Slow Dancing Through Time

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Screw that. A con man doesn’t last long once he starts conning himself; an ability to face reality is de rigeur in this trade. I could feel the sweat cooling under my arms, could smell the sour reek of my own fear. The cut on my upper arm throbbed. I had a bitch of a headache. No, whatever was happening—it was real.

  I didn’t like the way Stringy was looking at me.

  “You burned me, Jerry,” he said. “Jerry—you shouldn’t have burned me.” He sounded regretful, almost wistful.

  Then, slowly, he smiled.

  My balls started to retract.

  “Hey, man,” I said, licking at my lips. “I didn’t—I don’t know what’s—”

  “Oh, cut it out,” Stringy said impatiently. “Don’t bother working your way through Injured Innocence, tape 5-A. You burned me, and I know you burned me, and you are going to pay for it, never doubt it.” He smiled his glacial sliver of a smile again, thin enough to slice bread, and for the first time in years I began to regret that it wasn’t my style to carry a piece. Was Stringy packing a gun or a knife? Macho Man is not my style either—I’ll run, given a choice—but the thought flickered through my mind that I’d better jump him quick, before he pulled some kind of weapon; even if I couldn’t overpower him, maybe I could go over or around or through him and find some way out of here—

  I spread my hands wide in a weakly conciliatory gesture, at the same time kicking out with my legs and hurling myself at Stringy, thinking punch him in the throat, people don’t expect that . . .

  Stringy touched something on the desktop, almost negligently, and I stopped.

  I just stopped, like a fly trapped in amber.

  If I’d needed something to confirm that something very weird was going down here, that would have been plenty.

  My body was no longer obeying me from the neck down but, oddly, I felt my nerves steady and my panic fade—there are times when things get so bad that it seems you’ve got little left to lose, and that is the time, as all high rollers know, to put your whole bankroll down and pick up those dice and go for broke.

  “You’ve made your point, Stringy,” I said in a calm, considering voice. Then I smiled. “Okay, then,” I said brightly. “Let’s talk!”

  Stringy stared at me poker-faced for a couple of beats, and then he snorted derisively, and then he laughed. “You know, Jerry,” he said, “you’re really pretty good.”

  “Thanks,” I said dryly.

  “You had me fooled, you know,” Stringy said, smiling. “And I don’t fool easily. I really thought that you were going to come across with all that great snow, I really did. And that setup! Your staging and your timing were superb, you know, quite first-rate, really. You had me going in just the direction you wanted me to go, steered neatly right down the chute. If I hadn’t managed to pick up that bag in the confusion, I’d never have known that you were burning me—I would have just shrugged my shoulders and chalked it all up to fate, to the influence of some evil star. I really would have. You are a very subtle man, Jerry.”

  He was still wearing his Superfly pimpsuit, but his voice had changed—it was cultured now, urbane, almost an octave higher, and although he still employed the occasional smattering of street slang, whatever the unfamiliar accent behind his words was, it certainly wasn’t Pore Black Child from 131st and Lenox. Even his skin—it was different now; there were coppery highlights I’d never seen before, as if he were some refinement of racial type that simply did not exist. I was beginning to realize that whoever—or whatever—else Stringy was, he was also a bit of a con man himself.

  “You’re an alien, aren’t you?” I asked suddenly. “From a flying saucer, right? Galactic Federation? The whole bit?” And with any luck a Prime Directive—don’t hurt the poor backward natives.

  Please God?

  He curled his lip in scorn. “Shit no.”

  “What are you, then?”

  He propped his feet up on the desk, leaned back, put his hands behind his head. “Time traveler.”

  I gaped at him. “You’re . . . a time traveler?”

  “Got it in one, sport,” he said languidly.

  “If you’re a time traveler—then why the fuck were you trying to score cocaine from me?”

  “Why not?” he said. He had closed his eyes.

  “Why, for bleeding Christ’s sake?”

