A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

“What was that? Some kind of reflection? Or echo or something?”

  “Can’t rightly say, ma’am. Never seen that or the like of it a’fore.”

  She shuddered as though feeling the same queer sense of revulsion Smith had just experienced. It passed and he saw the young woman gather her resolve.

  “Right. When we leave next time, we leave from here and we wind the watch back by one minute on the hour. As soon as the twenty-four hours are up.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You care to share your thinkin' on why?”

  She stood up from where she'd made the small tower of rocks. Her knees were slightly muddy and she slapped away the wet dirt.

  “My thinking,” she said, “is still pretty basic, but here's a basic thought. You wind the watch forward to go forward in time. You wind it back to go back? Sound reasonable?”

  He considered it.

  “I believe you may be onto something, ma'am,” he said. “Can't say as I have applied myself in any regularized fashion to such a formula. For a good long time I had not the foggiest idea of what was happening or even what role Mr. Wu's damned watch played in it, if you will excuse my cussing.”

  She afforded him a thin, strained smile that would have to make do as regards her forgiveness.

  “I can't promise it'll help, Smith,” she said. “We might try this on the next jump, and still end up explaining ourselves to Starfleet or running away from hungry dinosaurs. But that thing only seems to have two control mechanisms.” She nodded at the watch in his vest coat pocket. “The hour hand and the crown. It's a pretty simple UI. Let's try the simplest affordances first. See where it gets us.”

  His comprehension of her meaning, the translation of the unfamiliar terms, seemed almost instant here. He knew what she meant by UI and affordances, even though he had never heard those words used in such a fashion before. Starfleet, too, he understood, as the name of fictitious space mariners from a story set in the far future, out among the stars. The watch told him so, but it helped that he'd been there as well.

  They were nearly ten minutes walking to the gas station. Two horseless wagons happened past in that time, neither of them stopping or even slowing to offer a ride. Smith had some experience with these “cars” now. He could not drive one of course, and he had not yet ridden in one of the machines, but he was past jumping out of his skin when he encountered them. Miss Cady, naturally, thought nothing of the remarkable contraptions, cursing the two that passed by only because the drivers refused to pull over and allow them to climb aboard.

  The stretch of road curved gently, but not so far that they ever lost sight of the small, single building toward which they walked. A gas station, it was called. A version of the stations where he had stopped for a fresh mount and supplies back in the Territories. The night was warmer than the cold, fog bound evening they had left behind in London, but it was still uncomfortably chilly, and once or twice, he felt light drizzle falling.

  Miss Cady fell silent for some time after the unsettling experience of first seeing themselves, and then seeing themselves disappear into nothingness. Smith was willing to wager that she was lost in her thoughts on the significance of the matter, and for his part he was content to allow the young woman her ruminations undisturbed. It had taken her mind off the awful scare they'd had back in London and the terrible fate that had almost certainly befallen the couple she had befriended.

  For his part, Titanic Smith had learned not to make friends during this whole forsaken misadventure. Such connections rarely broke even or well. Indeed, Miss Cady was the first person with whom he had even spoken for the better part of two weeks, other than brief exchanges to effect some necessary transaction while securing supplies or to seek information. Two weeks and many hundreds, possibly thousands of years. He had only intervened to protect her when the apprentices who had been tracking him suddenly turned their malign attentions to her. And having drawn her into a hell of his own making, how could he abandon her to whatever fate awaited the poor girl in the London of her past? It was a revelation and a blessed mercy to him that she had proved out so strangely well-educated on matters scientific and even resourceful on matters of a more practical nature.

  It was no inconvenience, either, that she was right pretty to behold, even if immodestly dressed and somewhat difficult of temperament. Smith was man enough to confess that she had adapted to her situation noticeably quicker then he to his, and unlike him, Miss Cady seemed to have the scholarship required to apply some manner of method to unraveling their troubles.

  A persistent drizzle settled over them as they reached the station. Signage proclaimed it a ‘Texaco’. It was so very different from the remote depots and commissaries of his time, and yet there hung about it the same funereal lonesomeness. He fell in behind the local girl as she navigated her way through the mysterious installations and equipage of the place. But he also readjusted his grip on their travelling baggage to allow him rapid ease of access to his weapons. In Marshal Smith's experience, often as not, men were like to fetch up hard and angry against each other in a frontier terminus such as this.

  “Just be cool,” said Miss Cady as she pushed through the glass door into the harsh, white light of the building's interior. Everything smelled wrong to Smith, but then, everything always did in these places where he was not meant to be.

  A bell rang over the door, taking him back to Fort Smith, where Thompson's General Store had enjoyed an identical convenience. But the man behind the counter was no Thurgood Thompson. He looked to be an Indian, in the original sense of the word. A dark skinned fellow with a towel wrapped around his melon. He was reading a book, making notes in the margins, and his tired watery eyes regarded them with blank indifference.

