Biding Time- the Chestnut Covin

by E W Barnes

“If you’re an agent, can you fix the errors?” Sharon interrupted.

  “No. I think it has to be you.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Of course not,” she muttered as she took a big bite of the sandwich and channeled her frustrations into chewing. “Keep talking,” she said, still chewing.

  “My assignment was observation and assessment with no impact on the timeline. At first it looked like it would be as simple as the TPC expected. I thought the rippling in the timeline was created by transferring ownership of the temporal amplifier.

  “Why didn’t you leave after you helped me move the bookcases? Wasn’t your assignment finished then?”

  “Yes, I should have left, but I was enjoying… the 20th century and I didn’t think there would be any harm staying a little longer. When we found the strongbox, I realized the situation had changed. I was planning to tell you everything. I know that sounds flimsy, but it’s the truth….”

  “Yeah, it does. How did you know I like salami?”

  “Well, uh, I had to research about you to prepare for my mission.”

  “They know my sandwich preference in the future?” She tried to imagine a future where her love of salami was a needed fact for a mission, and it occurred to her how much older than him she was. She didn’t want to do the math to figure out what century he was from or to think about how she would be dead and buried when he was born.

  “Ok, what do we do to fix things here and now?” She did not want to talk about the future anymore, just about how to fix the present.

  Caelen looked perplexed. “I am not sure. I need to access the control panel on the temporal amplifier in the bookcases to get a better idea of what happened.”

  “How did you know it was in the bookcases?”

  He smiled.

  “You said you moved the bookcases away from the wall, but there were no scrape marks on the floor. The only way you could have moved them alone without dragging them on the floor was with the maglev side effect of the amplifier.”

  Sharon’s mouth opened in a silent “Oh.”

  “Plus, during the earthquake, no books fell out of it and it looked like it never moved. And, I felt it as soon as I was within range, and I knew it was in the room….”

  “Kevin said he could feel it, too - what does that mean? Feel what?”

  “Once you have used it a few times, you become sensitized to a kind of temporal vibration given off by the amplifier. It is unmistakable.”

  “Who is Kevin? He said he was going to be my grandfather and that the TPC had recruited him. He was young; he said he had not met my grandmother yet… but everything he said could have been a lie.”

  “I don’t think the TPC recruited him - I think he is a member of the Chestnut Covin.”

  “He said the Chestnut Covin was a… a philosophical group opposed to TPC time travel policy, and not dangerous.”

  “A philosophical group is putting it mildly. They advocate for the wholesale plundering of the past to benefit individuals in the future.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When time travel was first developed, the world government convened a kind of commission, tasked with setting standards for time travel based on moral, ethical, scientific, and historical principles. One policy adopted was that time travelers could not use their knowledge of the past or future to benefit materially from time travel.”

  “Like not going back in time and betting on the winner of the World Series to get rich,” Sharon said. He nodded.

  “Some on the commission disagreed with this policy, arguing that if done carefully, the future could benefit from the past without changing the timeline. After the commission issued its recommendations, those in the minority formed the Chestnut Covin. The TPC has kept a close eye on them and as far as I know they meet to discuss their ideas and debate in government settings, and nothing more.”

  A twig snapped nearby.

  “You folks are not supposed to be in the park after curfew,” a stern voice said.

  A police officer stood next to the table, silhouetted in the blaze of the sun setting in fiery colors. The officer’s face was in shadow, and as Sharon started to ask What curfew? she read the officer’s badge - “McCloud” - and did a double-take.

  “Candice?”

  “Yes, that is my name. Do you need my badge number too? It won’t change the fact that you need to leave now and if you don’t get moving, I will arrest you.” She was not smiling.

  “Uh, no, no problem, we’re leaving.” Caelen was packing up the remains of their meal and they hurried across the street to Sharon’s apartment.

  Officer McCloud watched them until the apartment door closed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The apartment was dark. “I think we’re alone,” Sharon said as she closed the door behind them. She leaned against it and closed her eyes, rattled.

  “Are you ok?” Caelen asked gently. She wasn't. She was afraid - afraid of this strange reality she knew nothing about; suspicious of Caelen; and terrified they might not get back to the correct timeline. This was not the time to say all that. She swallowed and nodded.

  “I’m fine,” she lied, opening her bag to get the articles.

  They sat under the faux Tiffany lampshade at the kitchen table.

  No sooner had they spread the articles on the table, they heard Scott outside on the sidewalk, singing to himself drunkenly.

  Caelen stood up.

  “Your brother can’t know about this.”

  “Oh, well, we can go over the articles in my room,” she said, tucking them back in her laptop bag. Scott stumbled on the step outside the door.

  Caelen cleared his throat.

  “I also need a place to stay. When I was given this assignment, I had a cover, a job, and apartment, the works, and all that erased with the changes to the timeline. I checked while you were at the funeral. None of my cover survived the shift.

  “I thought I would wing it for a few days until we fixed things, and if there is a curfew in this timeline, there may be other laws I don’t know about. I can’t afford to get arrested.”

