Myths of the Modern Man

by Jacqueline T Lynch

  I grasped a handful of hair at the back of his head, and turned his face so I could look at him. A sudden sense of intuition…it was Dubh.

  I turned him back, face-first into the ground where he had fallen. I crawled over to the next body, and then the next. When I could feel the body was a woman’s, I tried to see if it was Boudicca. I looked into the faces of many dead Celtic women, until the darkness became such that I could not tell.

  After a long time, a very long time, the bodies were not packed as densely, were no longer a patchwork of limbs and tissue, and then I knew I was nearing the edge of the battlefield. The sky grew dark now, and darkness covered me.

  I made it. I shuddered, and vomited, retching over and over again.

  Sweating and sick, the cool night chilled me as I walked onward up the slope, out of the valley of the shadow of death. One quick look back, and I ran further into the hills. The night covered what had been, but still I walked deeper into the countryside, taking no time to rest. Where I heard shouts or screams, I turned in another direction. The main body of the Roman force made camp for the night, while only small detachments formed hunting parties to scour the hills. There was still a chance I could escape.

  Escape to where, I didn’t know. I looked up at the constellations. My buddies. My childhood friends. My bread and butter as an astronaut. Space never looked so good. I picked out what would be the north star at this time, and followed its direction toward Caledonia, future Scotland, hundreds of miles away, until I could double back and head south again. I had to kill time until Eleanor could pull me back. I sure as hell wasn’t staying here now.

  Kill time. Listen to me.

  I tripped, and fell over the body of Nemain. So, the Romans had found the druids and routed them. The perimeters of the battle had obviously gone farther than I expected, and I didn’t know where I was, or where I would be safe.

  Nemain had been decapitated, his head a grisly totem for a nearby thorn bush.

  Somehow I knew Taliesin must be near. He always walked three paces behind his master.

  Unless he shared his master’s fate.

  CHAPTER 19

  General English strode into the lab with self satisfaction and not an ounce of curiosity on his face. He did not shut the door behind him. The other man followed him, not in the manner of an underling, but rather as a superior personage being preceded so as to be presented in a respectful manner to lower beings.

  Eleanor glanced up in surprise and annoyance. General English had agreed to exclude the press from this mission this time, and yet here he was breaking his promise and coaxing a foolish reporter into her lab.

  Dr. Ford entered last, the third, and most reluctant-looking member of the trio. He seemed to stand straighter, at attention. His easy, casual superior swagger disappeared. His smile had left him. Fear in his eyes replaced it. He nodded at the General and the man, who Eleanor was just beginning to suspect was not a reporter at all. General English did not introduce him. He merely presented Dr. L’Esperance and Eleanor to the man with a slight wave of his hand. The man nodded to them, making firm eye contact. Dr. L’Esperance did not kiss him or hold him in her arms.

  “Dr. L’Esperance, Dr. Roberts.”

  Eleanor recognized him as the man General English spoke to at the demonstration of hand-to-hand combat between Colonel Moore and Colonel Yorke. His superior, possibly, the General had said then.

  The man strolled over to the empty module and for a moment, all five of them stared at through the clear shield at what was not there.

  “How long before you start the retrieval process?” the man asked, brisk and ominous.

  Eleanor looked at him stupidly for a moment, then back at the module, and answered, “Right now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and watched her, seeming to require no further explanation of the procedure.

  Under his observation she inserted the disk, and entered her security code, and ran the program to discontinue the reversal of electromagnetic energy, the shotgun that had propelled Colonel John Moore into a certain latitude and longitude coinciding with the earth’s lazy wobble and the ever-constant revolutions around the sun, over two thousand years previously.

  ERROR.

  The error screen rattled Eleanor, and Dr. Ford.

  The man said nothing, but his stare penetrated the stupefied surprise of the others. General English sighed impatience, which grew to outright concern when he saw that Eleanor was not hitting the terminal or cursing the keypad, or indeed, making any other motions at fixing the problem, such as he did with childish impatience when he could not get anything to work.

