Timeshares

by Jean Rabe

  The wrought iron gate, built by a famous gunslinger/ blacksmith during the period called the Old West, slid open.

  I went through to a door that let me into a brightly lit hallway lined with walls of one-way glass. I could see the grounds outside, and the glittering lights from the fountain. The air was dry and overprocessed. The guard post was empty.

  The door at the other end of the hall opened, and a guard came trudging toward me. Then he recognized me, and he straightened and quickstepped the rest of the distance.

  “You need to send some guards along the fence,” I snapped. “I saw a couple of people dressed in black walking toward the delivery gate.”

  He thumbed the headset in his ear and relayed my message.

  A half dozen guards, all straightening their uniforms, came hustling down the hall. They breezed past me and jogged along the fence.

  My guard made an officious pretense of scrutinizing the photo on my ID, then me, then the ID again.

  When the explosion came, I started even though I was expecting it. The loud boom rattled the glass walls.

  The guard jumped like the C4 had been set off in his pants.

  Behind me, some time traveler’s car went up in flames. The night sky lit up like sunrise. The reflection of red flames danced in the windows.

  The guard rushed out the door, through the gate, and down the sidewalk, yelling for back-up as he went.

  Another bomb went off, farther back in the parking lot, then another. That one was closer, but smaller, just like Duane had promised it would be.

  I stepped outside. The smell of burning metal and synthetic fuel washed over me.

  More guards poured out of the building and ran to the parking lot.

  I walked back to the gate as Rick came running up. He’d made good time circling the block. “What are you doing here? What happened?”

  Then he saw me. Really saw me. With my Timeshares Security badge and my glittering holographic Timeshares Security ID hanging from my collar.

  I tugged my Timeshares cap out of my back pocket and pulled it on.

  His face, so ruddy from running and from the reflection of the fire, went pale. “What—?”

  “Give me the backpack.”

  “What—?” His mouth worked. He looked like a fish staring out through the glass of a watery prison.

  “Give me the backpack. Now. Or I’ll call the guards.”

  The hurt in his face was almost more than I could stand.

  I had met Rick after the university had tossed out most of its books and made the library into a virtual theater showing vids of the past, before he won the Time Lotto. I’d heard him talking to a small group of people at a university vid premiere one night, and his voice had drawn me in. It was deep and smooth as caramel. It was a voice made for reading sonnets and poetry, not for recruiting people like Duane and me.

  But maybe Rick would live to read sonnets again and make women sigh with his amazing voice. I knew if I stood there much longer, I’d try to explain everything that I was thinking, and I didn’t have time for that. “Now!”

  He slipped his backpack off.

  I took it and slipped it on. The C4 in it was a lumpy weight in the bottom of the cloth bag. It felt like a rock against my spine.

  “I’m sorry, Rick,” I said. I handed him a custodian’s ID that I’d pilfered. “Put this on. Walk like you’re tired, but glad to be heading home. They won’t pay you any attention.”

  I turned to go, and Rick pulled me back by my sleeve.

  For a second, I thought he was going to try to stop me, but all he said was, “Why are you doing this?” His voice broke my heart. “I told you what I saw!”

  I tried to smile at him, but I couldn’t make my mouth move. “I mailed you a letter explaining everything.”

  If I was successful, the letter wouldn’t make any sense, but I owed him an explanation. I whispered, “Forgive me,” and I gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. Before he could protest, I shut the gate and walked back in.

  The first floor was in an uproar. Guards were running to man the huge lobby with its rows upon rows of stained glass and its original, ancient Persian rugs. I had to go through a double line of guards around the main elevator system, but none of them questioned my presence. They expected to see one of the Captains of Security on a night when bombs had exploded nearby.

  I got on the restricted elevator, pushed the button for the lowest level, and stepped up to the retina reader when prompted. The computer recognized me. It scanned me and found no metal, nothing it would think of as dangerous. I could feel the gun digging into my hip, the weight of the plastique against my back.

  The elevator went down so smoothly I barely felt movement at all.

  I stepped out into a white hallway that had come straight from a nightmare. That’s all there was, as far as I could see. Shivering white. Just white, disappearing into the distance. It was the most disconcerting thing I’d ever seen, and it hadn’t gotten better with familiarity.

  The walls were solid if you touched them, but there was a trick to the surface that made them look like they wavered and wobbled. There were no doors visible until you actually touched the entry to the lab you wanted to enter. That, it had seemed to Timeshares’ corporate officers, was the best way to protect their priceless time travel equipment. No one could even find it unless they knew how to get there in the first place.

  I knew how to get there.

  I’d been working for Timeshares since I’d graduated from college, when I’d signed up, all eager and starry-eyed, with my brand new history degree. I’d started out as a tech, then graduated to scout.

  Then Timeshares had developed the technology to make vids, and I’d become a vidhistorian, traveling into the past to film history for the virtual libraries. I’d loved it, and I’d been good at it. I’d been the best at capturing not just the pictures of the past, but the essence of the past, the smells and sights and sounds, the spirit of it. That was what I’d thought I would spend my life doing.

