Time Travel Omnibus, page 1025
Several natives are also blocking the way. Seeing us, they turn and call over their shoulders in a language I don’t comprehend. A bulky woman strides forward and chatters with Becca, occasionally pointing toward me. I hear my new name repeated a few times in the discussion.
After a moment, everyone relaxes and motions us inside.
Becca leans in. “She wanted to know if you were the magic man I was asked to bring.”
We attract a small crowd as the sky turns from pink to a brighter yellow. Light pours in as we walk inside the walled area. I expect a small village, but I’m surprised by this place—it’s about the size of a large sports stadium. The oval-shaped tree wall encircles a series of about forty thatched buildings. Becca and I are taken to the large building in the center. Smoke rises slowly from two of the thatch peaks. It is a mystical sight, watching the morning breeze guide the smoke toward the rising sun.
I decide it’s time to use my staff, and that I should have gotten a few pictures of the long path. At first I make up nonsensical words as I shake the staff. The crystals rattles and heads turn. I realize I don’t have to make up gibberish, English would sound just as confusing.
This is almost fun, and the children seem to enjoy my act. I wonder if Timeshares will let me to keep some of the pictures.
Becca stops me just short of entering the large building.
“This is our real mission. Inside is said to be a dying giant. These people think it is one of the old gods, but we think it’s just a species overlooked by time. You know, lost to the ages. I told them you are a follower of this god and need to help him pass on.”
“When and where are we exactly, Becca? I know I should have asked this right away, but I was just too caught up in everything. This giant isn’t one of those short-faced bears you told me about, is it?”
Becca kneels and hands out skins and beads to the local children as she responds. “The giant they speak of is a humanoid creature. They will not let any outsider near it. At this time most of the people in this village know the people from our office well—we’ve been coming here for a while. That’s why we needed someone new, and a photographer at that. We needed an outsider, one with real reddish hair. I rightly assumed they’d think you came from the Anishna to the north. They have been at war with the Anishna for more than a thousand years, and through those years they have learned to respect the supposed magic the Anishna wield.”
I look around and finally notice that nearly everyone carries a weapon of sorts, either holding spears or touching hatchetlike tools on their belts. Wonderful. No point in turning back now. I forcefully shake my staff. It makes the older folks flinch and the young ones giggle. I leave Becca behind and follow my guide inside the tent.
It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust. I move the staff around and take a series of pictures. Most of my shots are directed at the large mound in the center. Firelight dances on the inside of the thatch. I see an outline of a raised straw bed. On top of this is a massive man, likely eight feet tall. His hands are huge; each finger looks to be at least an inch in diameter. I shake my staff to calm my nerves before I realize I may have awakened the giant. I take several more shots and walk closer.
The giant is breathing. He wears only a loincloth and is covered in strange tattoos. I am in awe of this man.
One of the younger boys climbs up the side and offers the giant some water. The giant turns his head to the boy but does not open his eyes. Judging by the blackness around his sockets, he may not have been able to. I take more photos and I start to feel that the giant is near death. His hair is a matted, dirty blond and doesn’t fit with the dark hair of the villagers.
I spend the rest of the day meeting various villagers. Becca translates—at least I think she does. With the occasional giggle from the crowd and the blush in Becca’s face, I think I am the butt of a few jokes.
The next day, Becca wakes me. “Penobscot, they want you to help the soul cross over.”
We rush to the large central building.
The giant is coughing up blood. I wave my staff and in English ask the spirits to take him someplace peaceful.
This is not a time for photos.
That night they take his body to an open fire pit stacked with logs and branches. The giant is set ablaze.
From what I gathered, the villagers found him wandering down one of the roads a few months ago and befriended him. They believed him one of the great giants who pushed back the walls of ice.
The following days fly by. I am saddened when Becca tells me we need to leave. We are given food and water for our trip, and Becca has to drag me away.
We find our way back to the clearing. Becca and I lay in the grass, gazing up at the stars.
“Becca, thank for bringing me on this magnificent journey.”
She smiles. “You’re not so bad. Maybe you should join the team.”
“You mean Timeshares would hire me?”
Becca gives me a serious look. “Sure. You might be asked to risk your life now and again for some good photo opportunities, though.”
I am in shock. I have found my dream job. “Do they offer a good employee package? What would they pay me to start?”
Becca looks up at the stars as she answers. “They offer the greatest paycheck anyone could wish for, a reawakened joy of life.” How true those words are.
The return trip is a bit more traumatic. A bright light comes out of the sky and blinds me. I wake up in Timeshare’s office.
I change back into my modern clothes and meet Becca in the front office. She offers to buy me breakfast. One thing gnaws at me that I need to clear up.
“Becca, you didn’t seem too concerned about our crossing paths with the man-eating cats and the huge skull-crushing bears. Were you just trying to scare me? Or did such things exist?”