  She only stared in obvious helpless horror at the error message. General English began to shift from one foot to the other. He glanced sideways, anxiously at the man.

  Eleanor could not see Dr. L’Esperance watching all of them with grim sadness, and with particular sympathy for Eleanor. Eleanor had momentarily forgotten she was there. Now she remembered, and felt she would always remember this long, awful moment of Dr. L’Esperance’s triumph.

  “How long has he been gone?” the man asked, which at this nerve-wracking moment seemed idiotically beside the point. Eleanor snapped out of her stupor, and quickly hammered the keypad and tried a couple of other backups.

  ERROR.

  “Well?” he asked, more sharply this time. Eleanor flinched, and shot an annoyed glance in the general direction of General English.

  “About a half-hour,” she answered, her throat suddenly dry.

  “Over two thousand years equals one half-hour?”

  “Not exactly. There are elements which figure into the models.”

  Dr. Ford remained silent. He would not team up with her to save the mission, or save face.

  “But, in any event, this is because time is cyclical, like an orbit, is that it?”

  ERROR.

  “Yes.” She mumbled a desperate obscenity at the last error message. The man glanced sardonically at General English. Then he strolled toward the door, not looking back.

  “You’ve failed,” he said, “Remain on site until you’re debriefed and given permission to leave.”

  General English looked in horror at the empty module again, and then with venom at Eleanor. He glared at Dr. Ford for good measure, and then hurriedly followed the man out of the room.

  Eleanor heard the door click, distractedly brushed strands of hair from her eyes, and fumbled with the protocol again, step by step. Dr. Ford said nothing, but watched her sadly, with a sick feeling, as one would watch an animal in a trap.

  General English popped his head back in the door, clearing his throat.

  “Oh, Dr. L’Esperance, will you join us, please?”

  Dr. L’Esperance, who had stood all this time with her hands clasped gently in front of her, like a statue of an angel in a lab coat, gave him a slight, reassuring smile of acknowledgement, and quietly followed him out of the room. She did not look back at Eleanor. Eleanor waited for her to, risked a glance to see if she would, but she did not.

  Dr. Ford tucked his hands casually in the pockets of his blazer. She could hear the click of his neatly polished shoes on the tile floor as he approached her. His hands still is his pockets, he leaned gently over and kissed her on the cheek, like the sound of goodbye. Before she had decided what should be said, he turned and left the lab.

  What did Dr. L’Esperance say had gone wrong? She predicted the failure, but never said what it was. Had she sabotaged the mission? She could have. Eleanor thought she could have. She had never explained what she was doing in the intel archives.

  Eleanor looked around the lab for answers, which was futile and she knew it. She tried to think. She placed her cool fingertips on the keypad of the main terminal again, but repetition of the code was useless. The error screen would not disappear. What was the acceptable time span for error? She had already passed it. Of that much she felt certain, she had already passed it.

  Even if she kn
ew how to retrace steps and repair the error, the timeframe was fragile. She had lost her opportunity of ever turning it around.

  Damn her, she thought, sure that Dr. L’Esperance had done something to scuttle the mission for her own purposes. Now she was in conference with General English, who had asked her to go with him. Perhaps they were with the Committee, and that man. Who was that man? Part of Dr. Ford’s military conspiracy theory? Cassius. No staunch ally to ever defend her, yet she could not blame him. Survival of the fittest. It came down to that, just as he said it would be.

  She sat back away from the monitor and stared helplessly at it. She glanced with dread at the empty chamber.

  John was lost.

  Eleanor sat up. Dr. L’Esperance said as much. You lost him, she had said. For the first time, she thought of him.

  Where was he? Could he have been caught in some partial time vortex, or did he remain in Britannia at the crucial point? She did not know. There would be no getting him back. She would never know.

