A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  “Marshal, you take a hell of a long way around getting to your point, don't you?”

  He smiled at that, and his expression, like hers earlier, was unfeigned, if a little frayed around the edges.

  “Martha, my good lady wife, she used to say the exact same thing.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” Miss Cady said.

  “Don't fret none. She's been gone some years now. Scar still hurts, but the wound is done festering.”

  He sighed.

  “I mean it though, ma'am. Looks like you got yourself home first try, or a lot closer to it than I ever did. Perhaps you should consider hopping off the train here. You've given me some pointers about how to use this thing.” He patted the watch in his pocket. “I'm sure I could work it out from here. And as you have seen now, the olden days aren't always the best.”

  “What about the future?” she asked, and her eyes flickered with a small but undeniably bright flame of curiosity. “You've seen that too, right?”

  “Some,” he conceded, without giving more away.

  She turned from him, staring up the road where two bright lamps were gliding through the darkness toward them.

  The carriage she had summoned.

  “You're a good guy, Marshal. And you're right, I might be better off here.”

  She turned back to him and he was surprised by how low his spirits sank when he realized that she was considering his offer.

  “I can't promise to retrace your entire journey with you. In fact, there's no way I'm doing that. But, look, I won't send you off without at least working out some basic instructions for the watch. That might mean staying here for a couple of days, collecting more data. You know, sitting down, taking you through where and when you've been and the parameters of each jump. I'm pretty sure, given how well this one went, even with Chumley, that I can show you how to rewind.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, although it was a heavy weight to pick up. She seemed to be quickly adapting to the demise of her London friends. Was she still thinking of “restarting their level?” Perhaps not, now. Smith lowered his gaze, ostensibly because the lamplights of their approaching carriage were uncomfortably bright to look at, but mostly so as Miss Cady would not see that he was discomfited by the prospect of their impending separation.

  They had only been partnered up for a day, and Smith was surprised by how much he had come to rely on her, at least as far as understanding the watch was concerned. It had been a comfort as well, he had to admit, having somebody to whom he might turn and share his thoughts about the whole thundering mess.

  The motorized hansom cab was a wonder. Not the first he had seen, of course. The last few weeks, Marshal Smith had witnessed such things as most men could only marvel at. But he'd tended to keep his distance and his head down. This was the first time he had been in any conveyance more newfangled than a stream train. He was no rube, of course. He understood that the “car” was no more the work of wizards or deviltry than the subways of New York, or the elevated rail of Chicago, both of which he had ridden on during the twentieth century.

  But it was still a powerfully confounding experience to crawl into a stage coach without horses and light out across the landscape. Or, he corrected himself, along the road that ran through the landscape. As efficacious and well-appointed as this engine-driven cab undoubtedly was, Smith doubted it could keep up with a simple Conestoga wagon away from the paved roads on which it traveled.

  Their driver—he was pleased to hear they retained the terminology of the wagon era—was a silent fellow who sat up front, while Miss Cady and he remained in the rear seats. They were more luxurious than even the finest coach in which he'd traveled before his misadventures. Although to be fair, he was not one given to wasting money on pointless luxuries.

  Their baggage stowed in the trunk of the cab, Miss Cady and he shared most of the ride in silence. A strange and terrible noise filled the cabin of the vehicle, and it was some few moments before the marshal realized it was music. His companion occupied herself craning around, taking in the sights. One would have thought that she was the tenderfoot here, not him.

  “Seems a little different,” she said as they rode into the city proper. Smith was well past goggling at the architectural mysteries of any particular era. He had seen cities great and small now. He had seen them at the height of their power, and lying in ruins.

  Miss Cady's lodgings were situated near the waterfront, a hazardous place for a young woman in almost any period of history, although in this, her native time, the docks and neighboring districts of this metropolis seemed strangely quiet. Smith could see that great earthworks and engineering feats were underway here. Whole blocks appeared to have been razed, and enormous mechanical cranes stood sentry over the open pits. Much of the construction appeared to be the work of a company called ‘Trump’.

  “Ha. I guess he went on a tear after Hillary handed him his ass,” said Miss Cady, without explaining further for Smith’s benefit. He took it to be some local reference. “I was worried they would've knocked this place down,” she said as they drew up to a large brick warehouse. It was framed in scaffolding and dressed with a motley drapery of ragged tarpaulins. But it was standing and in one piece. “Not sure why they didn’t.”

  “Ivanka wants it for her new casino,” the cab driver said over his shoulder. Also without explanation. Miss Cady didn’t ask for one.

  “Whole thing’s tied up in court,” he explained anyway. “Hell of a fight.”

  They exited and she paid the driver with cash money as he hauled their baggage from the trunk. She’d been frowning at her building, as though perturbed by what the driver said, but she soon found something else to vex her.

  “Whoa. Seriously?” Miss Cady said as she handed over the banknotes, and Smith thought for a moment that perhaps the carriage driver had tried to stiff them on the fare. “You're carrying?”

  The man smiled. A happy grin.

  “Yeah, it's pretty cool isn't it? You folks been away for a while, I gather.”

  The man pulled back the jacket he wore to display a pistol holster under his armpit. Smith tensed for an instant, and then relaxed.

