Cowboy Bob considers me a moment while wiping his mouth with his checkered napkin. “The syrup is from Vermont.”
“Be that as it may, I think we’d rather talk about some of our more pressing issues,” I say.
“There’s your first mistake.” Bob stands up and takes his plate to the kitchen and sets it near the waffle maker. “You should never pass up good food just to deal with your personal problems.” The countertop is dusted with flour and batter drippings. He scoops a measuring cup into a bowl of waffle batter and pours it onto the griddle. “But since we have a minute anyway, what seems to be the dilemma?”
“We’re in the wrong 2009,” Francesca says.
Cowboy Bob pauses in the act of putting a finger full of batter to his mouth and then lowers it back down. “Where are you supposed to be?”
“Well, 2009, but not this 2009,” Blake says.
“Yeah, but which timeline are you navigating?” Bob wipes his finger off on a paper towel.
“That’s the thing. We don’t know,” I say.
Bob looks at each of our faces, seemingly to verify the truth of my statement. “You don’t know which stream you’re trying to navigate?”
“No,” I say.
“No wonder you got to the wrong time. You mean you didn’t even know the first time through, when I brought you up this way?”
“Nobody told us we needed to know that,” Blake says.
“Oh wow. I had no idea.” He runs his non-battered hand through his hair. “Man. Now I feel pretty bad. I should have asked you when you first showed up. I assumed when you said you wanted me to take you to 2009, that you meant in the stream we were in. Switching streams would have been a whole different process.”
“So you can do it?” Blake says. “You can switch timestreams?”
“Of course. You did it, obviously.”
“I don’t think we noticed we did,” I say. “Whenever it happened, we didn’t do it deliberately.”
“Maybe you guys should remind me again just how much training Harry gave you.”
“How long has it been for you since we talked last?” Francesca asks.
“A couple months or so,” Bob says. He opens a cupboard and pulls out three glasses. He walks over and sets them on the table in front of us and then moves the pitcher of orange juice to the table as well. “How long has it been for you?”
“It’s still the same day,” Blake says. “Still the same bad day.”
“Must not have liked home too much, huh? What’s different? Did they vote in the wrong president or something?”
“We’re still there. Other ones of us,” I say. “We never left.”
“Ah.” Bob nods. “That’ll do it.” He sits back down at the end of the table and continues to pick at his food. “So do you guys know which timestream you originally came from?”
“Not really,” I say. “We know stuff that happened in it, I guess.”
“Is that bad?” Francesca says. “Are we going to be able to figure that out?”
Bob waves his hand. “Oh yeah, that’s no problem. We can always figure it out pretty quick from doing a spectrometer test. That’s not an issue. Getting you back there could be tougher, depending on how far away you’re from.”
“So what happened?” I say. “How did we end up in a different timestream?”
“That happens easy enough,” Bob says. “You just went back and changed something significant enough to alter reality as you know it.”
“That’s easy?” Francesca asks.
“Yeah. Happens all the time. Trying to predict the consequences is a lot tougher, though. Knowing where that branch of the stream is going to take you is a big gamble. Sometimes it’s somewhere good, sometimes it isn’t.”
I pour myself a glass of orange juice.
“So how do we get back?” Blake asks. “Back to where we originally came from.”
“You have to get back to before the stream branched off and then follow the original stream,” Bob says.
He makes it sound so simple.
“So how do we do that?” I say.
“This would probably be easier to explain with a spectrometer,” Bob replies.
Francesca looks to the kitchen. “I think your waffle is burning.”
Bob pops out of his chair and trots back into the kitchen. He mutters curses as he tries to pry the waffle free of the waffle iron with his fingers. He grabs another fork and then finally manages to flip it out onto a plate. He snags the glass bottle of syrup as he passes the counter, and sits back down.
“So the universe is a fractal. Did Quickly cover that with you?”
“No,” Blake says.
“Okay. That’s a lot of your problem then. I’ll start at the beginning. You can’t think about time as a line. It’s only linear in places it’s never been changed. And it can potentially be changed anywhere. It’s better if you think about it as a sort of spider web, or a snowflake.”
He picks up the bottle of syrup again. “Okay. Let’s say you start in the middle.” He begins pouring syrup on the center of his waffle. “You go straight for a bit, but then something happens.” His syrup trail moves up one of the crevasses before cutting right across a quarter of the waffle. “See, I left my original path and started down a different one. I never noticed because it all felt like a straight line to me.” His syrup trail stops. “It turns out that I could possibly have made all manner of turns along the way too.” He begins to fill in some of the other waffle squares off the first line with syrup. “I could divide up each one of those little lines, too. It just depends on how many changes I want to go back and make.”
“So you’re saying we’re off course somewhere?” Blake says.
“Yeah. But don’t feel bad about it. Most time travelers are.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Cowboy Bob leans back in his chair and looks at me. “Most time travelers you meet are so far from their original timestreams, they couldn’t tell you the first thing about how to get back. Most of them never get back. Some don’t even realize they’re lost.”