  He opened his eyes. “Well, I don’t know what you do with yours, but what I do with mine is to stick it right up my nose an snuffle it up, snuffleuffleupagus until it’s all gone. Yum. Gives you a hell of a nice rush. Helps pass the time while you’re on your way to the Paleolithic, or whenever. Makes a long boring trip through the eons just fly by. Other time travelers may be into speed or reds or synapse-snappers or floaters, but among the elite of the Time Corps, such as myself, coke is the drug of choice, no others need apply . . .”

  “That’s not what I meant, damnit! Why come to me for it, why go to all that trouble, sneaking around in back alleys, spending all that money? If you can really travel in time, why not just go back to, say, pre-Conquest Peru, and gather up a sackful for nothing? Or if that’s too much trouble, why not just go back to the turn of the century when it was still legal and buy all you want, with nobody giving a damn? Or . . .”

  Stringy aimed a finger at me like a gun, and made a shooting motion, and I’m ashamed to admit that I flinched—who knew what he could or couldn’t do with that finger? Nothing happened, though, except that he made a pow! noise with his lips, and then said, “Right on! You’ve put your finger right on the veritable crux of the problem, sport. Why not indeed?” He winked, laced his hands behind his head again. “The problem, my old, is that the authorities are almost as stuffy in my time as they were in yours, in spite of all the years gone by. Particularly the Powers That Be in the Time Corps, my bosses—they want us to flit soberly through the centuries on our appointed rounds, primly protecting the One and Proper Chain of Events and fighting off paradoxes. They do not want us, while we’re engaged in protecting and preserving Order by, say, keeping the bad guys from helping the Persians to win at Marathon, they do not want us at that particular moment to go sneaking off behind some scrubby Grecian bush and blow our brains right out of the top of our skulls with a big snootful of toot. They frown on that. They are, as I say, stuffy.”

  He stretched, and ran his fingers back through his afro. “To forestall your next question: no, of course my bosses can’t watch all of time and space, but they don’t have to—they can watch the monitors in the control complex that show where and when our timecraft are going. So if we’re supposed to be in, say, 1956 Iowa, and we stop off in pre-Conquest Peru instead to grab us a sackful of crystal, why, that’ll show up on the monitors, right, and we’re in big trouble. No, what’s been happening instead is that we’ve been doing a lot of work the last few subjective years more or less in this location and in this part of the century, and it’s so much easier, when we’re scheduled to be in 1982 Philadelphia or whenever any way—when our car is already parked, so to speak, and the monitors off—to just whomp up some money, whatever amount is necessary, and take a few minutes off and go hunt up a native source. To take our bucket to the well, so to speak.”

  “I see,” I said weakly.

  “Except,” Stringy said, sitting up slowly and deliberately and putting his feet back on the ground and his hands flat on the desk in front of him, “except, Jerry, what do you think happened? We went to the well with our bucket this time, and the well was dry, Jerry.” That flat, evil light was back in his eyes again. “No snow in our forecast, Jerry old bean. And do you know why? Because you burned us, Jerry . . .”

  “If you can do all that stuff,” I said, fighting to control the fear that wanted my voice to break and whine, “why don’t you just go back to the start of all this and find yourself another source. Just never come to see me in the first place.” Why me, Lord? Let this cup pass from me . . .

  Stringy shook his head. “Might create a paradox-loop, and that’d show up on
the monitors. I came close enough to looping when I shook off the fuzz and came angling back to snatch you way from the long arm of the Law. Although—” he smiled thinly “—I would’ve loved to have seen the faces of those cops when you ran right through that brick wall; that’s one police report that’ll never get filed.”

  “Then why don’t you let me take the money and go out and buy you some real coke?”

  He shook his head again, that ominous glint in his eyes. “It’s not the money—that’s just paper. It’s not even getting the coke anymore. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  If I’d been a bit nearer, I’d have spit in his eye. “Why you dumb ersatz nigger!” I snarled, losing the ragged edge of my temper. “You’re a terrific one to be talking about principles. You paid for the whole transaction in funny money. You stiffed me.”