  “Haven't had a fare jumper since they changed the law,” explained the cab driver.

  Smith had not been expecting the man to display a sidearm, but he'd had enough guns pulled on him over the years to know that this fellow was simply showing off his piece. Men who did not really have to use a weapon as a tool of their trade were forever doing that.

  “Your gentleman has a fine looking piece there, too,” the driver said, nodding at the gun Smith wore at his hip. “Real old-school.”

  “Gets the job done,” said Smith.

  “I'll bet it does. What is that, like a .45 six-shooter or something? Looks like a real John Wayne antique.”

  “It is almost as new,” Smith explained. “It’s not my original sidearm, though. I had to replace—”

  “You think we could leave the reciprocal genital inspection for later, boys?”

  Miss Cady was standing by the bags, looking tired and unamused.

  “Hoo boy, that's a cranky one you got there, buddy. Good luck with that,” said the driver, and winked. He climbed back into his carriage and drove away.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Cady, causing Smith to wince. “My Twitter trolls and the Second Amendment. A fuckin’ winning combination.”

  She shook her head, dismissing the man, and searched in her pockets. She found a single key and used it to open the main door of the building.

  “No power,” she announced, flicking a switch just inside the door to no effect.

  Smith began to lower the bags, intending to hunt out a packet of matches, but she surprised him by pulling that small rectangle of glass from her back pocket and somehow causing it to throw out a bright cone of light. He had seen people obsessively worrying away at these gizmos in a number of different times and places, and had been naturally curious about what they could possibly be doing besides sending te
legrams to each other. Cady somehow fashioning a lantern out of the thing gave him to understand that there was probably all sorts of utility he would never reckon out, packed away inside the darned things.

  “Sorry, Marshal. But I'm up on the top floor and there is no elevator,” she said. “Not that it'd be working with the power out anyway.”

  She moved up the staircase, leaving him to follow, carrying both bags. Smith said nothing to her, but he was quietly relieved to discover she lived in a normal building and not some strange floating bubble on top of a giant needle or suchlike. The warehouse felt cold and desolate, as though life had departed this place a long time ago. There was no sign of recent habitation, and every sign that the building was returning to a state of nature. Dust on the floor. Rat droppings. Spiderwebs everywhere.

  “This doesn't look too bad,” said Cady. “They must have a caretaker come in or something.”

  Her boots thumped up the steps in front of him, and he had to avert his eyes from her derrière, lest he find himself staring at it in absent-minded rapture. It had been many years since he had known the comfort of a woman. Not since sweet Martha had departed the world. Her memory made him blush at his wanton urges. Shame was no little part of the heat that burned at his cheeks, and Smith was grateful for the darkness.

  “Now, one last boss battle,” Miss Cady announced, as she wrestled with her key in the lock. “Damn thing always sticks,” she said, jiggling the key so fiercely that Smith feared it might break off.

  The latch clicked open, and she pushed a shoulder against the heavy steel door. It slowly gave way on squeaky runners. Smith laid a heavy hand on the cold steel and put some of his own considerable weight into the effort of shifting it

  “Jeez, I hope someone looked after the cat,” said Cady. No starving feline attacked them, and her domicile smelled musty and close, but it did not reek of dead animal. She flicked at another switch on the wall, again without luck. The room stayed dark.

  It was not as pitch black as the staircase had been, however. Some light came in through the tall windows, even though they were too opaque to offer a clear picture of the outside world.

  “Looks like the cops were here,” she said, waving her makeshift torch around. “Maybe my parents, too, and Georgia. Looking for me, I suppose. Man, I didn't think I'd see this place again.”

  Smith could hear the regret in her voice at the hurt she must have caused her family and friends through more than two years unexplained absence. He took the burden of blame upon himself, for it was he who had given her to disappear.

  “I'm gonna crash out,” she announced, in a voice so unexpectedly free of guilt and contrition that for a moment he thought there must be a third person in the room.

  But, no.

  Miss Cady had simply moved on from whatever contemplation of regret she must have been entertaining.

  “Sorry, Smith. My cot sleeps one and we're not bunk buddies,” she said. “You mind sleeping in the armchair? You can put your feet up on the coffee table if that helps.”

  He dropped the two sacks with all their luggage to the floor.

  “Ma'am,” he said, “I could just lay my bedroll out on your hard floor there, and it'd be a princely comfort compared to some places I've dossed down before. But if’n you don't mind, I might just sit a while and keep watch. Until I know we ain't been tracked by Chumley or his ilk.”

  She measured him with a level stare.

  “Nice bedtime thoughts, buddy. Thanks for that. Yeah. You can totally stand watch.”

  18

  She woke him the next morning with coffee and a sweet roll so sweet that it set his teeth on edge.

  “Doughnuts,” she breezily informed him. “That's how you know you've made it back to civilization, Marshal. Doughnuts and coffee.”

  Cady handed him a white cup, which appeared to be made of stiffened wax paper. Smith couldn't help but be skeptical of its beverage-holding abilities. He sat up in his chair and followed her example in sipping the coffee through a lid. It was black and unsweetened. Not as he preferred it, but as he was used to. Life on the back of a horse did not allow for luxuries such as cream or chicory.

