by Rachel Ford
That sounded, to the taxman’s ears, more like one of the impossibly long passwords Nance would set on his router than any kind of coordinates he’d ever heard. Then, again, this was the Interdimensional Bureau of Temporal Investigations. Half an hour ago, he would have thought such an organization nonsense, like something out of one of Nance’s favorite science fiction shows.
That would have been before he met Special Agent Roger Winthrop. That would have been before Winthrop took them to this place, IBTI headquarters. Now, standing before a council of humans and aliens, in a plane he’d never visited, in a time that he didn’t know, he was more openminded.
So he accepted that that insanely long string of characters represented the particular dimension he and Nance had stepped out of.
The cephalopod nodded, in a distinctly human way that made Alfred shiver. “Thank you. Mister Favero and Miss Abbot, will you confirm for the council that you are here of your own volition?”
“We’re not, actually,” Nancy said. “Agent Winthrop here strong-armed us into coming.”
A few gasps sounded from the council, and Winthrop visibly bristled. “I did no such thing, Miss Abbot.”
“You threatened to take away our space time manipulator,” Alfred countered, “if we didn’t comply.”
Winthrop threw an injured gaze at them. “My job is to protect the timelines. To stop people from willy-nilly tampering with timestreams. People like you two.”
Alfred didn’t have a good answer to that. It was true that he’d done a little tampering, here and there. Not that all of his use of the spacetime manipulator was deliberate. But Winthrop had shown up just after the Lorina case. And though he maintained that he’d done right by interfering, his interference was certainly more elective than some of his earlier cases. So he decided to skip that part of the statement. “You don’t have the right to take our property.”
Winthrop raised an eyebrow, so high Alfred was sure it would disappear into his hair. “A taxman, of all people, should understand that ownership is not an absolute right, Mister Favero.”
He scowled. Winthrop had him there.
“Still, we didn’t do anything to justify threats like that,” Nance put in. “And, anyway, we don’t recognize your authority to police us.”
“Oh gods,” one of the councilmen – Alfred didn’t see who – muttered. “Not more ‘sovereign citizens.’”
“It wasn’t a threat, Miss Abbot,” Winthrop put in, seemingly offended by her choice of words. “I wasn’t giving you an ultimatum. I was giving you options.”
“Your abuse of the timestreams would have left Agent Winthrop well within his rights to simply confiscate the device,” a human councilwoman declared. Alfred searched his memory for her name. She’d been introduced as Katarina-something. She shrugged, now, adding, “Using any means necessary. Up to and including lethal force.”
Alfred gulped. “You mean…kill us?”
“Preserving the safety of the inhabitants of your reality – and ours – is a sacred calling. One mistake, Mister Favero, could cost trillions of lives.”
“So, you see, Agent Winthrop wasn’t threatening you. He was actually doing you a favor – a favor we don’t often grant violators.”
“Well don’t I feel special,” Nancy muttered.
“Being considered for admittance into the IBTI is a rare and distinguished privilege,” the cephalopod declared, spreading his tentacles in a magisterial way. “To even be here, Agent Winthrop has identified potential in your candidacy above and beyond the common traveler’s.”
That didn’t sound quite as bad to Alfred, and his moderated tone reflected the fact. “I’m still not entirely sure what the IBTI does, though. Or why we would want to join.”
“The IBTI is a kind of law enforcement organization, ensuring that the principles of ethical interdimensional travel are not violated: preserve the timeline, when at all possible. Avoid cultural, dimensional and temporal contamination. Prevent abuse of the ability to cross.”
“That all sounds good,” Nancy said, “but how can you punish people for violating laws they didn’t know existed?”
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
“There’s a difference between being ignorant of something that’s knowable, and being ignorant of something that we could not possibly know.”
