Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition

by Fiction River

  Remember that thing from about a year ago you told yourself you’d never, ever forget? It’s gone. Not your fault, it just got unfixed. And if it does come back to you, someone on the other side fixed it back again.

  I headed for a restroom. My footsteps clicked down a long corridor with yellow tiles on both walls, black tile on the floor, and black rubber bumpers for trim. Bathroom entrance was coming up on the left. I stepped into the opening, but instead of swinging around to the right or left of the entrance barrier, I kept going. I stepped into the wall and went time-out.

  Had anyone seen me, I would have just vanished. Which made perfect sense because, at that moment, I went elsewhen. Going out of time, I just wasn’t then anymore. The only sign I’d been there would be the pop of displaced air rushing in to fill a vacuum resulting from my untimely departure. Timing in or out slowly would avoid that, but who’s going to pay attention to odd sounds and weird air currents at an airport?

  Moving elsetime is also a brain-bender. If distance=(velocity * time), and time is zero; then I’m kind of everywhere at the same time. Though that doesn’t mean there’s no traveling involved. In elsetime, one moves from fixed point to fixed point. This is useful in establishing Sanctuaries, which you place at a when, and then only make accessible via a path of fixed events. Think of it as a combination to a lock.

  I moved quickly along a familiar timeline, turning back at Waterloo, forward when the Liberty Bell tolled at Benjamin Franklin’s death, and bounced left where I’d fixed the tape on the door at the Watergate. With a tiny twist, I slipped through a crack and into Central.

  Central has one of those open floor arrangements, the kind that’s periodically popular with large corporations. Central differs from most in that it’s larger than all of them. Not any of them, all of them. Combined. It goes on forever which, given its purpose, says a lot. Tons of glass and steel, going up to a ceiling that touches the lower edge of space. Really, the floor is an illusion—it goes down forever, too.

  I arrived at the right place, at the right time—easier said than done—and strolled through my supervisor’s slowly closing door. Ariadne Ravel looked up. The door had been closing since I shut it on my way out. The elapsed time between departure and arrival suggested the inquiry had been routine, but my expression contradicted that notion.

  “How bad?”

  “The Monitor’s report was true. Dumped a fifth woman at Chi Omega. I doubt we’ll find trace of her.” I shrugged off the plaid suit coat and loosened my tie. “He dumped her, didn’t fix her, but left enough for me to know it’s one of them. A new one by the feel of him. Egotistical enough to leave me the impression of a name: Caleb. He didn’t give me much more. Didn’t need to. He was just scheduling an appointment.”

  “Old Man Wrenn anoints another heir.”

  “Picks another unlucky contestant you mean.” I shrugged. “This one will be a nasty piece of work. Jupiter knows I was hands-on with the last few, so he sent me one that loves working in close.”

  “Should I be concerned you’re getting reckless, or just ignore your visits to uptime medical facilities?” She smiled, tucking a lock of long, blonde hair behind a perfectly shaped ear. “Not that I don’t appreciate your work, Alec, but this whole Capulet and Montague drama doesn’t end well.”

  I shook my head. “I’m a Marlowe. I’ll put a new ending on the play. We’re in the last act, or close to it.”

  “That’s been said before. If the marriage Jupiter Wrenn tried to arrange between his son and your great-grandmother had occurred, two of the Great Houses would have been united.” She shrugged. “I can’t help but think that might have made things around here easier.”

  “You’d have been bored—unless I’d been raised as a Wrenn.” I smiled and dropped myself into the chair before her chrome and glass desk. “That proposal was just one move in a long game. Even if it had happened, it wouldn’t have even slowed him down.”

  “You’re just thankful you didn’t get lost in the crowd.”

  “More true than you know.” Jupiter Wrenn, the eons-old patriarch of the Wrenn family, used a strategy for domination which the Great Families had dubbed the “promiscuous cuckoo.” He’d mount and impregnate anything with a pair of X chromosomes, then steal the children and apprentice them to the all-time best thieves, murderers, cultists and assassins. And I do mean All-Time, from the history before history begins, on up through. Judas was one of his. He even slipped a child into the alien colony on 23rd century Madagascar. She’d been a tough kill. Judas should have been tougher, but he fixed on those thirty pieces of silver. Made him easy to find, and distracted him so he never saw me coming.

