Time Travel Omnibus, page 867
“Els, Carr rak,” I explained. Els and Carr are going to flee. She immediately brightened at the prospect. “Hos,” I added. Follow and pointed to the door.
“Thuk ong,” she said fearfully. Death cave. To her the interior of the clinic as a dangerous cave.
I tried to explain that she was about to see frightening things, but that they would not hurt.
“Carr lan?” she asked.
Lan meant both help and protect.
“Carr lan,” I replied, but I knew that I had a problem.
In the Middle Pleistocene, anything that was frightening was dangerous too. The idea of fear for a thrill did not exist. The idea of a thrill did not exist, either. To be frightened was to be in mortal danger. In the distance I could hear the sounds of sirens and an increasingly large crowd. Els was like some huge cat, a dangerous predator who was stronger and more of a carnivore than I, but for all that she was curiously vulnerable.
She followed me into the clinic’s interior, holding my arm tightly and cowering against me. The lights had been dimmed and the corridors cleared. We walked briskly. Someone must have told the waiting crowd to be silent, but we could still hear the helicopter’s engine. Els kept warning me about cave bears. We walked out through the front doors into daylight—and the waiting crowd roared.
Els panicked and tried to drag me back inside, but the doors had already been closed and locked behind us. Microphone booms, cameras, flashing lights, the helicopter, guards and police with batons, more people than Els had ever seen in her life, even a press helicopter approaching over the rooftops. Els tried to drag me across the lawn. I tried to stop her but she was too strong. Guards broke ranks to block her path and journalists surged through the breach in the line.
“Carr! Tek orr brii!” she shouted.
I dodged around in front of her, pulled my hand free from Els and tried to wave the approaching mob back. There was a loud pop and Els ceased to exist. I turned to see her cloak collapsed on the grass, along with her wooden hair pins scattered, an ankle beacon-circlet, and a necklace of paperclips.
That turned out to be the beginning of a very long day. Garces, Tormes, and Uncle Arturo were near-hysterical, predictably enough. The police already had the area sealed off, but it did them no good. Els had simply been snatched into thin air. Several dozen video cameras had caught the disappearance and although the angles were different, the event remained the same. In one frame Els was there, in the next she was gone and her cloak and hair feathers were falling.
Of all people directly involved, Marella alone was willingly giving interviews. Aliens had snatched Els away, she declared in triumph. Her abduction had been caught on camera. Aliens had brought her to twenty-first century Spain, then snatched away again. To Marella’s astonishment, her theory was given no more credence than several others. A public survey favoured a secret invisibility weapon being tested by the Americans, followed by a conspiracy by our own government, a divine vision, alien abduction, publicity for a new movie, and a student stunt.
For the rest of the week forensic teams studied the area in microscopic detail, scientists scanned the area for any trace of radiation, and the lawns became a place of pilgrimage for psychics, religious sects, and UFO experts. I viewed the videos hundreds of times, but there was nothing to learn from it. In one frame Els was in mid-stride; in the next she was gone and her cloak was being blown inwards by air rushing to fill the vacuum where her body had been. Astronomers scoured the skies, observers on the space station scanned near-Earth space on every frequency that their equipment could monitor, and warplanes were almost continuously in the skies over Cadiz, but nothing was found.
A full two weeks later I was going through the folder of papers and statements that I had been given in those last hours before Els had vanished. There was a copy of the absurd marketing proposal for some perfume that Tormes had told me about. She came a quarter of a million years for Moon Mist fragrances—and then I had it!
“Carr! Tek orr brii!” she had called to me. Carr. Walk to the full moon.
The Rhuun could walk through time. Els had been telling me that she was going to walk through time to the next full moon.
For a long time I barely moved a muscle, but I thought a great deal. There was massive development at the rear of Els’s brain. Why? For control of movement? For control of some subtle fabric in time itself? Step through time and escape your enemies. Escape famine, reach a time of plenty in the future. Why follow herds of wild cattle when you can wait for them to return by travelling through time? They skipped the long glacial epochs, they visited only warmer periods. The worst of the Saale and Weischel glaciations must have been no more than a series of walks through tens of thousands of years for them. If the hunting was bad, they walked a few decades. If there was too much competition from neanderthal or human tribes, they walked to when they have left or died out.
