Time Past

by Maxine McArthur

  “He must have met us here in the past. That’s why he had to make sure you’re here.”

  He frowned. “But that’s... Anyway, you disappeared on your test flight. Big shock to everyone. But then Ensign Lee—you remember her? She mentioned to me that your signal cut out pretty close to where Calypso appeared. Aha, I say, and go to check on her navigational data, and she’s right.

  “So I go and have a little chat with the other three engineers on your team. They tell me you might have been caught in an anomaly of some kind. They weren’t very upset, though. Gave me the impression they wanted me out of the lab so they could go back to work.”

  I grimaced, half embarrassed. The three engineers and myself had agreed to keep the real content of the research secret; if it leaked, I was pretty sure the Invidi would try to stop us. I hadn’t intended to keep Murdoch out of the picture as well, even though that was how it turned out.

  “After twenty-four hours we sent out search and rescue ships, as usual,” he continued. “Must admit, when they didn’t find anything over the next two days, I started to get worried too. I guessed you didn’t have a lot of emergency life-support equipment installed. We had to cut down the search after that—you know how it is.”

  I nodded. If the missing person has no air left, there’s no rush to find them.

  He tilted the chair farther forward to look intently at me. “I didn’t give up. But I had no evidence to give them that you were alive to be rescued.”

  I half smiled. “There was no evidence.”

  “Oh, yes there was.” He let the chair fall back with a bump. “I took a look at your research notes...”

  “How did you do that?” I sat up straighter.

  “I’m chief of Security, remember?”

  “And?”

  “And it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Mostly equations and blueprints. But it was obvious even to me that you’d installed something other than a flatspace engine. Which wasn’t in your project proposal, by the way.”

  “We thought it was safer not to say exactly what we were doing,” I said.

  “Like you didn’t mention salvaging Calypso ’s engines in the first place?” he said reproachfully. “I talked to Finke, too.”

  Hieronymous Finke, the salvage operator and independent contractor whom I’d asked to bring in the remains of Calypso after the gray ship spat it out, together with a lot of Seouras debris.

  “Finke said he brought some space junk back for you and you stored it in one of the lower bays,” said Murdoch.

  “ConFleet was busy at the time,” I protested. “I didn’t want to bother them.”

  “Uh-huh. And you stored the junk as research material and paid Finke from the engineering budget. Nice bit of creative accounting, that. Veatch would be proud.”

  I suppose it had been naive of me to think that if we were successful, these minor transgressions would be overlooked. An unpleasant feeling, to have one’s sins exposed one after the other. I remembered how I’d kept away from everyone, including Murdoch, over the next couple of months as I investigated what remained of Calypso ’s engines. Maybe I was too angry at the Invidi, maybe overreacting to the events of the blockade.

  “I went back to your engineering colleagues,” said Murdoch, “and told them I wanted answers. They were all a bit subdued by then—I think they needed to tell someone what had gone wrong. They told me you were probably at the other end of the jump point Calypso came through. Nothing we could do from our end.”

  He leaned forward again. “I thought, I can do something. I was going to go to ConFleet and request a rescue ship to go through the same jump point. At least, I wondered if I should do that, because if ConFleet caught you with Invidi jump technology you’d be under arrest in no time. But anyway, before I could do anything, transfers came through for all three of your engineering team.”

  “Whose orders?”

  “EarthFleet for Josh Heron and ConFleet for the other two. Admiral’s signatures on all transfers, no discussion. I barely had time to ask them what was going on; none of them knew. I went back to check whether I had enough evidence about the project and where you’d gone to take to ConFleet if necessary, and what do you know? Lee’s navigational data was missing.”

  “What about the research results?” I said, not really wanting to hear the inevitable answer.

  “Some of it had security seals on it. Above my level. Some of it had been ‘transferred’ and disappeared into a bureaucratic muddle.”

  “Sounds like An Barik’s been busy.”

