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"You 'd guess? Don't you know?"
"It gets complicated if you think about it much. I'm one of your futures, you're one of my pasts. I think you're the Richard Bach in the midst of the money-
storm, aren't you? The new celebrity author? Nine airplanes, isn't it, and a flawless idea you've designed for a perfect woman? You're straight-arrow faithful to her, and still she leaves you cold?"
We touched the lift of a thermal with the right wing, and I banked steeply into it.
"Don't wrap it too tight," he said. "It's got such a small turning radius anyway, just a little bank will keep you in the lift."
"OK." This joy of an airplane would be mine! And he would be me. What things he must know!
"Look," I said, "I've got some questions. How far in my future are you? Twenty years?"
"More like five. Seems like fifty. I could save you forty-nine if you'd listen. There's the difference between us. I've got the answers you need, but there's not a prayer you'll listen before you get yourself flattened by the Great Steamroller of Experience."
My heart sank. "You think I'm scared of what you'll say, you're sure I won't hear you?"
"Will you?"
"Who can
I trust more than you?" I said. "Of course I'll listen!"
"Listen you might; act you won't. We get to meet now because we're both curious, but I doubt you'll let me help."
"I will!"
"You won't," he said. "It's like this airplane. In your time, it doesn't have a name, it hasn't been invented yet. When it is invented, it'll be called an ultralight, and it's going to revolutionize sport aviation. But you're not going to buy this machine finished, Richard, or hire anybody to
build it for you. You're going to build it yourself: piece by piece, Step One, Step Two, Step Three. Same with your answers, exactly the same. You can't buy them finished, you won't take them if I give them to you free, if I tell you word for word what they are."
I knew he was wrong. "You've forgotten," I said, "how fast I learn! Give me an answer and watch what I do with it!"
He tapped the control stick, a signal that he wanted to fly our kite for a while. We had gained a thousand feet in the thermal, nearly to cloudbase. Fields meadows forests hills rivers away down below us, lime and rolling velvet. No roads. Softfuffling whisper, the gentlest of winds about us while we glided upward.
With the calm smile of a gambler calling a bluff: "You want to find your soulmate?"
"Yes! Since always, you know that!"
"Your armor," he said. "It shields you from any woman who would destroy you, sure enough. But unless you let it go, it will shield you as well from the only one who can love you, nourish you, save you from your own protection. There is one perfect woman for you. She is singular, not plural The answer you're looking for is to give up your Freedom and your Independence and to marry Leslie Parrish."
It was well he had taken the controls before telling me.
"You're saying . . . WHAT?" I choked on the thought. "You . . . You're saying . . . MARRY? I cannot possibly . . . Do you know what I think about marriage? Don't you know I say in lectures that after War and
Organized Religion, Marriage brings more unhapp . . . you think I don't believe that? Give up my FREEDOM!! My INDEPENDENCE? You are telling me that my answer is to GET MARRIED? Are you ... I mean . . . WHAT?"
He laughed. I saw nothing funny. I looked away to the horizon.
"You're really scared, aren't you?" he said. "But there's your answer. If you'd listen to what you know instead of what you fear ..."
"I don't believe you."
"Maybe you're right," he said. "I'm your most probable future, not your only one." He turned in his seat, reached back to the engine, pulled a mixture-enrichment lever. "But it's pretty likely, I think, that my wife Leslie is one day going to be yours. She's asleep, right now, in my time, as your friend Leslie is asleep in your time, a continent away from you. Each of your many women, what you 've learned from them, gives you the gift of this one woman, do you understand that? Do you want more answers?"
"If that's a taste," I said, "I'm not sure that I do. Give up my freedom? Mister, you have no idea who I am. Answers like that I can do without. Please!"
"Don't worry. You'll forget this flight; you won't remember till much later."
