A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  “I would wager it as a righteous certainty, yes ma'am. You have your hair out like a San Francisco harlot, and you are dressed in a fashion to excite attention you do not need.”

  Cady wanted to push back, hard. But she bit down on the feminist tract she was about to unload in his face, took a deep breath, and let it go in a long exasperated sigh.

  “Okay, let’s play the tutorial.”

  She watched him translate the phrase inside his head. It was like watching the gears grind in there.

  “Womenfolk round these parts, they just don't look like that,” he said, nodding at her outfit. She checked herself, up and down: boots, faded blue jeans, black tee shirt, black leather jacket, dark blue scarf knotted loosely around her neck. She was also wearing thermal underwear—it had been cold in Seattle—but nobody could see that.

  Cady supposed he had a point. Recalling the street scene she had spied through the window, the women all looked like extras in some bullshit Oliver Twist musical. They didn't look like Dickensian cosplayers; they were hard-core actual Dickens bitches. They all wore dark heavy dresses, with some kind of birdcage arrangement strapped to their asses under the folds of their depressingly drab Victorian hijabs.

  “Fine,” she said, doing her hair up in a loose bun. “Give me your hat.”

  “Well I don't know about—”

  “Just give me your hat, Smith.”

  He handed it over. It sat a little awkwardly on top of her bundled mass of hair, but it gave her a boyish appearance that would have to do for now. Cady was not frocking up or strapping herself into a corset. In the hat, she could at least try to pass for a teenaged boy.

  “Jesus Christ, we look like a couple of freaks,” she said. “Come on.”

  As soon as they left the small room, she could hear the roar of the crowd downstairs. It echoed up the bare wooden staircase at the end of the cramped and badly lit hallway. A man was asleep on the floor, legs splayed out in front of him. He looked like he'd wet his pants.

  “What is this place?” Cady asked.

  “A saloon, The Spotted Goose,” Smith told her. “Not the best and not the worst either. Needed a place to camp out where they wouldn't ask questions of a man carrying a woman over his shoulder.”

  That gave her something to think about as they trooped down the rickety staircase. The noise of the crowd grew louder and more intimidating as they descended.

  “How did you pay for the room?”

  “Some of Wu's gold.”

  He shook his head, dismissing the concern that appeared on her face.

  “Weren't much of a pebble. Still plenty more where that came from.”

  “You probably got ripped off,” she said as they turned onto the landing and descended the final set of steps. The scene that confronted her was a steampunk vision of fratboy hell. Although the marshal had told her it was late morning, the main hall of the tavern was already crowded and roaring with hundreds of men. Had she not already lost all of her dinner, vomited into the bedpan in the room upstairs, she would have painted the floor in front of her with it, so foul and overpowering was the stench. Hundreds of unwashed bodies, bad breath, cigarette and pipe smoke, rancid farts, and rotting food, all assaulted her sinuses. It was almost impossible to see across the room, so thick was the unfiltered fug of smoke.

  She had stopped dead at the sight and the stench and only started moving again when Smith took her by the elbow and dragged her along, using his own body as a battering ram to clear a path through the press of filthy drinkers. Their voices, their accents, it was all so harsh and alien that she had trouble understanding a word of it, although that was as much a matter of the volume as the dialect in which they spoke. She bumped into somebody, knocking half his drink out of the enormous, greasy glass he was clutching. A horrible face, a fright mask of bulging eyes and yellow, rotting teeth—what few there were of them—loomed up in front of her.

  “Eren't yer got no fuckin' eyes,” the man roared.

  He made a grab for her, his fingers brushing her breast, and she swatted his hand away.

  “Cor, that's a fuckin' bit of jam,” he shouted over the general uproar of the room and reached for her again. Smith's fist crashed into his face, and the man went flying into the rabble. Cady flinched and cried out, expecting a brawl to erupt and engulf them, but instead, only laughter and cruel mirth chased them through the room. Within a few steps, the heaving crowd had closed behind her and she lost sight of the man Smith had punched out.

