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eBook Category: Science Fiction/Humor
eBook Description: When Smedley Faversham went yesterwards to 1926 to interview Erwin Schrodinger, he never expected a four-legged hairball to influence quantum physics. Story #4 in the Smedley Faversham Chronicles.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Analog, 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2008

7 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [53 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [51 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [37 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [230 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [42 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [92 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [110 KB] , hiebook (KML) [116 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [64 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [35 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [44 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [71 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [62 KB]
Words: 11658
Reading time: 33-46 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Most family trees are either mighty oaks or weeping willows. The family tree of Smedley Faversham, however, bore no resemblance to any botanical life-form except the species of tree which is known as a monkey puzzle. Smedley Faversham's family tree possessed branches which twisted through six dimensions of Space and two dimensions of Time, doubling back upon themselves to become roots which grew in the reverse direction. This was due to the peculiar nature of Smedley Faversham's family. Most of his in-laws were outlaws, and most of his relatives were time-travelers who propagated willy-nilly through multiple timelines. Most of Smedley Faversham's ancestors would not be born for many centuries yet--indeed, some of his ancestors would never be born at all--and most of his descendants had died long before he was born. On one fateful time-jaunt into the past, Smedley had gleefully murdered both of his grandfathers before his parents were conceived, just to see what would happen. (He had also wedded and bedded both of his own grandmothers ... but we will draw a veil over the painful subject of Smedley Faversham's numerous wives, ex-wives, concubines, mistresses, mattresses and matrices. Suffice it to say that Smedley Faversham's DNA was spread far and wide across the tapestry of Time ... and it had permanently stained the fabric.)

Smedley Faversham's bloodlines were just as tangled as his timelines, and much messier. But in all the pretzeled pedigree of his family tree, the one relative who struck the deepest darkest terror into Smedley Faversham's heart was a certain matronly female who time-traveled just exactly as she pleased, and who treated the laws of causality like her personal spittoon, to the point where not even Smedley Faversham could decipher his precise familial relationship to her. She was not precisely his aunt and she was not precisely his mother, and yet she was neither and both. He therefore referred to her, in muttered undertones, as Auntie Mater.

One fateful morning--most of Smedley Faversham's mornings had a tendency to be fateful--he was spending a quiet day at home, attempting to prevent the sinking of the Titanic. For an experienced time-traveler like Smedley Faversham, this should have been simplicity itself: a quick time-jaunt to 1912 would have transported Smedley to the deck of the doomed ship, whence a few words in the navigator's ear would have altered destiny and saved hundreds of lives. But Smedley Faversham seldom did things the easy way. Thus we find him seated on a couch in his holographic rumpus room in the year 2397, with a small wormhole suspended in midair directly in front of him. The far end of the wormhole was connected to a space-time nexus in the North Atlantic in April 1912, several hours before the Titanic's collision with the dreadful iceberg. Smedley Faversham was busily firing gravitons into the wormhole, attempting to strike the iceberg from a distance and weigh it down with so much extra mass that it would sink before the great ship ever reached it.

But something was not right. In order to strike the iceberg with a sufficient number of gravitons, Smedley Faversham would have to calculate both the iceberg's precise position in space-time and its precise velocity through the North Atlantic current. Each time that Smedley Faversham calculated the iceberg's position, its velocity changed. Each time that he confirmed the iceberg's velocity, its position altered. Suddenly, Smedley Faversham came to the realization that the massive object which had struck the Titanic was not an iceberg at all, but a heisenberg: one of the dreaded navigational hazards which flit uncertainly through every timeline and make trouble for every chrononaut.

Smedley Faversham debated the merits of shifting the whole shebang into an alternate timeline, in which the Titanic escaped all the icebergs and got struck by a meteorite instead. Or he could alter history so that the Titanic arrived in New York's harbor in 1912 with nobody aboard, because all the passengers and crew had been abducted by aliens ... preferably the same aliens who had already snatched the crew of the Mary Celeste. With infinite timelines available, the possibilities were limitless. Just as Smedley Faversham was considering his options, a larger and much more turbulent wormhole appeared in the center of his rumpus room. As this wormhole's event horizon widened, the smaller wormhole put its tail between its legs and vanished like a Chihuahua fleeing a Rottweiler. The smaller wormhole's few meager quanta of Paradox were sent scattering in all directions, but these were quickly engulfed by the larger wormhole and were added to its own Paradox quotient.

"Whose wormhole is this?" Smedley Faversham wondered aloud. "Is it possible that I'm coming yesterwards from the future to visit myself, and the person at the other end of this wormhole is me? If that happened, I'd be beside myself. With rage, I mean. No, this wormhole doesn't look like one of mine: the hemwork is too neat. Somebody else must be coming to visit me, then. But why would they need such a large wormhole? Its event horizon has already taken up most of my rumpus room, and it's still growing. Who could possibly..."

"Smedley Faversham!" bellowed a deep alto voice which Smedley recognized, and at once his blood ran cold. He quaked in his boots, and he quivered in his cummerbund. (We shall not discuss what he did in his underwear.) Now the wormhole grew wider by another nano-scoonch, and through its aperture stepped Smedley Faversham's Auntie Mater. She was a very large and formidable woman, and therefore she could only fit through a very large and formidable wormhole.

"Huh-huh-how nice to see you again, Auntie," Smedley stammered.

"Rubbish!" said Auntie Mater. "You've never liked me, and we both know it. When a man who can travel through all the infinite dimensions of Space-Time never bothers to visit his own aunt, then I know what an ungrateful nephew he is. Or an ungrateful son, for that matter. I've come six centuries and seventeen parsecs to get here, so the least you could do is offer me a chair." Without waiting for an invitation, Auntie Mater positioned her capacious derriï¿1/2re above the nearest chair, and began to sit down. Smedley Faversham cringed, because the chair was merely a holographic image made of polarized light-waves, which couldn't possibly support the substantial mass of Auntie Mater. Just as Smedley realized this, Auntie Mater deposited her avoirdupois in the chair, which held her weight in spite of all the laws of physics. Apparently even the laws of physics were intimidated by Auntie Mater.

"I've come here, Smedley, to ask you for a favor," his she-relative informed him.

"A fuh-fuh-favor?" Smedley stammered. "What fuh-fuh kind of favor?"