Time Travel Omnibus, page 912
“What, you mean you’ve spent all that time back in the past and never had a hamburger, fries, and a shake?” Tiffany had spotted the new auto-serve café several days ago: a rainbow of garish lighting framing an entrance to polka-dotted floors, cherry-red seats, checked napkins, and glossy tabletops—magic plastic teased into a very good replica of a 1950s diner. Well, actually, it was a replica of what twenty-first century nostalgia believed a ‘50s diner ought to have looked like, but still, it was cheery, uncrowded, and offered the promise of real, old-fashioned food.
Tiffany looked happily at her own plate. “Pure indulgence—absolutely nothing good for you about it.” Well, that wasn’t quite true. The burger looked like tofu, the bun was whole wheat, the potatoes were “fiber fries,” and the shake somehow managed to be “nonfat.” But at least it tasted like the real thing. Or maybe Tiffany was so starved for grease she’d forgotten what it was supposed to taste like.
Dannette was examining the plastic basket in which the meal had been served. “What are we supposed to eat this with?”
Tiffany popped a fry in her mouth. Fiber or not, it wasn’t bad. “Fingers.” She licked them to demonstrate, grinning at Dannette’s scowl. “And when did we become so civilized?”
Dannette tested her milkshake. “When we were supposedly taught twenty-first century manners.”
“Ah,” Tiffany said. “All rules have exceptions.” She dealt with a drip of secret sauce that was threatening to fall in her lap. “Otherwise, what’s the fun in life?”
Dannette’s reaction startled her. She set down the milkshake and for a moment the old fire burned in her eyes. “You know, that’s how I felt about hunting. It’s such an adrenaline rush. However much preparation you’ve done, when the moment comes, it comes in a hurry, and you have to be willing to take risks. If you screw up, it’s a royal mess—like bringing you here, only worse. Last week, a hunter snatched a guy in mid-air when he was taking a skydiving lesson. Did he wind up as one of yours?”
Tiffany shook her head. “But let me guess: he woke up thinking he was dead.”
“Yeah. If we were to put the ones like that into a tunnel leading to a bright light, I bet Ngawa could convince them they’re in heaven.” Dannette gazed out the door of the café. “It’s just the type of thing she’d try.” She switched back to Tiffany. “But I was talking about the hunter. Most likely, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go skydiving. But what happened was that eight people went up and only six came down. I finally managed to create a record of a wind shear that might have blown the other two so far off course their bodies fell in a river and were somewhere downstream, feeding the fish. But that got the pilot sued by the quarry’s parents for going too close to the river. I wanted to patch that—the poor guy didn’t deserve it—but Ngawa wouldn’t approve another trip. The woman really has no heart.”
She finally picked up her hamburger and took a bite. “This,” she said, “can’t be healthy.” A trace of a grin danced around the corners of her mouth. “The safe house I was in this time might cure even your craving for things like this. The folks in Research have come up with a new “Standard Twenty-first Century Diet” for people who spend all their time with computers: nothing but frozen pizza, chips, bad beer, and a boatload of something called Twinkies. I started to read one of the nutrition labels, then decided I didn’t want to know. I swear I could hear my arteries hardening.”
Tiffany remembered her first image of Dannette-the-Goth. “Your research department seems to pick up a lot of bad information. That pizza-and-Twinkie thing was always a caricature.”
“Figures. Those guys probably got it from some old movie.”
Tiffany set down her own burger and turned serious. “Okay,” she said. “What gives? This morning you gave me all these mysterious hints, and now all you want to talk about is skydiving and Twinkies.”
Dannette wiped an invisible something from the corner of her mouth. “You know,” she said obliquely, “I’m really going to miss you.”
“What?”
Dannette leaned back in her chair, savoring the moment. “I think I can get you home. Back where you can harden your arteries as much as you want.”
“You’ve found a patch?”
“No. Something simpler. I think I can get you Outside.”