They visited the Spain of the neanderthals, saw the coming of humans, and saw the neanderthals vanish. That might well have made them wary of humans. Three thousand years ago they might even have seen the Phoenicians build western Europe’s first port city where Cadiz now stands, then watched as the Iberian Peninsula became part of the Roman Empire. With the development of farms came more trusting, placid cattle and sheep, although there were also farmers to guard them. However, all that the Rhuun had to do was walk a century or so into the future whenever farmers appeared with spears, swords and crossbows. Perhaps Ramoz’s shotgun was their first experience of a firearm, so they thought it would not be hard to defend their kill.
Homo sapiens evolved intelligence and had believed it to be the ultimate evolutionary advantage, but there are others. Mobility, for example. Birds can escape predators and find food by travelling through the third dimension. Homo rhuunis can do that by travelling into the fourth. Perhaps human brains are not suited to time walking, just as our hands and arms are better at making machines than flapping like wings. Could a time-walking machine be built? Would Els be vivisected by those wanting to find out?
What to do, how to do it? I felt a curiously strong bond with Els. I had a duty to protect her, and I owed no loyalty to Tormes, Marella or even my uncle. I was already outside the law, yet in a way that gave me a strangely powerful resolve. I had nothing to lose.
Nineteen days after Els vanished I was ready, waiting in a car beside the clinic’s lawns. A borrowed police car. My uncle was at home, fast asleep thanks to a couple of his own sleeping tablets in his coffee. His uniform was a rather baggy fit, but I had no choice. Every so often I started the engine, keeping it warm. On the lawns, a dozen or so UFO seekers loitered about with video cameras, mingling with the religious pilgrims, souvenir sellers, security guards, and tourists. People always returned after an alien abduction, so the popular wisdom went, and so those who followed Marella’s theory were ready. All but myself were concentrating on the skies, where the full moon was high.
There was a loud pop, and Els was suddenly standing naked on the lawn. Before the echoes of her arrival had died away I set the car’s lights flashing, then scrambled out and sprinted across the lawn calling, “Els! Els! Carr lan! Carr lan!”
She turned to me. Everyone else merely turned their cameras on us, not willing to interfere with the police.
“Els, hos Carr!” I cried as I took her by the arm. She did not want to approach the police car with its flashing lights. “Els, Carr lan!” I shouted, not sure if my intonation meant help or protect. She put a hand over her eyes and let me lead her.
Els had never been in a car before, and she curled up on the seat with her hands over her face. I pulled away from the clinic, turned a corner, and switched off the flashing lights. Two blocks further on, I transferred us to a hire car, and after twenty minutes we were clear of Puerto Real and in open country. Using Ramoz’s name I had located his farm in the municipal records, and by asking the locals in the area I had confirmed that the Field of Devils was indeed on the dead farmer’s land. It was a fifty-minute drive from the clinic. I had practised the trip several times.
All along Els had just needed help to return to the Field of Devils, help to move through space to where she could walk through time and rejoin her tribe in our future . . . or had she stayed because of affection for me? Whatever the case, she had only resorted to time-walking in sheer terror, when the journalists and camera crews had charged.
My mind was racing as I drove. Glancing down, I could see Els by the gleam of the dashboard lights. In a strange sense, I longed to call Tormes on my cellphone, to tell him what had really happened in the Middle Pleistocene. The heidelbergensians had spawned two new species, not just the neanderthals. With the Saale Glacial’s ice sheets approaching, the neanderthals went down the tried and true path of increased intelligence, improved toolmaking skills, and a stockier build to cope with the growing cold. Homo rhunnis evolved mobility in the fourth dimension instead. This instantly removed the trait from the gene pool—at least in normal time. Humanity had evolved later, but continued down the same path as the neanderthals.
