Accepting One's Situation

My name is Nareth E. Nishi, and I was born to a Japanese father in the city of San Francisco in the year 1864. All I have ever known of my American mother is that she was a whore in a waterfront brothel. Often, I tried to learn more from my late father, who would say only that my mother died not long after after my own birth. Afterwards, he went East, to Manhattan and then New England, where he finally settled in the city of Providence in Rhode Island, having accepted a professorship at Brown University. My father was a brilliant man, but he was not sane. And in the final years of his life, his madness became a malignant, all-consuming thing.

These are not the matters I have sat down at this writing desk, at this typewriter, to say. I may yet have many long years ahead of me to speak of my childhood in Providence, of my schooling, of the young man whom I loved and almost wed. All those things are forever lost to me now, as lost to me as is my mad father, and for now I will let the distant past be the distant past.

My name is Nareth E. Nishi, and I find myself stranded in an alien world and time, and slowly I begin to believe that this is where I will spend the remainder of my days, however many they may be. After my father's suicide and the death of my fiancé — a story for another evening — I found myself alone for the first time in my life. At the age of twenty three, it seemed everything that could possibly ever matter had been stolen from me. And yet it also seemed that perhaps I possessed the ability to change the course of my life, indeed the course of time. For had my father not spent the last decade of his life on a contraption which could carry a man forward or backward through the stream of time? And now that contraption, along with his laboratory and our house on College Hill and all my father's effects and personal papers, had passed to me. I bore my grief for a full week after his funeral, seven days and nights when the noon sun and the black of midnight seemed no more to me than the merest variations on the same shade of grey.

In the end, I opened the time portal which Father had died mercifully believing to have been shut forever, and in my sorrow and desperation I tried to reach back and alter our history. I tried to step back one week and rescue him. Yes, truly I know now what I have done, the entire, impossible horror of it, that I have somehow trespassed in the domain of gods, if such things as gods can even endure in a universe capable of the depredations I have witnessed in the last twenty days. The contraption was never perfected, and though I was well-versed in its mechanics, operation, and theory, only moments after the massive Gramme dynamos had powered up and the vessel had detached from its originating temporal coordinates...I say these things now as if they will ever again mean anything at all to anyone but me. Since that moment, my mind has gnawed at the events a thousand times over, searching for anything that I might have done wrong, any miniscule, critical step in the procedure I might have skipped or failed to properly carry out. I have tried to discover if it might have been my fault....but my recollection grows ever less certain. Only in the last few days have my perceptions of time, my ability to discern past from present from future begun to return, and as my sense of time grows more concrete, so my memory of that life before the accident begin to fade. It is as though this place and time may accommodate but one outcome, not the multitude that for a while I comprehended.

I can describe only what seemed to occur. The vessel was shaken by some titanic force, and I watched from my seat as it began to drift from the time stream. My father's automaton attempted in vain to correct the drift, but the contraption began to splinter. I have tried to find some more adequate word for what happened and none has come to me. There was one final instant, the smallest fraction of a second, before I was no longer simply me. As a wine glass might shatter when dropped upon a marble floor, so that moment shattered, and all things contained there within the portal shattered, too, and it seemed to me as though an incomprehensible gulf of being was laid open before me. Only, I did, however briefly, conceive of it. I held a trillion years within my mind's eye. Within a trillion divided minds that were yet all somehow mine, as all possibility became suddenly, violently realised. And I fell.

Father would have the words and equations to tell the facts of this, perhaps. I find that I do not, no matter how hard I once strove to be a student worthy of his lessons. I know what I have said, and I would think it madness...my father's legacy...if I did not now sit here, writing these things down in this room in this city surrounded by the sea. I fell. We fell. All the Nareths, for in that instant we were a multitude.

In twenty days, I have walked a hundred worlds. I have spiraled round and round, coming at last to this place and this time. I have glimpsed those other splinters of myself, some hardly recognizable, some so fused with the contraption that they are themselves hardly more than automata. And, here, I find that I have begun to accept that this is my life now. Here in this city named Babbage, where I have been welcomed. For that I should be grateful. I have despaired of ever finding the piloting automaton, whose electrical mind might have retained our home coordinates. I have hidden what remained of the vessel in the sea where I pray it will never be discovered, and now I will live this life as best I may. But it is not so simple, not matter how much I might wish it to be. My mind learned some infernal trick during the accident, and if I allow it to wander, even in the most innocent day-dream, I find that I am once again moving through time and inconceivable extradimensional voids, slipping between countless existences. I no longer need my father's machine to travel.

That is enough for now. I can smell the salt water, and I desire to see the full moon shining over this new ocean, which is only new to me.