  The Great Houses each have their own fables about when they became able to go time-out. Some suggest the ability arose among the Neanderthal or Denisovans. No one knew for certain, and there are few enough fixed points back then to make travel easy or comfortable. And every family has a tale of a crazy uncle who went elsewhen and got eaten by a dinosaur, so temporal anthropology gets treated like a hobby, not science.

  For the Great Houses, history begins when their ancestors started bumping up against each other. A dozen and a half of the Great Families hold sway over the Western Hemisphere, and more are scattered throughout Eurasia, Africa and Australia. Temporal arbitrage generates a lot of wealth, so alliances, feuds and dynastic wars crop up elsewhen as often as they do in the game of Time.

  The relationship between the Great Houses and Clockers has generated the biggest divide that splits the families. Master families believe, because of their abilities, they should dominate all the Clockers. The Wrenns belong to that group. Mentors like my family point to the presence of Freetimers as evidence that time travel is involved in the next evolution of humanity. We believe that we’ve just found time travel first, and we’re there to help others realize their destiny.

  Central serves the Mentor cause, pooling our skills to oppose the Masters. The Masters have a very loose alliance, known as the Dominion, as a counterpoint. Jupiter Wrenn, while firmly a Master, has an unsettled relation with the Dominion. This stems from his willingness to get children on other family’s women without consent—Master, Mentor, Freetimer or Clocker, he just doesn’t care.

  In the eons of battling between groups and families, the Wrenns and Marlowes have shed a great deal of each other’s blood. My grandfather stepped up the killing, and my father nearly perfected it. A Wrenn killed him—clearly at a point in when after I’d been born—and with my grandfather’s training, I was able to pick up where my father left off.

  Literally.

  I arrived to kill my father’s assassin before the gunsmoke had thinned.

  “Does Jupiter think this new one is going to be good enough to kill you?”

  “He’s taunting me. And testing.” I shook my head. “He’s confident I can’t get to him. The more he learns about me, the easier it is for him to pick a whelp who can get me. ”

  “I wish we could help you in locating him.” A frown wrinkled her forehead. “The Monitors are doing their best.”

  “I know. He’s fixed his Sanctuary in some elsewhen that’s early and idiosyncratic.” I scratched at my throat. “He’s made it a place where no one would want to go.”

  “Yet you’re sure there is a way in?”

  “Ego like that, has to be. What good is being clever if no one can experience your brilliance?” I smiled. “But, I’ll worry about the combination once I learn everything I can about the lock.”

  A blond man rapped on the glass door, then poked his head into the office. “Marlowe, a Monitor caught a ripple around one of your fixes.”

  Ariadne looked up. “When?”

  Letters and numbers scrolled across the transparent glass sheet the size of a playing card in Hopkin’s left hand. “10 April 2012.”

  I nodded. “Town in Syria called Mara.”

  Ariadne arched an eyebrow. “War zone. Nice.”

  “Better than an airport.” I stood and gave her a smile.
“Caleb’s probably thinking that’s going to work for him. In this when, he would be wrong.”

  ***

  I timed-in very slowly. I embraced the lack of my existence in that when, then linked it to my sense of being one with reality. I focused my reality on that spot at that instant, and just poured myself in. No displaced-air pop, no tremor in the now. I hadn’t been there before, then I was.

  Perfecting that little trick had taken fifteen years of training with a Zen Master.

  Thunder shook me, rippling through my chest. Light flashed, but not lightning. Twinkling stars sprayed out in the Milky Way. A few shot across the heavens’ dark vault, burning brightly then winking out. From below them, tanks and artillery vomited fire skyward. Exploding shells shot sparks high. Tracer bullets scorched the air.

  I smiled. Time to be the butterfly.

