Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennet

  “You could always go back to school,” Louise said. “You’re never too old to learn.”

  “But there’s just so much. Not just this world, but so many others. By the time I got caught up, I would be too old.”

  “To spend the rest of your life learning?” Louise asked, shaking her head in wonderment. “What could be better than that?”

  Such a twenty-fourth-century attitude, Clare thought. Thomas and Louise and their kids were the closest family she had, yet they were alien to her in so many ways. So she put it in the only terms she knew they had in common. “I just want to be able to take care of somebody. And not just babysitting.” Sitting “babies” who are more informed and comfortable and secure in this world than I am, whose houses take care of them better than I can. “I want to make some kind of difference. But I don’t know how.”

  Louise led her into her bedroom so she could get dressed. “Have you talked to Sonny or Mister Offenhouse about this?” she asked as Clare slipped on the old-fashioned bra and panties that made her feel comfortable despite being worse for her circulation than the modern equivalents.

  “They can’t understand. They’ve both found new careers, new ways to be useful.” She knew from experience that Ralph Offenhouse would just give her a pep talk about his own achievements and barely even notice she was in the room, while Sonny Clemonds would just invite her to a party and try to get her drunk enough to agree to spend the night with him. Once had been enough, thank you very much. She didn’t feel he’d taken advantage of her; it had been just as much her taking advantage, seeking respite from her loneliness. But it had felt hollow and desperate in the morning. All she told Louise, though, was, “Aside from when we came from, we don’t have anything in common.”

  After that, the conversation drifted off into awkward triv-

  ialities as it always did. Louise took her downstairs and made one more stab at teaching her to play Roladan Wild Draw, which was like a strange cross between California lowball poker and Truth or Dare. Louise had the FNS newsfeed on in the background as they played, something Clare was convinced she did on purpose to distract her poor old bisabuela. She was just about to give up and suggest they switch to gin rummy when she heard something on the newsfeed that caught her attention.

  “. . . reported lost nearly ninety standard years ago. The vessel was reportedly trapped in a form of suspended animation within the Typhon Expanse, where it was discovered and freed by the U.S.S. Enterprise under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. The Bozeman and her crew are expected to arrive at station Deep Space 4 in two days, and already, surviving family members and descendants have been notified. There are sure to be some tearful reunions in the days to come. The Bozeman’s rescue should also be a boon to historians . . .”

  “The Enterprise?” Louise asked. “Weren’t they the ship that rescued you? Dios, they sure get around.”

  “Ninety years,” Clare breathed, barely hearing her. “That’s going to be rough. To adjust, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes. Who’d know that better than you?”

  “Right. Who would?” Suddenly Clare felt something bubbling up inside that she’d been missing for four years. At long last, she realized, there was a way she could be useful.

  Deep Space 4

  Setting Orange, Bureaucracy 41, 3534 YOLD

  (A Tuesday)

  03:08 UTC

  “I’m sorry, Mare, but by the time you see this message, I’ll be gone.”

  Megumi’s Dear John letter kept replaying in Dulmur’s head hours after he’d received it. Even though he’d had every reason to know this was coming, the reality of it had left him in shock. “I know what you’ll say. ‘Be patient, we’ll talk this through.’ But when, Mare? We never talk anymore! You’re never here! Even when you’re here, all you think about is your work, and you can’t tell me about it. So we have nothing to say to each other anymore. You say it’s important, but how can it be more important than us?”

  He’d never been able to make her understand. He loved her so much, wanted to spend every possible moment with her. But there were so many threats to the timeline, more than anyone would ever expect. Something new was always coming up. Like spending two fruitless weeks interrogating Berlinghoff Rasmussen—a glib, shifty twenty-second-century inventor who’d stolen the time pod of an uptime historian and attempted to pirate modern technology so he could “invent” it in his own time, endangering history for personal profit—who had cheerfully evaded all their questions about whether he’d pilfered from other eras of history or where and when the errant time pod might have arrived in the past. Or spending the next month trying to dissuade the Klingon High Council from approving the proposal of Korath, an up-and-coming young physicist/inventor from the Cambra system, to develop a battlecruiser engine capable of reliably surviving a Tipler slingshot maneuver, enabling Klingon warriors to travel into the past and participate in the great wars of history. (Lucsly had ultimately persuaded them it would be a dishonorable breach of the Temporal Accord, no matter how much Korath had tried to spin it as permissible “historical research.”) Or spending another three weeks helping the First Federation investigate an anachronism in their historical records before finally determining that it was simply a historiographic error rather than evidence of a timeline disruption. The Firsts were known for their excess of caution, but like firefighters, the DTI had to respond to every alarm just in case it was real.

  Whatever the source of the trouble, however far it took Dulmur from home, it added up to the same thing. If he didn’t fight to keep the timeline intact, Megumi’s very existence could be erased, reduced to a vacuum fluctuation in some other history. He couldn’t let that happen if there was anything he could do to protect her.

  But now that she was gone, Dulmur felt like a fool. Why hadn’t he seized every precious moment with her that he could, knowing that it could all vanish at any moment? One way or another, he added grimly.