  Cassius had said Moore was capable, and the failure of the mission allowed for the military theorists not to capitalize on the project. Dr. L’Esperance said something else. She wanted him back, to foil the militarists by saving the mission and turning the findings over to the public. Who was right, or were they both merely guessing, or dressing up what was for each really only a self-serving plot? She trusted no one now.

  But, Moore was gone. Of that much she was certain. There were too many other variables as to the why and right and wrong of it, she did not know what was for the best. She did know she failed, that her failure might cost her career, as Dr. L’Esperance predicted. It certainly cost Moore his life.

  She rubbed her hands slowly together, and stuffed them in the pockets of her lab coat. John was lost. She had done it.

  The door handle clicked, and someone entered her lab. For the moment, it was still her lab, but it probably would not be for long. She expected to hear the voice of disciplinary measures, even held out for the vague possibility of offered words of comfort. There were neither.

  “Eleanor,” Dr. L’Esperance said, “Will you let me help you now?”

  Eleanor turned and faced her, spitting invective and fury. Dr. L’Esperance only watched her with apparent curiosity.

  “What did you do? What did you do to ruin it?” Eleanor nearly shrieked her words.

  “Nothing.”

  “You scuttled my project. You said it would fail, and you made it happen.”

  “I did not,” Dr. L’Esperance replied with her calm, soothing attitude of motherly understanding that made Eleanor want to strangle her.

  “Then if you didn’t, what in holy hell makes you think you can fix it now? Do you think you are that much more an accomplished metaphysicist than I am? I have credentials to fill this room.”

  “I’ve already told you I am a great admirer of your work.”

  “From the future?” she scoffed.

  “As I’ve said.”

  Eleanor began to pace the room. Dr. L’Esperance placed her hand on Eleanor’s shoulder, but Eleanor squirmed away from her touch.

  “Assuming Colonel Moore was in the right place, the error involves the celestial wobble, which you did not calculate properly.” Dr. L’Esperance said.

  “I did.”

  “No. You assumed the wobble was a full rotation. It was not.”

  Eleanor stopped and stared at her.

  “Based on what?”

  “A similar anomaly at the turn of my millennium. It makes time travel back several thousand years impossible from my era. We need to first hit this location, and booster back from here, factoring in the half wobble.”

  Eleanor swore, swiped her hand through her hair and looked at Dr. L’Esperance again.

  “I have no way to work that out. Not with the information I have. It will take me weeks to come up with a model.”

  “I can do it for you now.”

  Eleanor considered her.

  “Oh yes, you can do anything. That’s convenient. Why would you want to help me?”

  “For all the reasons I stated earlier. This isn’t personal, Eleanor.”

  “It’s always personal,” she muttered, and stole a glance at the empty module again.

  “Look, Doctor, Colonel Moore is past the moment of opportunity. I couldn’t get him back now even if you had a model to correct the problem. It’s over. I’ve lost him. I’ve lost him as you said I would.”

  “There is a possibility,” Dr. L’Esperance said, “one we use frequently in my time. I’ve told you. A Retriever. Someone carrying a device to piggy-back the electromagnetic waves.”

  “Do you mean Milly?”

  “Milly has her job here. No, the only one who can go with the proper magnetic devise to retrieve him is you.”

  “Good lord, what are you talking about?!” Eleanor folded her white lab coat arms and longed for self possession to return.

  “I cannot go, Eleanor. I am needed here to run the patch program. Only I can do that. Besides, my darker skin would make it difficult for me to travel in anonymity in Britannia at that time. You are fair. You know the mission. You know Colonel Moore. Only you can do this.”

  “I can’t do this!” Eleanor’s voice shook, “I’m not a field operative. I’m an administrator, a scientist. A theorist. I have no qualifications that would even keep me alive in that place and time, let alone accomplish the mission to retrieve Colonel Moore!”

  “Nevertheless, you are the only one who can go.”

  “We can get a female operative to do it. I’ll call….”