  He shrugged. “Your people never would’ve noticed anything odd about that money. But that doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is—you don’t fuck around with the Time Corps. Never, ever, not even when the only mission we’re on is a clandestine dope run. You’ve screwed over the Time Corps, and we’re going to take it out of your hide, I promise you.” He smiled that thin and icy smile again, and it cut like a razor. “We’ll get that one-hundred thousand dollars’ worth of use out of you, Jerry—one way or another!”

  I tried to keep my face still, but a hundred dreadful images were skittering behind my eyes, and he probably knew it: me as a galley slave, tied to a giant oar while the salt sea spray stings the festering whip-scars on my back; me as a mine slave, working deep underground, never seeing the sun, lungs straining at the foul air, my back gnarled, my hands torn and bleeding; me as a medieval serf, struggling to pull a primitive plow through the unturned soil, sweating and groaning like a mule; me being disemboweled, crucified, having my eyes put out, having molten gold poured down my throat . . . No doubt a race of time travelers could arrange for any of those fates—history is large enough to swallow thousands of wretches like me down into nameless oblivion, and no doubt it had. Was Judge Crater now a kitchen slave in ancient Carthage? Did Ambrose Bierce now spend his time shoveling out manure piles in some barnyard in Celtic Britain?

  Well get one-hundred thousand dollars’ worth of use out of you—one way or another.

  Think, damnit, think. Let’s see the Giant Brain get you out of this one, kid.

  My mind raced like a car engine does when someone has the accelerator and the brake simultaneously floored.

  I stared unflinchingly into Stringy’s ice-pale eyes for one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three, and then slowly, oh so slowly, I allowed a smile to form on my face, a beatific smile, a knowing smile, a smile that I managed to make both mocking and conspiratorial all at the same time.

  “Tell me, Stringy,” I said lazily, “do you ever meddle with the One and Proper Chain of Events instead of just preserving the status quo? Do you ever tinker with it, just a little bit, here and there, now and then? Do you ever beat the bad guys to the punch by changing something first?”

  “Well . . .” Stringy said. He looked uneasy.

  “You know something, Stringy?” I said, still in that same dreamy, drifting, conversational tone. “I’m one of the few guys in the world who can pull off the Big Con—can’t be more than five or six others who can handle it, and I’m the best of them. There can’t ever have been many, not in any age. And I took you with it, Stringy—you know that I did. I took you with it clean. And you know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for an Act of God, a million-to-one accident, you never even would have tumbled to the fact that I took you.”

  “Well . . .” Stringy said. “Maybe so . . .”

  I felt a rush of fierce singing joy and carefully hid it. I was going to do it! I was going to con the sonofabitch. I was going to take him! With the odds stacked overwhelmingly in his favor, still I was going to take him!

  I metaphorically rolled up my sleeves and settled down to talk better and faster than I had ever talked before.

  ###

  Now, years later by my own subjective life clock, I sometimes wonder just who was conning whom. I think that Stringy—not actually his name, of course; but then, neither is my name Jerry—was playing me like a virtuoso angler with a record trout on the line from the moment I came stumbling through the timescreen, playing on my fear and anger and disorientation, letting me run up against black despair and then see just the faintest glimmer of hope beyond, conning me into thinking I was conning him into letting me do what he’d wanted me to do all along: or, at any rate, as soon as he had realized what sort of man I was.

  Good recruits for the more exotic branches of the Time Corps are hard to come by in any age, just as I’d said, and Stringy was—and is—a very subtle fellow indeed. I always enjoy working with him, and one of the fringe benefits—for Stringy’s taste for snow was real enough—is the plenitude of high-quality dope he always manages to gather unto himself.

  Ironically, my specialty within the Corps has become the directing of operations where the button is supposed to come hot, where the marks are supposed to realize that they are being conned; their resultant fury, if adroitly directed toward the proper target, can have some very interesting effects indeed.