“Semantics, Miss Abbot. The principle is unchanged. You and Mister Favero have violated all three laws. You have not preserved the timeline. On multiple occasions, you’ve changed your own and other people’s fates. You’ve not respected the sanctity of the cultures and dimensions you entered; your excursion to Yngil-wode is perhaps the worst example, but certainly not the only.”
“That was an accident,” Alfred protested. “We didn’t mean to travel then.”
“Intent is irrelevant. And, finally, you have abused the ability to cross to pursue personal and professional interests.”
“We have not,” he gaped. Of all the charges, this one rankled the most. He and Nance would never abuse their capability to cross time and space.
“On the contrary, Mister Favero, you have used the device numerous times for personal reasons. Both of you. You used it to erase her murder from the timeline, not once but multiple times. And she used it to save you as well.”
“Hold on, you’re calling saving lives an abuse?”
“It’s use for personal gain, Miss Abbot.”
“Personal gain by not letting my boyfriend die?”
She was flabbergasted, but the cephalopod nodded. “Precisely.”
“Come on,” she protested. “It’s not like we were embezzling or something: we saved each other’s lives.”
“Sentimental motives are no less risky than avaricious ones,” Katarina offered.
“However,” Winthrop put in, “your use, however misguided, has always tended along the arc of moral good. As trite as it sounds, your hearts have been in the right place.”
“Even if your heads,” the cephalopod sniffed, “were not.”
“You’re a kind of chaotic good,” Katarina added. “So we allowed Winthrop to bring you here, in case you wanted to reform your ways. We brought you here to see if you’d be interested in being lawful good.”
“What happens if we say no?” Nancy asked.
“If you say no,” Winthrop said, “I will issue you a citation. It will be your one – and only – warning not to abuse the device.”
“Oh,” Alfred said. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“No,” Winthrop agreed. “It’s very generous of me, actually. However, in about – well, I won’t tell you how long. Time is relative anyway. But before too long, you will violate the warning.”
Now, the taxman frowned. “We wouldn’t.”
“You do. To save a friend of yours, a Justin Lyon.”
Alfred barked out a laugh and Nancy snorted. “You’ve got your wires crossed, Special Agent. Justin is no friend.” Justin Lyon was nearer an enemy than a friend. He was a coworker, and Alfred’s next-door neighbor at the office. The man was a menace.
“Which makes your choice even more curious,” Winthrop said. “Regardless, you do use the device to save his life. And then, I’m forced to confiscate it.”
“How do you know this if it hasn’t even happened yet?”
Winthrop frowned. “Time is not linear, Miss Abbot. Not for those of us in the IBTI. Before I decided to give you the option to join, I followed the timeline through. I saw what happens.”
“Oh. Well, wouldn’t it change, now that we know?”
“Exactly. Now that we know we’ll mess up, we won’t.”
“So you’ll let Mister Lyon die for your own gain?” Alfred blinked, unsure of how to respond to that. Agent Winthrop cracked a smile. “Trick question, Mister Favero. You don’t.” He shrugged. “I know.”
“So if we don’t join, we lose the device?” Nancy sighed.
“Eventually, yes.”
“But,” Katarina put in, “that cannot be your only rea
son for joining. You have to believe in the cause.”
“I’m not sure I understand the cause. I mean, I know you said it’s to uphold those principles. But what exactly do we do? How do we decide when to interfere, or when not to? How do we decide which set of people needs our help and which doesn’t? And how is that different than Alfred and I using the machine on our own?”
“We interfere when there is no other choice: when something or someone is going to irrevocably change the timeline, and there’s no one there who can stop them.”
“We will sometimes make humanitarian exceptions,” Winthrop added.
The cephalopod snorted. “You know how I hate that word, Winthrop.”
“Forgive me.” He turned to Alfred and Nancy, explaining, “It’s a humanoid term. We’re trying to purge it from our vocabularies, as it’s too exclusionary. What I mean is, we will allow missions of mercy, if they’re approved by the council.”
“Any interference requires a warrant,” Katarina said. “And to get a warrant, you need at least three members of the council to sign off.”
