“We’re going to have a séance. Oren, open the whisky, if you would, and pour each of us a full glass.” “First… — Tim Powers

“When you get to where I am—”

“I’ll never get to where you are. I’ll make better choices.”

“Choices! You don’t get choices, you get...situations that you react to—the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you’ve got at the time, not some hovering ‘soul.’ You’re a mercury switch—if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it’s got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don’t. You don’t have free will, sonny.”

“Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—”

“Bullshit. If—” The older Marrity was panting. “If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every ‘choice’ you’d make in any moral quandary.”

Quandary! To Marrity the sentence sounded as if it had been prepared ahead of time. Not for talking to me, he thought, this old wretch couldn’t have anticipated talking to me—he must have cooked it up for his own solace.

“Laplace’s determinist manifesto,” came another man’s languid voice from the background. “it overlooks Heisenberg’s uncertainty.”

“Okay,” said the older Marrity furiously, “then it’s probability and statistics that dictate what we’ll do! But it’s not—”

“It’s a sin,” said Marrity, breathing deeply himself. To Daphne he projected a vague cluster of images—hugging her, holding her hand—and he was able to have more confidence in his reassurance now.

“Said the fourth domino to the twenty-first!” exclaimed the older Marrity, laughing angrily. “‘Ah, wilt Thou with predestination round / Enmesh me and impute my fall to sin?’”

“That’s me, that old guy, that old drunk guy! Who claimed he was my dad? Like, me from the future?”

“One future, not the future. There isn’t any the future.”

By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong.