by Anthology
“I don’t believe you’ve had one of Charlie’s drinks . . .”
Freya laughed. “I don’t know that I will, in any event.” She moved to the window; Mary felt a small electric shock as Freya’s arm brushed hers. They stood together and looked onto the changing quicksilver shapes in the flickering shadows. Mary was surprised that Freya didn’t seem shocked by any of it.
“Geraldine always was a scattered girl. Never too sure what she wanted.” Freya pointed to her sister, who was filled with light from within, illuminating the network of veins, arteries, capillaries under her skin. The light dimmed and she laughed as a monkey tail poked out from the waistband of her skirt and wound around her waist. The guests giggled and chattered, jazz dancing through the trees. A man looked down as his body transformed into a series of geometric, frosted glass panels separated by thin lead welds. His friend leaned down to peer through the glass, seemingly unperturbed by the snowy wings that had grown where his ears should be.
Geraldine laughed and swung her tail—quite flirtatiously, Mary thought—at a woman whose skin had turned a mottled sea-blue. Delicate leafy sea dragons swum around her wrists and wove through her hair as it drifted as though tugged by the tide and unseen currents.
“We don’t allow people to witness our parties if they aren’t prepared to participate.” Charlie sounded a lot less amiable than usual and Mary noticed he was holding an icepick, its point gleaming. She shook her head at him, not wanting to have to take Freya’s time by force. That was a messy business at best and could turn ugly. “Easy, Charlie. Easy,” she whispered.
“But I have seen one before. Don’t you remember?” Freya looked surprised, then took a step backwards as she glanced at Charlie’s icepick. “You told me to be patient because you’d come back and I would discover things way beyond what I had seen that night.” She held her left hand out to Mary, palm upturned.
The skin of her wrist was pale, the veins cobalt underneath. Between the delicate layers was a watch hand, pointing toward her palm.
Mary recognized it instantly. “That’s the second hand from your grandfather’s watch,” she said.
“So you do remember!”
Mary shook her head. “I’m afraid not. We’ve never met before, but . . . things that have happened in your past may be going to happen in our future, see?” Why am I telling her this? she wondered.
Charlie scowled as her words spilled out.
She hurried on. “So you had better tell your story so we can see exactly what’s going on.” And how on earth we’re going to deal with it, she thought.
Freya looked nervously at Charlie, the icepick still in his hand. Mary frowned. “Put it away Charlie.”
Grumbling, Charlie reluctantly stowed the weapon under his counter.
“I was only seven,” Freya began “when my grandparents had a party, just like this one. The world in 1889 was a lot different to the world now—it was all propriety and manners and rules—it was claustrophobic, especially for a child. I couldn’t sleep and lay in bed, listening to the party downstairs. And then I heard your voice, Mary, calling for everyone to line up for the evening’s special treat—just like you did earlier tonight. I crept to the top of the stairs and I, I saw . . . it was just like tonight, people changing into things I’d never dreamed of. Can you imagine what that was like for a child?”
A loud bang on the window made them all jump. An enormous peacock, still with human legs, lay sprawled on the grass, shaking its head.
“Amateur,” muttered Charlie.
“I wanted to join them,” Freya went on “and I crept out from my hiding place, made it to the first landing. That was when you saw me, Mary. You walked up the stairs towards me and I thought you were so lovely, so different. But as you got closer, I felt very peculiar . . . sort of still from the inside out.”
Mary glanced across at Charlie, who shrugged his shoulders. “You introduced yourself, held out your hand and when I shook it, the stillness filled me up entirely and we shone then, Mary, you and I, like a shooting star. ‘Here she is,’ you called quietly downstairs. And then you leaped up, Charlie, nimble as you please, to say hello.”
“And the watch hand?” he asked.
“My grandfather’s watch was there on the bureau. You fiddled about with it for a bit, then asked me to hold out my arm. You told me not to look and that it would feel a bit like a bee sting. When it was done, you said that it would remind me to wait for you. To wait for my new life. And I’ve been waiting ever since.”
Charlie began polishing the cocktail shakers, even though they were already clean. “And now that we’re back, what is it you want?”
Freya looked surprised. “To come with you, of course.”
The shaker clattered to the floor. “We’re not taking applications, here! This is a two-man gig.”
“But I’ve been waiting my whole life. It’s already happened, don’t you see? My past, your future, it must all lead to now. You talk about taking people’s time, but I’ve given all my time just waiting, knowing you’d come back.”
Mary turned toward the window, unable to look at Freya’s hopeful face. Geraldine’s guests were scattered across the lawn in little groups; some dancing, others with their arms, or fins or wings, wrapped around one another singing. They were all having the night of their lives, in exchange for just a little of their time.