  Smith felt a momentary pulse of sadness pass through him at the thought of poor old Chester, lost somewhere on the ebb and flow of years.

  He sighed, and the sigh turned into a yawn, and he realized, as he started to wake up, that he had fallen deeply asleep, in spite of his best intentions. He was seated in a surprisingly comfortable armchair, big and deep, and covered in old, cracked leather. He had meant to keep a look out for the apprentices, it being his experience that, if they were going to find you at any particular time, they tended to do so quickly, or right at the end of a stay, just before a feller jumped out of that little square on the calendar, usually with his six-gun blazing.

  “You fell asleep,” she said. “Figured you might like some sugar and caffeine to kickstart your heart.”

  “I do appreciate the thought, ma'am,” he croaked, his voice still rough.

  “Back to ma'am, are we?”

  “It's only good manners.”

  “Would have been better manners not to snore so loud you knocked the dust from the rafters.”

  “Oh. My apologies, Miss Cady,” he said, but she cut him off.

  “Ms.,” she insisted. “You're gonna stand out a hell of a lot more here than you did in London, Smith. Be a good idea not to draw attention to yourself with …”

  She appeared to struggle to find her words, eventually shrugging in exasperation.

  “Look, it's just good manners to call women “Ms.” here. Anyone young enough that you'd feel comfortable giving them a piggyback ride around a pillow fort, you can call Miss. The rest of us prefer Ms.”

  Smith doubted that, but he was not inclined to argue. He was of a mind that Miss Cady definitely preferred “Ms.,” but he would not take her word for every woman he might encounter. He'd had reason to converse with women born many years after Ms. Cady McCall, and they'd not come the high hat with him over his manners. But perhaps Wu's diabolical timepiece simply translated everything he said into whatever they needed to hear. Everyone except this little snapdragon.

  “Got it,” he answered. “Ms.”

  Cady sat herself down on the edge of her cot. She hadn't been lying or using some strange terminology about that. She had slept on the sort of fold up bed—a couple of crossed slats and a length of canvas—that you often saw in half-settled frontier areas like mining camps, where folks'd had time to attend to some of the basic amenities, but not so closely that everyone was sleeping under silken canopies in four poster beds.

  “You sleep alright?” she asked. “I've crashed a few times in that chair. It's cool for naps but it's hell on your back if you spend a whole night there.”

  “I'm sorry I dozed off,” he said. “And sorry I snored up such a storm. Been a while since I had anyone to complain.”

  She waved her doughnut at him, dismissing the apology, or rather the need for one.

  “You and me both, Marshall. I been hacking away at my game up here, all on my lonesome, as you'd say, for about two years now.”

  She stopped, as if in mid thought.

  “Four and half years,” she said, shaking her head. “It's now four and half years ago that I wrote the first line of code.”

  She looked back at him.

  “That seems weirder than having been in London yesterday. To me, anyway.”

  “Probably feels more real,” he said. “London felt real to me. Real enough that if I'd been only two years off the mark, like you are now, I mighta stayed. Made my way home and found my little girl. She'd-a been young enough that I could've picked everything up again, I reckon.”

  Cady nodded slowly, as though measuring his words and finding them honestly spoke.

  “You think I should stay here?” she asked.

  In truth, he did. There were hazards in prospect that she could not yet fathom. But that's not what he advised.

&nbs
p; “Ms. Cady,” Smith said, “you got to make that choice yourself.”

  She smiled around a sip of coffee.

  “You can actually get by without the “Ms.,” too, if you like. It's gonna make you stand out just as much. Let's just roll with Cady.”

  “Cady,” he said, trying it on for size. It fit. “Well, Cady. To answer your question, I don't rightly know what to tell you. You been gone a long while from home. That might be no never mind where I came from, and people were always moving around, disappearing into the frontier and such, but I would guess you have people here who were worried, and then frantic. To them, you been gone for years.”

  She looked around the small room where she had lived just yesterday, and many years ago. It was crowded with all manner of machines that Smith did not recognize or understand, but also with simple things that he did. The cot. The chair. A set of dresser drawers. Pictures on the wall. Books on a shelf. A bottle of whiskey. A leather satchel. And what he assumed were children's toys. For a full grown woman, she seemed to have a lot of little play figures scattered about her working desk. He knew the thing on the desk was called a computer, too. He'd learned that elsewhen.

  “You sound like you think I should jump again,” she said.

  “I don't presume to think anything about what you should do, ma'am,” he said, before quickly correcting himself. “I mean, Cady.”

  “Well, you're probably not wrong about peeps being pissed that I went dark. My folks must think I'm dead or something. And, man, Georgia. I gotta call her as soon as.”

  Smith took a long draw on his coffee. It was waking him up.

  “I am your servant in this … Cady. You just tell me what you want to do, and we'll get it done.”

  “First thing, we got to clean ourselves up. There's a gym down the street. Was still there when we drove past last night. We can get day passes, use the showers and stuff. There's no hot water or power here.”

  “And then? After this gymnasium?”

  “And then we go find out how much trouble I'm in.”