Time Travel Omnibus, page 823
Past the wagons loaded with rich jetsam of the Gilded Age, we ran: lined up in the morning gloom and salt wind were the grand pianos, the crystal chandeliers, the paintings in gilt frames, the antique furniture. Statuary classical and modern; gold plate and tapestries. Cases of rare wines, crates of phonograph cylinders, of books and papers, waited like refugees to escape the coming morning.
I glimpsed Averill, struggling through the sand with his arms full of priceless things. He was sobbing loudly as he worked; tears coursed down his cheeks, his eyes were wide with terror, but his body served him like the clockwork toy, like the fine machine it was, and bore him ceaselessly back and forth between the wagon and the boat until his appointed task should be done.
“Sir! Where did you get to?” he said, gasping. “We waited and waited—and now it’s gonna cut loose any second and we’re still not done!”
“Couldn’t be helped, old man!” I told him as we scuttled past. “Carry on! I have every faith in you!”
I shut my ears to his cry of dismay and ran on. A boat reserved for passengers still waited in the surf. Pan and I made for the boarding officer and gave our identification.
“You’ve cut it damned close, gentlemen,” he grumbled.
“Unavoidable,” I told him. His gaze fell on my gore-drenched shirt and he blinked, but waved us to our places. Seconds later we were seated securely, and the oarsmen pulled and sent us bounding out on the receding tide to the Thunderer where she lay at anchor.
We’d done it, we were away from that fated city where even now bronze hatchets were completing the final betrayal—
No. A gentleman does not betray others. Nor does he leave his subordinates to deal with the consequences of his misfortune.
Donal shivered in the stiff breeze, waking slowly. Frank’s coat had been lost, somewhere in Chinatown; I shrugged out of my dinner jacket and put it around Donal’s shoulders. He drew closer to me, but his attention was caught by the operatives working on the shore. As he watched, something disturbed the earth and the sand began to flurry and shift. Another warning was sounding up from below.
The rumbling carried to us over the roar of the sea, as did the shouts of the operatives trying to finish the loading. One wagon settled forward a few inches, causing the unfortunate precipitation of a massive antique clock into the arms of the immortals who had been gingerly easing it down. They arrested its flight, but the shock or perhaps merely the striking hour set in motion its parade of tiny golden automata. Out came its revolving platforms, its trumpeting angels, its pirouetting lovers, its minute Death with raised scythe and hourglass. Crazily it chimed FIVE.
Pan and I exchanged glances. He checked his chronometer. Our boatmen increased the vigor of their strokes.
Moment by moment the East was growing brighter, disclosing operatives massed on the deck of the Thunderer. Their faces were turned to regard the sleeping city. Pan and I were helped on deck and our mortal charges handed up after us; a pair of white-coifed nurses stepped forward.
“Agent Pan? Agent Victor?” inquired one, as the other checked a list.
“Here, now, Donal, we’re on our ship at last, and here’s a lovely fairy to look after you.” I thrust him into her waiting arms. The other received the baby from Pan, and the little girl went without complaint; but as his nurse turned to carry him below decks, Donal twisted in her arms and reached out a desperate hand for me.
“Uncle Jimmy!” he screamed. I turned away quickly as she bore him off. Really, it was for the best.
I made my way along the rail and emerged on the aft deck, where I nearly ran into Nan D’Arraignee. She did not see me, however; she was fervently kissing a great bearded fellow in a brass-buttoned blue coat, which he had opened to wrap about them both, making a warm protected place for her in his arms. He looked up and saw me. His eyes, timid and kindly, widened, and he nodded in recognition.
“Kalugin,” I acknowledged with brittle courtesy, tipping my hat. I edged on past them quickly, but not so quickly as to suggest I was fleeing. What had I to flee from? Not guilt, certainly. No gentleman dishonorably covets another gentleman’s lady.
