Time Travel Omnibus, page 911
It was Tiffany’s turn to blink. “Because I wasn’t.” This conversation wasn’t going at all the way she’d planned. Although, come to think of it, she really hadn’t had much of a plan in mind. Temporizing, she told Randall how she’d come to be here.
“Well,” he said when she’d finished. “At least you now know why I stood you up that night. I really did worry about you for months. The hunter who grabbed me later told me she hadn’t known that you and I had met yet, that there wasn’t supposed to be anyone who’d care all that much if I disappeared. But I was sure you would, which is why I forced them to change the patch.”
Too much information, all at once. Tiffany clutched at the fragments and asked the first question that came to mind. “What patch?”
Now, Randall was the one to be confused. “My death. Not much of a body to bury, but a few bones shipped back from here and a fake DNA report to make it look like me. They told me they dropped the bones into a tanker-truck fire that killed a dozen other people. Why did they have you call me, anyway, instead of letting me stay dead?”
More information overload. “This isn’t exactly an official call,” Tiffany said, feeling Dannette’s presence beside her. “I never heard of such a wreck, and for sure, nobody reported finding your body.” Her next remark was needlessly cruel, but there was too much pain to keep it all bottled up. “You just vanished and I never heard a word from anyone.”
Randall’s face jerked as though she’d slapped it. “Shit,” he said. “The goddamn bastards. They stuck with the original patch and . . . and patched me with that . . . that fable. And I bought it, hook, line, and sinker. Damn, damn, damn. I should have made them show me the post-patch archives, though I suppose those could have been faked, too. I’m sorry, Tiff. I really am.”
Tiffany forced a wan smile. “I know you are. And it’s not as though it matters any more.” That was a lie, but it felt better than acknowledging the truth and it made it easier to ask the next question. “Did they say what their precious archives had in store for us if they hadn’t nabbed you?”
Randall’s gaze shifted sideways—onto his green heaven through yet another window? “Do you really want to know?”
Tiffany didn’t trust herself to speak. She nodded, a new lump rising in her throat. Oh-oh.
“Two kids, Golden Anniversary, grandkids, ripe old age, the whole package.” Randall’s voice was too steady, as though reciting the phone book. His own way of dealing with the information, she suspected. “If they didn’t lie about that, too. By the time they told me anything about you, I’d been booted up to someone named Ngawa, and she seemed a pretty cold fish. Her job was to get me processed, acculturated, and on the market, as efficiently as possible. I was doing my best to resist. We made a trade: she’d answer my questions and arrange a patch that would give you closure. I’d be a good boy and learn to live here.”
Tiffany’s consciousness was spiraling toward a point near the pit of her stomach. I will not cry, she thought. I will not. “Did you keep your end of the bargain?”
Randall lowered his gaze. “How else would I be out here?”
“And if you could go back?” The tears were closer than ever.
“But I can’t, can I?” Noise intruded in the background, and Randall looked off to the side. “In a moment, dear,” he called. “It’s someone from the Center, just checking up on me.” He turned back to Tiffany. “That’s my wife.” He held up his left hand, displaying a simple gold band. “For me, it’s been seven years. We have four kids. All boys, I insisted on that. Whatever else I do, I won’t contribute to the gender imbalance, though I do worry . . . never mind. I’ll guard them however I can.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll manage. I’ll have the equivalent of my GED in a couple of months. I’d have had it sooner, but the boys take a lot of time. There are plenty of jobs I can do once I get it.” His eyes carried a wistful look, and he again gazed across Tiffany’s shoulder, out the window she was now certain lay in that direction. “Although Regina points out that we don’t need the money. She has a Ph.D. in a field that didn’t even exist until a few years ago.” His eyes flicked back to hers, slid away again, then returned. “I’m glad to know what happened to you but sorry it worked out so badly.” Again his gaze flickered between her and the distance behind her, and Tiffany realized that there might be an advantage to her windowless existence. “I hope things go better for you, now,” he said, reaching for the disconnect. “But please, don’t call again.” And then his image collapsed: a bird in a gilded cage—tauntingly replete with windows.
