use to damage him. There was just a goat in the book, a goat having adventures. It was written by a constitutionalist, an outspoken supporter of coronation and expansion.
    As he takes the book, he