Tiffany had despaired of ever seeing what lay beyond the plastic walls. Earlier that day, she’d even tried calling up windows at random, just to see if she could find one that overlooked anything beyond the confines of this artificial womb. But the wall had ignored her, just as it had when she’d tried to call up a ‘puter port.
Still, what was the point? “I thought I’d cease to exist. Or destroy all of you in some giant flash.”
“Who told you that?”
Tiffany laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Guess.”
“Yeah. Well, it’s another half-truth. The full truth is that we barely understand this technology. We didn’t invent it. We stole it, and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since.”
“What, you mean you’ve pirated someone else’s invention?”
“No. Well, yes. But not the way you think. We stole it from the future.” Dannette waved off Tiffany’s question before it formed. “That plague Ngawa told you about? It hasn’t happened yet. We’re not sure when it will happen, but it’s hundreds of years away. Perhaps more. All we’re sure of is that we ourselves are being harvested by people three centuries in our future, which is about the optimum ‘sporter range. At longer range, power consumption is too high. Closer to home, you get a lot of warp unless you’re really careful who you pick.” Dannette paused, gazing vaguely across Tiffany’s shoulder. “Think of it this way. If you were to nab your own father, you’d have an unpatchable warp. Both of you would have to stay in the Bubble forever, and we’re not even sure that would work. But if you nabbed your great-great-great to the nth grandfather, nothing much happens by the time the wrinkle gets to you. You’re still you, even though a piece of your gene line should be missing.”
Dannette poked at a fry, then wiped her fingers. “Did Ngawa tell you that story about the shifting mole?”
Tiffany nodded.
“It’s one of her favorites. But it begs the real question, which is why her mole could shift but she, sadly, remains Ngawa. Temporal empiricists explain it with something they call chronological inertia. Philosophers and theologians call it conservation of souls. It’s all fancy mumbo-jumbo for, ‘We don’t really know, but thankfully, it works.’ Something similar applies to the world as a whole. Your generation and mine can lose millions of men to the future, but as long as everyone’s reasonably careful about their quarry, and the patch teams do their jobs, the right things get invented, the population rebounds, and nothing much happens to the people doing the raiding. There’s probably a lot of short-term sideslip in the twenty-second century, but by the time it reaches us, it all irons out in the wash.”
Tiffany started to correct the mangled aphorism, then decided to let it go.
“The bottom line,” Dannette continued, “is that you can pick short-range quarry if you’re sure there’s not going to be a lot of warp—people who wouldn’t be missed no matter what—but it’s a lot easier at longer range. That’s why we’re raiding your century, and that’s why the twenty-seventh is raiding us. We have good reason to believe that they are being raided from the thirtieth, which may itself be being raided from even farther ahead. We’re not sure how many iterations forward the process extends, but it could be quite a few.” Dannette paused. “That’s why your old boyfriend is so concerned about his kids. Not because they might catch the plague, but because when they’re grown we’ll still be in that optimum target range for our friends in the twenty-seventh century. Although eventually, their crisis will pass, and presumably so will ours.”
Tiffany struggled to imagine a succession of cultures raiding each other through time, the disturbance cycling backward like swells on a temporal sea. Talk about dancing to the tune of past mistakes: these people were dancing to the tune of the future’s. “How do you know all this?”
“We caught a few of their hunters.” Her eyes dropped. “Much as you nearly caught me. The ‘sporters were easy to duplicate, even when we had no clue how they operated. At first, we thought we’d jump forward and try to negotiate with them, but ‘sporters only work backward. It seems to be a warp thing.”
“So if all you had to go on were a few stolen ‘sporters, how did you manage to come up with all of”—Tiffany flapped a palm at their general surroundings—“this?”
Dannette puffed her cheeks in an imitation of her familiar snort. “Ngawa’s father invented it. Supposedly. I was serious when I said he was somebody important. But the more patches I do, the more I suspect he was given the technology by a twenty-seventh century patch team: by controlling sideslip, the Bubble makes us less disruptive to them, too. Ngawa’s father is a very good temporal theorist but it’s hard to see how he could have achieved so much without help. Especially the warp monitors. They’re about the size of a house and I’m not sure even he knows how they work. That’s why arrivals are always in those domed rooms. The entire room is a monitor.”