  The thing about manipulating time is that it’s really not hard at all. Engineering any particular outcome requires the right amount of energy being expended at the right moment. It’s the embodiment of the Butterfly Effect. Flutter a wing here, an empire falls a century later. The cumulative consequences of a series of actions creates a drive which has to be matched with an equally powerful force.

  Fixing isn’t that hard, either. Take a sight or sound—scent is really good—weave in some emotions and it fixes an instant. Concentrate hard enough, use as many elements as you can manage, and erasing outcomes built around that fix becomes really difficult.

  Mara, in Syria, wasn’t much of a place. In the annals of the Syrian Civil War it barely warranted a mention. But that night, government forces withdrew, surrendering the town to rebel forces. They didn’t raze the town, they just pulled out, which meant Nur Abdullah, a future President, wouldn’t die in the fire which once could have consumed his family’s apartment.

  As a Fixer, I reinforce actions or results—sometimes both. With Mara there were a million ways to convince the Colonel in charge of the garrison to withdraw quickly. First time around I’d blown up his fuel depot. He could maneuver in town and fight, or he could run for it. He made the right choice.

  Caleb latched on to my action, and set his ambush for that moment in Mara.

  What he missed is that I’d fixed the result. And not Nur’s survival. That would have made Nur a target. I just wanted Mara abandoned and in peace. Blowing up the depot had done that. So would phoning up the Colonel and giving him a direct order from Damascus to get his butt out of Mara. Bashir Assad isn’t my best impersonation, but there isn’t much call to do it at parties, so I don’t get to practice.

  Truth be told, I don’t have any time for parties anyway.

  Finding Jupiter’s latest toy wasn’t hard, and he was pretty much everything I feared in a close-in fighter. I surrendered eight inches in height to him, and probably fifty pounds. All of that was muscle and scars—too much of the former, too few of the latter. Definitely stronger than me, probably faster and undoubtedly younger.

  A physical monster, he had skills, too, clearly. My first guess was that he’d been apprenticed to Jack the Ripper, but I nixed that quickly. Finding a spare moment in that guy’s life was harder than finding a sober moment in Lindsey Lohan’s. A better fit was a few years in residence at a gladiator school—Ludus Magnus would have been the easiest place to hide him. After that some surgical training, then a stint as a mercenary in the 60s and 70s in Africa. His finishing school would have been fieldwork during the Balkan ethnic cleansing campaigns of the 1990s.

  Knowing what I knew, I should have been studying him through a sniper scope a half a klick away.

  Needing what I needed, however, I appeared off to his left, twenty feet or so away. I didn’t reach for the pistol at my right hip. Instead I drew a double-edged dagger from the sheath opposite. I didn’t really intend for there to be a fair fight, but he turned to face me before I’d gotten even halfway close.

  No need for a challenge. No need for words. He drew a dagger, too, longer than mine, with the same triangular blade, but lacking mine’s ornate pommel. His shoulders hunched and he tucked his chin down. None of the Wrenns had ever been good looking, and the twisted smile writhing across the lower half of his face didn’t help matters.

  If lethal had an avatar, Caleb was it.

  Blades slashed air. Starlight twinkled from razored edges. Dust rose in a low, beige cloud as we circled and passed. We shifted styles, stances and grips, watching each other with murderous intent.

  Only one of us would walk away.

  He lunged. I spun inside, raking my knife back. He got ribs. I shredded his shirt, but only caught a little flesh. I’d wanted a full stab. Ducking my head, I came around beneath his arm, then parried his return cut with my left hand.

  Fire blossomed. Blood ran from the deep cut in my palm.

  Sweat burned into the cut on my side. Caleb made a show of not even touching where I’d gotten him. He dropped back two steps, his grin writhing to new depths of hideous. He shifting his grip again, extending the bloodied blade in my direction.

  I closed my hand into a fist. Blood ran a little faster. I relished the pain, the sting, the scent of blood and dust, the sound of my breathing and his. The scrape of gravel beneath our boots as we circled. I catalogued it all, remembering it hard. I Fixed it.

  There would be no forgetting.