  But then I’d met Rick. Then he’d told me what the world of the past was making of the world of the future. The week after he came back from his time trip, I’d made a lateral move into Security.

  All I’d needed to complete my plans was to find someone who could help me get the C4, once called plastique, and create enough of a distraction that I could enter the bottom floor with it. The elevator scanners would have picked up any of today’s metallic-based explosives. And I couldn’t go into the past and bring it back myself. The scanners would have caught me coming out with contraband.

  I didn’t know how Reverend John’s people had done it. I was fairly sure his C4 was from the past, not that it mattered. Duane’s explosions had shown that the C4 worked. That’s all I cared about.

  I walked the required number of steps, and put out my hand. I pressed my face to the wall and tried not to blink as the computer scanned my eyes. The door appeared under my hand and slid open.

  No matter how many times I saw it, the time machine took my breath away.

  Even on this side that visitors never saw, it was sleek and shiny, but not shiny like the reverend’s suit. Shiny like a spaceship and crackling with blue static electricity. It was art as much as it was machine. And it was the worst thing that had ever happened to humanity.

  The tech’s expression was slack and bored. On the commercial side, the operators had a variety of travelers to keep them occupied. They had costumes to check, and they had to search whatever was brought back, which I’d always thought was one of the most interesting jobs in the building, because you could never predict what someone would pick up and try to bring back.

  But on the employee side, there was nothing to do but check authorizations and push buttons.

  “What’s going on topside?” he asked, as he scanned my retinas and my fingerprints.

  “Nothing really. Somebody blew up a car in the visitor lot.”

  I took off my ID and my badge and put them into a safety
basket. The laser field around it wouldn’t let anyone but me take them back out.

  “Oh.” He seemed as disinterested, as lackadaisical, as the security guard had been. “Haven’t seen you take a trip in a while, Captain. Where you off to tonight?”

  I handed him the gold square with my destination encoded in it. He fed it into the reader, checked the authorization, then the picture that came up on the screen, and gave my clothes a quick once over to make sure I looked appropriate for the time period.

  Then, with a yawn, he double-checked everything. He didn’t even seem impressed that my destination was such a rare one. He did a desultory check with a metal detecting wand, then checked to see that my implant was still under the skin on the back of my neck.

  “Step in when you’re ready.”

  My heart thumped and started to race. Heat rose up my neck. I’d traveled hundreds of times, but I was more scared than I’d been the first time.

  I guess that was why I fell as I materialized in another time. I stayed there on my hands and knees retching for several minutes. My tongue was coated with a taste so sweet it felt thick.

  Bill, the PR guy who’d done the original advertising campaign for Timeshares, had told me he tasted vinegar. I’d have traded vinegar for this taste any day. It was like I’d taken a drink of perfume.

  I wiped my mouth, wiped my tongue on my sleeve, and I still couldn’t get rid of it. This had never happened before, but I’d never gone into the past so close to my own time.

  Timeshares claimed that they restricted traveling into the immediate past because of the physical stress it caused. But they also said no one could disable the equipment and stay back in time. I thought of Dina, walking sometime, somewhere, in a pristine forest, breathing in air that had never been through a processor. Would what I was about to do send her back to our time? Or make it like she’d never been there at all?

  The paradoxes of time travel, even after all the years I’d done it, could make you crazy if you started trying to follow the twists and turns.

  I climbed to my feet and looked around. I’d seen this building so often, on posters in the Timeshares gift shop, in books, that I knew it as if I’d lived here. It was night, and the building was dark, but I only had to retrace my steps once to find the lab.

  I eased through the door. The lab looked just like it did in Timeshares’ orientation video. It had old-fashioned metal tabletops that looked like autopsy tables. Long lightbulbs cast a greenish-blue light over everything. Every surface was messy with books and papers and charts and snips of computer boards and pieces of oddly shaped metal. That kind of chaos would never be allowed in a Timeshares lab today.

  And sitting there, bent over his work in concentration, was the man who’d started it all. The creator of the time travel technology, Dr. Ken Campbell.

  I let the backpack slide off my shoulders and pulled the gun out of my waistband. Even though it was made completely of plastic, it pinched the flesh between my thumb and forefinger when I slid the mechanism back and let it go. A shiver of pain went through my thumb.

  Dr. Campbell jumped and turned around. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”

  I must have been a sight, holding a trembling gun pointed at him with one hand while I sucked my wounded hand to ease the sting.

  He said it again as we stared at each other, and I realized I didn’t know what to say to him. How do you tell someone they helped you ruin the world?

  “You don’t know what you did.” My voice was all winded and croaky.

  His gaze darted between my face and the wobbly gun pointing at his gut. He opened his mouth like he was going to call for help.

  I found my voice. “Don’t yell. If you do, I’ll just have to kill you before I tell you why.”

  His gaze darted from the gun to the door, but his curiosity got the best of him.

  It was exactly what I expected from the genius who created the time machine—more curiosity than sense. “You ruined everything. You and your machine.”

  I shook the gun toward the guts of the machine he was working on. “You ruined history!”