  Miss Cady walked down an aisle piled high with brightly colored foodstuffs. Some of them he recognized as cookies and the sort of sweet treats a lucky child might find under a Christmas tree. A good deal of the merchandise was a complete mystery to him, but not as much of a mystery as the strange machine to which his travelling companion addressed herself. First, she fetched out her wallet, and then, from the wallet, a small rectangle of hard, brightly colored material. It looked to be about the size of a calling card. She fed it to the machine, which appeared to wake up at the prospect of the meal.

  Smith watched as the young woman did something akin to playing a pianola, eliciting from the contraption a series of strange sounds. The next sound, which emerged from her, was even stranger and more unexpected. A series of curse words so voluble and foul he might not have expected to hear them from the worst sort of degenerate.

  “Is there something wrong, ma'am?” Smith asked, and she surprised him again by laughing.

  “Are you kidding me?” she laughed again. “No, nothing is wrong. In fact I think we got our first lucky break.”

  She held up a handful of banknotes, fanning them out like a card sharp on a paddle steamer.

  “I'm rich,” she said. “Like, crazy stupid rich.”

  She was shaking her head as though to deny it.

  “I didn't know if my card would even work. I didn't…”

  Another thought occurred to her, and she lost interest in explaining herself to him.

  “Hey,” she called out to the shopkeeper. “Hey, man, what's the date today?”

  The attendant lifted his bloodshot gaze away from the book he was annotating and stared at her as though he did not understand. Smith wondered if he spoke English. Miss Cady folded away her money and the magical card which had conjured it up from the strange machine. She put both in her wallet, which she carried in the pocket of her tight fitting dungarees.

  “The date?” she said again, then, “Don't worry.”

  Instead she plucked a magazine from a rack, drawing Smith's attention to it for the first time. He hadn't noticed the display in amongst the visual clutter of all the unfamiliar color and merchandise. His eyes went wide. More than half of the publications decried from their lurid covers the most confronting filth he had ever
seen. It was a world away from the illicit reading matter they had spied back in London. Here, no quarter was given when giving offense. Smith actually stepped back into the shelves on the opposite side of the aisle, as though recoiling from a rabid dog.

  “Thunderation!”

  “This the latest copy?” he heard Miss Cady ask, as she waved one of the few periodicals not explicitly given over to depravity.

  It was entitled Who Weekly.

  “Yes, just in yesterday,” the clerk assured her. He spoke with a natural American voice, at odds with the dark tint of his skin and the alien cast of his features.

  She placed the journal back amidst the smut without so much as a blush. She noticed his discomfort and snorted with amusement.

  “Don't pretend you haven't done worse,” she said. “I've seen Deadwood.”

  Miss Cady's demeanor had passed from shock and distress into something more adjacent to excitement. She took a small utensil from a rack next to the journals. It was encased in a hardened see-through shell of the wrapping material you saw everywhere at this place and time.

  Plastic, as he recalled.

  “I'll take the phone and whatever SIM you got with the most data on it,” she said. “And if you could open up the blister pack for me, that'd be awesome.”

  Their transaction occupied the next few minutes, with Miss Cady asking a series of questions which could only be related to her new ‘phone’, a sort of personal, walking-around telegraph apparatus. He had seen their like in a number of times and places, but knew himself no more qualified to operate a phone than he was to control one of the horseless carriages. He had even seen the “cars” driving themselves around at one time and another—in a year far into Miss Cady's future, he presumed—but he had not the courage to climb on board for a ride. It was like this everywhere he went.

  So much of his energy and concentration was devoted to avoiding catastrophe in the pursuit of the most simple aims, such as finding food and shelter, that he had not dared experiment with the local conveniences, lest they bring him undone. This was as true of his travels into the distant past as it was when he found himself adrift many years from now.

  “Come on, Smith,” Miss Cady said, her business done. She waved the phone at him. “We're catching a cab to my place. There's no Ubers anywhere out here.”

  Again, now that they were back in her native time and place, the translation of her meaning was instantaneous.

  They were to take carriage to Miss Cady's lodgings.

  17

  The accommodations were more pleasant inside the station, but Smith understood the reason why she had them wait outside in the cold rain. Their conversation would have drawn the attention of the shop clerk by reason of its insanity.

  “We overshot by two and a bit years,” she said. “We landed in February 2019 and about fifteen miles from where you time-tunneled us back to London. But, that's pretty good for my first spin at the wheel of the TARDIS, don't you think?”

  “It is remarkable, Miss Cady,” he said. “I don't cotton how you achieved such an end. I just been jumping around like a steer with a freshly-branded behind.”

  “Like I said,” she explained, or tried to, “I just broke down the affordances on the user interface and worked backwards from there. Not perfect. We're still in the wrong place and time. But this is a hell of a lot better than hanging out with Queen Victoria. We can do this, Smith,” she said, her voice bright with hope as she slapped him on the back in a remarkably mannish way, “I'm gonna get home, and you're gonna get home, and I think we can even restart the level with Gracie and Bertie.”

  The marshal nodded without conviction as he took in what she was saying and what all the strange words meant. She had certainly proved herself more adept than he at winkling out the correct usage of the Chinaman's watch, but she seemed to be discounting the interference of its guardians, the apprentices. They had not taken kindly to his employing the magical chronometer, and he did not imagine for a second they would approve of her gaining mastery over it. But Miss Cady was so transported by the success of her experiment and the theory behind it that Smith was not inclined to discourage her.

