Time Travel Omnibus, page 914
She found one, and momentarily her heart stopped. April was gone. So were May, June, July, and the rest of the summer. The preview channel was trumpeting a new season of shows she’d never heard of, and stark letters at the bottom of the screen proclaimed it to be September 17. She had been gone for nearly five months. Or was it a year and five months? No, it had to be less than a year. Overdraft protection on her bank account and automatic rent and utility payments would have saved her from eviction for five months, but not seventeen.
So this is sideslip, she thought as she kicked off her shoes and padded back to bed. I wonder what else is in store?
She found out in the morning, when she booted up her computer. “You have mail,” it announced. It whirred for a disturbingly long moment, then informed her that there were 3,759 items in her in-basket. She thought about deleting them all, unread, but some would be “where have you been?” notes she had to answer if she ever figured out what to say. Amnesia? A whirlwind romance in Outer Mongolia? Once she picked a story, she’d have to live with it.
Starting with the oldest, she scrolled through the messages, deleting them in batches. She didn’t answer any of the personal notes, even ones from Brenda. Deleting junk mail was calming—the first normal thing she’d done in months.
After an hour, she took a break. She threw away the entire contents of the refrigerator, wiped down the empty shelves with disinfectant, and—suddenly sympathetic with Dannette’s attitude about canned food and pasta—coaxed her car into life for a trip to the supermarket. It was as hard to imagine that Dannette was hundreds of years from being born as it had been, months before, to picture Brenda, centuries dead.
After lunch, she returned to sorting e-mail. She had most of it eliminated when she found a message from timegirl2327. The subject line read, “I found a way!”
“Welcome back,” the message read.
“I’m on patch duty a few months back from you, and realized I could just plant a message to be delivered to you in the future. When I get home, I’ll look for your answer. Just hit ‘reply,’ and don’t worry if your server says it’s undeliverable—I’ll still find it.
“Your escape worked. They found the exit opened under Ngawa’s name and presumed you’d walked out before the error-correction closed it. You’re now viewed as pretty brilliant, if I do say so myself. Ngawa came back with memory holes. She didn’t remember you and had forgotten that she hated me until she checked her files. Then she told me I’d be on patch duty forever. It seems that back when I nabbed you, she did something that somehow backfired. Which, of course, she blamed on me. If I ever find out the details, I’ll let you know, but when she realized that she’d not told me before, she clammed up again. So she’s still Ngawa, maybe even more so.
“At first, she talked of sending a hunter to ‘sport you back here, but her father intervened and told her to leave it be. More advice from the future, or just common sense? It never crossed my mind that she’d consider something so insane. The sideslip has already occurred. Nabbing you again would just create a new warp. Even Ngawa should have seen that, but when she gets angry she forgets to think. Apparently, her father really slapped her down. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on her? Nah—I ran from my father; I didn’t become him.
“I’ve not seen any other sideslip here, but something interesting appears to be going on uptime. Do you remember that outfit in my future that I said was taking fifteen million a year from yours? Well, they’re now down to five million. So far, nobody else seems to have noticed.
“I’ve got a sabbatical coming, but I’ve decided to stay here for the time being. I probably should go out there and face my father, but I’m not ready—yet. And I need my spare time for research. If I have anything to say about it, I really am going to run that uptime outfit someday and, well, after meeting you, I’ve decided that maybe smaller is better. If you have any ideas toward that end, pass them on.
“Let me know if you get this.—D”
Tiffany read the letter three times. Did it make her feel more or less at home? Or did she now have two homes, one here and one in the future? She was simultaneously energized and too tired to write at length. “Got back last night,” she typed. “Haven’t done anything yet. My advice: male babies. You’ll still get raided, but you won’t need to take as many from us. If the folks in the Twenty-Seventh get the same idea, maybe you can work a bigger sideslip upstream.” That’s what Ngawa was afraid of, Tiffany thought. I’m helping Dannette undermine the entire system.