  As with the South Sea Bubble scandal, for instance, which brought Walpole—no friend of Bolingbroke’s—into power, as a minor result of which—one of many, many results which echoed down the timelines for centuries—a certain motion picture starring Errol Flynn was never made, or even contemplated. Or with the Teapot Dome scandal, as a result of which—a small result among many more significant and long-term results—Harding’s name is not attached to a certain dam in Colorado, and never has been.

  My latest operation is something that will come to be called Watergate. You haven’t heard of it yet—you couldn’t have heard of it yet.

  But just give it time—you will.

  AFTERWORD TO SNOW JOB

  This story is an artifact of a high-energy, high-production period of mine. Although I’d already started to come out of a long dry spell by the beginning of 1979, it wasn’t, paradoxically enough, until I nearly died at the end of 1980, was hospitalized for a while, and then released, that I really shifted into high gear. When I was released from the hospital into the crisp, clear winter days of early January 1981, I found myself crackling with creative energy, and during the next two or three years I turned out more than twenty stories, both solo and collaborative, as well as a fair amount of critical writing, several anthologies, and a largish body of stuff that has yet to be completed, including chunks of a couple of novels. This was the most fertile production period I’d ever enjoyed, rivaled only by a similar high-production period from 1971 to 1973.

  Michael’s anecdote about the origin of this story is true. I’m embarrassed to say that the writing of it was something of a stunt; I was showing off, flexing my creative muscles—if I’d been in a low-energy period instead, I probably never would have attempted to do what I did. I was browsing through old files, and I happened to pick up the first chapter of an abortive novel Michael had begun and then abandoned the year before. Called “The Button Comes Hot,” the bulk of the chapter was taken up by a long description of an intricately detailed coke-scam which was being run by a young con artist. The coke-scam scene was really well-done, and it occurred to me that it was a shame to waste it just because it was embedded in the now-extraneous plotline of a novel that had faltered and died. All at once, with a rush of mischievous excitement, I saw how I could save the coke-scam scene and build a viable science fiction story around it, and, better still, that I could do it all without having to tell Michael about it.

  I snipped the coke-scam scene out of the novel fragment, added a time-travel plot at the beginning and end of it, and did a unifying draft, taking particular care to feather over the joints where I had put the two drafts together, so that they melded as seamlessly as possible. I had fun coming up with the details of the alternate-world scams—especially the
Errol Flynn movie that was never made on this timeline because of them—and inventing the sardonic, drawling dialogue of the coke-sniffing time traveler. I worked on the story all day on February 10,1981, and then stayed up most of the night typing up a clean draft. I was just finishing up when Michael arrived the next day—I had been expecting him, which was why I was hurrying to finish—and I chuckled fiendishly to myself as he rang the doorbell. Won’t he be surprised! I thought.

  He was.

  Although this is really an innocuous little thing, nobody in the genre would touch this story with a ten-foot pole. It finally sold to High Times, appearing in an issue with a girlie-magazine-like gatefold of a marijuana plant. Later on, it was reprinted in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, after Shawna McCarthy had taken over as editor there.

  SEND NO MONEY

  SUSAN CASPER & GARDNER DOZOIS

  SEND NO MONEY! the postcard said, in dark blue letters against a bright orange background. Judy smiled, and pushed it into the stack. She liked her junk mail. Certainly it was less depressing than the load of bills that made up the bulk of her mail. She especially liked the computer-generated “personalized” ones, eternally optimistic, that excitedly announced, “You may have won a million dollars!” (Only Maybe Not), or the ones that promised to send you something “Absolutely Free!” for only $2 plus shipping and handling, or the ones that enclosed sample swatches of material, or paper thin slices of stale-looking fruitcake, or slightly squashed bits of cheese wrapped up in cellophane. Today’s stack of junk mail was particularly large. Who knew what might be in it?