As I reached the aft saloon we felt it beginning, with the rising surge that lifted the Thunderer at its mooring and threatened to swamp the fleeing whaleboats; we heard the roar coming up from the earth, and in the City some mortals sat up in their beds and frowned at what they could sense but not quite hear yet.
I clung to the rail of the Thunderer. My fellow operatives were hurrying to the stern of the ship to be witness to History, and nearly every face bore an expression compounded of mingled horror and eagerness. There were one or two who turned away, averting their eyes. There were those like me, sick and exhausted, who merely stared.
And really, from where we lay offshore, there was not much to see; no DeMille spectacle; no more at first than a puff of dust rising into the air. But very clear across the water we heard the rumbling, and then the roar of bricks coming down, and steel snapping, and timbers groaning, and the high sweet shattering of glass, and the tolling in all discordance of bronze-throated bells. Loud as the Last Trumpet, but not loud enough to drown out the screams of the dying. No, the roar of the earthquake even paused for a space, as if to let us hear mortal agony more clearly; then the second shock came, and I saw a distant tower topple and fall slowly, and then the little we had been able to see of the City was concealed in a roiling fog the color of a bloodstain.
I turned away, and chanced to look up at the open doorway of a stateroom on the deck above. There stood Labienus, watching the death of three thousand mortals with an avid stare. That was when I knew, and knew beyond question, whose weapon I was.
I hadn’t escaped. My splendid mansion, with all its gilded conceits, had collapsed in a rain of bricks and broken plaster.
A hand settled on my shoulder and I dropped my gaze to behold Lewis, of all people, looking into my face with compassion.
“I know,” he murmured, “I know, old fellow. Too much horror to bear. At least it’s finished now, for those poor mortals and for us. At least we’ve done our jobs. Brace up! Can I get you a drink?”
What did he recognize in my sick white face? Not the features of a man who had emptied a phial into an innocent-looking cup of wine, and given it to him under pretense of calming his nerves. Why, I’d always been a poisoner, hadn’t I? But it had happened long ago, and he had no memory of it anyway. I’d seen to that. And Lewis would never suspect me of such behavior in any case. We were both gentlemen, after all.
“No, thank you,” I replied, “I believe I’ll just take the air for a little while out here. It’s a fine restorative to the nerves, you know. Sea air.”
“So it is,” he agreed, stepping back. “That’s the spirit! And it’s not as though you could have done anything more. You know what they say: History cannot be changed.” He gave me a final helpful thump on the arm and moved away, clinging to the rail as the deck pitched.
Alone, I fixed my eyes on the wide horizon of the cold and perfect sea. I drew in a deep breath of chill air.
One can write lies. And live them.
Two operatives in uniform were making their way toward me through the press of the crowd. I looked across at them.
“Executive Facilitator Victor?”
I nodded. They shouldered into place, one on either side of me.
“Sir, your presence is urgently requested. Mr. Labienus sends his apologies for unavoidably revising your schedule,” one of them recited.
“Certainly.” I exhaled. “By all means, gentlemen, let us go.”
We made our way across deck to the forward compartments, avoiding the hatches where the crew were busily loading down the Art, the Music, the Literature, the fine flowering of the Humanity that we had, after all, been created to save.
SCHERZO WITH TYRANNOSAUR
Michael Swanwick
A keyboardist was playing a selection of Scarlotti’s harpsichord sonatas, brief pieces one to three minutes long, very complex and refined, while the Hadrosaurus herd streamed by the window. There were hundreds of the brutes, kicking up dust and honking that lovely flattened nearmusical note they make. It was a spectacular sight.
But the hors d’oeuvres had just arrived: plesiosaur wrapped in kelp, beluga smeared over sliced maiasaur egg, little slivers of roast dodo on toast, a dozen delicacies more. So a stampede of common-as-dirt herbivores just couldn’t compete.
Nobody was paying much attention.
Except for the kid. He was glued to the window, staring with an intensity remarkable even for a boy his age. I figured him to be about ten years old.
Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, I went over to stand next to him. “Enjoying yourself, son?”
