by John Barnes
When the bucket reached the top, before I quite took a drink, I caught sight of my reflection. There were still blood smears everywhere, and a feather or two that I hadn’t brushed off. My hair was a tangled, uncombable mess, and where the nanos had rebuilt skin on my face they had also caused big tufts of whiskers to grow out. And I was so happy to be alive, and feeling well, that I was grinning like a complete idiot.
“That’s Mister Geek to you,” I told my reflection.
-9-
It wasn’t so much knowing how to get to New York that was the problem—after all, I was on Long Island, on the side facing the Sound, with the water a scant few hundred yards off. All I had to do was face the water, turn left, start walking, and keep walking.
My guess was that the John Locke had blown up at about 3:45 in the morning, local time, and since it was due into port at about 5:30 A.M., I was probably thirty miles, as the crow flew, from Manhattan, which was all there was of New York at the time—the whole settled area was what’s just Lower Manhattan today, Greenwich was not only still a village, but it was separated from town by farms, and the other boroughs were pretty much farmland and little villages. According to the information they’d dumped into me, in this timeline Boston was not only still the biggest city in the Thirteen Colonies, but would stay bigger longer. The faster things grow, the more they concentrate near pre-existing sites, and thus it would probably not be until the middle of the next century that New York would become America’s largest city.
All of which meant that there weren’t going to be any buses or trains along soon, and even when I got to Brooklyn I would probably have to wait a while for a ferry.
That put me in mind of another problem, and I checked my coat pocket. I still had the purse of silver and copper coins, and there was enough in there to get me food, lodging, and a ferry if I was careful. It would be nice to afford new boots as well, but maybe Morris would be able to lend me a pair or to extend a loan …
It did seem pretty bizarre that with the resources of almost two million Earths, the ATN was borrowing petty cash from private citizens. Maybe I could do something to get everyone reimbursed. …
If your feet have ever been in shape for barefoot walking, you know there’s still a limit to how much of it you can do. After seven or eight miles, I was getting footsore and, moreover, skirting around villages was getting to be a hassle. I figured I was far enough away, and my clothes were at least dry, so that people wouldn’t immediately wonder if I’d been on the Locke.
I was in luck; the next place along the road, a little tavern called the Dog and Pony, had fresh bread and sausage and decent beer for not too much, and was willing enough to let a traveler sleep in the yard for part of the afternoon. I got fed and rested, borrowed a scissors, and trimmed my nails. For a copper coin I rented a basin and razor and made myself all but presentable; if I had just had shoes and stockings, I might merely look like I needed new clothes.
The owner was a little surly guy who didn’t seem to have the slightest curiosity about me; as I finished another beer for the road, and was tucking some bread, cheese, and sausage into one of the coat’s big pockets for later, though, he asked, “You’ll be going up to New York Island, then?”
“I will,” I said. “I’ve friends with money up there.”
“If you don’t mind working your way, the stage is coming, and I know they’ll have need for a porter; bunch of folks swum to shore up the coast after the boiler blew on that John Locke yesterday, and the money to pay the passage for the rich folks just went by t’other way this morning. I know Fat Richard that drives the stage is short a porter-boy, for his usual one broke an ankle, and with so many well-off folks, even if not much floated to the shore, there’s bound to be need for a porter-boy coming back, especially what with some of them bound to be injured.”
“That’s a great opportunity,” I said. “How soon do you expect him?”
“I expected Fat Richard an hour ago. That means he either broke a wheel and won’t be here today, or more likely he was held up getting all the quality-folk”—he said quality-folk the way my father used to say terrorists—“into that stage, with them all fussing and some of them hurt and wanting special arrangements.”
I nodded. “So it might be worth waiting around for an hour.”
“Aye. And if you’d like to dig up a potato bed for me, I have an old pair of boots you might have for it, that I think would fit you.”
We checked, the boots fit, and I got to work on that stony patch of ground. One nice thing about the times, there was no paperwork to fill out, and if you weren’t fussy, there was at least some kind of work. I remembered reading that it was only after the Civil War that it could be proved that anyone ever starved to death during an economic depression in America; before that the countryside was always close, and most people could do enough work to get themselves a space in the barn and a little food.
When the stage pulled up it was the silliest-looking contraption I’d ever seen. Luc had introduced vulcanized rubber to this timeline a while back, so it had inflated tires with wooden spokes, like what you see on old Ford Model T’s in our timeline. That meant a lot of the shock from the bumpy, rutted road was being taken up by the undercarriage, and to make that work in turn there was an elaborate double system of springs, much more complex than on any old-movie stagecoach, with individually pivoting and counterweighted arms rather than axles. So from the wheels up through the suspension it looked like a moon buggy.
Above that it got weird. The passenger compartment was small and looked like it was about half the size it should have been for the wheelbase; it was shaped like a can of ham lying on its side, and held on to that silly suspension with a system of guy wires, as far as I could tell.
In front of this thing was what looked, more than anything else, like a bicycle built for four, or two bicycles built for two welded together side by side, in which each front cyclist pedaled the front wheel directly, like the way a kid’s tricycle works, and each back cyclist pedaled the back wheel directly. All four of them sat way back, so that the rear cyclists had their heads only a couple of feet from the front of the stagecoach behind them.