“This last trip was only about seven thousand years ago. You will not have to worry about those bears until,” she pauses to think and glances at a calendar, “. . . a week from next Tuesday. We need you to photograph the first meeting between the Clovis and the Karquees in 12,560 B.C. Those bears surprise us all the time around that area. Just stand tall and wave your magical staff to scare them, and get off a few good photos in the process.”
“You really think that will work? Are they scared by the crystals?”
“I doubt it, but it might buy you some time to run away. Just think how cool those photos would be. And don’t worry, I’ll frame one and put it on my desk to remind me of your heroism.”
She opens the door, and we head to Destiny’s Diner.
MEMORIES OF LIGHT AND SOUND
Steven Saus
“At least I get to wear a nice hat,” Monica laughed. She held its floofy rim down as a gust of fall wind threatened to pull it off her bobbed hair. “You know, baby, when I said I wanted to visit Manhattan someday, this isn’t quite what I meant.”
Anthony adjusted his bowler, shielding his dark eyes from a stray beam of late afternoon sunlight. “It’s an important time period,” he said. “The Roaring Twenties. Flappers, speakeasies, all that jazz. Besides, the Statue of Liberty isn’t wading in seawater like it would be if we came here in our time.”
Anthony grabbed the leather handle of the suitcase the Timeshares agent had provided for them. They had managed to buy one of the first unaccompanied tours. They wore period clothes for the trip and had an automatic recall trigger. Timeshares had arranged for a native to provide a packed suitcase, an itinerary, and lodgings. The reduced traveling mass and short length of their vacation reduced the price enough to let regular people like them afford the trip.
“The hotel is right across the street. Good for one night only.” The traffic only justified checking the street once, but the back part of Anthony’s brain twitched so he checked for cars again.
The hotel’s foyer spread out before them as Monica handed her fur coat to a doorman. Anthony pointed to the marble pillars along the walls. “See? I got you Roman columns.”
She giggled, and Anthony wrapped his arms around her, the soft cotton of her dress thin under his arms.
“It’s our honeymoon,” she whispered in his ear, her pale fingers playing with the trace of gray at his temple. “I’m more interested in another kind of column.”
Anthony’s face grew hot. He only had a few years on her, but her forwardness still took him by surprise. “We’ll do something about that after I check in,” he said with a smile.
He walked to the counter and rang the bell while Monica examined the oil paintings on the wall. The other men in the lobby looked at her. Anthony’s smile got bigger as he leaned on the counter, watching the men watch her. It didn’t matter how much they looked. She had chosen him, the loser boy who had finally been successful. Now, on his honeymoon, he could finally make things right with—
The clerk’s rough voice stopped his daydreaming. “You a wop?”
The blunt question punched through Timeshare’s historical briefing. Their warnings echoed his grandfather’s stories of a time when his family was not considered white. Anthony’s heart beat faster as he turned to face the desk clerk, fingers pressed into the polished wood of the counter.
“What the hell did you say?”
Monica was at his side, her words cutting into the clerk’s reply. “We’re from Cleveland. Ohio. It’s our honeymoon!”
The clerk nodded to Anthony. “Sorry. Didn’t figure, but the owner doesn’t want no dagos staying here. Drives off real business, you know how it is. Gotta be careful with all the boats coming in.”
Monica tapped the counter. “We don’t have much of that in Cleveland, thank goodness. Husband, dear, why don’t you sign us in and pay the man?”
“Of course,” Anthony forced out, fumbling with the strange paper money.
He signed his name as Michael.
Anthony relaxed on the bed, pleasantly surprised at the comforting sensation of the thick quilt against his bare skin. He fluffed the pillow, pressing his head into the soft, real feathers. After years with bland foam, he found the prick of an occasional quill fascinating. The sweat from their lovemaking slowly dried on his skin while Monica rinsed off in the extravagant claw foot bathtub. Both of them had paid more attention to each other than the room, which was now littered with their clothes. He let his attention wander as she splashed, taking in the ornate gilded wallpaper, the swirled plaster ceiling, the gas lights and radiator. Eventually it rested on his trousers. On the small bulge of folded papers in the pocket.
The muscles in his stomach clenched. Anthony closed his eyes. “Monica, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“What, that racism is annoying? Or that you’ve rested enough?” She had gotten out of the tub and leaned against the doorway, dripping and naked. Monica grabbed her hat and plopped it on her head. “You like?”
“I wouldn’t have married you if I didn’t.”
Her gaze slid down his body, one corner of her mouth rising higher in a wicked grin. “Doesn’t look like you like it quite enough,” she said.
Anthony rolled his eyes. “I am older than you.”
Monica snorted. “It must be the hat.” She tossed it onto the bedpost, then jumped onto the bed in a slick wet heap.
“Even medical marvels have their limits, you know.”
“Modern medical marvels,” she said after kissing him. She rose up on one elbow. “You can’t worry about this stuff, baby. You’ve got to be practical about the past. You know how this all turns out, history. You can’t change it now, so let it go.” She ran a finger across the short hairs on his chest. “Maybe you should concentrate on right now.”