Tiffany leaned her elbows on the table and buried her head in her palms, still refusing to cry. A hand tentatively touched her shoulder. “Damn,” said Dannette, and she realized the hunter was also close to tears. “We’re not supposed to break up couples. Officially, it creates too much warp. And the men take too long to adapt.” She paused. “But that’s merely what Ngawa says. It’s also just plain wrong.” Another pause, then more softly: “I wonder if I’ve ever done it.”
The last thing Tiffany wanted now was another chink in Dannette’s armor. She wanted to cry, to hurl things, to blame someone. But sometime in the past few days, Dannette had moved beyond being simply the closest thing she had to a friend in this world, and become the real thing. Tiffany reached over and put her own hand atop Dannette’s. “It’s not your fault,” she murmured, wondering how many more times she was going to find herself uttering those words.
She was rewarded with a sniff, then the hand was snatched back and Tiffany sensed motion as Dannette swiped away the traces of her weakness. Then Ms. Hard-ass was back in control. “I sure as hell hope not,” she said.
That pretty much ended the evening. A few minutes later, Tiffany and Dannette were walking back to the residential wing when the wall chimed and called Tiffany’s name. “Here,” she said, and found herself facing a V-phone image of a medic she vaguely knew. “Sorry to call you after shift,” the woman said, “but we could use you in room 15B.”
For once, the page was welcome. Tiffany hadn’t been looking forward to spending the rest of the evening alone, and even though she was a long-time caffeine addict, she’d have had trouble getting to sleep this soon after two cups of coffee.
“On my way,” she said. She turned back to Dannette. “How much trouble did I just get you into, really?”
“Probably none. Why?”
For a few hundred meters, her route to work was the same as that to Dannette’s dorm. The medic hadn’t used the word emergency, but a call at this hour meant she had a patient she’d prefer not to simply sedate until morning. “Walk with me?” Tiffany said, and started off.
Dannette trotted to catch up. “Sure. What’s got you worried.”
“The walls,” Tiffany said. “They always know where I am. What else do they know? Is this conversation being recorded? Is everything being recorded?”
“No. The walls are an autonomous system. Nobody has access and anyone who got caught trying to hack them would take a quick trip to jail.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, we have technology that would make . . . what’s his name, Big Brother?”
Tiffany nodded.
“. . . that would make Big Brother look like a tadpole. But this isn’t a police state; in fact, our constitutional rights are stronger than yours were. I could stand here and plot open treason, and the walls not only wouldn’t recognize it, they wouldn’t react if they could. But if my heart stopped, they’d have a medic here on the run. It’s like having a very attentive but brainless nanny.”
The case in room 15B proved not to be as much of a problem as the medic thought, and the man relaxed considerably when Tiffany convinced him he was in the future, not a flying saucer. She had dealt with that problem before and could list all the ways his experience differed from the alien abductions he’d read about. But the best solution was the simplest. The first time she’d asked a medic to prick blood from her own finger had taken some fast talk, but its redness had done much to persuade the man of the medic’s humanity. Within a week, the other medics were calling Tiffany their resident vampire.
The problem cases continued to come in as fast as Tiffany could work them. Each time she thought she could stand it no longer, her workload would again be eased, but that only meant she saw a greater and greater fraction of truly difficult cases. As more months crept by, Tiffany learned that the system was being continually ramped up in the hope of doubling last year’s number not only of snatches, but of “placements”—Ngawa’s euphemism-of-choice for marriages. Tiffany was a staff of one, working an ever-more-select fraction of the incoming men.
