Time Travel Omnibus, page 1009
“Huh.” They came to a fork in the path. A stone bench, stained gray and gently eroded by lichen, sat to one side. “Were you behind the assassination attempt, then?”
“No.” She perched tentatively at one side of the bench. “That was definitely Internal Affairs. They were after him, not you.”
“Him—”
“The iteration of you that never stayed in the Hegemony, never met Xiri, eventually drifted into different thoughts and met Yarrow again under favorable circumstances—”
Pierce slowly turned around as she was speaking, but in every direction he looked there was no horizon, just a neatly landscaped wall of mazes curving gently toward the zenith. “It seems to me that they’re out of control.”
“Yes.” She became intent, focused, showing him her lecturer’s face. “All organizations that are founded for a purpose rapidly fill with people who see their role as an end in itself. Internal Affairs are a secondary growth. If they ever succeed, there won’t be anything left of the Stasis but Internal Affairs, everyone spying on themselves for eternity and a day, trying to preserve a single outcome without allowing anyone to ask why . . .”
Not everything added up. Still thinking, Pierce sat down gingerly at the other side of the bench. Not looking at her, he said: “I met Imad and Leila, Xiri’s parents. How could they have survived? Everyone kills their own grandparents, it’s the only way to get into the Stasis.”
“How did you survive your graduation?” She turned and looked at him, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “You can be very slow at times, Pierce.”
“What—”
“You don’t have to abide by what they made you do, my love. Corrupt practices, the use of complicity in shared atrocities to bind new recruits to a cause: it was a late addition to the training protocol, added at the request of Internal Affairs. It may even be what sparked the first muttering of Opposition. We’ve got the luxury of unmaking our mistakes—even to go back, unmake the mistake, and not enter the Stasis, despite having graduated. Agents do that, sometimes, when they’re too profoundly burned-out to continue: they go underground, they run and cut themselves off. That’s why there was no agent covering the Hegemony period you landed in. They’d erased their history with the Stasis, going into deep cover.”
“You say ‘they.’ Are you by any chance trying to disown their action?” he asked gently.
“No!” Now she sounded irritated. “I regret nothing. She regrets nothing. Withholding the truth from you for all those years—well, what would you have done if you’d known that your adoring Xiri, the mother of your children, was a deep-cover agent of the Opposition? What would you have done?” She reached across and seized his elbow, staring at him, searching for some truth he couldn’t articulate.
“I . . . don’t . . . know.” His shoulders slumped.
“All those years, you were under observation by other instances of yourself, sworn in service to Internal Affairs, reporting to Kafka,” she pointed out. “Honesty wasn’t an option. Not unless you can guarantee that all of those ghost-instances would be complicit in keeping the secret, from the moment you were recruited by the Stasis.”
“That’s why, back in college—” The moment of enlightenment was shocking. Yarrow’s mouth, seen for the first time, wide and sensual, the pale lips, his reaction. He looked across the bench, saw the brightness in her eyes as she nodded. “I’d never betray her.”
“It happened more than once, according to the Final Library. They can make you betray anyone if they get their claws into you early enough. The only way to prevent it is to make a palimpsest of your whole recruitment into the Stasis—to replace your conscript youth with a disloyal impostor from the outset, or to decline the invitation altogether, and go underground.”
“But, I. Him. I’m not him, exactly.”
She let go of his elbow. “Not unless you want to be, my love.”
“Am I your love? Or is he?”
“That depends which version of you you want to be.”
“You’re telling me that essentially I can only be free of Internal Affairs if I undo what they made me do.”
“There’s a protocol,” she said, looking away. “We can reactivate your phone. You don’t have to reenlist in the Stasis if you don’t want to. There are berths waiting for all of us on the colony ships . . .”
“But that’s just exchanging one sort of reified destiny for another, isn’t it? Expansion in space, instead of time. Why is that any better than, say, freeing the machines, turning over all the available temporal bandwidth to timelike computing to see if the wild-eyed prophets of artificial intelligence and ghosts uploaded in the machines were onto something after all?”
She looked at him oddly. “Do you have any idea how weird you can be at times?”
He snorted. “Don’t worry, I’m not serious about that. I know my limits. If I don’t do this thing we’re discussing, him upstairs will be annoyed. Because Kafka will have all those naively loyal young potential me’s to send on spy missions, won’t he?” Pierce took a deep breath. “I don’t see that there’s any alternative, really. And that’s what rankles. I had hoped that the Opposition would be willing to give me a little more freedom of action than Kafka, that’s all.” He felt the ghostly touch of a bunch of raisin-wrinkled grape joints holding his preteen wrists, showing him how to cast a line. He owed it to Grandpa, he felt: to leave his own children a universe with elbow room unconstrained by the thumbcuffs of absolute history. “Will you still be here when I get back?”
She regarded him gravely. “Will you still want to see me afterward?”
“Of course.”
“See you later, then.” She smiled as she stood up, then departed.
He stared at the spot where she’d been sitting for what seemed like a long, long time. But when he tried to remember her face all he could see was the two of them, Xiri and Yarrow, superimposed.