Without looking up, the kid said, “What do you think spooked them? Was it a—?” Then he saw the wranglers in their jeeps and his face fell. “Oh.”
“We had to cheat a little to give the diners something to see.” I gestured with the wine glass past the herd, toward the distant woods. “But there are plenty of predators lurking out there—troodons, dromaeosaurs . . . even old Satan.”
He looked up at me in silent question.
“Satan is our nickname for an injured old bull rex that’s been hanging around the station for about a month, raiding our garbage dump.”
It was the wrong thing to say. The kid looked devastated. T. rex a scavenger! Say it ain’t so!
“A tyrannosaur is an advantageous hunter,” I said, “like a Hon. When it chances upon something convenient, believe you me, it’ll attack. And when a tyrannosaur is hurting, like old Satan is—well, that’s about as savage and dangerous as any animal can be. It’ll kill even when it’s not hungry.”
That satisfied him. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad.”
In companionable silence, we stared into the woods together, looking for moving shadows. Then the chime sounded for dinner to begin, and I sent the kid back to his table. The last hadrosaurs were gone by then.
He went with transparent reluctance.
The Cretaceous Ball was our big fund-raiser, a hundred thousand dollars a seat, and in addition to the silent auction before the meal and the dancing afterward, everybody who bought an entire table for six was entitled to their very own paleontologist as a kind of party favor.
I used to be a paleontologist myself, before I was promoted. Now I patrolled the room in tux and cummerbund, making sure everything was running smoothly.
Waiters slipped in and out of existence. You’d see them hurry behind the screen hiding the entrance to the time funnel and then pop out immediately on the other side, carrying heavily laden trays. Styracosaurus medalhons in mastodon mozzarella for those who liked red meat. Archaeopteryx almondine for those who preferred white. Raddichio and fennel for the vegetarians.
All to the accompaniment of music, pleasant chitchat, and the best view in the universe.
Donald Hawkins had been assigned to the kid’s table—the de Cherville Family. According to the seating plan the heavy, phlegmatic man was Gerard, the money-making paterfamilias. The woman beside him was Danielle, once his trophy wife, now aging gracefully. Beside them were two guests—the Cadigans—who looked a little overwhelmed by everything and were probably a favored employee and spouse. They didn’t say much. A sullen daughter, Melusine, in a little black dress that casually displayed her perfect breasts. She looked bored and restless—trouble incarnate. And there was the kid, given name Philippe.
I kept a close eye on them because of Hawkins. He was new, and I wasn’t expecting him to last long. But he charmed everyone at the table. Young, handsome, polite—he had it all. I noticed how Melusine slouched back in her chair, studying him through dark eyelashes, saying nothing. Hawkins, responding to something young Philippe had said, flashed a boyish, devil-may-care grin. I could feel the heat of the kid’s hero-worship from across the room.
Then my silent beeper went off, and I had to duck out of the late Cretaceous and back into the kitchen, Home Base, year 2140.
There was a Time Safety Officer waiting for me. The main duty of a TSO is to make sure that no time paradoxes occur, so that the Unchanging wouldn’t take our time privileges away from us. Most people think that time travel was invented recently, and by human beings. That’s because our sponsors don’t want their presence advertised.
In the kitchen, everyone was in an uproar. One of the waiters was leaning, spraddle-legged and arms wide against the table, and another was lying on the floor clutching what looked to be a broken arm. The TSO covered them both with a gun.
The good news was that the Old Man wasn’t there. If it had been something big and hairy—a Creationist bomb, or a message from a million years upline—he would have been.
When I showed up, everybody began talking at once.
“I didn’t do nothing, man, this bastard—”
“—guilty of a Class Six violation—
“—broke my fucking arm, man. He threw me to the ground!”
“—work to do. Get them out of my kitchen!”
It turned out to be a simple case of note-passing. One of the waiters had, in his old age, conspired with another recruited from a later period to slip a list of hot investments to his younger self. Enough to make them both multibillionaires. We had surveillance devices planted in the kitchen, and a TSO saw the paper change hands. Now the perps were denying everything.