  I meant our “local” Invidi, An Barik, who had been the Confederacy Council observer on Jocasta for several years before the Seouras blockade. An Barik lived on Jocasta but didn’t socialize in any way with other species, and only appeared at official functions when absolutely necessary. We suspected he’d been able to contact the Confederacy at any time during the blockade but chose not to. It was difficult to understand why, but as far as we could see, his reason was so that nothing would happen to prevent Calypso arriving.

  He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. So I went to see him. Tried to, that is, but I never got any response that made sense. I started to get really worried. It was over a month since you left and everyone was saying how sad, a tragic accident, let’s get on with our lives.”

  “I’m sorry, Bill.” I looked up from where I’d been tracing circles on the coarse brown weave of the blanket. “I meant to tell you.”

  “You mean, you didn’t mean to get lost.”

  “Right.” I don’t know what bothered me more, that he knew me well enough to accept I’d put off telling him, or that I had, in the excitement surrounding the test flight, put it off too long. “So, um, what happened after that? Did you go to the Confederacy and tell them what you suspected?”

  “No-o,” he said slowly. “I waited another couple weeks. I mean,”—he flashed me a quick smile—“you’ve got out of some difficult situations before this. And... I dunno. I didn’t want them to arrest you for possession.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And then the orders for my transfer came through.”

  “You?” Hell, I messed up Bill’s life too. The three engineers were a different matter—they’d all accepted the risks and wanted to be part of the project. But Murdoch didn’t even know what we were doing.

  “Yeah. I didn’t know what was going on for a while. Back to Earth, the orders said. By the time I contacted someone who knew something—an old mate of mine in Finance—it was time for me to go. I took leave and stayed on the station and tried to get the transfer annulled, or changed, or something. No luck. So I started looking for An Serat. That was bloody difficult, too. I tracked him to a H’digh colony.”

  “You went yourself?” Travel quotas for private individuals of the Nine Worlds within the jump network were small and prohibitively expensive. I didn’t want to hear that Murdoch had mortgaged his pension to try to find me. Or worse, put himself in the kind of danger that stowaways on Four ships faced.

  “I pulled in a favor with Neeth—you remember, the K’Cher trader who tried to sell our planet?”

  I did remember the incident, which had embroiled External Affairs, the Confederacy Bureau of Trade Investigation, the K’Cher League of Barons, and a network of small traders and pirates that covered the whole of Abelar system. Murdoch’s Security team had prevented Neeth from being lynched.

  “It gave you a berth to Rhuarl system?”

  “Uh-huh. Serat seemed pretty much at home with the H’digh on Rhuarl.”

  “So what did he say?”

  Murdoch narrowed his eyes as he remembered. “He didn’t say much. Basically, that he’d been waiting for me. He told me he’d send me back to Jocasta and then to meet you. I waited around for a couple hours, then a H’digh gave me a pass back to Central in an unmarked transport.”

  “Who was the pilot?”

  He shrugged. “I was in the passenger cabin, didn’t see. But the fittings were humanoid-friendl
y, so probably a Melot. A Melot met me at Central, anyway, and put me on another transport. This one went from Central to Abelar. I tell you, by this time I was buggered from standing around waiting for Customs inspections and for the ships to leave. You know how they take hours from when the exit permit’s approved to when the jump point actually opens. Not to mention the time getting to the points in flatspace. And then we rendezvous in Abelar flatspace with another ship, half a dozen Melot crew, no markings. I couldn’t see the navigation details, but I reckon it was near where you disappeared.”

  That made sense. He’d have to finally go through the same jump point as I did; if he jumped from Central he couldn’t have come to the past because those jumps on the Central network are all set at “present” time. Twelve o’clock in Central is twelve o’clock everywhere else.

  “An Serat seems to have a lot of backup,” I said.