Or, I realized, three cyclists. The rear seat opposite me wasn’t taken. And just as abruptly I realized what the other duty of a porter-boy must be. Well, I didn’t mind working, and it beat walking for speed if not for ease.
A few minutes later introductions got made. The guy on the left front was Richard, “driver, captain, and company man,” as he described himself. He was fat only by comparison with the other two, and I’d actually have said he was just muscular. I suppose it’s all relative.
I sat behind him. The one who sat on his right was Abel, the guard, who had a short carbine strapped over his shoulder and a pistol at his belt. To my right was Seth, the conductor, who grinned at me as we got onto the seats; there had been the minor task of carrying one man with a broken, splinted leg to the outhouse and back, but there was no one getting on or off at the Dog and Pony, so I didn’t have to load any additional bags.
“It’s a clever porter that signs on where the guests have lost their luggage,” Seth said.
I smiled back at him. “Except for some work on my legs, I think of this as a free ride.”
“Wait till we climb that hill down yonder, from Whitstown to Flushing. That’s when you’ll see how free this was!”
I nodded and laughed, and then the driver said, “All right, now, gentlemen … we’re all introduced, our passengers are all aboard … now, porter-boy, Strang, have y’ever did this here before?”
“Not at all.”
“Right, then you’re as fitted to the work as Abel here and better than Seth, for him’s learned it wrong. Y’see where my left foot is here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, now you see where your own is. And see that your own comes back to that place when mine comes back. Not just afore, not just after, and not pritnear, and if y’do get it wrong—and ye
will, ye will, ye’ve these two t’show you how to get it wrong—don’t you try to catch it up, but take your new mark and mind you keep it where it is.”
“Got it, sir.”
“But will y’do it?”
“I’ll try.”
“That’s what I was afraid of hearing, ye’re just like the others.”
“We ain’t moving at all while we talk, Richard,” Seth said.
“True enough. And … one, two, stroke.”
If you’ve ever ridden a bicycle built for two, you’ve got an idea of what this is like; your legs work pretty hard and it takes a while to get in sync so that you’re pushing forward but not doing all the pushing. This was both easier and harder—harder to stay on Richard’s beat, but much easier to tell when you were off it. In half a mile or so, I wasn’t exactly an old hand, and I could tell my muscles would complain later, but I was pulling my own weight and then some, and we were clipping along at something like four miles an hour or better.
The other men settled into the rhythm comfortably, once it became clear I wasn’t going to be impossible, and soon we were bouncing along that dirt road, the little scoop seat at my back thumping my butt, the pedals pushing against my legs but not painfully hard. I could probably, if I’d had a decent pair of running shoes, have run the distance in a bit less time, with maybe a little less overall effort, but it was interesting, anyway, to see the little villages roll by and to swing by the occasional farmer out doing his spring plowing.
I even saw one steam tractor, an immense chugging thing that slowly crawled across the field on big steel rims, which got everyone talking for half an hour; Seth and Richard were very much in agreement that it was the wave of the future, that with steam you could plow deeper and faster, and so forth, but Abel inclined to the view that the horse was cheaper, oats grew faster than wood, steam tractors did not make more steam tractors, and anyway no one had proved to him that plowing deeper really brought that much more wheat.
“You’ve all got strong views on it,” I noted. “Are you all from farming families?”
“Aye, each of us,” Seth said. “Alike as can be in that way. We’re all third or fourth sons, there was no more land to take us, and the frontier is a long way away. Oh, we dream about it, but mostly we work. The pay’s good, and the Flushing Line is a good outfit, you know, and so it’s not so easy to decide to pack it all up and head for Ohio or Kentucky. Nothing keeping us here but decent pay, but that’s a lot, especially when a man’s got a family.”
In my timeline, there had been almost no settlements across the mountains yet, and many people who weren’t in line to inherit a farm had been angry about the frontier being closed to them. It occurred to me that even after the Revolution, only a tiny minority of people had ever packed up from settled regions and moved west; the only difference in this timeline—but it made a big difference in terms of peace and quiet!—was that the normal force of family and community, and not the authority of the state, was perceived as holding people back.
I wondered what was happening to the Indian nations, and whether they’d get any better deal out of it this time. Supposedly there were going to be treaties of alliance and development and all that, but the fact was ATN was in a war, they wanted timelines to develop fast economically and technically because more sophisticated timelines made better allies, and people who just wanted to live the way they had been living tended to get stomped flat.
We claimed we had allies who had joined ATN while still in the Stone Age, but the truth was that once we found them, they didn’t stay Stone Age long. And even now teams were jumping farther and farther back into the past, despite the enormous expense, to get industrial civilization going earlier and earlier in more and more timelines, and thus to create allies who were ever more advanced in science and technology up at the 2700s A.D., where the fighting was going on.