The worst case proved to be the last. By this time, yurt-domes, recovery rooms, and medics sometimes worked round-the-clock, although most transportees still arrived during the nominal daytime. This one came in at night and woke from the stun screaming. Even though it was Tiffany’s sleep shift, she was paged to the recovery chamber, where she found Ngawa and a hunter she’d never seen before. The hunter was wearing a decent facsimile of a cheerleading outfit from a decade before Tiffany’s time, but Ngawa had made her usual non-effort to conform to twenty-first century norms, and her fright wig was at its most hideous, with black-and-white bangles that looked disconcertingly like eyeballs affixed to the end of each dreadlocked stalk.
The quarry was a broad-faced young man who’d wedged himself into a corner of the recovery room. Upright and confident, he would have been hulking, but crammed in the corner, knees drawn to his chest, he was a child in a ludicrously oversized body.
He was wearing a football uniform that pronounced him to be a Javelina. An elastic wrap circled his left knee, and water (a melting ice pack?) seeped from beneath the bandage. A trail of moisture marked the path by which he must have scooted crabwise across the floor, en route to the corner. His helmet was in his left hand, gripped so tightly by the chinstrap that his knuckles gleamed porcelain-white.
Tiffany wheeled on Ngawa, ready to give her a dressing-down similar to the one she herself had given Dannette all those months before. Was the woman totally devoid of empathy? But at the last second, Tiffany remembered her place and attempted to clamp a lid on her anger.
It wasn’t much of a lid. “Out,” she snapped, and to her amazement, Ngawa nodded curtly and followed her bidding.
Tiffany turned to the hunter. “Details,” she demanded, and the faux cheerleader drew back a step in unconscious reflection of the deeper fear huddled behind her. Bad start. Tiffany reminded herself that she had no real authority, and that indignation, however righteous, would carry her only so far. “I’m not blaming you,” she said, although she wasn’t sure who else there was to blame. “Just tell me what happened.”
The hunter bit her lip. Behind the college-girl getup she probably wasn’t all that much older than her quarry. Some hunters worked by ambush. Some, like Dannette, operated more like pickpockets. This one probably relied on the lure of wholesome good looks.
“It was the fourth quarter of the game,” she said with a trace of quaver, and Tiffany nodded encouragingly. “He’d wrenched his knee. He didn’t know it yet, but it would be the end of his football career.” The girl’s voice was gaining strength as she fell into the rhythm of a by-rote debriefing. “The real injury would come the following week, when he’d twist the same knee, again, in practice.
“It was a small college, and he was by himself in the locker room, icing his knee, while everyone else was watching the game. I just stepped in, said ‘Hi,’ and snatched him the moment I was sure he really was alone. End of story. If I’d not taken him, he’d have gone to grad school and become a psychologist, so I know he’s got a brain. But after his initial screaming fit, all he’s done is crawl in the corner and whimper.”
And you view that as weird?, Tiffany thought. You took a man headed for the type of life work that attracts the perceptive, empathic types—the ideal “good ones”—caught him when he’d been abandoned by his teammates, then zapped him here where one of the first things he sees is Dr. Eyestalks. It’s a wonder he didn’t go catatonic.
But there wasn’t much use in saying any of that. This whole time-travel/hunting thing dehumanized everyone. Dannette was starting to show a soul, but hunters had to abandon a piece of their humanity each time they yanked someone into an alien future—especially when their assignment was to deliberately pick the kindest, most sensitive ones because they were the most marketable “placements.”
Tiffany masked her feelings as best she could. “Thanks,” she said. “Now, you’d better leave us alone.”
As the hunter made a grateful exit, Tiffany turned to the football player. She kicked off her shoes and sat down with her back to the wall, so she neither towered over him nor squatted on her haunches like an adult speaking to a child.
“My name’s Tiffany,” she said. “They kidnapped me, too. But they won’t hurt you. They’re lonely, too.”
Hours later, the football player had yet to speak. Nor had Tiffany said anything more, because at this point it would all be hollow. But in the silence, he’d inched closer until eventually she found herself cradling his huge body against her tiny one, as tears rolled off his cheeks and dripped to her sleeve. Tiffany’s eyes were also moist, and it took a supreme effort for her not to dampen his hair with tears of her own.