Saying Good-bye to Now
Twenty years in Stasis. Numerous deaths, many of them self-inflicted, ordered with the callous detachment of self-appointed gods. They feed into the unquiet conscience of a man who knows he could have been better, can still be better—if only he can untangle the Gordian knot of his destiny after it’s been tied up and handed to him by people he’s coming to despise.
That’s you in a nutshell, Pierce.
You’re at a bleak crossroads, surrounded by lovers and allies and oh, so isolated in your moment of destiny. Who are you going to be, really? Who do you want to be?
All the myriad ways will lie before you, all the roads not taken at your back: who do you want to be?
You have met your elder self, the man-machine at the center of an intrigue that might never exist if Kafka gets his way. And you’ll have mapped out the scope of the rift with Xiri, itself rooted in her despair at Stasis. You can examine your life with merciless, refreshing clarity, and find it wanting if you wish. You can even unmake your mistakes: let Grandpa flower, prune back your frightened teenage nightmare of murder. You can step off the murderous infinite roundabout whenever you please, resign the game or rejoin and play to win—but the question you’ve only recently begun to ask is, who writes the rules?
Who do you want to be?
The snow falls silently around you as you stand in darkness, knee-deep in the frosted weeds lining the ditch by the railroad tracks. Alone in the night, a young man walks between islands of light. A headhunter stalks him unseen, another young man with a heart full of fears and ears stuffed with lies. There’s a knife in his sleeve and a pebble-sized machine in his pocket, and you know what he means to do, and what will come of it. And you know what you need to do.
BESPOKE
Genevieve Valentine
Disease Control had sprayed while Petra was asleep, and her boots kicked up little puffs of pigment as she crunched across the butterfly wings to the shop.
Chronomode (Fine Bespoke Clothing of the Past, the sign read underneath) was the most exclusive Vagabonder boutique in the northern hemisphere. The floors were real dateverified oak, the velvet curtains shipped from Paris in a Chinese junk during the six weeks in ‘58 when one of the Vagabonder boys slept with a Wright brother and planes hadn’t been invented.
Simone was already behind the counter arranging buttons by era of origin. Petra hadn’t figured out until her fourth year working there that Simone didn’t live upstairs, and Petra still wasn’t convinced.
As Petra crossed the floor, an oak beam creaked.
Simone looked up and sighed. “Petra, wipe your feet on the mat. That’s what it’s for.”
Petra glanced over her shoulder; behind her was a line of her footprints, mottled purple and blue and gold.
The first client of the day was the heiress to the O’Rourke fortune. Chronomode had a history with the family; the first one was the boy, James, who’d slept with Orville Wright and ruined Simone’s drape delivery par avion. The O’Rourkes had generously paid for shipment by junk, and one of the plugs they sent back with James was able to fix things so that the historic flight was only two weeks late. Some stamps became very collectible, and the O’Rourkes became loyal clients of Simone’s.
They gave a Vagabonding to each of their children as twenty-firstbirthday presents. Of course, you had to be twenty-five before you were allowed to Bore back in time, but somehow exceptions were always made for O’Rourkes, who had to fit a lot of living into notoriously short life spans.
Simone escorted Fantasy O’Rourke personally to the center of the shop, a low dais with a three-frame mirror. The curtains in the windows were already closed by request; the O’Rourkes liked to maintain an alluring air of secrecy they could pass off as discretion.
“Ms. O’Rourke, it’s a pleasure to have you with us,” said Simone. Her hands, clasped behind her back, just skimmed the hem of her black jacket.
Never cut a jacket too long, Simone told Petra her first day. It’s the first sign of an amateur.
“Of course,” said Ms. O’Rourke. “I haven’t decided on a destination, you know. I thought maybe Victorian England.”
From behind the counter, Petra rolled her eyes. Everyone wanted Victorian England.
Simone said, “Excellent choice, Ms. O’Rourke.”
“On the other hand, I saw a historian the other day in the listings who specializes in eighteenth-century Japan. He was delicious.” She smiled. “A little temporary surgery, a trip to Kyoto’s geisha district. What would I look like then?”
“A vision,” said Simone through closed teeth.
Petra had apprenticed at a tailor downtown, and stayed there for three years afterward. She couldn’t manage better, and had no hopes.
Simone came in two days after a calf-length black pencil skirt had gone out (some pleats under the knee needed mending).
Her gloves were black wool embroidered with black silk thread. Petra couldn’t see anything but the gloves around the vast and smoky sewing machine that filled the tiny closet where she worked, but she knew at once it was the woman who belonged to the trim black skirt.
“You should be working in my shop,” said Simone. “I offer superior conditions.”
Petra looked over the top of the rattling machine. “You think?”
“You can leave the attitude here,” said Simone, and went to the front of the shop to wait.
Simone showed Petra her back office (nothing but space and light and chrome), the image library, the labeled bolts of cloth—1300, 1570, China, Flanders, Rome.
“What’s the shop name?” Petra asked finally.