  Another set of passes. He thrust, I parried, leaping back, then darting forward again. I slashed at his forearm, drawing blood. He returned the slash, cutting down and across my right thigh. I drew back. The injury didn’t slow me, but my maneuver put me on the defensive.

  In a knife fight, the aggressor wins.

  Caleb came on hard. I leaped back from a thrust, then twisted away from a cut. He slashed backhanded. The sharp blade caught me on my right shoulder. An argent sting traced across my chest. A couple inches higher and blood would have jetted from a slit throat.

  Blood spattered the dust at the far end of his blade’s arc.

  I’d known what was coming. That’s why he’d gotten as much and as little as he had. I’d not wanted to give him even that much, but I had to. I needed to.

  I danced forward to the right. Plant. Pivot. Strike. I reversed my blade and smashed the heavy pommel into his spine.

  Vertebrae cracked wetly.

  Caleb tried tracking me, but his legs stopped working. He flopped face forward, his legs twisting around useless. Dust coated sweaty flesh and caked his tongue. He spat and swore, then gathered his hands beneath him.

  Before he could flip himself over, I pounced on his back. I drove my knees into his shoulder blades, and sat down hard on his broken spine. He snarled and tried to throw me off.

  I stabbed down and around into Caleb’s armpit. Fluid warmth gushed over my hand. I’d gotten all of the brachial artery. Fourteen seconds and he’d be unconscious. Within a minute he’d bleed out.

  I leaned down and growled into his ear. “You were never good enough, and he knew it.” I said it in Latin so it would hurt more.

  Caleb tried to bite my face off. He failed. For him, the world began to close in at the edges. He realized he was going to die, and all of his dreams would die with him. Jupiter’s promises mocked him.

  Caleb let his life flash before his eyes.

  That’s it. Good boy.

  Caleb remembered everything, in excruciating detail. His training for the arenas. His exaltation at winning an Emperor’s attention. Unmatched was his pride when Jupiter came to claim him as his son. Caleb actually believed, at that first meeting, he was demigod, finally chosen to be elevated to his rightful place in life.

  Subsequent brushes with reality did little to disabuse him of this notion.

  My words focused him to reexamine one of his triumphs. It was the one which earned him true notice, and the mission to slay me. Dallas, 1963, the Book Depository. Remarkable shooting and an even better frame fashioned around Lee Harvey Oswald. A masterful job fixed forever by the anguish of a nation. Caleb’s pride in the shooting, and greater pride in giving
Jupiter the rifle he’d used, these both burned nova-bright in his recollections.

  And yet now, as life pulsed out of him with every heartbeat, it melted into mortification.

  Philosophers and moralists among Clockers suggest that dying people see their lives flash before their eyes so they can catalogue the sins for which they will be judged in the afterlife. Not true. Freetimers and Clockers both do it. It’s an instinctual effort to fix every detail of life.

  It’s a last ditch effort to be remembered forever.

  Caleb, given his training and skill, really should have been able to do a better job.

  I waited until he’d bled out, then dragged his corpse down into the fuel depot. I hid his body in the heart of it, erasing all traces of the deed. I’d not remembered any signs from before, after all. Then I blew the depot up as I had before. It eased stresses on the timeline, making it easier to fix.

  It also allowed me to capture the excess energy for myself.

  Caleb’s attempt to fix himself, coupled with similar attempts by the other Wrenns I’d killed up close, clued me in on finding my nemesis. To reach Jupiter’s sanctuary, each had taken a unique path, one completely idiosyncratic, yet not without points of similarity.

  He forced them all to navigate through moments of personal mortification and failure, belittling them one more time before they arrived to bask in his glory. He hadn’t fixed his Sanctuary through actions or results, but through emotions. To reach him, they each had to seek moments of shame and weakness. No one was going to casually stumble into his sanctum, and few were the dedicated hunters who would want to go down that path.

  I pushed into time-out and forward a century or two. I didn’t need to replace my body, so I settled for Medbots repairing the cuts, salving the wounds and pumping me full of a pharmaceutical cocktail which had me feeling nigh unto invulnerable.