In the distance I could see a helicopter’s searchlight. It was hovering where we were heading: the Field of Devils. I turned off the headlights, slowed, and drove on by moonlight, but the car had already been noticed. The light in the sky approached—then passed by. The pilot was heading for where he had last seen my lights. It gave us perhaps another two minutes. Els could easily escape through time and rejoin her tribe. I would be caught, but what could they do to me?
We were only half a mile from the Field of Devils when the helicopter’s searchlight caught the car. I braked hard, opened the door and pulled Els out after me.
“Els, tek var es bel!” I cried in Rhuun as we stood in the downwash of the rotor blades, imploring her to time walk two thousand midsummers away.
“Carr, Els kek!” she pleaded, grasping my arm.
Kek was new to me, but this was no time to be improving my grasp of Rhuun. The helicopter was descending, an amplified voice was telling me to drop my weapons and raise my hands.
“Els, tek var es bel!” I shouted again.
Els stepped out of the twenty-first century.
To me it had all been so obvious. The Rhuun could travel forward in time but take nothing with them. Their skin cloaks and tents, their stone scrapers, axes and knives, and their wooden spears and pins, everything was left behind when the time-walked. Only the person time-walking could pass into the future. What I had forgotten were the babies visible on Marella’s video. If babies had could be carried through time, so could adults.
The brightness of the helicopter’s spotlight vanished, replaced by the half-light of dawn. I was standing naked, in long grass, with Els still holding my hand. The air was chilly, but there was no wind. Els whistled, and awaited a reply. None came. The rolling hills were luridly green, and dotted with dusky sheep and cattle. It was an arcadia for Pleistocene hunters, but it was not the Pleistocene.
In the distance, great snow-capped towers loomed. The air was clear and pure, and there was silence such as I had never experienced. There was a series of distant pops, like a string of fireworks exploding, and the rest of the Rhuun appeared a few hundred metres away. Els whistled, then waved. Another tribe materialized, then another. Some sort of temporal meeting place, I guessed. Even at a distance, the towers looked derelict, and there should not have been snow in southern Spain. Els was unconcerned. There was game to hunt and nobody to defend it, so nothing else mattered. Taking my hand again, she began to lead me toward the other Rhuun.
In the years since our arrival I have concluded that humanity has ceased to exist, possibly wiped out by a genetically targeted plague, destroyed by a doomsday weapon . . . victims of their ingenuity. I have become a great shaman, inventing a primitive type of writing, the bow, the bone flute, the tallow lamp, and even cave painting, but when I die I shall end nature’s experiment with high intelligence—once known as humanity. Sheer intelligence has not proved to be a good survival trait in the long run, and through their fantastic mobility the Rhuun have inherited the Earth.
LEGIONS IN TIME
Michael Swanwick
Eleanor Voigt had the oddest job of anyone she knew. She worked eight hours a day in an office where no business was done. Her job was to sit at a desk and stare at the closet door. There was a button on the desk which she was to push if anybody came out that door. There was a big clock on the wall and precisely at noon, once a day, she went over to the door and unlocked it with a key she had been given. Inside was an empty closet. There were no trap doors or secret panels in it—she had looked. It was just an empty closet.
If she noticed anything unusual, she was supposed to go back to her desk and press the button.
“Unusual in what way?” she’d asked when she’d been hired. “I don’t understand. What am I looking for?”
“You’ll know it when you see it,” Mr Tarblecko had said in that odd accent of his. Mr Tarblecko was her employer, and some kind of foreigner. He was the creepiest thing imaginable. He had pasty white skin and no hair at all on his head, so that when he took his hat off he looked like some species of mushroom. His ears were small and almost pointed. Ellie thought he might have some kind of disease. But he paid two dollars an hour, which was good money nowadays for a woman of her age.
At the end of her shift, she was relieved by an unkempt young man who had once blurted out to her that he was a poet. When she came in, in the morning, a heavy Negress would stand up wordlessly, take her coat and hat from the rack, and with enormous dignity leave.