Tiffany took a deep breath. “So what happens if I step Outside? Presuming that you really do know a way to get me there. What keeps your world from ending or me from just vanishing? Is this chronological inertia that strong?”
“No. I spent as much as possible of the last three weeks reading up on theory, and mostly likely you indeed disappear. I suspect that’s what would have happened to that skydiver if he’d gone Outside before I patched him. But if the theory’s right, you don’t truly vanish—you rebound to your own time, releasing all that warp strain and producing most of the sideslip back there.”
“Which means exactly what?”
“Damned if I know. The skydiver might have found himself truly dead—splattered into the ground with an unopened ‘chute. You’re probably more complex. Ngawa really is frightened of you. She’s had you scanned every time you go into a retrieval room. Stacyn did a few of the scans, and she says the warp’s been increasing.”
“Why? I’ve never been anywhere but here.”
“Ah, that’s the billion-dollar question.”
“Million. A billion was a lot of money.”
“Million, then. But that’s just what makes it baffling. Each time you say something like that, you decrease my potential warp by helping me blend in. But your warp keeps going up, so it has to be related to something else. I think it’s from all the things you’re learning about us, even though Ngawa’s done her best to keep you from knowing any more than necessary for you to be of value to her. I know you don’t do it for that reason, but each time you get one of those guys to cooperate, you save us a lot of time and money.”
Dannette hesitated, gathering her thoughts. “There’s only one reason I can come up with for why your warp might increase as you learn about us. I think that if we let you rebound, you’d do something with that knowledge. I think that’s what Ngawa’s worried about, and I’m willing to gamble that if she’s afraid of it, it might be a good thing.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward, even though they were alone. “Of course, there’s a lot of risk involved. All of this is just theory—and theory we don’t really understand, at that. But if you want to go home, now’s the time to try it. Two days ago, Ngawa left for a meeting, and she’s not yet come back. As long as she’s Outside, she won’t be protected when the sideslip hits.” The old intensity was back in her eyes. “I even know a way for her to take the blame.”
“How’s that?”
“You remember how surprised I was that Ngawa hadn’t given you even basic ‘puter access?”
Tiffany nodded. That entire evening would be hard to forget.
“Well, I think that’s your ticket out of here. As long as the system really doesn’t know you exist—and I checked it again a couple of hours ago and can’t find you anywhere—you should simply be able to walk out, any time you want.” She gave Tiffany a moment to digest that information, then continued. “That day when you asked me whether the walls eavesdropped, I didn’t think to tell you that they do have one security duty: preventing unauthorized people from leaving. But if you don’t exist, you can’t be unauthorized.”
“What if it’s the reverse? That they only let authorized people get out? Then I’d be stuck, anyway.”
Dannette’s headshake was emphatic. “No; it has to be the other way. We have thousands of employees who tromp in and out at will. It’s only the temporal staff who have to stay here, because we’re the ones who accumulate warp. If you don’t exist, you should be able to get out—and Ngawa’s going to catch hell for not thinking of it.”
It didn’t prove to be quite that simple, of course. The stripped-down computer existence that allowed Tiffany to spend money and receive pages meant that the system actually did know who she was. “But that stuff uses only low-level files,” Dannette told her. “We can simply delete you from them, and then you really won’t exist.”
They waited until the switchover from swing to graveyard shift—Tiffany found it amazing that those terms hadn’t changed in three hundred years—then went prowling for an unattended port in the retrieval wing, which, although still in use at night, was only lightly staffed. Theoretically, the job could be done by calling up a port somewhere private, but Dannette didn’t want to leave traces on any account that could be linked to her. “If we do this right, it’ll look like you did it yourself,” she said. “Everyone will wonder how you figured it out, but I’ll be happy to tell them how bright you are. You love to do that sit-and-listen thing where nobody realizes you’re paying attention, when you’re always two steps ahead of them. Ngawa’s never figured it out. It’ll be another screw in her coffin.”
