Time Travel Omnibus, page 975
Remember! Irene closed her eyes, and forced herself to recall the details of the day.
The moon cast long shadows against the graves of the cemetery. Irene used the light of the moon and stars to guide her way to her son’s gravesite. Her arms were fully recovered, the skin soft, supple, new, flawless, perfect.
She felt out of breath, robbed of her joy. She should be celebrating the resurrection of her son, at home, with her husband.
Today, everything was meant to be fixed. Instead, it was shattered.
Her son’s grave was filled, with a small indentation and her son’s headstone the only proof it ever existed. Irene saw no sign of her husband.
Where did he go?
She began to panic. What if he escaped? What if he tries to hurt my son again?
He was bound, she reminded herself. Four strong men. You saw it yourself.
She crouched at the grave, and let her hands linger over the memory of her son still etched in the stone. If she had a hammer, she would destroy it, break it down to dust. She worked the stone with her hands, pressing it until it fell over in a muffled thump.
Irene stood and ran her eyes around the small graveyard, looking for her husband. She did not know what she would do once she found him. Her mind refused to answer any time she asked. What will you do? she chided herself. Scream at him? Hit him? Kill him?
“Delbert!” She called into the darkness. “Where are you, you whoreson?!”
Above her, the old sentinel tree groaned in answer. Irene looked up.
Remember!
Her husband’s body swung from the tree, his legs twisting one way in the wind, then another. He had fashioned a rude noose from the scraps of hemp the diggers had used to bind him. His fingers were raw and bloody. The purple sheen of his face was hard to pick out against the backdrop of the night sky.
Irene fell to her knees and broke her eyes away from her dead husband, letting her vision fall to the tree’s trunk. Her husband had cut into the wood, worked at the dry, dead bark with his bare hands.
The words he left behind were simple, covered in blood:
LOOK AFTER HIM.
Her husband had not forgotten.
“I’m sorry,” Irene whispered.
February 13, 1933
Irene had dreaded this day. Unlike the future, the past was inevitable.
She panted through exertion, her body covered in a clammy sheen of sweat. There was little heat in the hospital, and she only had a thin cotton gown to separate her skin from the cold. Goosebumps pebbled her exposed arms and thighs, and her spread legs were high above her body, mounted in stirrups.
“We’re almost there, Irene.” The doctor smiled from between her legs. He was an older man, with well-styled whiskers and a bald head.
“You’re doing great,” a nurse echoed, dressed in a white apron and cap. She was standing next to her, holding her hand as she took in large gasps of air.
She gritted her teeth and balled her fists as the doctor pushed her son deeper. She recalled the pain of childbirth, and knew that it was nothing compared to this. She could feel her son struggling as he went higher into her uterus, with his sharp feet and hard elbows.
Irene had dreaded this day, but not for the pain.
She cried out in grief. These three years had been wonderful, an era of brightness where her life held few flaws.
Yet the anniversary of her son’s birth always hung over Irene, like dark storm clouds on the horizon, a constant reminder that his end was coming. Now her son was on the final path of his life. He would live another nine months, until he became a part of her.
Irene could feel him struggling, his limbs searching for room in her cramped stomach. She cried out as her son flipped, planting a hard heel up against her diaphragm.
“And we’re done. You did a great job, kid,” the doctor said. He turned and scrubbed his hands in a metal basin, a wan smile on his lips.
Irene ran a hand across her bulging belly and rested her sweat-soaked hair on the over-starched hospital pillow. Her smile was sad. There was little joy in it.
Irene still remembered.
She would never forget.
THESE ARE THE TIMES
Jack Campbell
Pratical time travel could make a historian’s job a lot simpler—or a lot more complicated!
Like different people, some places and times in the past attract a lot more attention than others. Sometimes a particular there and then only needs a few Temporal Interventionists dropping by before every question is pretty much answered. Lady Godiva, for example, who really did do her bareback ride, but no one who saw her picture in action once wanted to see it again. They probably forgave the taxes just so she’d put her clothes back on.
Other places get a fairly constant stream of TIs either trying to change things for their clients or trying to collect information from the past. It’s hard to visit Washington, D.C. anytime during the first three centuries of the United States, for example, without tripping over fellow TIs.
Then there’s very specific there and thens, places and times where something special happened, a turning point, and everyone wants to be there.
Like Boston, Massachusetts, in April 1775 C.E.
I’d landed what should have been a nice, simple job. No Interventions this time by someone wanting to ensure Great-Great-Great-etc.-Uncle Ned made it to Lexington Green so they’d have a hero in the family instead of an ancestor who’d stayed in bed with a hangover that morning, or someone wanting to murder Paul Revere or poison his horse. That stuff could get hazardous, especially with so many TIs from different centuries clustered in this here and now all trying to either carry out their own Interventions or stop someone else from achieving their Intervention.