  Sharon realized she was not the only one unnerved by the changes in the timeline.

  They heard Scott fumbling with a key at the door.

  “It’s only a one-bedroom apartment, and Scott’s on the couch…” Sharon thought quickly. She grabbed Caelen’s hand and pulled him to the couch.

  When Scott got the door open, Sharon and Caelen were watching an old movie playing on the television.

  “Hey,” she said over her shoulder. Caelen looked up for a second and then turned his attention back to the movie.

  “Hey,” he said, looking confused. It was clear he had intended to fall onto the couch as soon as he came in, and this barrier to his plan stymied him.

  Sharon glanced at him again. “We’ll be watching this for a while - you can sleep in my room.”

  His expression cleared. “Yeah, yeah that will work.” He stumbled into her room and closed the door.

  “Great, my bed will reek of booze and cigarettes,” she muttered wrinkling her nose.

  “There,” she said smiling at Caelen. “You can sleep on the couch; I will sleep on the floor until we sort this out. No!” She put up a hand. “I insist. This is my home, you are my guest, and I won’t have it any other way so don’t argue.”

  He grinned. “That is very gracious, but I have another idea. Do you have any camping gear?”

  Puzzled, yet intrigued, Sharon crept into her room and extracted a sleeping bag, a self-inflating air mattress, and two blankets from the top shelf of her closet.

  She needn’t have been careful about the noise as she grabbed the extra pillow from her bed. Scott was snoring and didn’t move a muscle as she tiptoed around the room. Emboldened, she got out small bag and packed clothes and toiletries.

  Caelen found paper bags in the kitchen and loaded up on plastic plates, utensils, food, and the flashligh
ts still out from the earthquake. He was setting the bags in a line leaning against the bookcases when she came back out.

  “Put everything here,” he pointed to the floor next to the paper bags. “Do you have the articles?” She picked up her bag and confirmed that her computer, charger, the yellow pad, pen, and the articles were all there.

  “They are in my bag,” she said as she dropped another pillow and blankets taken from the hall cabinet.

  “We can come back if we need something, but I would rather not have to,” he said as he swung the bookcase out to reveal the control panel.

  “I am programming the penumbra to take us and the gear, and nothing else. Are you ready?” he asked. She slung her bag over her shoulder and nodded apprehensively. He was going to send them somewhere in time - but to when?

  Caelen tapped on the control panel and then, after glancing at her once more, activated the temporal amplifier. There was a hum and her skin tingled, almost as if her pores were dancing to music she couldn’t hear. Then things seemed to warp like a mirage, glowing faintly red, and then her living room slowly disappeared.

  She was standing in a dark place. Disoriented, she took a step backwards, tripped on something bulky and fell hard to the floor.

  “Are you ok?” It was Caelen’s voice, and a moment later there was light as he turned on a flashlight.

  They were in her grandparents’ library, unburned and whole, the bookcases standing against the wall where they had always been. The bags and blankets they had gathered surrounded her. The box with her cleaning supplies was against a wall. She scrambled to her feet. The house echoed with the shuffling noises of their movements.

  “What…?”

  “I brought us here, back a few weeks. I figured this would be a safe place for us to make our plans.”

  She put her hand on a door frame, feeling the cool, solid surface against her skin. She inhaled the good smell of wood cooling after being warmed by afternoon sun.

  This is what time travel meant, she realized. She could go back to times when there was no pain. She could be in this wonderful house before fire destroyed it; she could see her mother before the illness took her away; she could be with her grandparents again, her real grandparents, not a limited holographic image or the cold facsimile that was Kevin.

  As she thought of Kevin, she remembered that time travel could also be ugly: Strangers and death and intimidating cops enforcing scary curfews.

  Caelen had closed the curtains and blinds and was organizing the paper bags.

  “Setting up camp,” he explained with a grin.

  While they might have used the whole house, they kept to the library.

  “This way, we can clear out quickly if we need to,” Caelen said while the air mattress expanded under the window and he made up a bed near the door with blankets.

  “Why would we need to clear out?” Sharon asked. “No one is living here right now.”

  He pointed to the box of cleaning supplies she’d left.

  “In this time, you’re still preparing the house for sale, and others might come here, too, right?” Sharon nodded. “I think it’s better to avoid awkward questions that might arise if it looks like you’re living here.”

  They made a fast meal by the light of the flashlight. Sharon leaned against the wall while she ate. She closed her eyes for a moment and smelled orange blossoms.

  “Shar,” a voice said. She woke with a start. She had fallen asleep over her meal.

  “We can go over the articles tomorrow,” Caelen said, as he put away the food.

  Sharon climbed into the sleeping bag she had set on the air mattress and Caelen wrapped himself in the blankets on the other side of the room.

  By the sounds of it he fell asleep right away. Sharon lay awake for a while thinking about her decision to trust him. Would she regret it?

  “I wonder who the real estate agent is,” she murmured when sleep came, thinking of officer Candice in the park as she drifted off.