Eventually, his tears ceased. Tiffany’s arm was cramped, she’d missed most of her sleep shift, and her stomach was rumbling. Sometime soon, the young man would also be hungry.
“Several things you can have for the asking are comfortable quarters, food, and really good medical treatment for that knee,” she said. “They’ll also give you fresh clothes, although I won’t say much for their fashion sense.” She paused. “When you’re ready, they’ll tell you what’s going on. Probably better than I could.”
For the first time, the football player met her eyes. “Thanks,” he said: a single word in a surprisingly soft voice. His massive hand gave her shoulder a near-painful squeeze. Then he levered himself to his feet, most of his weight on the uninjured leg. “I think maybe I’ll be okay.”
Tiffany rose with him and gave him as level a gaze as her eight-inch shorter frame would allow. “I think so, too,” she said as she helped him to the bed and summoned the recovery team.
But she wasn’t so sure about herself.
In the hallway, she was surprised to find Dannette. A section of wall had turned transparent, offering a one-way window into the recovery room, where a medic was now with the football player, prodding at his knee in the manner of doctors throughout time.
Dannette’s eyes glistened, and this time, she made no effort to hide it.
“How long?” Tiffany asked. She’d had no idea the recovery-room walls could become windows, but it came as no great surprise. There’d been no sign of the view port from inside, but that didn’t surprise her, either.
“Long enough. Laurel told me the story over breakfast, and I’ve been watching you ever since.” Dannette pressed a napkin-wrapped package into Tiffany’s hand. “I snagged you a muffin.” She was still facing the one-way window. “It’s not fair, is it?”
“No,” Tiffany said. The time hunters really did pick the sensitive, caring, and—let’s face it—handsome, ones. Never the misfits who might actually enjoy a future in which they could have their pick of women. No surprise there. Women of all eras would do the same. Men too, for that matter.
Tiffany’s stomach gurgled at the smell of food, and she began unwrapping the muffin. Then she looked again through the window and stopped.
Dannette touched her forearm. “Don’t,” she said. “That’s for you. You give . . . too much.” She returned her eyes to the football player. “If he lets them, they’ll treat him like a king.”
Tiffany hesitated, then pulled off the remainder of the napkin and bit into the breakfast roll. “Why does it have to be this way?”
Dannette was still staring through the window. “I don’t know. It didn’t start with us.”
“Yes. Ngawa told me about the plague.” An unbidden thought crossed her mind. “Are the new guys at risk of catching it?” Randall was worried about his children, she remembered. His boy children.
Dannette was no longer looking through the window. “What exactly did she tell you?”
Tiffany recited what she remembered, suddenly aware of how little it was. A plague that killed most of the men, leaving a society in which males were in short supply. Men would have solved the problem with harems. Time snatches were a monogamisticly female response.
“I’ve got to hand it to her,” Dannette said. “She’s really good with half-truths.” She summoned up a digital chrono on the windowpane. “Crap. I go on shift in twenty minutes. Another three weeks planting ‘puter records, this time in 2012. They’ve reserved me a return slot for about noon today. Debriefing shouldn’t take more than a few hours. What say we talk about this at dinner? Say 18:00? Pick us something interesting; I’m sure I’ll be in the mood for real food. Sorry I can’t tell you more now, but if I start explaining, you’ll ask so many questions I’ll be late for costuming.”
Dannette waved away both the chrono and the window, started to leave, then turned back to Tiffany. “And get some sleep. Call in sick or something. Tell them that one of these is enough for one day.” She paused. “You might need that rest this evening. Me, I’ve got to do some thinking. But at least I’ve got the better part of a month to do it.” She turned on her heel and walked briskly away.
Interesting food to Tiffany meant something different than to Dannette. “What the hell is this?” Dannette asked, staring at her plate.