There wasn’t anything dangerous in my job description. I was supposed to jump back uptime before sunset on the eighteenth, well before serious shooting started, and any travel by me near decision points or critical individuals would be finished well before then. No, all I had to worry about was being caught in the crossfire between TIs fighting before that time to either create or block Interventions. Unfortunately, this here and now had a lot of crossfire, and as a TI myself, I looked entirely too much like one of the combatants, so I stayed as alert as anyone else who knew a secret war was underway around them. That’s aside from the fact that I was trying to blend in with the locals, who were also ready and willing to commit potentially homicidal actions against each other.
I’d been sent back by the Virtual City project, whose latest plan was to record everything said and done in Boston and the nearby surrounding area on 18 and 19 April 1775. Important places, like where the Sons of Liberty had met, had long since been bugged, so you could get detailed transcripts of everything said by anyone of any importance in the city on those days. But the Virtual City project aimed to create a visual and auditory record of the entire place and time. Once all of the data from the thousands of bugs was integrated, individuals several centuries from 1775 would be able to “walk” down the streets of this here and now, go into just about any building, and hear and see what had actually happened to anyone, not just the famous people.
Historians loved it, people who enjoyed soap operas loved it, privacy advocates screamed bloody murder and pointed out that people farther uptime could be doing the same thing to us. But the law said no such project could include any living person, so not enough people who were alive objected to it. And like every other TI, my implanted personal assistant made sure I was invisible to the bugs, so no future voyeurs would be eyeing me. Historians insisted on that so we wouldn’t mess up the record, which is sort of ridiculous since TIs spend a good part of their time messing up history. It’s what we do. Historians love us for the facts we can tell them and hate us for changing the facts we tell them.
But I wasn’t out to change anything this time. My job consisted of walking down a preplanned grid of streets while the bug deployment gear built into the heavy coat I wore spat out bugs according to its own programming. To the casual observer here and now who got close enough to one, the bugs looked like gnats as they flitted into position on buildings or inside windows and doors to observe activity inside. Each had a nice array of visual and audio recording gear that would send their data to collection arrays, which I and other TIs had dropped off in various places where they looked like rocks. If any local picked one up, they’d feel like rocks, too.
All I had to do was keep one internal eye focused on the map my implanted Assistant named Jeannie displayed my route on, and one external eye on the assorted denizens of Boston, other obstacles to be avoided, and anything suspicious or dangerous.
Not exactly safe, but not the most hazardous job I’d ever had, either. Everything went fine until I realized somebody was following me.
He was aristocratic looking, fair haired, wearing very nice clothes, and seemed the sort of guy who robbed people by embezzling from the bank he owned rather than the sort who followed someone down an alley and hit them on the head. But he kept showing up in my peripheral vision and that got me worried.
I finally turned quickly and focused on him for a moment before turning away again. Jeannie, lock on. Can you ID this guy? Internal communications come in very useful at such times.
Negative, Jeannie responded. You’ve never encountered him before, but he’s not a local. He does have an implanted time-jump mechanism. I can’t be certain from this distance, but it seems a couple of generations more primitive than yours, placing the man’s origin a little more than a century before our home now.
Any weapons?
None detected.
Which didn’t mean none were there. But I had to know what this guy wanted with me, and accosting him in public was less risky than letting him choose the moment. I turned the next corner as my preplanned route directed, but then pivoted and took several quick steps back to the corner just in time to meet my tail as he came around. “Hi, citizen,” I greeted him in a low voice as the crowds of locals walked past us, using the anachronistic term on purpose to get his reaction.
He glowered at me. “You’ve got your nerve.” High-class British accent, and very well done. I wondered if it was authentic. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing?”
“Since you’ve got an implanted Assistant and jump mechanism I’m sure you know what I’m doing. So what? It’s not about you.”
His glower changed into a snarl. “I suppose it’s just a coincidence that you’re planting sensors in the same area where I was waylaid tomorrow.”
“As far as I know, yes.” Wait a minute. If he was here tomorrow and knew what had happened, that meant he was also probably here today. “You doubled-back? You’ve got dual-presence in this here and now, and both within this city?” Instead of answering directly, he smiled unpleasantly. “Don’t you know what that can do to someone’s mind?” No one knows why, but being consciously present in the same here and now more than once can create a lot of problems that mimic old ailments like schizophrenia and paranoia. The closer you physically are, the worse the effects are.
“That’s only a problem for weak-minded mongrels,” he replied with that supercilious sneer that only a many-generational member of the upper class can really carry off. “You think yourself very superior. But you’ve met your match.”
“Look, I’m not—”
“You won’t stop me!” He must be one of the guys trying an Intervention. I took a moment to wonder what, but it didn’t matter much. Everyone who made any difference in the events of the next few days had TI bodyguards secretly following them everywhere. Every building that mattered had other TIs guarding them and sweeping them for bombs and such. The people who wanted to keep history the way it more or less was in general had a lot more money than the ones who wanted to change things, and could hire more TIs to protect turning points in history. Some of them must have taken out this Brit tomorrow.
