Free This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan Page B

nexus.
    Although Hadntz seemed to be able to negotiate timestreams, Bette could not hold many of them in her mind at the same time. Timestreams were physically real consciousness-consensus, and, until Hadntz had invented her tool for knowing about other timestreams, they had been invisible to humanity, like bacterium before the invention of the microscope, and other galaxies before the invention of the telescope. Hadntz’s Device theoretically gave humans access to other timestreams, and, because they were consensus realities, it also gave humans the power to change other timestreams.
    Theoretically, of course, thought Bette, sipping sweet, scalding-hot espresso through a sugar cube.
    It made her quite ill, physically, to move from one timestream to another. Maybe she had slept that off in the train. A memory teased her—a long, long tunnel—then vanished like silvery fish in a dark lake.
    Insertion of oneself into another timestream changed it. The long-term physical effects of timestream jumps were unknown, and Bette felt lucky she had not ended up drooling in front of a television set in an old folks’ facility, or in Bedlam a couple hundred years ago.
    Sam’s signal was music: bebop, in particular, a distant music he heard and then was able to follow, although he did not like to and did not want to.
    Jill. Yes. Now Bette was remembering. The splinters—yes, really it was an appropriate word, considering—were coming together again, forming a complete, if distorted vision. When had that visit been? Where had she and Sam come from? Another timestream? This one? That had been a very brief visit, wrought with great difficulty. She remembered that much.
    Now, she hoped, she was back in that same timestream, just a bit farther on. She hoped that Jill was no longer in the hospital. And no longer in—
    Danger. Yes. Some dark threat. What? What?
    The waitress slid a plate holding a dozen pale oysters in front of her. Their fresh, briny scent was tantalizing. One thing that she had learned in her life was that it was best to eat when food was available, because she had gone through many times, during the war, when it was not. Bette swallowed three oysters quickly, and considered motive, trying to hit on the key that would unlock the mystery of her presence here .
    Hadntz had recently enhanced her invention with a genetic alteration that increased mirror neurons in the brain, which thereby increased empathy. She claimed that once male team aggression, a trait that evolved in agrarian prehistory to protect property, and the predisposition to consign outgroups to a subhuman status—which made it easier to kill and torture others—were modified, conditions for all life on earth would improve immensely.
    Why did Hadntz, Bette, Sam, Wink, and by now, uncountable others, think that such modifications were morally acceptable?
    The answer went back to the War. And, actually, not just the wars of the twentieth century, which had been the crucible for its tandem development with the atomic bomb, a project that Hadntz had left early on, but all wars. Anyone who had experienced polio knew for a fact that modifying humans with a vaccine was better than allowing polio to occur. Anyone who had experienced war knew that there should be a better alternative. A positive alternative, not just appeasement, which Churchill had likened to feeding a crocodile, hoping that one would be eaten last, when Chamberlain had appeased Hitler in 1938 by signing the Munich Agreement, ceding to Hitler the Sudetenland. Appeasement had not worked; Hitler continued his aggression. Living in a dictatorship, or a religious tyranny like the women accused of witchcraft, though perhaps peaceful on the surface, was not an alternative to war either. No—cessation of war could only occur in a human atmosphere of communication, universal suffrage, and universal literacy agenda-free education. Many studies—at least in some timestreams, Bette thought, looking around