  Cady had to clamp her free hand down on top of the marshal's hat to prevent it being knocked off and lost. Her other hand held onto his arm. She did not dare lose contact with him in this chaos. So tightly packed were the hundreds of drunken revelers that she was buffeted by pressure waves passing through the mob. More than once she had to struggle to stay on her feet. It was as bad as any mosh pit she’d ever been in. Smith kept them moving at a pace that prevented her being dragged under, but she became aware of more and more of the men beginning to focus on her. Strange curses and shouts followed them across the room. Hands pawed at her, first her shoulders, then all over her body.

  It was horrifying.

  And then it was over. The marshal shouldered through a pair of swinging doors and out onto the street. A new miasma of toxic odors rolled over her, but this was more redolent of a barnyard. Body odor and tobacco smoke gave way to horse manure, although they did not give way entirely. The sidewalk, such as it was, was not nearly as crowded as the tavern, but it still heaved with throngs of Londoners muscling their way past, and sometimes into, each other. There were more women out here, and she saw immediately that Smith had been right. She did not fit in.

  But he had also been mistaken in thinking they would stand out. The massed humanity on the streets of London seemed to have arrived from every corner of the globe. Perhaps it was their proximity to the docks. She had glimpsed the masts and funnels of hundreds of ships just a mile or two distant on the river, and although the locals were all of a sort—sallow faced, stoop shouldered, thin and loud—they did not have the city to themselves. London was the capital of an empire and it seemed that, if she cared to look, she could find amongst the throngs of poor English men and women visitors who had sailed up the Thames from every corner of the globe. In the first few moments after their escape from the tavern, Cady spied turbaned Sikhs, African-Americans, a Chinese man in a bright silk dressing gown, and an Arab-looking dude in a fez selling monkeys from a hand drawn cart full of bamboo cages.

  She had no time to stop and take in the menagerie. Smith propelled her along the street, gently but forcefully steering her away from the inn they had just left.

  “Thank you,” she said, meaning it. Her heart was still racing. “That was pretty intense. This is pretty intense. I didn't expect it to be like that. I just thought …”

  She trailed off because she didn't really know what she had thought. Did she really imagine a couple of hours spent in the open world of Ubisoft's digital London would prepare her for this monstrosity?

  “It is a helluva thing,” said Smith. He stayed within arm’s distance, shoving and knocking aside anybody who tried to get between them. It was like being escorted down a football field by the offensive tackle, a monster truck intent on ploughing through all opposition. The men here were crazy macho, stomping about like pro wrestlers on angry pills. She got used to it though, and even began threading aggressively through the crowd, like a salmon swimming upstream, but always staying close to her companion.

  “I was a goodly while finding my seat on this particular bronc,” Smith said as they passed around a crowd gathered outside a storefront where a carnival barker invited all comers to “witness the horrors of the Burmese Ape Woman.”

  “Have you been to London before?” she asked, quickly having to qualify the question, which sounded a lot dumber than it had in her head. “I meant, like, you know, the normal way?”

  They made it past the crowd outside the freak show—Cady assumed it was so
me sort of freak show—and crossed an intersection where a couple of alleys meandered away into a medieval-looking streetscape, which seemed even more crowded than the wider thoroughfare along which they were moving. The dogleg alleyways were thick with foot traffic. Small knots of window shoppers clustered around the sooty panes of stores, much to the irritation of men in top hats and women in flowered bonnets who waved umbrellas about as if to threaten a whipping. Cady craned her head around Smith's obscuring bulk to see what might have drawn such attention, but all she could see were a few small signs identifying the storefronts as bookshops.

  “I have passed through here twice before,” Smith said, distracting her from the scene, “but not as a conventional traveler, no. I laid low not far from here when everything was much smaller, but more dangerous. Another time, there was a war.”

  His voice was grim and he did not elaborate. Cady did not ask. Maybe he’d been here during the Blitz? He'd probably have trouble understanding it. Must have been terrifying.