Eventually, some generation would have to deal with that future plague, but that was their problem, and there was no excuse for the disturbance to reverberate through so many iterations. It was just like Dannette and her father, or Brenda and her adolescent tormenters. Or maybe the whole world always worked that way. The moment she’d seen Randall, Tiffany had realized the same thing could happen to her. Having him vanish so suddenly, like one of those guys who goes out with you once, then never calls back, hadn’t yet made her cynical, but it had made her doubt her ability to judge character.
She resumed typing. “If you have to take men, try to pick the sad, lonely ones and make them happy.—P.S., you can have as many of the yahoos as you want.”
Then she called Brenda. Or tried to. Brenda wasn’t home, and didn’t pick up her cell phone, either. Tiffany left “guess what, I’m back” messages on both phones, then busied herself trying to create the least flaky reason she could imagine for her absence. Brenda, on the other hand, deserved the truth, or as much of it as Tiffany dared tell her. Brenda had friends in the technology industry, and Tiffany didn’t want them inventing brew-to-order beers or magic plastic years ahead of schedule.
Brenda didn’t call until evening. “Where have you been?!” she demanded, almost before Tiffany had gotten the phone to her ear. “I thought I’d never see you again!”
“The future,” Tiffany answered simply. She then sketched a bare-bones summary of the Bubble culture, with its hunters, patchers, archives, and shifting shortages of men. Futures inflicting their woes on the past, generation to generation.
Brenda accepted everything without comment. “The best I’d come up with,” she said when Tiffany finished, “was that you’d gotten involved in some really nasty secret agent stuff and they’d made you vanish—rather exotically, at that. Either that or it was, ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ ” She laughed. “So I’ve been right all along. There really are no more good men.”
“Not ‘no more,’ ” Tiffany said. “But definitely fewer.”
“Fewer, schmewer. That’s why I was late getting back to you. I was out with this doofus who thinks a woman’s job is to wear a skimpy bikini and lounge around the deck of his yacht. Okay, so he’s a rich doofus. But he kept wanting me to be more skimpy.”
Tiffany cradled the phone against her ear and relaxed, listening to her friend prattle on about men, as though the intervening months hadn’t existed. The excuses, the remaining e-mail, the job she probably no longer had—all of that would work itself out. Tiffany was home.
A few days later, Brenda took a vacation. “Long overdo,” was all she’d say. When she came back, she and Tiffany met for coffee for the first time since Tiffany’s return. But it wasn’t quite like old times because Brenda brought a friend.
“Tiff, this is Wadsworth Huffington,” she said. “I call him Wads, but he doesn’t really like it.”
“Charmed,” Wads said, sweeping off a beret and kissing her hand. Nobody had ever kissed Tiffany’s hand before. His moustache tickled. “Miss Brewster has told me so many wonderful things about you.”
Tiffany glanced at Brenda. “Miss Brewster?”
Brenda smiled sweetly. “Wads is a bit old-fashioned. His uncle was a prince or duke or something, and he’s just full of old-world charm.”
“Not a prince, my sweetkins,” Wadsworth said. His accent was upper-crust British. “I do wish you would get that right. There really is a rather large difference.”
Brenda nudged Tiffany. “Isn’t he delightful?”
Tiffany pulled Brenda closer to her. “Where on Earth did you get him? Is he some kind of actor you latched onto to feed your sick fantasies?”
Brenda looked hurt. “No way,” she said. “Wads, tell Tiffany how we met.”
Wadsworth gave her a glance. “The real story?”
Brenda nodded.
“Right-o,” he said. “Or I suppose that the proper expression is okay. I always had a gift for languages, but this American vernacular is rather difficult. But to start at the beginning, it had been a truly astoundingly dull day. A dull year, for that matter. A country gentleman’s life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and I never had any taste for business. Maybe—”
Brenda nudged him in the ribs. “Remember what I told you about time being money, Wads?”