“Are you in your original timestream?” Francesca asks.
“Oh no. Definitely not.”
“So where are you from?” Blake says.
Bob forks some waffle into his mouth and then stands up. “Crrm on.” He wipes his hands off and signals for us to follow him. I carry my glass of orange juice with me. He leads us back upstairs to the office. The crystal fob is still swinging gently in the wash of the ceiling fan.
Walking past the gravitizer, Bob reaches into a wicker basket full of cardboard tubes and pulls one out. He slides a drawing out of the tube and spreads it open on the desk. The drawing is a blueprint with an array of little dark blue lines intersecting dots with identifiers. I recognize it as the same type of map Lawrence had on his computer monitor but without the depth.
“Here’s one of the Zeta stream. A fair amount of known fissures to work with. You can see how the streams have identifiers based on numbers and letters. That helps I.D. what you are working with. You can trace your way backward or forward that way.”
“What are all these little symbols?” I point to some little marks that resemble hieroglyphics along some of the lines.
“Those are special notes of events and persons, kind of like shorthand for references. You can’t fit all the info on one page, so it pays to have symbol references.”
“You catalog all this stuff yourself?” I ask.
“Me? No. Well . . . some of it. Most of it I got from Harry. He did all the major work. The rest of us just mooch off his good graces.”
“What timestream are we in right now?” Blake asks.
“That’s an excellent question to ask,” Bob says. “And often.” He reaches into a cupboard next to the gravitizer and pulls out what I recognize to be a temporal spectrometer. Like Malcolm’s, it has a handle coming from a box with a screen. This one is larger and gray, however, and seems to have a few more dials. Cowboy Bob
points it at the wall and squeezes the trigger on the handle. The green light flashes and a squiggly line graph appears on the screen.
“Okay, so you see this squiggle? That’s the frequency of this timestream. When you get down to a sub-molecular level, and start dealing with things like string theory, everything vibrates. The whole universe is vibrating. The good news is, if you look hard enough and small enough, in any given timestream you see it’s all vibrating at the same temporal frequency.”
He points the spectrometer at Francesca and pulls the trigger. The light flashes red this time and another squiggly line appears.
“Only thing is, when something gets changed in the universe on a scale that is no longer capable of being contained by a simple paradox, the frequency can change. A time traveler’s activities can be a good example. They change something and then our interaction with the universe changes.”
“It makes another universe?” Francesca says.
“No, not exactly. It’s the same universe. We’re not duplicating matter or energy or all the other things the universe is made of. You’re just operating on a different frequency of that universe. It’s like another facet of the same diamond, if you will. You might be in the same place, but the way you see it and interact with it has changed.”
Bob looks at his frequency reading from Francesca. “Hmm. Interesting.” He points the spectrometer at me and takes another reading.
“What’s interesting?” Francesca asks.
“It looks like you three are from one of the primes.”
“Prime?” Blake asks.
“It’s one of Quickly’s earliest timestreams. He cataloged the first twenty-six major divisions he discovered after letters. Those became the primes. He started adding numbers to the various branches off those streams as things changed. That structure became the basis of our time mapping system.”
“What does that mean for us?” I say.
“Nothing really.” Bob rummages around in the cupboard some more. He pulls out a thick binder and lays it on the desk. “It just means that the timestream you originally came from, and the one Quickly came from, are not that far apart.”
“Could he be from the same one?” Francesca asks.
“Let’s see.” Bob flips through the first few pages of the binder and runs his finger down an index. He then turns to a section in the back that shows various frequency graphs and letters. He flips through a few pages, comparing the images to the one on the spectrometer. “Looks like . . . you’re a November Prime.”
I lean in and read the graph he’s looking at. “November?”
“Yeah, it’s the phonetic name for the letter N.”
“So which one are we in now?” Blake asks.
“This is an L branch. LVR17, to be precise.” Bob grabs another cardboard tube out of the basket, and after extracting a couple of drawings, finds the one he’s looking for. He lays it over the Zeta drawing and spreads it out for our inspection. He points a finger to the centerline. “Okay. Here’s Lima Prime. That’s broken up by letter codes of its own. You trace that up from its origin point till you hit its V branch, follow that till you hit the R branch of that line and then seventeen breaks later, you find us. Approximately here.”
“It’s like a road map,” Francesca says.
“Yeah, more or less,” Bob replies.
“So how do you move around?” I ask. “You said you can get from one stream to another?”
“Yeah. It can be challenging at first, but you can do it fairly routinely once you get the hang of it. What you have to do, is one of two things. The most basic option is to backtrack. All the different branches stem from a prime somewhere. You can backtrack down the branch till before the offshoot you’re looking for. It’s like you put your car into reverse on the interstate and back up till you get to the exit you missed. Then you need to find a way to take that exit instead of going forward on the interstate again.”
“What does that involve?” Blake asks.
“You need to use something as an anchor to jump forward that exists on that offshoot, but no longer exists on the interstate. Usually you just destroy something on your way back.”
“Destroy something?” Francesca says. “This is sounding complicated.”