So all day Ellie sat behind the desk with nothing to do. She wasn’t allowed to read a book, for fear she might get so involved in it that she would stop watching the door. Crosswords were allowed, because they weren’t as engrossing. She got a lot of knitting done, and was considering taking up tatting.
Over time the door began to loom large in her imagination. She pictured herself unlocking it at some forbidden not-noon time and seeing—what? Her imagination failed her. No matter how vividly she visualized it, the door would open onto something mundane. Brooms and mops. Sports equipment. Galoshes and old clothes. What else would there be in a closet? What else could there be?
Sometimes, caught up in her imaginings, she would find herself on her feet. Sometimes, she walked to the door. Once she actually put her hand on the knob before drawing away. But always the thought of losing her job stopped her.
It was maddening.
Twice, Mr Tarblecko had come to the office while she was on duty. Each time he was wearing that same black suit with that same narrow black tie. “You have a watch?” he’d asked.
“Yes, sir.” The first time, she’d held forth her wrist to show it to him. The disdainful way he ignored the gesture ensured she did not repeat it on his second visit.
“Go away. Come back in forty minutes.”
So she had gone out to a little tearoom nearby. She had a bag lunch back in her desk, with a baloney-and-mayonnaise sandwich and an apple, but she’d been so flustered she’d forgotten it, and then feared to go back after it. She treated herself to a dainty “lady lunch” that she was in no mood to appreciate, left a dime tip for the waitress, and was back in front of the office door exactly thirty-eight minutes after she’d left.
At forty minutes, exactly, she reached for the door.
As if he’d been waiting for her to do so, Mr Tarblecko breezed through the door, putting on his hat. He didn’t acknowledge her promptness or her presence. He just strode briskly past, as though she didn’t exist.
Stunned, she went inside, closed the door, and returned to her desk.
She realized then that Mr Tarblecko was genuinely, fabulously rich. He had the arrogance of those who are so wealthy that they inevitably get their way in all small matters because there’s always somebody there to arrange things that way. His type was never grateful for anything and never bothered to be polite, because it never even occurred to them that things could be otherwise.
The more she thought about it, the madder she got. She was no Bolshevik, but it seemed to her that people had certain rights, and that one of these was the right to a little common courtesy. It diminished one to be treated like a stick of furniture. It was degrading. She was damned if she was going to take it.
Six months went by.
The door opened and Mr Tarblecko strode in, as if he’d left only minutes ago. “You have a watch?”
Ellie slid open a drawer and dropped her knitting into it. She opened another and took out her bag lunch. “Yes.”
“Go away. Come back in forty minutes.”
So she went outside. It was May, and Central Park was only a short walk away, so she ate there, by the little pond where children floated their toy sailboats. But all the while she fumed. She was a good employee—she really was! She was conscientious, punctual, and she never called in sick. Mr Tarblecko ought to appreciate that. He had no business treating her the way he did.
Almost, she wanted to overstay lunch, but her conscience wouldn’t allow that. When she got back to the office, precisely thirty-nine and a half minutes after she’d left, she planted herself squarely in front of the door so that when Mr Tarblecko left he would have no choice but to confront her. It might well lose her her job, but . . . well, if it did, it did. That’s how strongly she felt about it.
Thirty seconds later, the door opened and Mr Tarblecko strode briskly out. Without breaking his stride or, indeed, showing the least sign of emotion, he picked her up by her two arms, swivelled effortlessly, and deposited her to the side.
Then he was gone. Ellie heard his footsteps dwindling down the hall.
The nerve! The sheer, raw gall of the man!
Ellie went back in the office, but she couldn’t make herself sit down at the desk. She was far too upset. Instead, she walked back and forth the length of the room, arguing with herself, saying aloud those things she should have said and would have said if only Mr Tarblecko had stood still for them. To be picked up and set aside like that . . . Well, it was really quite upsetting. It was intolerable.