  “Yeah, but none of it official, you notice? No ConFleet or Confederacy Trader markings on anything. I reckon he’s doing this without Barik and the other Invidi knowing. Anyway, they loaded me into a single-pilot fighter like a bloody droid. Not a word, not so much as a mind-your-step-don’t-forget-the-emergency-exit. And the fighter went through the jump point on autopilot. Not a thing I could do about it.

  “The fighter kept going once we left the jump point. I knew it was heading for Earth but I don’t think anyone detected me coming in.”

  “Nor me,” I said. “The only reason I can think of is that both your fighter and Calypso II contained an Invidi shielding device to avoid detection.” My search of Calypso II failed to find one, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  He nodded. “My ship was programmed already—it did nearly forty-eight hours’ burn through the solar system after coming through the jump...”

  “That’s a day faster than I was.”

  “... hit Earth’s atmosphere and fried, and not a bloody thing I could do about it. I didn’t enjoy that, I can tell you. Sitting there sucking my rations and doing my exercises, waiting for whatever An Serat—or whoever—had decided for me.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “The life-pod worked fine and I ended up in the sea. Just off the coast, with a little raft to paddle in. Thoughtful, the Invidi. Bloke in a fishing boat picked me up. He was suspicious at first but I sounded enough like a local to pass. Said I’d got lost and spent the night drifting. Mist as thick as Jupiter. He wasn’t going to make any trouble, the engines on that boat were too damn quiet for plain fishing. No lights or anything. He let me come inshore with him as a family member to get past the harbor checks. He didn’t want anything to do with Customs.

  “Then I tried to follow your signal... Good job that transponder is standard equipment now.”

  I twisted and felt under my shoulder blade. “That’s what I wanted to say. It must be a different signal. I took the transponder out.”

  “Look for yourself.” He passed me the locator, a flat square you could fit in your palm. The smooth syntal molded itself to my hand with heaviness out of proportion to its real weight. Its signal confirmation winked at full strength. I looked at the small thing, solid proof that there was a future and it wasn’t all in my imagination. Then I looked up at Murdoch and smiled—he was even more solid proof.

  He half-smiled back, mystified. “Are you sure you got the transponder out?”

  I remembered a tiny, bloody splinter on Grace’s finger. “Yes. Unless they put a backup in without telling me.”

  “Must be.”

  “That would explain why I still couldn’t get past the alarms.” I saw his expression of confusion. “When I tried to go into a shop in the city, something set off an alarm. That’s why I asked Grace to take out the transponder.”

  He snorted. “How did you explain it?”

  “I said it was a kind of microchip. They put them into dangerous criminals in this country, but I said in my country political prisoners get tagged too.”

  “Jeez, what a century.”

  “But listen, even after that, I couldn’t get through. I thought it was the Seouras implant, so I just kept away from wired places after that. Maybe it was a backup transponder.”

  “So if you want to go through any security barriers, we’ll have to take out the backup too.”

  I wriggled my shoulders. “Ouch. I suppose so.” It still might be the Seouras implant which was setting off the alarms, but if so we could do nothing. The implant was a neural connection originally installed in my neck by the Seouras at the time of the Abelar Treaty. I’d agreed to it, so that I could understand what the Seouras were saying and communicate this to the others.

  Murdoch stretched, his shoulders making a faint popping sound. “Halley, why did An Serat send me after you?”

  “I’m surprised he ‘sent’ you anywhere,” I said.

  I couldn’t reconcile the idea of an Invidi and concrete action. Not that Invidi aren’t good at getting people to do things, but they do it by maneuvering people into situations where we do what we want to do, only it ends up being what the Invidi want. Like An Barik exploited my friend Quartermaine’s desire to know more about the Invidi and asked him to retrieve a device from Calypso. Like An Barik used my desire to protect the station from the Seouras to keep himself safe while he waited for Calypso to arrive. Or like An Serat used my desire to find out how Calypso worked to get me here in the past—although this one was guesswork on my part. Even like how the Invidi had used the Bendarl desire for expansion and the militaristic structure of their society to create ConFleet to keep order in the Confederacy.