  They made their way across the intersection, hurried along by the curses of a London bobby who blew a loud whistle and waved them out of the flow of traffic. For a city without motor vehicles, London's traffic still heaved and roared like a storm-tossed sea. There seemed no pattern she could recognize to the torrent of horse-drawn cabs, carts, and omnibuses. She was pretty sure that's what they were called, the double-decker carriages drawn by teams of horses which snorted and pissed and shat all over the cobbled road surface. Hooves and steel shod wheels trampled and mashed the droppings to a thick brown paste that lent the outdoor air the fetching bouquet of an industrialized sewage plant.

  “Come on,” said Smith. “Let's keep moving. This is your plan.”

  They walked for hours, but the day refused to grow brighter or warmer. In fact, Cady became convinced it was much later than Smith had said. The watery grey light of late autumn lost the timid luster it had enjoyed when they first emerged into the street, and she could feel the biting chill on her exposed skin as what little warmth remained of the day quickly leaked away.

  “Fog,” she said, at last. “Look.”

  They had been striding up a wide avenue, keeping to themselves, talking quietly. Smith looked up, his eyes following where Cady pointed.

  “Reckon as much,” he said. “Seen the like of it in San Francisco, too.”

  The city was disappearing, as though beneath a shroud. The Londoners seemed to pay it no heed, even though the fog bank was denser and heavier than anything she had known in Seattle, which was saying something. It had an evil color to it, a malarial yellow-green tinge, suggestive of pus and contagion. Cady could feel the cold leeching in through her leather jacket and even through the thermal top she wore beneath her tee shirt. Gas lamps were sparking to life, lit by swarming teams of men and boys with long tapers. The light was soft, even beautiful, a rare contrast with the seemingly infinite ugliness of the greater city.

  “What’s the time?” she asked Smith.

  He checked his mysterious pocket watch, holding onto her arm as he did so, presumably in case he twitched and winked away in time. The idea made her nervous. What if he triggered that thing while they weren't in contact?

  “It's gone a little after one o'clock,” he said. “Be getting dark in a few hours anyway, I reckon, this time of year. Best hurry on.”

  They resumed their journey. Cady's attention was torn between the gaudy, fascinating spectacle of late Victorian London and the information she was intent on getting out of Smith. He was not a stupid man. Far from it. She could tell he was possessed of a sharp native intelligence, and he was streetwise in a way she would never be, in spite of having played at living in a loft on the waterfront in a “bad” part of Seattle; “bad” meaning that property developers were at least six months away from making a killing on redeveloping the whole neighborhood.

  She wanted to know how many times he'd jumped.

  That was the term she'd settled on when he had nothing better. Only to be expected, Cady thought. She came from a time and had been raised in a culture a hundred years descended from H.G. Wells. As much as the reality of time travel had put the zap on her head, the idea of it was not inconceivable to Cady McCall. The theory of relativity was old news.

  So, she wanted to know, how many times had he “jumped.”

  “Can't rightly say, Miss Cady,” he said, his tone apologetic. “First couple of times, I did not know what was happening and I could not rightly say, at least once or twice, whether I made passage from one time and place to another or not. I may have passed from one dark wilderness to the next without being aware of it. I haven't always fetched up in places like this,” he said, waving one hand around to take in the city.

  They were moving from the slum district in which they had arrived, through a commercial area of warehouses and light factories. There were still tightly-packed residential neighborhoods surrounding the industrial estates, supplying the workers for the mills, but she thought the houses themselves were growing larger, less ramshackle. They were still obviously given over to slum housing, with many families living under the one roof, but the change in architecture seemed to speak to some progress in leaving the worst part of the city behind. Or at least, she assumed it was the worst part.

  “Try to remember, Marshal. It's important. To get home, we have to figure out how this thing works. It's a piece of technology, the watch, the machine. It has gears and sprockets and little wheels inside. They're doing something weird, but they will be doing it according to a set of rules. I can work those rules out. I'm sure of it. It's like code. You just have to understand the language and apply the rules. So think. How many times have you jumped? If you recognized the time and place, that would be good to know. And if you even half suspect you see a pattern in the way you've moved around, that would be even better.”