That meant that if you were, say, a Polynesian in 800 A.D., in any of billions of timelines, with hardly any risk at all that the Closers would attack your timeline in your lifetime … you were not necessarily made better off when ATN agents showed up and leapfrogged Japan into the Industrial Revolution, bringing steamships out to the South Pacific hundreds of years early. Very likely you died of disease, or you quite possibly got shot by not-yet-fully-culturally-sensitive Japanese, or failing all that, anyway, a pleasant life went out the window.
I wondered just how much good we actually did …
I also wondered why I was having such thoughts. I figured it must be partly having the luxury for thought—these were not guys who talked a lot unless there was something to talk about, the work was repetitive and strenuous but not killing if you were in shape, and so I had my mind and eyes free. It was a nice spring day, and those are the best kinds of days to be outside with nothing to think about that has any immediate relevance.
The villages were getting larger as we got farther south and west, and the country was more settled. In a little while we had reached the point where there were no more woods between the farms, as such, just one farm after another shading into villages and back to farmland, and the road was actually a little crowded—that is, there were people, wagons, pedal stages like ours, and so fordi in sight all the time. I took a deep breath at that; it occurred to me that my counterpart was out there somewhere, and that given that he was me he’d not believe I was dead until he saw the body. Therefore, he’d be looking for me, just as I was for him, and whichever of us saw the other first would have the advantage.
The hill outside Whitstown, leading up to Flushing, was everything Seth had implied it would be. When you push a wheel directly with pedals, if there’s any resistance at all, the resistance has all the leverage. For my own sour amusement I started to figure it out. … The stage behind us probably weighed 1500 pounds loaded, we and the pedal gadget probably 850, and on a 5 percent grade like this that worked out to probably (near as made no difference) a backward drag of maybe 120 pounds. Okay, so each of us has one foot pushing at any given time, thirty pounds against the foot—except the wheel multiplies it. If the pedal radius was about half the wheel radius, that would come to—
“I worked it out once,” Seth said, “and I make it that we’re pushing sixty pounds on a stroke.”
Well, he’d had more than one chance to do this, I thought to myself. Richard said, “Just hold your stroke as even as you can; this part is where ye earn your pay. And remember at least ye won’t get pedal-kicked as we do comin’ down.”
The push went on for quite a while, but there was a reward I wasn’t expecting at the top of it; I had wondered why everyone was emphasizing getting to Flushing, and I hadn’t realized that it was the end of the line. As we neared the top I saw that the woodsmoke marking the clear spring sky was not from a village, but from a power plant, and that there was a traction line starting from here.
I still had all the bag unloading to do, but all it was was work, and Seth, as conductor, helped a little. Besides, a coach full of shipwreck victims doesn’t have a lot of bags and certainly doesn’t have anything very heavy.
The passengers inside the coach were pretty quiet—not surprisingly, since I’m sure many of them were still in shock. Three were injured badly enough to need carrying, and that was the toughest part of the job, not so much for the weight as the caution I had to put into it.
“You’re good with the public,” Seth observed. “Stick with work like this, and you might make conductor some day—though it’s not so easy as it looks.”
I grinned. “I’ve other business, but it’s good to know I could take this up. Though I doubt I’d make conductor quickly—it looks like there’s a lot to learn.” No matter where you go or when you go, you’ll never give offense by telling a guy his job looks difficult.
“Well, that’s what Richard told me when I was a porter-boy and he was a conductor,” Seth said, grinning. “Good luck wherever you’re bound.”
By now it was almost dark, but there was still a seat on a passenger car
just starting out on the traction line, so I rolled into Brooklyn that evening just as it got dark. A quick walk down by the wharf assured me that the ferry would start again at first light and told me how much cash I had to hang on to to get across to Manhattan; there was enough left for a bed and two meals at a tavern nearby, though if I’d had anything worth stealing that I couldn’t keep under me, I’d have thought a long time before staying there. As it was, the fleas attacked pretty fiercely at first, but I was so tired that it didn’t matter to me, until morning anyway.
Breakfast was a big bowl of boiled potatoes and beef, plus all the corn bread I could cram in, which was quite a bit—the nanos had presumably expired, but I was still paying back the energy they had consumed.
It was chilly and gray but not raining when I walked down to the wharf and caught the ferry. The East River was as gray and flat as the sky, and there was no wind this morning, so we went over pretty quickly. Less than four hours after I’d gotten up, right about midmorning, I was on the wharf in Manhattan, completely broke and knowing only Morris’s address. It was even less impressive than my entrance into Boston. I hated to imagine what arriving in London would be like.
Well, nothing much to do for it; Morris, like most of the rich people, lived up higher and away from the water, so I started the short walk from the wharf up French Church Street to Broadway. There was more brick and stone than in Boston, and in general everything had an air of comfortable prosperity; I remembered that in my timeline Thomas Paine had said that the British moved the war to the Middle Colonies because there were more Tories there, and there were more Tories there because more men had more to lose. I could believe it, looking around me; here were thriving businesses, big new houses, all the signs of growing wealth in a city, and a lot fewer beggars than you would see on the same streets in my timeline. Hardly anything makes a city more attractive than enough work for everybody … I hoped that the progress we had created here would at least continue to provide that much.