  There seemed no logical reason for An Serat to want me or Murdoch in the past, yet he obviously did. Unless it was something on Calypso II that he wanted. Which didn’t make sense either, because the only things of value on Calypso II were the engines, which had come from Calypso and An Serat in the first place.

  “The only reason I could think of for him to send me after you,” Murdoch continued, “was that he’d met me in the past and knew I had to get here. But why didn’t he say that when he first met us on Jocasta?”

  “He didn’t want us to know. Because we’d know and maybe prepare against being sent here.” I thought again. “No, it’s already happened, hasn’t it. Unless when we meet him in the past we tell him that he didn’t tell us...”

  “Bloody hell. You really understand this?”

  I looked around at the tent. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. We need to separate the history of the history files from our personal histories. Our desadas. ”

  He groaned. “No mystic terms, please.”

  Desada was one of the many Invidi words we knew but did not understand. The usual translation was “fate” or “pivotal life-moment.” Quartermaine, my late friend who was also an Invidi expert, had thought it meant an experience that influenced the rest of one’s life. I didn’t agree.

  “I’m redefining it. Think how pleased the linguists will be when we get back. I don’t think desada is a single experience. It’s the way the Invidi keep track of their own inner timescapes.”

  “Experience always runs the same way?”

  “Sort of. If they’re always jumping in and out of different places and times, it would be necessary to keep their own timelines.”

  Murdoch shook his head. “Hang on. Say I come back in time and start living my life here. I’m forty-four, right? Bill Murdoch in this history won’t be born for another fifty or so years. What happens when that fifty years is reached?

  Will there be two of us? Which is the real one?”

  “I guess you’re both real.”

  “What happens when that child turns forty-four? Will he then travel into the past, and over and over?”

  “I don’t think so. You both have your own lives. Your desada. ”

  He opened his mouth, shut it again. Rubbed his hand over his head and blinked tiredly.

  “Unless it’s a different universe,” I added. It wasn’t a theory I thought about often, for the simple
reason that if it was true, we could do nothing but start over in this century.

  “And the Invidi don’t come, you mean?”

  I nodded.

  He snorted. “Then we’re gonna find out the answer to the question that’s been bugging everyone for a hundred years.”

  What would have happened if the Invidi hadn’t come? Or, as far as we’re concerned, what will happen if the Invidi don’t come?

  A wave of cold sickness made me shiver, and I drew my legs closer. If the Invidi didn’t come, we’d be stuck here. Stuck in this place where the struggle to survive consumed the lives of those who had nothing, and the knowledge of their own futility diminished the lives of those who had everything.

  No wonder they idolized people like Mandela and Alvarez. There was so little hope otherwise.

  I shivered again and leaned back against the wall of the tent, feeling it give slightly, cool against my back through the thin shirt. Murdoch watched me, his face unreadable. His presence filled the tent. I could feel his warmth, reaching out across the bed, banishing the shiver. A strange feeling. Almost like the flush of H’digh pheromones... But that was ridiculous. Not here, not now.

  “When did you find out it was this year?” said Murdoch. He turned the chair around and sat on it properly, stretching his legs out beside the bed with a grunt. “I didn’t realize until I saw a newspaper on the fishing boat. A newspaper, would you believe it? Sort of brought it all home to me when the ink came off black on my fingers. Anything that messy had to be real.”

  “I tracked Earth communications when I was coming into the solar system,” I said, ignoring the strange feeling of warmth. “That’s why I had to come down to the surface and wait for the Invidi to come. I couldn’t maintain life support in Calypso II by myself for five months.”

  I told him how I’d ended up on Earth, ending with where Grace took me in.

  “We can’t get back through that jump point without Invidi help,” I went on, “either to repair Calypso II or lend us another ship. And unless we go back through that jump point, we can’t get back to Jocasta in 2122. At least, I assume the point is stable now, since you came through it.”