“Nail,” Tiffany corrected automatically. “Coffins had nails.”
“Gads, I’m going to miss you.”
“Can you come visit? I’ve got this friend you’d really love.”
“A guy?”
Tiffany laughed. “What, you’re going to try to steal another one?” Then she realized how cruel that joke had been. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. See, you won’t miss me as much as you thought. No, it’s a girlfriend. You’re a lot like her. Seriously, can you visit?”
Dannette pushed an errant strand of hair from her eyes. “Now that’s a tempting idea. Way too risky, though, warp-wise.” She paused, thinking. “But, maybe we can do something else. Let me think about it. Meanwhile, let’s disappear you from the system.”
An untraceable port was easy to find. Generally, ports were opened directly from a ‘puter account, but even the simplest equipment often had the ability to create one of its own. Dannette found an empty medical bay and handed Tiffany a blood pressure cuff. “Here you go. Let’s see how those arteries are faring.”
Tiffany perched on an examining table and slipped on the cuff, watching the wall automatically open a port the moment the cuff was in place. As the device began squeezing her biceps, Dannette opened a sub-window and flicked first to the V-phone directory, then to a system Tiffany didn’t recognize. “This is it,” she said. “Once I do this, we’re committed. Still want to go home?”
Tiffany’s heart was hammering hard enough that she must be producing weird results on the blood pressure monitor. Readings, she was sure, that would soon be scrutinized by people trying to figure out how she got away. She did her best to fake calm. “Let’s do it.”
“Keep taking BP readings, then, so this thing doesn’t close down on me before I’m finished.”
“How long will this take?”
Dannette was already flipping through menus so fast Tiffany couldn’t keep track of them. “Not long. I had three weeks back in your century to figure it out. There’s no security to crack because normally, if you tried to do this to someone, they’d just call up a port and restore the settings.” Dannette’s face was tense, though, and Tiffany wondered what she would say if someone stepped into the retrieval room. Hi, we’re just playing with this thing to see what it can do? Yeah, right. Normal people don’t do computer work with blood pressure cuffs.
Finally, Dannette stepped back. “That’s it. You’re history. By the way, this thing says you might be under stress.”
“Tell me about it.” The cuff released its grip, and Tiffany took it off. The port vanished. “Now what?”
“Now we find you an exit, and figure out how to open it.”
“What! You mean you don’t know how to do that?”
“A joke. Isn’t that supposed to be a way to alleviate stress?”
Tiffany scooched off the examining room table and lowered her feet to the floor. Why did they always make those things for people six feet tall? “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“It does kind of bring back old times.” Dannette leaned against the table, half-sitting on it. Ah, to be that tall, Tiffany thought. “Actually, I do have a way. And a backup, though I’m not too fond of that one. All we have to do is get you to the rim. Any outer wall can become an exit. But first, let’s make sure this worked.” She faced the wall. “Map,” she commanded, and a wall segment brightened into a detailed layout of the retrieval wing. “Now, you try it.”
“What, I just ask for a map and one appears?”
“Yeah. You mean you didn’t know you could do that?”
Tiffany shook her head.
“Sorry. That’s another one that never crossed my mind. Even with your limited ‘puter existence, you should have had access to these things. I lived on them during my first few weeks in this place. How’d you ever find your way around?”
“With difficulty,” Tiffany admitted. She faced the nearest wall. “Map,” she said in the closest approach she could manage to Dannette’s casual command. Nothing happened. She tried again, more forcefully. “Map!” Still nothing.
“Good,” Dannette said. “Now let’s get out of here. It’s probably best if we left separately.” The tension was back. “It wouldn’t be good for me if someone sees us together now.” She turned back to her own map, scrolling to a distant part of the Bubble, then zooming in. “Let’s meet here.” Her finger stabbed a location in the maintenance section. “Think you can find it?”