  I paused, trying to find words, and when I did, they boiled out, running over each other and doubling back. “First, it was only rich people who could afford to time travel, so they started a lottery so that everybody had a chance. More and more people went back, and then the colleges and universities got into it. And more and more historical mysteries were solved. It became a race, a contest. Who built Stonehenge, where the Anasazi went, what the world was like before pollution and overcrowding. How they built the pyramids and why children suddenly started living longer in the 1300s. Who really invented the lightbulb first and whether Lizzie Borden really killed her family. Why Petra was abandoned and where the Maya went. How their calendars worked and why the world didn’t end in 2012. Where the Hope diamond went and who stole the Liberty Bell. Who Mona Lisa really was. Why the Victory sank and where Atlantis is. Who King Arthur was and what the Druids were really like. Why the Greeks never discovered zero.”

  My voice sounded mad, even to me. Crazy and shrill. I swallowed and made an attempt to slow down. “Harvard found Hitler’s body. Cambridge solved the extinction of the dinosaurs. MIT discovered how the pyramids were built. The University of North Carolina discovered what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke. And a pissant southern college with only a couple of thousand students debunked King Solomon’s Mines and took pictures of the creation of the Nazca Lines.”

  I could see the hunger grow in his eyes, the questions, and the desire to know the answers to all the things I was talking about. It was like watching what had happened to my world in microcosm etched in his face.

  I’d forgotten that he had only lived to make one short time trip. He’d died before he could really experience his own creation.

  Maybe because of me. I shook my head. Don’t go there. Don’t get tied up in time knots.

  “In the future, I—somebody—will come back with a film of Jesus. At first, Timeshares won’t distribute it. But, then, someone will get greedy, or just stupid, and they will. And that will start a race for more information on all the religions.

  “Except—except everybody sees their gods their own way. The vids won’t be the wonders they were intended to be. Not everybody will agree that they’re accurate. Not everybody will agree that it’s Jesus or the Buddha, or their version of Jesus or the Buddha. So somebody else will go back to debunk the first film. And somebody else will try to debunk the debunker’s film.

  “And some people won’t stop at arguing their points of view. Somebody will kill the person who blasphemed their god. And somebody else will kill that person. And pretty soon the whole world will be at war. Killing each other because they don’t like the other person’s version of the past.

  “The world Rick saw . . .” I stopped. I could hear Rick’s voice in my head. Rick’s beautiful, rich velvet voice, twisted with the darkness of what he’d seen in the future.

  My stomach churned. I could still taste the perfume of Campbell’s time. And somewhere in the middle of my rant, I’d lowered the gun.

  He’d been too transfixed to notice. “Tell me more,” he breathed. He stood there, in the middle of his lab, with the last piece of the puzzle in his hand.

  I knew the shape and size of it as well as I knew a spoon or a key. Or the gun in my hand.

  On this day, he’d made an intellectual leap and discovered the last component that would make his time machine work. Today, he’d changed history.

  “It’s like the whole world is starving, and all they want to eat is the past. And one of these days, they’ll hate other people’s versions of the past so much, they’ll destroy the future.”

  But he was ravenous, too. I could see it in his eyes. He was like everyone else in my time. He’d heard everything I’d said, and the wrongness of it, the horror, didn’t even occur to him. He just wanted to know more.

  The gun wasn’t heavy, but my arm came up as if I was
in slow motion.

  I pulled the trigger. It was as loud as a metal gun, but the sound was flatter.

  The bullet hit him in the chest. His eyes went wide and round as a red stain grew on his lab coat. He fell back slowly. Slowly. He crumpled to the floor, and he died with the heart of the time machine clutched to his own heart.

  Someone would come, a guard or somebody working late in one of the other labs. But I couldn’t move until I took a couple of deep breaths, until I offered up a prayer for forgiveness.

  Then I took the component from his fingers. It was sticky and warm with his blood.

  I put it in on the table with all the other bits and pieces and shoved them together. On the top, I put his notebook.

  I knew that notebook. I’d seen it every day for most of my adult life. It was proudly displayed in the lobby of Timeshares, and every morning, the CEO, wearing white gloves, turned a page of it, so that if you were willing to come by every day for more than three months, you could see all Dr. Campbell’s handwritten notes. Except that reading was a dying art.

  I opened the backpack and took out two blocks of C4.

  I shoved the detonator into it, the way Rick had shown me, and I put it on top of things on the table.

  And then I put the rest of the C4 into the belly of the time machine. It didn’t look like the flashy thing that sat guarded and worshipped in my time. This first version was just a square gray ugly box of machinery with a transporter that looked like one of the old shower stalls in Rick’s abandoned building.

  The guards came before I had time to push the button.

  There were two of them, older men clad in blue uniforms with shiny brass buttons that winked at me. They crashed through the door and slid to a stop when they saw Dr. Campbell’s body.

  I could have shot them. I pointed the gun at them. But I hadn’t come back here to kill innocent people.

  One man drew his gun, but the other one forgot to unhook his holster flap. He fumbled at with it. His eyes were tight with fear.

  The faster of the two shot me.

  It felt . . . odd.