His sneer turned contemptuous. “I know your kind. Sit back safely, give the orders, send out your hooligans to do your dirty work while you pull the strings within your lair. It’s a regular Moriarty you consider yourself, isn’t it?”
“Actually, no.”
He leaned close, his face reddening with anger. “You stopped me tomorrow, but you won’t stop me tomorrow this time. Try to sic your hounds on me again and I’ll be ready.”
I leaned a little closer, too, emphasizing my words. “I don’t know you, I don’t care what you’re trying to do, I’m not here on Intervention or Counter-Intervention or Counter-Counter-Intervention. I’m just working for a data collection project. Go away and I promise you any further interactions between us will be purely by chance.”
“You lie. I have my eye on you Moriarty. Neither you nor your ruffians will be safe if you try to cross me again.”
I started losing my temper, too. “Listen, you moron. I’m not Moriarty, but if you mess with me I’ll do a Wellington on you. Understand?”
His eyes narrowed, he shifted his weight, and I braced for him to jump me. I’ve got a tranquilizer crystal shooter embedded in one finger that can knock out someone for a long time, and if necessary, I’d use it on this loon. But he just glanced around, taking in the crowds passing by, then stepped back slightly. “Right, Yank. Think you can rule the world, eh? And all time as well. Not bloody likely. Keep yourself and your brutes away from me and my plans.” Then he spun about and vanished rapidly around the corner.
I blew out a long breath, relaxed, then started walking my route again. Jeannie, any idea what that last little speech of his was about?
He seems to believe that you’re a citizen of the United States, which supplanted the United Kingdom as the world’s most powerful political entity.
That figured. Someone out to try to cause the U.K. to stay on top of the world longer than it had. Since I didn’t intend going anywhere near any potential targets for someone like that, he’d hopefully go off and follow some other innocent TI through the streets of Boston.
My route took me down toward the docks, where the smell of the sea, rotting fish, and raw sewage got worse. Even though the port had been closed by British authorities since the Boston Tea Party a while back, there was still plenty of street traffic here. The narrow lane ahead was partially blocked by a cart holding some of those fish, so I worked through the throng squeezing past on one side.
Standing against a building up ahead was a man wearing a cloak draped around him, his tricorn hat pulled low on his forehead. He looked up as I drew near and our eyes locked.
I came to a dead stop, drawing some mumbles of anger from those who had to suddenly avoid me.
The boat-cloaked figure stepped forward and extended one hand. “Thomas? I’m Palmer. I trust you remember me from London?”
“Palmer?” I took the hand, which would have been slim on a man. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“I had business.” Her voice sounded deeper than I recalled, probably because her own Assistant was tweaking her vocal cords so she’d pass as a male. The locally fashionable male wig helped, too, as did the clothes. Locals expecting to see a man would see one. “It’s nice to see you here and now.”
Jeannie actually sounded happy. I’ve established contact with her Assistant. This meeting is after our last encounter in London but prior to any other encounters. That’s the sort of thing TIs have to straighten out right away when they meet someone they know. Have I already seen you again before or after this? What did we say or do? It gets confusing. But no problem this time.
I realized I was grinning like an idiot. “Yeah. Very nice to see you, too.”
“Going somewhere?” Pam asked. I nodded. “May I accompany you?” Another nod, and we set off down the street, speaking in low voices.
“Pam, what brings you to Boston?”
“Palmer,” she murmured back. “I get really tired of enduring male attitudes toward women in downtime places like this, and even more tired of enduring the clothes they’re expected to wear. It’s easier to pass as a man at this time of year when I can wear a cloak. What are you up to?”
“Something called the Virtual City project. Do you know about it?” Maybe she’d even walked through it.
“Annie told me about it,” Pam advised. Annie must be her Assistant. “She’s happy to be talking to Jeannie again.”
“Yeah, Jeannie’s thrilled, too.” I gave Pam a speculative look. She lived way uptime from me. “I guess you could tell me how the project comes out.”
She grinned back at me. “Could. Won’t.”
Because TIs don’t share things they know about other TIs’ futures. That’s the rule anyway, though I know of TIs who’ve broken it, either to help another TI or because they want to mess up another TI. “I hope the fact that you’re smiling means nothing serious happens to me.”
Pam looked away, studying the buildings around us. “Serious? I don’t know. Harmful, no, I don’t know of anything like that.”
Enigmatic at best, but she didn’t seem willing to go into more detail and I couldn’t press her on the issue. “So what brings a nice girl like you to a here and now like this?”
“Boston? Boston’s full of nice girls here and now,” Pam replied.
“Not down by the docks.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m not a sailor.”
“Are you doing an Intervention you can’t talk about?”
She shook her head. “No. Data collection. I need to be in Lexington the day after tomorrow.”
“The day after tomorrow? The nineteenth? That’s the day.” I gave her a frankly skeptical look. “Data collection? Lexington on 19 April 1775 has more bugs planted in it than the Amazon rainforest. There’s still something they haven’t got even in your time?”