He sighed, feeling the topic get away from him. “But I need to—”
“Husband of mine,” she said, inching her way down the bed, “we can only afford one honeymoon. Get your mind off the past and on the present.”
And for a little while, he did.
The next morning, Monica snored softly as Anthony picked his trousers up from the floor and pulled the papers from his pocket. Golden light from the early sunrise shone through the window. The soft clank of the radiator echoed in the cool autumn morning. The folded sheets were bound with a scrap of string. One ragged edge showed where Anthony had removed them from the binding. He untied the string and unfolded the yellowed paper, smoothing the wrinkles against the floor. He put aside the copied record from Ellis Island and began to read.
Anthony skimmed over the handwritten Italian of his grandfather’s diary. He remembered the translation, merely using the sheets as sentimental cues. The earliest entries began a few weeks from now, in the coalfields. His grandfather had stopped keeping the diary the day Anthony’s parents had died. The day Anthony began to live with the old man.
Anthony was glad of that. He replayed that part of his childhood again and again. So many fights with his grandfather. So many times his grandfather had tried to keep Anthony from screwing up his life. All the times when he caught Anthony smoking, stealing, or sneaking out at night. The times when he insisted Anthony stay in school.
Monica turned in her sleep. The bedsprings’ creak echoed the springs of his old bed in Grandfather’s house. That night he’d thrown himself on the bed in teenage melodrama, arguing over the sound of protesting springs. The last night.
“You cannot go out with them, Anthony. You are grounded. They are bad boys, and you cannot go with them.”
The ancient jazz from his grandfather’s record player was yet another way the old man was behind the times.
“You don’t understand! You can’t understand. You’re not even from this country. You don’t get it!”
He could not remember what any of it looked like. All he remembered were the sounds and silences of that night. The sudden silence of his grandfather—confused and unable to speak. The echoing wail of the ambulance siren. The beep-punctuated quiet of the hospital room as Anthony waited for the doctors to tell him it was a massive stroke. The total silence of the funeral home when his smart-ass teenage mouth could not say a thing.
“What’s that, baby?” Monica said.
Anthony mashed the pages back together. His hands twisted the string around them on autopilot. The radiator clanked again, louder, giving him a moment to stall. He held a fragment of the past, a relic of a memory older than himself. He could not take anyone else judging him about this.
“Nothing,” he said. She flinched at the flatness in his voice. “Just some notes about things to see in the city.” Anthony pushed the papers back into his pants pocket.
“Okay, baby.”
He watched her breasts rise and fall with a deep breath.
“Are you coming back to bed?”
Anthony put on his trousers. “No. Let’s get dressed. I want to get started on our tour.”
The lion did not roar.
Monica’s eyes were large. “How does it move around?”
Anthony closed the pocket watch in his hand and looked up at the lion. It stopped circling the cage—it had just enough room for that—then sank down and began chewing at the bald patches on its haunches. It ignored the stinking bowl of kibble and scraps in the far corner.
“I don’t think it can. These small cages in zoos were normal even when I was a kid.” He could smell the musk of the big cat over the metal of the cage; they were far closer to the lion than they would ever be in the naturalistic enclosures of a modern zoo.
“Is that why it’s chewing on itself? Because it has no room? Because it feels trapped?”
Anthony started to reply when a swarm of schoolchildren flowed around a corner and past them, a pushing, shoving, river of shouting youth. Behind them, a school-teacher in a muted floral dress prompted stragglers to keep up.
Monica pointed at the kids. “They’re so cute, Anthony.”
“No.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I can’t afford kids. We’ve talked about this before.” Anthony looked at his watch again. “We’ve got to get going, anyway.”
“Fine.”
Anthony looked up; the hardness of her voice was also in her eyes.
“We won’t talk about it, Anthony. I’ll meet you at the front gate.”
He watched her walk away, her stride keeping pace with the students. A chuff from the lion got his attention. It had stopped gnawing at itself, its face instead turned straight toward him. Anthony understood how antelope felt.
“I can’t afford it,” he whispered. “I can’t afford to make another mistake.”
It was afternoon when they got to the docks, and even if the conversation was not forgotten, Anthony was not going to mention it. The early afternoon sunlight angled across the water as the ferry lowered its ramp. When it did, humanity poured out, swirling among the few people waiting nearby. The passengers’ brown clothing offset the sea of olive skin and dark hair. Pale manifest tags from the passenger ships were still pinned to their clothes. The sound of immigrant voices reached Anthony, a linguist’s stew of Europe, the words too fast in too many languages to understand. The smell of disinfectant came next, carried on their clothes from Ellis Island, pushing away the smell of the sea.
Monica leaned into his shoulder, a whispered breath in his ear. “Why are we here, baby? Isn’t the Statue of Liberty next on the itinerary?”
Anthony turned his head slowly from side to side, both negating and trying to take in each of the faces as they went past. He tried to imagine each one forty years older, to match them to the face he had argued with years ago. His heart twisted more with each small wave of people that passed. He was only able to see a few of them. There were too many—the ferry was emptying too fast.