Wadsworth grimaced. “Yes, you Americans have always been a rather hasty lot. All right . . . uh, okay. I was on the bridle path, exercising my favorite hunter at a brisk trot, when your friend Miss Brewster just sort of—I guess the word would be plopped—out of a tree, like a luscious, ripe peach falling gently to the ground.” Wadsworth beamed at her and Brenda beamed back.
“I hadn’t quite figured out the altitude control,” Brenda said, still smiling cloyingly at Wadsworth. She pried her attention from Wads and turned back to Tiffany. “I don’t think I told you what a stir you created when you pulled your vanishing act. I mean, you took a big scallop of the parking lot with you, plus half a car and the base of a street lamp. The rest of the lamp fell down on about three other cars, so we were kind of afloat for a while in cops and disturbed citizens. Then this whole group of odd-looking women showed up, a lot like the one you’d chased out the door, all trying to snoop around and overhear what people were saying to the police. Some of your buddies from the future?”
“Sounds like it.” This must have been Ngawa’s study team. I bet she panicked and cobbled together the team from whoever was available, Tiffany thought. Who then made a hash of it, so she blamed Dannette. It certainly sounded like Ngawa.
“It was all very confused,” Brenda said, “and the cops didn’t like it at all, especially because your divot looked a lot like a bomb crater except that its edges were too smooth and nobody could find any of the debris.” She grinned. “Which made it a pretty damn weird bomb crater.” She looked out the window, reconstructing her memory. “Anyway, the women eventually started to walk away, though they didn’t look happy.”
Yeah, Tiffany thought. They were going to have to tell Ngawa they’d accomplished nothing. Nobody could look forward to that.
Brenda was still talking. “Then all of a sudden they stopped. One was pawing frantically through her purse—you know, the way you do when you’re so desperate you can’t see what you’re looking for even if it’s right in front of you? But the cops were watching, so the women quieted down and left for good. An hour or two later, most of the cops had left, but I was still hoping that maybe you just might pop back from wherever you went . . . or fearing that someone would find your body . . .”
“Sorry,” Tiffany said. “I worried about you, too.”
Brenda started to speak, then bit her lip. Wads delicately took her hand, but said nothing. Brenda squeezed his hand in return, then resumed her story. “About that time, another woman arrived. She was a lot more discrete, but she couldn’t find what she was looking for, either.” Brenda opened her purse so Tiffany could see the handle of a device that didn’t look as much like a pistol as she’d once thought it did. More like a hair drier with too many buttons. “That’s because I’d already found it. I’d had various theories of what it might be, but when you told me about time snatches, it all fell into place. So I figured that if they were stealing from us, we’d just have to steal from someone else.”
Tiffany looked at Wads. “So you just went back to what, 1910 England, and grabbed him?”
“A bit earlier, actually. He was rather advanced for his era.”
“And he went along with this?”
Brenda nodded. “I just put on my best Jane Austen act and let him court me. After we’d had a few nice chats, I told him where I really came from and that I’d hunted him up from the obituaries, where he’d come across as a nice guy who’d not done much, then died young of a heart attack. He wasn’t all that thrilled by that description, particularly the part about dying young, but he perked up when I told him that in our time, that was easy to fix.” She turned back to Wads. “Right, sweetkins?”
“Yes,” he said. “Although I don’t think I will ever get used to this tofu substance you insist on feeding me.” His glance wandered out the window, just as a young woman in cycling shorts and an athletic top passed through his line of vision. His eyes swiveled, then averted. “Zounds,” he said, and even Brenda raised her eyebrows at that one.
Brenda slid the purloined ‘sporter over to Tiffany. “Want to give it a try? It’s loads of fun. Once you’re done, maybe we can make more. It looks like the whole thing was designed to be maintainable back here if needed, which means we ought to be able to build one from scratch. Just think: we could be Tiffany and Brenda’s Lonely Hearts Mended Club.”
Tiffany stared at the device. To all appearances, Brenda had found a good man, and Tiffany envied her for that. But in her mind’s eye, she saw women with eyestalk hairdos walking into the coffee shop. Bare-midriffed cyclists descending on Napoleonic France. French women, armed with their own stolen ‘sporters, chasing men farther backward in time, until the ‘sporter batteries ran down and stranded them somewhere awful, burned at the stake for witchcraft.
