Chorale — Barry N. Malzberg

Kemper had the answer; Reuter had the problem. Kemper had figured it all out by the twenty-second century; he was a man of temporal science. The past did not exist. The past upon which the present was based had no credence unless it could be reconstructed, bit by tiny bit. Surrogates would have to go back in time and become the cast of thousands. Napoleon was needed; likewise the Kennedys, all four of them.

There were those who would have taken argument with Kemper, but Kemper, unfortunately, was beyond dispute; in other words he, like all the other famous and infamous, was dead. Reuter's problem was that he had gone back to Vienna in the early 1800s to be Beethoven. Beethoven, Reuter has decided, was a disgusting man. Someone must listen - don't they realise that it was all a fraud?