  “We can’t. There is no time for preparation. And besides, we would have to officially requisition an operative, and it would be known that I helped you. How much longer would it take for word to get out that I am from the future, something we must guard against, Eleanor.”

  Eleanor slowly lowered herself to the metal stool at her workstation. She looked as if she had been given a death sentence, and quietly realized that had always been her biggest fear, from the earliest time she could recall the sea rising and the earthquake take her town as a child. She thought such realizations early in her life had made her fatalistic, but they had really only left her terrorized, and fear was her personal key to survival. She had not loved life as much as she feared death.

  “You must decide, I think, what is most important to you now,” Dr. L’Esperance spoke gently, “your survival on this mission, or your survival here in your own time. At least you have a choice when and where to make a stand. So many do not.”

  “How…how would I even find him?” Eleanor’s weak voice sounded like a gasp.

  “If he intentionally moved from his position, you likely will not. Although why he might intentionally move, I could not begin to say. It would certainly be illogical for him to do that. If he was killed already, you likely will not find his body. If he is alive and the battle is over, it is probable he was captured.”

  “Probable. Improbable.” Eleanor muttered, hugging herself.

  “These are the tools of our trade, Eleanor.”

  “I know that.” The tools of our trade. The knives in our drawer.

  “I would send you therefore to the south, to the region where the captives would be collected. That is our best chance, if he survived.”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “Your protection is that you will go as a Roman noblewoman, perhaps adopting the persona of a wealthy merchant’s wife. In your quest for a suitable slave, you will be allowed near the closure of the captives. If you see Colonel Moore, you need only grasp his hand or touch his body in some place and activate the device, which sends the signal here. Once I have you tracked, I’ll reverse the magnetic process and return you both. I will of course first need to amply your equipment.”

  “Amplify?”

  “The devices we use in my time are much more powerful, and faster. I’m afraid your system setup is not always as accurate, and I rather think the coarse amplification of forces
must indeed be harsher on the time traveler than my contemporaries are used to.”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “You need only touch him….”

  “I’m afraid. I mean…I’m afraid.”

  Dr. L’Esperance touched the communicator, and in a moment Milly entered the lab. Dr. L’Esperance gave her a warm smile and gestured for her to approach. In low tones she gave Milly new orders, as they both stole glances at Eleanor, who watched them closely, apprehensively, trying to see them with new eyes as two women from nearly a thousand years into the future. They did not seem any different in form or gesture than anyone she knew, except that there was a look of serenity in them both, telegraphed by every neat, careful move and gentle tilt of the head. They were both placid. Milly left.

  “How long have you known her?” Eleanor asked.

  “Ten or eleven years, I should think. We work together.”

  “Milly is also quite tall,” Eleanor observed wearily, feeling inclined to make such irrelevant observations because the real issues at hand were too frightening to discuss, “I had never noticed because she is usually sitting down. Or leaning over a desk, or stooping to pick up something. She stood almost eye-to-eye with you. You’re quite tall, Dr. L’Esperance.”

  “Compared to you,” she smiled, “but my height is quite average in my era. Evolution and a diet more rich in animal protein than to what you are accustomed would account for taller, more muscular individuals.”

  “You eat a lot of meat?”

  “Yes. Arable land has diminished greatly, but biogenetics in domestic livestock has increased food supply with new breeding techniques.”

  “I see,” she said, not really thinking about it.

  “Milly is going to use her resources to procure a suitable guise for you.”

  “Clothes?” Eleanor asked, her stomach beginning to churn.

  “Yes,” Dr. L’Esperance said, turning her attention from Eleanor’s anxiety to the terminals. She approached Eleanor’s workstation, pausing thoughtfully and scratching her smooth cheek with long, glossy nails, as she thought through the process on behalf of the slower computer in front of her. Eleanor watched her. She wished Dr. Ford were here. She wished she could tell him of all this, get his opinion, and hear him dismiss her suspicions, and her fears, as ludicrous.