“So…you can violate your own principles, as long as you all agree to do so?” Nancy frowned.
The cephalopod inclined his head imperiously, then nodded. “Essentially, yes.”
“I’m not sure that that’s very fair.”
“On the contrary. No man is an island. No man can act unilaterally. But no law can be absolute, either. The purpose of the IBTI is to preserve the multitude of races and species through the myriad dimensions. In general, that requires non-interference. But we would be fools to assume that the general principle always applies in the specific incident.”
“But aren’t you in the same spot as us, guessing at the impact of your choices?”
“That’s why it requires approval from the council. If three seasoned members can be convinced, then the cause is worth pursuing.”
“Has that ever gone wrong?”
“Not as often as doing nothing has gone wrong.”
Chapter Two
After a review of their timeline incursions, the council approved Special Agent Winthrop’s recommendation to admit Nancy and Alfred for a trial period. “We feel, with proper guidance, your unique survival and decision making skills could be put to good use for the preservation of the timelines.”
“Can we think about it?” Nance asked.
“Of course,” the cephalopod, whose name, Alfred learned, was Ki’el, said. “Take all the time you need.”
This elicited a hearty round of laughter from the council, and, seeing their blank expressions, Winthrop explained, “Industry humor.”
Alfred was not amused, but he made no comment. The truth was, the taxman was a little overwhelmed. He’d jumped through time and crossed dimensions before. He’d even met an alien. So none of those things, individually, astonished him. But it seemed that every time he began to have a handle on the world, to understand just how vast the realm of the possible actually was, it expanded. The rug was constantly being pulled out from under him. And though he was a resilient man, capable of making lemonade out of lemons, there were only so many curveballs he could dodge. This is all coming out of left field.
Then, having thoroughly abused every metaphor that came to mind, he sighed. “I don’t know, Nance. I don’t know what to do.”
They were standing to the side as the council disbanded, watching the curious parade of aliens and humans go on their way. It was like being at one of Nance’s comic book festivals. Except, of course, these aliens weren’t people with too much time and misapplied talent on their hands. These curious visages, the heads with a thousand eyes, the vast array of inhuman skin tones…it was all real. Sugar cookies.
Nance took his hand. “I don’t know either, babe. I mean…it sounds good, right?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. He was a man of the law, after all. And though his specialty might be tax law, law was law. He served the law back home. The idea of serving it on an even grander scale, of saving galaxies and timelines, did appeal. Not that it was more important than his own work, of course. But here, his impact might be felt more broadly. “Still…doesn’t it seem…I don’t know.”
“Overwhelming?”
He glanced up, surprised by the insightfulness of her word choice. “Yeah.”
Her blue eyes were troubled, and her pretty face pinched into a frown. She nodded. “Yeah, it does. I don’t know what to think.”
“Me either, Nance.” The fact was, not that long ago, they’d been back home, blissfully unaware of any interdimensional organizations. And, not that she knew it, but he’d been about to ask her to marry him. That was the future he wanted.
Not this strange future the IBTI was offering. “I don’t know,” he started.
But Roger Winthrop’s voice interrupted before he could finish the thought. “Miss Abbot, Mister Favero: I’m so excited for you.”
“Oh?”
If Winthrop registered the wariness in Alfred’s tones, he made no sign of it. Instead, he bobbed his head with enough energy to send his light hair flying this way and that. “The Council signed off on it: you’re in.”
“Only if we choose to be,” Nancy reminded him.
“Of course.” Now, Winthrop’s brow creased. Confusion colored his light eyes. “But…you don’t mean you’re actually thinking of declining?”
The pair hesitated. “The thought had occurred,” the taxman said in a moment.
“But…why?”
Nancy spread her hands, gesturing at the dais and the now empty council seats. “I don’t know…this is just a bit much, isn’t it? I mean, being recruited into an interdimensional time travel organization? Like some kind of time cops or something?”
