"The Tourist - a short story by Paul Park" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

The Tourist - a short story by Paul Park



The Tourist
a short story by Paul Park
Everybody wants to see the future, but of course they can't. They get
turned back at the border. "Go away," the customs people tell them. "You
can't come in. Go home." Often you'll get people on TV who say they snuck
across. Some claim it's wonderful and some claim it's a nightmare, so in
that way it's like before there was time travel at all.
But the past is different. I would have liked to have gone early, when it
was first opened up. Nowadays whenever you go, you're liable to be caught
in the same pan-cultural snarl: We just can't keep our hands off, and as a
result, Cuba has invaded prehistoric Texas, the Empire of Ashok has become
a Chinese client state, and Napoleon is in some kind of indirect
communication with Genghis Khan. They plan to attack Russia in some vast
temporal pincer movement. In the meantime, Burger Chef has opened
restaurants in Edo, Samarkand and Thebes, and a friend of mine who
ventured by mistake into the Thirty Years War, where you'd think no one in
their right mind would ever want to go, said that even Dessau in 1626 was
full of fat Australians drinking boilermakers and complaining that the
17th century just wasn't the same since Carnage Travel ("Explore the
bloodsoaked fields of Europe!") organized its packaged tours. They weren't
even going to show up at the bridgehead the next day; my friend went, and
reported that the Danish forces were practically outnumbered by Japanese
tourists, who stampeded the horses with their fleets of buses, and would
have changed the course of history had there been anything left to change.
Wallenstein, the Imperial commander, didn't even bother to show up till
four o'clock; he was dead drunk in the back of a Range Rover, and it was
only due to contractual obligations that he appeared at all, the Hapsburg
government (in collaboration with a New York public relations firm) having
organized the whole event as a kind of theme park. Casualties (my friend
wrote) after seven hours of fighting were still zero, except for an
Italian who had cut his finger changing lenses--an improvement, I suppose,
over the original battle, when the waters had flowed red with Danish
blood.
And that period is less travelled than most. The whole classical era
barely exists anymore. First-century Palestine is like a cultural ground
zero: nothing but taxi cabs and soft-drink stands, and confused and
frightened people. Thousands attend the Crucifixion every day, and the
garden at Gethsemane is a madhouse at all hours. My ex-inlaws were there
and they sent me a photograph, taken with a flash. It shows a panicked,
harried, sad young man. (Yes, he's blond and blue-eyed, as it turns out,
raising questions as to whether the past can actually be altered in
retrospect by the force of popular misconception.) But at least he's out
in the open. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, and the entire family of Herod the
Great are in hiding, yet still hardly a week goes by that Interpol doesn't
manage to deport some new revisionist. It's amazing how difficult people
find it to accept the scientific fact--that nothing they do will ever make