It wouldn’t have worked anyway. The authorities keep strict tabs on the historical record. Wealth on the order of what they had planned would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
I fired both waiters, called the police to take them away, routed a call for two replacements several hours into the local past, and had them briefed and on duty without any lapse in service. Then I took the TSO aside and bawled him out good for calling me back real-time, instead of sending a memo back to me three days ago. Once something has happened, though, that’s it. I’d been called, so I had to handle it in person.
It was your standard security glitch. No big deal.
But it was wearying. So when I went back down the funnel to Hilltop Station, I set the time for a couple hours after I had left. I arrived just as the tables were being cleared for desert and coffee.
Somebody handed me a microphone, and I tapped it twice, for attention. I was standing before the window, a spectacular sunset to my back.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “let me again welcome you to the late Cretaceous. This is the final research station before the Age of Mammals. Don’t worry, though—the meteor that put a final end to the dinosaurs is still several thousand years in the future!” I paused for laughter, then continued.
“If you’ll look outside, you’ll see Jean, our dino wrangler, setting up a scent lure. Jean, wave for our diners.”
Jean was fiddling with a short tripod. She waved cheerily, then bent back to work. With her blond ponytail and khaki shorts, she looked to be just your basic science babe. But Jean was slated to become one of the top saurian behaviorists in the world, and knew it too. Despite our best efforts, gossip slips through.
Now Jean backed up toward the station doors, unreeling fuse wire as she went. The windows were all on the second floor. The doors, on the ground floor, were all armored.
“Jean will be ducking inside for this demonstration,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to be outside unprotected when the lure goes off.”
“What’s in it?” somebody called out.
“Triceratops blood. We’re hoping to call in a predator—maybe even the king of predators, Tyrannosaurus rex himself.” There was an appreciative murmur from the diners. Everybody here had heard of T. rex. He had real star power. I switched easily into lecture mode. “If you dissect a tyrannosaur, you’ll see that it has an extremely large olfactory lobe—larger in proportion to the rest of its brain than that of any other animal except the turkey vulture. Rex can sniff his prey”—carrion, usually, but I didn’t say that—“from miles away. Watch.”
The lure went off with a pop and a puff of pink mist.
I glanced over at the de Cherville table, and saw Melusine slip one foot out of her pump and run it up Hawkins’ trouser leg. He colored.
Her father didn’t notice. Her mother—her step-mother, more likely—did, but didn’t care. To her, this was simply what women did. I couldn’t help but notice what good legs Melusine had.
“This will take a few minutes. While we’re waiting, I direct your attention to Chef Rupert’s excellent pastries.”
I faded back to polite applause, and began the round of table hopping. A joke here, a word of praise there. It’s banana oil makes the world go round.
When I got to the de Chervilles, Hawkins’ face was white.
“Sir!” He shot to his feet. “A word with you.”
He almost dragged me away from the table.
When we were in private, he was so upset he was stuttering. “Th-that young woman, w-wants me t-to . . .”
“I know what she wants,” I said coolly. “She’s of legal age—make your own decision.”
“You don’t understand! I can’t possibly go back to that table.” Hawkins was genuinely anguished. I thought at first that he’d been hearing rumors, dark hints about his future career. Somehow, though, that didn’t smell right. There was something else going on here.
“All right,” I said. “Slip out now. But I don’t like secrets. Record a full explanation and leave it in my office. No evasions, understand?”
“Yes, sir.” A look of relief spread itself across his handsome young face. “Thank you, sir.”
He started to leave.
“Oh, and one more thing,” I said casually, hating myself. “Don’t go anywhere near your tent until the fund raiser’s broken up.”
The de Chervilles weren’t exactly thrilled when I told them that Hawkins had taken ill, and I’d be taking his place. But then I took a tyrannosaur tooth from my pocket and gave it to Philippe. It was just a shed—rexes drop a lot of teeth—but no need to mention that.