  “So, we have twenty-four hours until we can try again,” she said, thinking out aloud, “or a bit less I guess. What's the time now?”

  He started to reach for the watch, but instead she consulted her phone, which turned out to be a timekeeper as well.

  “Forty-seven minutes since we arrived,” she mused, more to herself than to him. “That leaves us …”

  She pressed at the glowing glass window, which constituted all but the entirety of the strange handheld telegraph machine. Her thumbs danced over the brightly colored illustrations as she cursed and muttered to herself about the “stupid android.”

  He wasn't quite sure what she meant. That small, quite amazing piece of glass was nothing like the robots he had seen in her future. Miss Cady ignored him as she worried away at the … phone.

  “Okay,” she announced at last. “I've set a countdown clock. We have 23 hours and 13 minutes … mark!”

  Satisfied with whatever plan she had set in train, the young woman put away the device.

  “I can't deal with explaining any of this to anyone right now,” she said. “I wouldn't even know where to start or how much to tell. So I figure we can crash at my place, if it's still there, and if it's not, we'll just grab a couple of hotel rooms somewhere. I can afford that kind of thing now. Benefit of an enforced savings plan.”

  “You'll have to explain, I'm afraid, ma'am. I'll take your advisement that the watch translates most things, but sometimes you still leave me pondering your true meaning.”

  She smiled, and although it was a little ragged around the edges, it appeared sincere. She brushed a few stray strands of hair out of her face with a still shaking hand.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It's just so much, all at once, you know.”

  “I am the choir here that you are preaching to, ma'am. Yes. I understand.”

  She took a couple of calming breaths, leaning forward to look up and down the dark and quiet road as she did so. Keeping an eye out for their carriage, he figured.

  “When I left, like, a day ago for us, but a couple of years ago for these guys …” She waved her hands airily, as if taking in the store clerk, the gas station, the whole world. “Oh, man, my parents are going to be pissed! I wonder if I should tell them, or just roll this timeline back? Anyway, a couple of years ago when I left, I had just finished …” She paused and seemed to consider how best to tell her story. “Let's say I had just finished a job, and I was due to be paid. Well, I've been paid, here, you know and …”

  He watched as she struggled to come to terms with whatever had happened. It seemed absurd to him that she could so readily adapt to the madness and impossibility of traveling through the ages, and yet have difficulty accepting that she had been paid for a job of work. An errant gust of wind blew cold rain across them, and she shivered inside her oilskin coat.

  “Anyway,” she shrugged. “There's nine and a half million dollars in my account.”

  “Damnation!” Smith exclaimed, unable to catch himself before the curse left his lips. “Do please excuse me, Miss Cady,” he followed up quickly. “It's just I have never heard of such a sum of money being piled up in one place by any one of my acquaintance, is all.”

  She seemed to regard his apology with wry amusement, and he remembered how unaffected she had been by the display of wanton carnality on the covers of the station periodicals. Smith reminded himself that this young woman might not be weathered by the standards of the frontier whence he had come, but she had grown up in a different world and it had obviously rubbed away at her in very different places. Given the curses he'd heard dropping from her pretty mouth, he was probably safe to suppose she was not much ruffled by his idea of strong language.

  “That's cool,” she said. “It gave me a hell of a shock, too.”

  And there she went, cursing again, a
lthough to be fair, invoking the name of Satan's playground was a mild sort of cussing compared to the way she had previously sulfured up the air.

  “Anyway,” she went on. “My cards haven't expired yet, and it doesn't look like anyone froze my accounts, so we have access to funds. As much as we need. We're gonna be good, Smith. We're going to work this out.”

  She punched him on the arm this time. Her spirits were lifting by the second. It was a most remarkable turnaround for a young woman who had been confronted by a homicidal maniac just a short time ago, and who had lost a friend, however recent of acquaintance, to the said same fiend. He could only put it down to Miss Cady's indomitable belief in her own abilities. She did seem convinced she could set everything right.

  Smith chose his next words carefully. He did not much want to say them, but honor demanded that he give voice to the thought which had just occurred.

  “You know, ma'am,” he said, and she picked up on the somewhat formal tone of his address.

  “Yes, Marshal?”

  “Well, it seems to me, that unless you are all fired up to get back to the exact moment when you left, you have no real obligation to me, and good reason to bring our connection to an end.”

  She tilted her head to one side and examined him with a calculating detachment he had previously seen only on the face of one or two especially punishing defense attorneys.

  “What do you mean, Smith? And remember, I don't have the universal translator. So keep it simple.”

  He shifted the heavier of the two bags from one shoulder to the other.

  “I'm just saying, Miss Cady, that if you find yourself amenable to the current circumstance, I would understand if you were to decline the opportunity to resume a long and dangerous trek through the centuries with me. I did not intend to get you involved in this and I cannot in good conscience expect that you would extend your involvement were it no longer necessary for you.”

  Her expression was unreadable, but she did not dismiss him out of hand.