  The fog was rolling in so heavily it had become an almost physical presence by then. It muted the sound of the city. The clip-clop of hooves, the squeak of carriage wheels and somewhere in the distance, the blast of a steam engine whistle, all felt much more distant than the earlier clamor of the day. Millions of people were still constantly in movement around them, though. If anything the traffic grew worse, slowing to something less than walking pace in the impenetrable thickness of the cold and sickly pall.

  Smith had taken hold of her again, but there was nothing creepy or douchey about it. Cady was glad to feel his strong hand gently wrapped around her upper arm. She did not want to be separated from him and trapped in this fairytale hellhole.

  9

  Whenever they had to ask for directions, which was frequently, Cady let Smith do the talking. He seemed comfortable with the locals, which made sense. He wasn't that different from them. She didn't trust herself not to say something stupid. When possible, he sought information from uniformed police officers, bobbies, dressed in capes and those stupid little hats they wore. They invariably asked him about his sheriff's badge, or marshal's star, whatever it was, and he told them he was with a traveling Wild West show. It never failed to impress and endear.

  Mostly, though, he simply asked some street hawker or dark-coated gentlemen in a top hat. Employing this pathfinding technique, they moved slowly toward the old center of the city, which was now barely visible around them. Cady was very hungry and starting to shiver with the cold, but there was nothing they could do until they cashed up. Smith still had a handful of Wu's gold, and she intended to get as much value out of it as she could before he frittered it all away.

  Between these occasional stops to ask for directions, she interrogated him about his movements and the watch. She would make proper notes later on, but for now, as best she could tell, he had jumped at least two dozen times, moving up and down the timeline, even landing somewhere that sounded like the far future.

  “Found myself in a city,” he said, “but not like this.” The marshal waved a hand to take in the city, and the fog was so thick it was as though he had stirred a thick pea soup with a
big wooden ladle. “Weren't no one living in the city,” he explained. “It was mostly flooded. Looked like it had been that way for a long time. Most of the buildings, they were empty, some of them toppled over, but I do declare, when they were built you could have plucked the stars from heaven away up on the highest of them.”

  They had come to a large roundabout where the traffic had ground to a halt. Unseen carriage drivers cracked whips and cursed at each other. Bells clanged on horse-drawn vehicles, and pedestrians threaded their way through the misty chaos, ignoring abuse from the drivers and the warnings of a single, overwhelmed police officer who feebly blew on a whistle while Cady and Smith worked their way around the tangle.

  The pavement, which had been laid down in cement or slabs of stone or something, gave way to a long stretch of broken gravel. It was muddy underfoot and sucked at her boots as she trudged through the mire. One benefit of the all concealing fog was the cover it afforded them as they made their way through the crush of foot traffic. People loomed up out of the mist and disappeared back into it in mere moments.

  “Have you taken any baseline measurements, done any testing to benchmark outcomes and compare … “

  She could see from his expression that he had not, or more likely that he had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I am a practical man, Miss Cady,” Smith said, “but I am no professor of mechanics. Nor did I spend much of my school days with my head in the history books. I'm afraid I just cannot answer what I take to be your questions.”

  The pavement resumed, and with it, the clicking of ladies’ heels and the crunch of gentlemen's boots on the solid footpath. She was almost dizzy with hunger.

  “You're right, sorry. It was a stupid question.”

  “No, ma'am. It was a good question. It gives me some hope that you may be possessed of the wherewithal to untangle this knot. I spent some days in the era from which you hail, and although much of it was vexing to me, I did notice that your womenfolk are not backward in pushing themselves to the fore and claiming those ranks and privileges previously reserved only for their brothers and fathers. I wonder, then, are you some kind of learned mechanic or even a professor of the scientific arts?”