  ◆◆◆

  It wasn’t the dim light peeking around the curtains that woke her up, but the luscious scent of fresh coffee.

  “Perfect timing.” Caelen handed her a cup as she walked into the kitchen. She thanked him and, the kitchen table having already been sold, leaned against the counter. She took a deep inhale and then sipped the coffee. It was delicious.

  Caelen cleared his throat. “While you were asleep, I tried to shift back to my time.”

  He was subdued as if he were reluctant to talk about it.

  “I couldn’t get back.” He stared at the floor as if saying it out loud made it real.

  “Why not?” Sharon asked.

  “I don’t know. Something in this timeline may have changed the future somehow. All I know is that I am stuck here.”

  Sharon didn’t know what to say. They continued drinking their coffee in a thoughtful silence. After a few minutes Caelen spoke up again.

  “After I couldn’t get back to my time, I checked the temporal amplifier shift records to learn whatever Kevin did that kicked us into this timeline, and how to change it back.”

  “And?”

  “The first record on the list was confusing,” he said. “It was not clear what Kevin was trying to do. I’ve never seen a shift record like it before. Without more information, we can’t just correct the error and jump back into the correct timeline.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She stared at him.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? You’re the TPC agent, the time traveler from the future. How can you now know?”

  “I've never experienced anything like this before,” he said.

  Sharon looked at him through narrowed eyes.

  “How long have you been an agent?”

  “I have been with the TPC for over 12 years,” he answered, not meeting her eyes.

  “How long have you been an agent?”

  He sighed. “A year. I was a chrono-historian for 10 years, specializing in 21st century history. I transferred a little over a year ago. This is my first assignment.”

  He met her eyes looking both embarrassed and proud. He sighed.

  “It was supposed to be a routine assignment. I had no way of knowing this would happen. A shift to a parallel timeline is almost unheard of.”

  Sharon stared at him then exhaled.

  “Ok. I understand it’s not your fault. It doesn’t boost my confidence knowing I am time-traveling with a rookie.”

  He watched her as if measuring her mood and then relaxed as she winked and smiled, muttering something about the blind leading the blind.

  “There, uh, was a lot of data in the shift records, not just the last shift Kevin initiated.”

  “Grandmother was not authorized to use it after she married my grandfather and there shouldn’t be any, um, temporal shifts after she stayed in the 20th century, right…?” Sharon began.

  “You knew her,” Caelen said, a glint in his eyes. “Do you think she used it?”

  Sharon chuckled. “Yeah, if she thought it was the right thing to do, she would have, rules be damned. What if it wasn’t my grandmother who made the other shifts - what if it was Kevin?”

  “All the more reason to figure out what’s going on,” he answered.

  ◆◆◆

  Back in the library, sitting on the floor in the shadow of the bookcases, Sharon pulled out the articles, explaining how Mrs. Bower had said the articles represented the errors her grandmother had discovered.

  She also pointed out Kevin in each of the article photos.

  "Did your grandmother want us to focus on Kevin or on the events in the articles?” Caelen mused.

  “I don’t care about Kevin or the articles. How do we get back into my timeline where my sister is healthy, and my niece is alive, and my brother is with his family?”

  “You’re right, that is our priority; and my guess is that to do that we will need to correct the errors your grandmother discover
ed.”

  “Isn’t that history changed now? If we’re in a parallel timeline, do errors in the other timeline matter?”

  “They might matter even more now. When we researched the articles in the other timeline, they hadn’t been published. What about now?”

  Sharon pulled her laptop over, typing rapidly. Caelen saw her brows contract, and she bit her lip.

  “You’re right. The articles are now showing as published. These things happened in this timeline. How did my grandmother know about errors in this timeline if she was in the other timeline?”

  “The temporal amplifier protects against paradox, and it's theoretically possible to gather data from parallel timelines if someone uses the same temporal amplifier,” he said.

  Sharon got her yellow pad and pen.

  “We need to write all of this down.”

  Caelen stepped away from the control panel.

  “I think it would be a good idea for you to learn how this works. I can take notes.”

  He showed her how to pull up the shift history records, how to read the display, and how to move through the list.

  She stood in front of the panel while he waited, pad and pen in hand. “You’re sure I won’t accidentally send us to the age of dinosaurs or an ice age, right?”

  “I’m sure,” he laughed. “The device is not in time travel mode. The dinosaurs are safe.”

  “Wait. How do we know that the shift records are from this timeline and not the other timeline…” she paused, thinking. “It’s the protection against paradox thing, isn’t it?” she said, answering her own question.

  He nodded. “And more proof that this temporal amplifier was used for the shifts, otherwise the records would not be there.”

  She tapped the keyboard and changed the display, then read the information out loud.

  “The next record after, uh, before last night’s shift was travel to 1980. It looks like it was a trip to New York City.”

  “Ok,” Caelen said as he wrote.

  “The next one was to Long Beach in 1968. After that, it was to Washington, D.C. in 1962.”

  “Mm hm.”

  “And then the next one was to… wow. London in 1940.”