  “You can’t go back,” Lucsly said. “You know that.”

  Dulmur started, taking a moment to realize his partner wasn’t talking to him. Across the briefing room table sat the command crew of the U.S.S. Bozeman, now in their fifth day in the twenty-fourth century after spending eighty-nine years, eight months, and twenty-three days of objective time caught in a temporal causality loop, reliving the same few hours over and over. Right now, Dulmur knew just how they felt. “I’m sorry, Mare, but by the time you see this message, I’ll be gone.”

  “You don’t understand.” The Bozeman’s acting first officer, Lieutenant Parvana Whitcomb, leaned forward urgently. She was a young human with blocky mid-Eurasian features and bowl-cut black hair, unusually low in rank for an XO post. “We have family back there. I have a husband, a little girl who needs me. Look, I’m not even supposed to be here. I was only filling in for a few weeks after Commander Sulu turned down the job! I’m supposed to join my family at Norkan after the Typhon Expanse survey.”

  “You were supposed to join them,” Lucsly replied. “As you’ve been informed, ma’am, your husband and daughter lost their lives in the Norkan Massacre of 2307. The Department is very sorry for your loss.”

  “‘The Department is sorry,’” Whitcomb scoffed. “Empty boilerplate. You can’t understand, you’re just a bureaucratic drone trying to keep your paperwork in order!”

  Lucsly threw Dulmur an uncomfortable look. Normally it was Dulmur’s job to do the handholding. Today he couldn’t find it in himself. At least Whitcomb had had a daughter. She may have only known the girl for three years, but that girl’s life had lasted another twenty-eight beyond that. A brief run, but at least the Whitcombs had known the joy of starting a family.

  “There’s more, Marion. I want kids. You say you want them too, I used to think you did, but I can’t handle any more excuses. Time is finite, Mare. You should know that more than anyone. And I can’t live the rest of my life just marking time with you, waiting for you to keep your promises. I need a real family, not a hypothetical
one.”

  How could he explain to her? How could he stand to risk bringing a child into existence when that existence could be negated by circumstances beyond his control? How could he stand not knowing if the child he held in his arms today was the same child he’d had the week before? Sure, the Department had recently begun using phase discriminators to shield its records from temporal alteration, but those records didn’t contain everything.

  “Now, now, Parvana.” Next to Whitcomb, the Bozeman’s captain, Morgan Bateson, put a hand on her arm to calm her down. “These gentlemen are only doing their job.” He shook his bearded head gravely. “You know Starfleet regulations on the matter. We can’t go back.”

  “Even to prevent a disaster?” Whitcomb cried. “It’s easy for you to spout regulations, Captain. You didn’t have any close family, didn’t lose anyone to the Romulans.”

  “That’s right!” cried the tactical officer, an Andorian ensign named Shelithan ch’Riin. “I lost all three of my bondmates in a Klingon attack just four years after we were trapped! And while it happened, I was just sitting through the same tiresome duty shift I’d sat through five thousand times already! I should’ve been there!”

  “A lot of people have lost their lives in the past ninety years,” spoke up Lieutenant Commander Claudia Alisov, the chief engineer, a fortyish woman whose cherubic features were framed by a mass of curly red-brown hair. Her tone was soft, sympathetic, yet firm. “We can’t save every one of them. It’s history now.”

  “But does it have to be?” The question came from the science officer, Lieutenant Lloyd Boen, a ruddy-faced human with a gray monk’s fringe and goatee. “We don’t know for sure that changing the past will erase this future. We could just branch off a new timeline.”

  “That’s right, we can’t know,” Lucsly said. “That’s why we can’t take the chance.”

  “But if we have any chance at all of saving our families,” Whitcomb urged, “how can you expect us to sit back and do nothing? How can we not do everything in our power to bring them back?”

  Bateson tried to rein Whitcomb in again, but Dulmur was no longer listening. How can I not do everything in my power?

  “Quit?” Lucsly cried as he followed Dulmur down the station corridor. “You can’t quit!”

  “Watch me,” Dulmur fired back. “This job has ruined my life, and what do I have to show for it? I get to tell other people their lives are ruined too!”

  “And what about all the lives you’ve protected? The lives you’ve saved?”

  “For how long? Huh? What’s the point if anything I accomplish can get wiped out of history the next time some tourist falls through a subspace rabbit hole?”

  “There’ll be just as much risk of that if you quit. More, even.”

  “But at least I won’t have to face it every day! I can forget it, pretend along with everyone else that I actually have a solid footing in reality. I can focus on having a family, maybe even get Meg back if I beg hard enough. I can concentrate on being happy in the time I have instead of obsessing over the latest quantum anomaly or historical inconsistency.”

  “No, you can’t,” Lucsly told him. “You’re too good an agent to give it up. You’re as dedicated as any agent I’ve ever worked with, because you know you can make a difference.”

  Dulmur whirled and got right up in the taller man’s face. “I’m not ‘dedicated,’ Lucsly! I’m obsessed! I’ve lost track of everything else that mattered in life. And you know why? Because of you! Because you infected me with your, your autistic obsession with time and order and control. You go around trying to force the whole universe to fit into your nice, neat, clockwork life, and I let you make me into one of the gears! You made me a robot like you, partner, and it cost me the one thing I love! Well, no more! I’m through!”