“It’s really not that bad,” Cowboy Bob replies. “Look.” He reaches into the cupboard and pulls out a glass ball anchor of the same type we used in our lab training. “Let’s say I want to get to a branch of time that diverged off of this one a few minutes ago. Maybe Francesca here punches me in the eye half an hour from now and I cry about it. You guys laugh at me. I decide I don’t want to keep on living in the timestream where a girl made me cry, and everybody made me feel bad. Well, no problem. I channel my anger and smash this anchor into tiny useless bits. Then I go back to an hour ago, right before this timestream exit I know about. I find my glass anchor there, still intact, and jump forward with it again, going past the point in time where I smashed it.
“The anchor doesn’t exist in that form here anymore at that specified time. You can’t get here at that time anymore, so where do you go? The anchor takes the exit, and you arrive at that same parallel point in time on the nearest timestream where it didn’t get smashed.”
“Hang on though.” I say. “I thought for sure Quickly said we shouldn’t ever use things that could get destroyed. He said something about not using paper and such cause you could die or something.”
“Yeah,” Francesca straightens up. “He said that happened to some mice.”
Bob scratches his beard. “Quickly said that? He said you’d die?”
“Yeah,” I reply. “Maybe he didn’t say die exactly. I think he said some lab rats got lost or something. I’m not really sure now.”
“Maybe it was in a different context. You could certainly get lost that way. No doubt about that.”
“That’s not how I took it.” Francesca says. “But I like the part where we get to destroy things.”
“I figured,” Bob says. “I knew you were violent from that time you punched me in the eye.”
Francesca smiles.
“But wait a minute,” Blake says. “If you go to another timestream that’s parallel to yours, aren’t you already there?
“Yes, that’s true,” Bob says. “There would be two of me there, and none of me in the timestream I left from. You guys would just have to go on living your life knowing you laughed at me and hating yourselves for it, and you would never see me again. I would just have to have a great time with myself and the other versions of you, who are hopefully nicer. You can’t ever leave a time without leaving a hole or adding something to somewhere else. Things that happened, happened. You can’t undo that. But you can choose to live somewhere else.”
“Okay, so you said there were two ways,” I say. “What’s the other way?”
“Yes, with the other way you get to skip all the backtracking business and just go straight to the point on the other timestream you’re aiming for. The trick is, that only works if you already have something from there. If you have an object you can use as an anchor that is from the time you want to get to, the anchor has no choice but to function there.”
“We have some things from our time we brought with us, like some of our clothes and my phone,” Francesca says. “Could we just use those?”
Cowboy Bob scratches his beard. “Yeah, that could possibly work, if you degravitized it. Do you have any specific times you remember where you have a safe location of your phone that’s accurate enough to get to? You can’t be seen by your other self either, or you’ll instantly branch off into a new timestream. Unless you have a memory of meeting yourself in your bedroom one night.”
Francesca shakes her head. “Wow, that’s kind of hard actually. I had that phone with me pretty much all the time. Mostly it was just in my purse or maybe on my nightstand. I can’t think of any time when I could sneak three people around it without noticing.”
“Yeah, that’s where stuff gets complicated,�
�� Bob says.
“But if we were to find something, something from our time, we could use it to get home?” Blake asks.
“Yeah, provided you were in range of your chronometer,” Bob replies. “And provided you don’t change your home timestream by your arrival.”
“And there won’t be two of us there?” Blake asks.
“Not if it’s the timestream you originally left from. You’re still missing there. It will stay that way unless you make it back.”
“Good,” Blake says. “I’ve had enough of my other selves already.”
Cowboy Bob straightens up and puts away the charts. “The bad news is, I’m not headed to the November Prime in 2009 anytime soon, or I could give you a lift. I might pass the N on the way back, but it wouldn’t be till wherever it intersects the L. I think that happens decades back.”
“We’re actually planning to go back to 1986,” I say. “We left some things undone there that we need to fix.”
Bob nods. “I could probably get you close without much trouble. I’ll be going that way anyway. Any day in particular?”
“We need to get back to the day the lab burned.”
“I see.”
“Where are you going?” Francesca says.
“I’m actually going back to 1910 or so, if I can make it.”
“Wow. That’s really far back,” I say.
“Yeah, but for me that’s home.”
“You’re from 1910?” Francesca’s eyes widen.
“More or less. I was a kid then. I was actually born in 1899.”
“Seriously?” I say. “That’s so cool. How did you end up here?”
“That’s a long story, but Harry and Mym found me when I was a kid. Life wasn’t going too great for me at the time when they picked me up. Mym was a little kid then, too. They were on the way back from a trip to the mid 1800s. I guess Harry had a soft spot for orphans. He treated me like family.”
“The Parsons, who owned this ranch, weren’t really your parents?” I ask.
“No. Hank was an old school friend of Harry’s. Hank and his wife never had any kids but always wanted some. Harry thought Montana would be a good place for me to grow up without too much culture shock while he trained me. Things around here haven’t changed all that much in the last hundred years.”
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 40