“Chronomode,” Simone said, and waited for Petra’s exclamation of awe. When none came, she frowned. “I have a job for you,” she continued, and walked to the table, tapping the wood with one finger. “See what’s left to do. I want it by morning, so there’s time to fix any mistakes.”
The lithograph was a late nineteenth-century evening gown, nothing but pleats, and Petra pulled the fabrics from the library with shaking hands.
Simone came in the next day, tore out the hem of the petticoat, and sewed it again by hand before she handed it over to the client.
Later Petra ventured, “So you’re unhappy with the quality of my work.”
Simone looked up from a Byzantine dalmatic she was sewing with a bone needle. “Happiness is not the issue,” she said, as though Petra was a simpleton. “Perfection is.”
That was the year the mice disappeared.
Martin Spatz, the actor, had gone Vagabonding in 8000 BC and killed a wild dog that was about to attack him. (It was a blatant violation of the rules—you had to be prepared to die in the past, that was the first thing you signed on the contract. He went to jail over it. They trimmed two years off because he used a stick, and not the pistol he’d brought with him.)
No one could find a direct connection between the dog and the mice, but people speculated. People were still speculating, even though the mice were long dead.
Everything went, sooner or later; the small animals tended to last longer than the large ones, but eventually all that was left were some particularly hardy plants, and the butterflies. By the next year the butterflies were swarming enough to block out the summer sun, and Disease Control began to intervene.
The slow, steady disappearance of plants and animals was the only lasting problem from all the Vagabonding. Plugs were more loyal to their mission than the people who employed them, and if someone had to die in the line of work they were usually happy to do it. If they died, glory; if they lived, money.
Petra measured a plug once (German Renaissance, which seemed a pointless place to visit, but Petra didn’t make the rules). He didn’t say a word for the first hour. Then he said, “The cuffs go two inches past the wrist, not one and a half.”
The client came back the next year with a yen for Colonial America. He brought two different plugs with him.
Petra asked, “What happened to the others?”
“They did their jobs,” the client said, turned to Simone. “Now, Miss Carew, I was thinking I’d like to be a British commander. What do you think of that?”
“I would recommend civilian life,” Simone said. “You’ll find the Bore committee a little strict as regards impersonating the military.”
When Petra was very young she’d taken her mother’s sewing machine apart and put it back together. After that it didn’t squeak, and Petra and her long thin fingers were sent to the tailor’s place downtown for apprenticeship.
“At least you don’t have any bad habits to undo,” Simone had said the first week, dropping The Dressmaker’s Encyclopaedia 1890 on Petra’s worktable. “Though it would behoove you to be a little ashamed of your ignorance. Why—” Simone looked away and blew air through her teeth. “Why do this if you don’t respect it?”
“Don’t ask me—I liked engines,” Petra said, opening the book with a thump.
Ms. O’Rourke decided at last on an era (eighteenth-century Kyoto, so the historian must have been really good looking after all), and Simone insisted on several planning sessions before the staff was even brought in for dressing.
“It makes the ordering process smoother,” she said.
“Oh, it’s nothing, I’m easy to please,” said Ms. O’Rourke.
Simone looked at Petra. Petra feigned interest in buttons.
Petra was assigned to the counter, and while Simone kept Ms. O’Rourke in the main room with the curtains discreetly drawn, Petra spent a week rewinding ribbons on their spools and looking at the portfolios of Italian armor-makers. Simone was considering buying a set to be able to gauge the best wadding for the vests beneath.
Petra looked at the joints, imagined the pivots as the arm moved back and forth. She wondered if the French hadn’t had a better sense of how the body moved; some of the Italian stuff just looked like an excuse for filigree.
When the gentleman came up to the counter he had to clear his throat before she noticed him.
She put on a smile. “Good morning, sir. How can we help you?”
He turned and presented his back to her—three arrows stuck out from the left shoulder blade, four from the right.
“Looked sideways during the Crusades,” he said proudly. “Not recommended, but I sort of like them. It’s a souvenir. I’d like to keep them. Doctors said it was fine, nothing important was pierced.”
Petra blinked. “I see. What can we do for you?”
“Well, I’d really like to have some shirts altered,” he said, and when he laughed the tips of the arrows quivered like wings.
“You’d never catch me vagabonding back in time,” Petra said that night.
Simone seemed surprised by the attempt at conversation (after five years she was still surprised). “It’s lucky you’ll never have the money, then.”
Petra clipped a thread off the buttonhole she was finishing.
“I don’t understand it,” Simone said more quietly, as though she were alone.
Petra didn’t know what she meant.
Simone turned the page on her costume book, paused to look at one of the hair ornaments.
“We’ll need to find the ivory one,” Simone said. “It’s the most beautiful.”
“Will Ms. O’Rourke notice?”
“I give my clients the best,” Simone said, which wasn’t really an answer.
“I’ve finished the alterations,” Petra said finally, and held up one of the shirts, sliced open at the shoulder blades to give the arrows room, with buttons down the sides for ease of dressing.
