I'm twelve-year-old boy floating in a big room with a round window of plate diamond--the view-lounge of our spaceship. We're just docking with the Mars Orbital Station; I wanted to see Mars rotate under us. It looks like a huge, scarred orange. More craters than I expected. Here comes the big volcano! Three more in line... So big I feel like they'll nearly brush us. Wait for them to come round again... the planet spins so fast under us, visibly; surely it'll be only a couple of minutes. My sense of time must be distorted... why?

I crawl through to the Station. It's recently built and still small. A tiny crew. They've just noticed that there's a young man here who can't be accounted for--neither crew nor passenger! Who is he? Looks maddeningly familiar to me. A charmer. The others accept him in a resigned sort of way--he can't be pinned down, he just disappears... can he teleport?

He focuses on me. Wants to teach me things. Why?

He tells me why.

"I'm you. You from the future. Five, ten years. Time here is strange, and a loop has happened." He's come back to steer me onto the path that will give me the powers he has, that let him come back to steer me onto... no, don't think about it.

And so, following his advice, I climb into the next ship outbound for Jupiter and beyond, and glide out amid a lurid mass of lights and even visible, tumbling rocks. It's some cheap Hollywood conception of the asteroids! All wrong--what IS this? A loop back to the Dark Age of Science?

And the charmer, his work done, (the sheer shock of knowing what I can become is enough for him, it seems) ...he doesn't come along. He PARACHUTES back to the surface. All the way from space! Down toward the blue surface of... Mars? No way! No oceans THAT big, not even after terraforming. That's Earth! Somehow he's done it again.

I guess he wasn't sure he could be quite accurate enough, teleporting millions of miles, to land neatly on the surface. No fun to appear buried ten feet down or a hundred feet up. So he packed a chute and an oxymask and just aimed for the lower ionosphere or stratosphere, where a few miles off is meaningless.

Down he goes... he can fall 400 meters a second through this thin air without heating up too much; the amount of friction at equilibrium is, of course, just about the same for any skydiver, at any height. As the air thickens he actually slows, down to 300, 200... He deploys his drag chute, then the big one, and floats down slowly, as long as he has the air to spare. What a view!

And a job well done. Now he can get on with his ordinary life as a... a teleporting... oh, sure! His life, sohhhhh ordinary. And... are there MORE loops? Who says this is all?

What if HIS future visits HIM?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• The future: a week ago, my therapist asked me to picture myself five or ten years ahead... here, that self is coming back to visit me, steer me. Toward psychic abilities and charm? But what if my future self five or ten years further on has a different agenda? Toward social re-entry?
• Mars, orange = I baked some bread with orange peel in it. The dough looked like the Martian surface...
• Mystery man living on charm = Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe's lover, a young aristocrat, lived on his charm.
• Martian Timeloop = "Martian Time-Slip", Ursula Le Guin's favorite Philip K. Dick novel. It's a sort of Martian "Rashomon", with a crisis shown through various eyes, and time-branches, and permutations.
• Parachuting from space = You know, you really could! Objects in orbit are moving 8 kilometers a second, and meteors much faster; it's no wonder they burn. But if you did simply fall from 100 kilometers up, on the edge of space, whether from an Arthur Clarke space elevator or from teleporting into low Earth space... well, a good parachutist with a few minutes' air might just make it! From 200 up, I don't know--you'd build up a lot more speed in the near-vacuum. But maybe even then...

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