  He began to storm away, but Lucsly grabbed his arm and spun him back around. Dulmur was startled by the man’s implacable strength. “If you really cared more about family than about the work, you wouldn’t have let the work push your family life aside in the first place. You let that happen because you know that what we do matters. This is a job that has to be done, and you’re one of the very few people who can do it really well. You can’t just walk away from that, Dulmur.”

  On some level, Dulmur was aware how exceptional it was for Lucsly to praise anyone. But he was too angry to let it register. “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? The work. You’re a machine, Lucsly. Even a Vulcan has more passion than you. You, you’re a walking grandfather clock. How is that a substitute for a wife who loves me, for children I can take care of?”

  He pulled his arm free. “You don’t need me, Lucsly. You don’t need anyone. You can preserve history all by yourself. I’m through.”

  He stormed away, and this time Lucsly didn’t stop him. He didn’t plead. He didn’t appeal to their friendship. How could he? Did he even know the meaning of the word? All he said, when Dulmur was nearly out of earshot, was:

  “You’ll be back.”

  DTI Headquarters, Greenwich

  Prickle-Prickle, The Aftermath 37, 3534 YOLD

  (A Monday)

  20:16 UTC

  “I thought I was finally starting to get used to them being gone,” Parvana Whitcomb said, sitting stiffly erect on the comfortable couch in the Temporal Displacement Division’s counseling office. “And then this happens.” She shook her head. “He was my baby brother. Now, to see him as this wizened old man, wasting away . . . his mind gone . . .” Her fists clenched in her lap. “It isn’t fair! It’s only been two months! I only just got back, we barely reconnect and then he dies! He should’ve had more time! We both should!”

  Clare Raymond did her best to project calming sympathy, even though it was hard for her to relate to the lieutenant’s anger. In her time, for Jamshid Whitcomb to make it to a hundred and ten would have been a remarkable accomplishment, but his older—well, formerly older—sister saw it as too short a life. But Clare suspected that Whitcomb would see it as hollow if she suggested looking at it from her point of view. However full her brother’s life may have been, she’d been cheated out of most of it.

  So instead Clare tried to relate it to her own experience. “I know how hard it is to watch a loved one fade away like that. My grandmother . . . she lingered in a hospice for weeks. There’s this awful tension, the waiting . . . wanting her to finally be at peace, knowing that she’s already gone and wanting to get the dying over with so you can start grieving properly, yet being terrified to answer every time the phone rings . . .”

  Whitcomb nodded. “It’s like being frozen in time all over again.” She was quiet for a time. “You know, we all had this horrible feeling of déjà vu. Somehow we knew that everything we did, we’d done a million times before.” She smirked. “That Doctor T’Viss of yours figured out why that happened . . . time was looping back on itself through an extra dimension, our worldlines overlapping themselves, the quantum information getting overwritten each time . . . but with enough spillover that we retained a trace of memory. Sometimes we even heard voices, our own voices echoing from earlier loops. Or the sensors picked up ghost images that shouldn’t have been there. But somehow we just didn’t bother to do anything about them. Didn’t dig into them and solve the puzzle like the Enterprise crew did.

  “I think we tried to, somewhere in the first few thousand cycles. We must have wondered, investigated, tried to break free of the loop. But we didn’t have the technology they did, couldn’t crack the mystery. So I think eventually we just gave up. We subconsciously remembered an endless string of failures and just became resigned to it. We went through the motions, the same dialogue and actions cycle after cycle, even though we knew it all by heart.”

  Clare didn’t know what to say. The whole idea of it was mind-numbing to her. She’d never gotten into the sci-fi shows back in her own day; she remembered the boys in school with their lunchboxes displaying pictures from Lost in Space and Batman and The Invaders, but Bewitched had been
more her speed. She’d had kind of a crush on Lee Majors in her teens, but that was about it. The kind of superscience Whitcomb was talking about was as good as one of Endora’s magic spells to her.

  Before she could formulate a response, though, the lieutenant spoke again. “Maybe we’re still too much in the habit of accepting things as they are. Letting opportunities to escape our situation pass us by.”

  It took Clare a moment to figure out this was something that should worry her. “Um, escape? What . . . uh, what exactly do you mean by that?”

  “Boen’s been researching the physics, you know,” Whitcomb said. “They say we can’t go back without risking the collapse of this timeline, but if Doctor Naadri’s ideas are right, maybe we can. The way we came into the future was strictly one-way. If we found another way back, we wouldn’t be following the same Feynman curve; there’d be no direct entanglement. We could, we could make a one-way trip to a time, say, six months after we were trapped in the Expanse. We’d just branch off into a timeline of our own without endangering this one. It could work!” she insisted, leaning forward, straining as if to leap out of the chair. “But the damn bureaucracy won’t even give us a fair hearing. They’re too hidebound to take a chance. And Captain Bateson, he’s too fixated on setting a good example to help us adjust—he won’t even listen.”