Author:	John Varley
Copyright:	1983
Date Reviewed:	9/8/85
Rating:	9.0

Synopsis: Two planes, a DC-10 and a Boeing 747 collide in mild air. It's the worst air tragedy to date; there are no survivors. Bill Smith is called in to lead the investigation team. Meanwhile, if that has any meaning here, Louise Baltimore is called in to lead the team which will remove all the people from the two planes before they crash. Louise lives in the 50th century and her job is to pull people back from the past just before they die so they can be stored in suspended animation for later use. Eventually we learn that the 50th century is dying and their only hope is to populate a new world (or at least the same world at a later time) with healthy people from the past.

But Louise is having a very bad day. That morning, during an operation in 1955, a young operative looses her stunner. The loss of any item from the future into the past can cause tragic time paradoxes which will ripple up and down the time scale. The stunner is not found and the operative, a 12 year old girl, is forced to pay the penalty of death by staying aboard the plane during the crash. Punishment is harsh and immediate - it's a hard system. Later that day the 1983 operation also has problems. An operative is killed by a would be hijacker and his stunner is also lost.

Back in the present, Bill Smith is finding a lot of inconsistencies with this particular crash. In the stomachs of a hundred passengers is an airline chicken dinner that was served during the flight. However, also served was a meat dish and a fish dinner and the probability of finding the remains of only the people who had chicken is astronomical. Several mechanical watches are found and counting time zone differentials, their time are all off by 45 minutes. The digital watches are all running backwards.

One of the rules of looking into the past is that once you've looked (or went), that time is hidden from future viewing. After the operation, there are four blank spots meaning someone will go back four times to try and undo the paradox damage caused by the lost stunner. After the last blank spot, time is seen to become fuzzy which means that a paradox has occurred. The disturbance travels at about 200 years per minute giving the future only hours before it is whipped away. Against her better judgement, Louise is sent back to the past by a note from her future. She doesn't fear the operation but the note says only go to bed with him if you want to and that possibility frightens her. A few years ago she became pregnant but the child, a beautiful girl, died after just two years. Everyone dies from where she comes

Louise's first three attempts, windows B and D, are failures. In the first she looses her cool in a chance meeting with Bill Smith (all time now hinges around Bill Smith), and in the third, Bill is injured by the stunner as he tries to open it. Louise goes back again to window C to try and keep Bill from going to the hanger where he'll learn about the future and although they do have sex, his urge to solve the case is greater than his infatuation with her.

After he's stunned, the weapon is removed back to the future and Bill tells his story to his superiors. Of course they don't believe him and he is fired. Down and out, Bill seeks a reporter who asked particularly probing questions about the inconsistencies. It seems that this reporter, also a Nobel laureate in physics, 30 years earlier purchased from an Indian a stunner which was found near a crash site. His daughter was on that flight. While they are getting their stories straight, Louise and her robot friend Sherman (who seems to be planning the whole operation along with BC, the big computer) arrive from the future and demand all evidence of the stunner. Their threats are useless though since they can't change the past so the doctor demands that he be taken into the future to see his daughter before he tells them where the stunner is.

By the time they arrive, most of the population has committed suicide, which is better than seeing time end. Although they are not really ready, the only way out now is to load the sleeping people from the past on to a giant space ship and send it through the gate, millions of years in the future, to a time when all the pollution and disease are cleaned away.

Review: "Millennium" is an excellent science fiction. Although the plot is somewhat padded, especially towards the middle, I found the prose easy to empathize with. In many ways this book is similar to "Mindkiller" by Spider Robinson. In describing the accident, the author draws on references of several events of the past few years such as the air traffic controller strike, the 747 that went down in the Florida Everglades because the crew was busy looking at faulty instruments, and the flight out of Washington that hit a bridge because of ice build up. The part of the book told in the present is really the present - now on this Earth. It was almost like reading a newspaper. For all the problems of the 20th century, John Varley paints a bleak picture of the far future. I really felt sorry when the young operative was forced to stay behind on the plane that was about to crash. I also like the descriptions of the diseases of the future and how the working people turn themselves into gnomes (half machine, half human) when they can no longer move about on their own. Someone who lives past 35 on his own is very lucky.

The time travel aspects were well done but little new ground was broken here. It was interesting the way Louise went back in time in a different order than the events themselves (i.e. she went to widow D before window C) but I think more could have been made of this. The confusion of the time paradoxes simply stated them again rather than exploring new possibilities, as in "The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov where every decision creates a new time line. The possibility of saving people just before they die was also very interesting.

There are some problems with the story, especially it's consistency. I also would have appreciated it more if the reason for the operations where known earlier. This was explained three quarters into the story and when it came the explanation was less than what I anticipated (using the people from the past as slaves). The author also failed to explain the cause of all the time problems like the watches and chicken dinners. Who was guilty of such poor planning and why had that never happened before in a previous crash. Also, how did it come about that Sherman, an ordinary robot could become so powerful? I also had some problems with the Epilogue and the Prologue (which followed). I believe that Louise was insane and could very well have constructed the whole skin suit business but I don't like the explanation that B.C. was really God.