Winthrop considered, then nodded. “I suppose it must seem like a lot to take in, all at once.” He shrugged. “I’ve been with the IBTI so long, I forget how frightening it can be to linears.”
“Linears?”
“Forgive me. That’s another term we’re trying to phase out. Some of the newer recruits consider it problematic.”
“What does it mean?” Nance wondered.
“People – beings – who experience time in a linear fashion.”
“You mean…normal people?” Alfred asked.
Winthrop frowned at him. “You’re new here, Mister Favero: but that terminology has been obsolete for a long time. It’s considered rather offensive now.”
“Offensive?” the taxman blinked.
“Yes. Your understanding of the world is very Earth focused at present. Your idea of normal reflects the familiar. But you will see soon enough that there is no such thing as normal. What is familiar to you, what you now consider normal, is utterly alien to others. And it’s nothing but hubris that centers our own existence in discussing universal truths.”
“Oh. Err, sorry?”
“You’re quite alright, Mister Favero. No harm was intended, and so no offense taken.”
“You said you were recruited into the IBTI,” Nance asked. “When? How?’
“Oh, well…” Winthrop puffed out his cheeks in thought. He looked to Alfred a kind of chipmunk of a man, his eyes disappearing into his long face. “Let’s see now. It was in the year eighteen hundred and forty-three. In your universe, actually.”
“So you’re from the same timeline as us?”
“Yes, a few hundred years removed.”
“So what happened? Did they just…take you?”
His eyebrows rose. “Certainly not. I was working on a device, a kind of time accelerator. I hadn’t quite cracked reversing time, but I had figured out how to move forward.” He smiled at the memory. “Which is more impressive than it sounds, believe me, Miss Abbot. I was working in a nineteenth century laboratory, with nineteenth century tools.
“At any rate, I was just about to fire the old beast up when a creature appeared in my lab. IBTI policy, now, is to send a member of the prospect’s species, if possible. So a human to make contact with humans, and so on. But in m
y day, that wasn’t the case. The chap they sent was a Delkandian.”
“A what?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t know about them. In your time, they’re still a good three hundred years away from discovery. They’re a handsome race – you’ll see some of them around here. Colorful neck frills, that can get quite large when they’re heated, and all that. But distinctly nonhuman.
“I thought I’d gone mad for half a minute there. But he took me here, to IBTI headquarters, and gave me pretty much the same spiel I’m giving you, about a duty to our fellow creatures, to history and to the future, and all that.” He smiled self-deprecatingly. “And I joined. Of course, I joined.”
“But what happened to your old life?” Nance asked. “Did you just disappear? Didn’t anyone wonder where you’d gone?”
“Oh, no. I didn’t just vanish. I still pop in now and then, chat with old friends, that sort of thing.”
Nancy stared at him. “Pop in? No one notices that you’re not there?”
He smiled. “I was a scientist who believed he could travel through time, Miss Abbot. You can imagine that my social calendar was never overburdened.”
“Still, how does that work? I mean, in our time, you must be dead?”
“Oh yes. Quite dead.”
“But you’re still alive, and working for the IBTI?”
“Yes. At the point I left, and return to now and then, I’m still living in England. But in about five years – linear time – I will take my leave, on an expedition to India. And, as far as the timeline knows, I will die in India.”
“Ah,” she nodded, understanding crossing her features. “So you basically faked your own death?”
“More or less, yes.”
“Won’t you miss your home?”
He shrugged. “Of course. That’s why I drop in, now and then. The truth is, Nancy Abbot, your era romanticizes mine. But I lived it, and it’s nothing like your movies and television shows. Believe me, there’s nothing romantic about dying of consumption. There’s no charm in a lack of proper sanitation, or decent medical care, or in relying on primitive science. Aside from a handful of colleagues and my sister – with whom, the sad truth is, I’ve never been particularly close – there’s not much I miss in my old life.”