Wadsworth talked old-fashioned, but he wasn’t stupid. “Intriguing choice, is it not?” he said, and Tiffany knew what she had to do.
Brenda had no idea how lucky she’d been. To Wads, this was a grand adventure. But most men, even relieved of a deadly heart condition, wouldn’t be so chipper. Tiffany knew. Her dreams were haunted by a football player, huddled in on himself, tears staining her shirtsleeve. How long would it be until Tiffany was asking Dannette to send plans for a twenty-first century Bubble?
“Intriguing, yes,” she said. “Difficult, no.” She rocked back her chair far enough to raise the front legs off the floor. Before Brenda could protest, she shoved the ‘sporter beneath one of the legs. “Sorry,” she said. “This ends here.” Then she rocked firmly forward, hard enough to produce a satisfying crunch. For good measure, she did it again, making sure the fragile circuit boards were thoroughly smashed.
Nearby, a group of men looked up from a table covered with texts and notebooks.
Brenda’s shock passed, and a brief smile flitted across her lips. “I take it you had a really great time off in the future,” she said, sotto voce. Then she turned to the fall semester’s new group of chiropractors. “Hi,” she said. “My friend here is kind of shy, but she’s been wondering what you’re studying . . .”
THE DEVIL YOU DON’T
Matthew Hughes
The frantic sparks fly up into the November night like lost souls seeking safe harbor, who, finding none, extinguish themselves against the unheeding darkness. Or so I might write it if ever I should put pen to paper to tell this tale. But I shall not.
The fire itself is confined by the blackened steel barrel. I poke again with the gardener’s fork, and another flurry of sparks shoots up, and, with them, scraps of burning paper. By the flickering light of the flames, I can sometimes see a printed word or two before they are consumed: Alamein, Rommel, Singapore, Yalta.
The books are thick. They will take time to burn but I have learned patience. I have always taken the longer view. Perhaps it is a sense of history. Perhaps it is just how I am formed. But, in the arena of public life, he who takes the longer view must win out in the end.
The gardener has left in heaps his cullings from the bygone summer’s flower beds. I gather another armful of dried stalks and withered blossoms and throw them onto the flames. The flare of light illuminates the disturbed earth that the gardener turned over this afternoon and the pile of red bricks that have lain here much longer—more than a year since I abandoned building a wall to take Mr. Chamberlain’s reluctant call.
First Lord of the Admiralty, then. Prime Minister now. It was what I had always wanted, I will admit, though I would have preferred its arrival under less perilous circumstances.
The books are burning well. I leave them and kneel beside the wall. The cement with which to mix the mortar is just where I left it and there is water at hand. I lay a red fired brick atop the black soil, trowel its side with mortar, then place a second beside it.
Another pass with the trowel, then another brick. The work proceeds as it always did, a step at a time. That is how walls are built. As are lives. And futures.
The man appeared from thin air. I wanted to think he had stepped out of the darkness, but the space behind him was well-lit by the lights of Chartwell’s great house, my house. I had not been here since the start of the war.
“Please don’t be alarmed,” he said.
“I am alarmed,” I said. “My visitors usually make less startling entrances, and then only when invited.”
“I mean you no harm.”
“I am relieved to hear it.”
“I’ve come from the future.”
“Now I am alarmed anew,” I said.
There was a policeman in the house, a Special Branch man with a pistol. But I did not call out. My visitor begged me to allow him to demonstrate his bona fides.
I did so and was soon convinced. He had a watch that displayed time through ingenious means and a device no larger than a calling card that could extract a square root in the blink of an eye. He showed me coins and paper money bearing the likeness of the young Princess Elizabeth, grown grandmotherly beneath the Crown of State.
“I am glad to know that the royal family endures,” I said. “You bring me a heartening sign when one is sorely needed.”
