mentally deranged is remarkably illuminating. One thing I learned was that the transmission process plays merry hell with your brain, although I suspected this was due to the effects of cerebral implants rather than an inevitable consequence of the shift. Even more unfortunately, I had popped a few hallucinogens before I left, to ramp up my performance; many of the settings I had to do manually, so I needed all the help I could get. As I say, I did pretty well, but I emerged the other end raving and incoherent. Even the little sense I could talk merely convinced people that I was completely nuts.
I had been aiming for San Francisco in 1972; hitting a small village three miles south of Munich in 1936 was pretty good. I will not here describe the experience of landing in a world so foreign to my experience, so brutal and so intoxicating in many ways. Suffice it to say that it is a most peculiar business. The new reality is so overwhelming that you quickly forget your own past circumstances: I found that I spent little time thinking about my previous life, which very speedily took on the nature of a dream, dissociated from my current existence.
That didn’t make it any easier, mind you; even when I returned to sanity, the chances of making mistakes and attracting attention were enormous. Social mores were very different, for a start. Getting money was a strange business and quite how you were supposed to behave with others – depending on your age, sex, wealth, education, location and beliefs – was incomparably complex. I was, in fact, quite glad I had a long time to get used to it all. I was convalescing, so I thought I might as well make it pleasant. I had set my heart on a surfboard and a Thunderbird but, once I moved to France in 1937, I found there were more than enough pleasures to fill my days for a while.
I had left with a full suite of implants which made my life verymuch easier. I could speak German fluently, for example, and could manage just as well in twenty-three other languages. I had the expertise to be a highly successful lawyer or surgeon; I could have won the Nobel Prize many times over simply by printing other people’s work a little ahead of them. By the standards of the day, I was also quite remarkably beautiful and healthy, and could easily have become a major film star. I did none of that, of course, as I did not want to attract any attention, just in case.
The lack of newspapers was a nuisance, though; I remembered that a war was going to start, for example, and knew more or less who would win it, but I had no more idea what the following day would bring than anyone else. Foolish, no doubt, but I was a psychomathematician whose speciality was time; events were mere epiphenomena which interested me not at all. I was briefly worried that the lack of stock market reports (I wanted a simple life, but not a poor simple life) might doom me to poverty, but soon enough realised that calculating asset price movements was absurdly easy. Rudimentary mathematical ability and a simple star chart were the only things needed.
So I spent several months in Paris amassing some seed money in the most enjoyable way women could in those days, and also worked out the formula for predicting the markets. I then sorted out my finances once and for all and settled in a quiet location in the countryside where a studied eccentricity – my behaviour was, in fact, very bizarre, and it took years to learn how to behave properly and inconspicuously – protected me from prying eyes until I felt able to blend in.
Only during the war did I emerge, as not doing anything would have been more noticeable than actually taking part. I also relocated to England, as France didn’t promise to be so very entertaining. Then I was free to get on with my work. Oddly I found that my greatest advantage was having no assistance whatsoever. My mind could roam freely and, unshackled from the limits of standard procedure, could approach the
I had been aiming for San Francisco in 1972; hitting a small village three miles south of Munich in 1936 was pretty good. I will not here describe the experience of landing in a world so foreign to my experience, so brutal and so intoxicating in many ways. Suffice it to say that it is a most peculiar business. The new reality is so overwhelming that you quickly forget your own past circumstances: I found that I spent little time thinking about my previous life, which very speedily took on the nature of a dream, dissociated from my current existence.
That didn’t make it any easier, mind you; even when I returned to sanity, the chances of making mistakes and attracting attention were enormous. Social mores were very different, for a start. Getting money was a strange business and quite how you were supposed to behave with others – depending on your age, sex, wealth, education, location and beliefs – was incomparably complex. I was, in fact, quite glad I had a long time to get used to it all. I was convalescing, so I thought I might as well make it pleasant. I had set my heart on a surfboard and a Thunderbird but, once I moved to France in 1937, I found there were more than enough pleasures to fill my days for a while.
I had left with a full suite of implants which made my life verymuch easier. I could speak German fluently, for example, and could manage just as well in twenty-three other languages. I had the expertise to be a highly successful lawyer or surgeon; I could have won the Nobel Prize many times over simply by printing other people’s work a little ahead of them. By the standards of the day, I was also quite remarkably beautiful and healthy, and could easily have become a major film star. I did none of that, of course, as I did not want to attract any attention, just in case.
The lack of newspapers was a nuisance, though; I remembered that a war was going to start, for example, and knew more or less who would win it, but I had no more idea what the following day would bring than anyone else. Foolish, no doubt, but I was a psychomathematician whose speciality was time; events were mere epiphenomena which interested me not at all. I was briefly worried that the lack of stock market reports (I wanted a simple life, but not a poor simple life) might doom me to poverty, but soon enough realised that calculating asset price movements was absurdly easy. Rudimentary mathematical ability and a simple star chart were the only things needed.
So I spent several months in Paris amassing some seed money in the most enjoyable way women could in those days, and also worked out the formula for predicting the markets. I then sorted out my finances once and for all and settled in a quiet location in the countryside where a studied eccentricity – my behaviour was, in fact, very bizarre, and it took years to learn how to behave properly and inconspicuously – protected me from prying eyes until I felt able to blend in.
Only during the war did I emerge, as not doing anything would have been more noticeable than actually taking part. I also relocated to England, as France didn’t promise to be so very entertaining. Then I was free to get on with my work. Oddly I found that my greatest advantage was having no assistance whatsoever. My mind could roam freely and, unshackled from the limits of standard procedure, could approach the
Similar Books