“You know, Charlie and I have traveled an awful lot and seen some amazing things. This is a magical decade to be living through. You should be out there enjoying it, not wanting to come along with the two of us.” She turned to face Freya, who was twisting her hands anxiously. “Listen to that wonderful jazz. Doesn’t that make you want to forget everything and just be?”
In a shadowy corner of the garden, the band played, their instruments now part of them. The fat bellied bassist was the double bass, the trumpeter’s trumpet sprouted from his lips. Sharkey Malone, of course, was still Sharkey Malone, but with every gravelly note he sang, a bronze honey-bee flew from his lips and there was just a glimpse of the piano keys that had taken the place of his teeth. “When I hear it, it makes me think of timeless things, like I can see into forever. I’m not like them.” She looked mischievously at Charlie. “And I’ll prove it. I’ll have one of your special drinks, please. Gin,” she stated, before Charlie could ask.
Mary sighed, relieved, then smiled at Charlie, who was making a double for Freya. This would fix the whole issue once and for all. A drink, a transformation, a blissful forgetting would leave them in the clear. No matter what Freya said, she didn’t belong with them.
“One more question. What do you do with the time that you take back?”
“When we know that,” said Charlie “it’ll be time to go home.”
Freya lifted the tiny glass, the violet liquid shining. “To tomorrow,” she said, then downed it in one shot. She glided outside, where she was joined by a swarm of dragonflies, their wings shimmering Lalique-green and plum, which had previously been a rather prim man in a pinstripe suit.
“So that’s that, then,” said Charlie. “I think we better—”
“Go while we have the chance?”
“Couldn’t have said it better, old girl.”
Mary and Charlie whisked around the room, collecting bottles and glasses and packing them into the black bag. She snapped the case shut and picked it up as Charlie climbed up onto her shoulder.
They went out onto the lawn, for their traditional last walk-through of a party. To their left the plump woman who had become a chrome goddess lay sleeping, like a fallen statue. The dragonflies buzzed about in a man-shape, hovering around the amber lights. And the band played on, a sad, sweet dirge.
Ain’t no sun, my autumn girl
Ain’t no moon or rain
Got an empty home, an empty heart
Since the sunrise stole you away . . .
“Well, bugger me . . .”
“Charlie! Language.”
On their right was a giant willow
tree; at its base stood Freya, her eyes dark and sparkling.
Mary stared, her eyes wide. “You’ve not changed one bit. And that was a double dose. How?”
“I told you, I’m not like them. I’m all still inside. Only after I had that drink, this happened.”
Mary and Charlie looked down at Freya’s wrist. The watch hand was moving, now, ticking away second by second. They reached out and rested their forefingers gently over it. Freya’s time pulsed through them and it felt like exaltation.
Mary clasped her hand. “Time is indeed the fabulous monster in us all. The difference is in what you do with it. Best you do come along with us, after all.”
They set out for the jetty, stretching out across the darkened river that held the night reflected.
On the shore sat Geraldine, propped against a fig tree and snoring softly. Her dark locks lifted gently in the breeze, rippling and shaking as they parted to reveal glossy black feathers. With a fierce beating of wings, the sky was filled with ravens from her hair.
Freya bent to kiss her sleeping sister, then followed her new companions waiting on the jetty. Mary sat on the edge, Charlie still on her shoulder.
“What time does the clock have, Charlie?”
He swung from her shoulder and began to climb down her back, deftly unclasping the square silver buttons that ran the length of her spine. As he undid the last one, the doors of her back opened wide. She heard Freya gasp as she looked inside and wondered what it must be like to see it for the first time; a giant hourglass in the center, surrounded by carefully hung fob watches, alarm clocks, chronographs, and wristwatches, with a stone sundial sitting at her left hip. They softly ticked and swung, the silvery river of time swirling and twisting around them and shivering the sand in the hourglass.
“Twenty-one July 1969, 2:56 a.m.” He shut the doors, then gave Mary a wink before hopping into the bag.
“Now that does feel like a celebration,” Freya said.
“You just wait,” replied Mary.
The air around them quivered and flowed as they walked toward the end of the jetty . . .
OCCUPATION DUTY
Harry Turtledove
Pheidas wasn’t thrilled about going upcountry from Gaza—who would have been? But when you were a nineteen-year-old conscript serving out your term, nobody gave a curse about whether you were thrilled. You were there to do what other people told you—and on the double, soldier!
He got into the armored personnel carrier with all the enthusiasm of someone climbing into his own coffin. None of the other young Philistinians climbing aboard looked any happier than he did. The reason wasn’t hard to figure: there was a small—but not nearly small enough—chance they were doing exactly that.
The last man in slammed the clamshell doors at the rear. The big diesel engine rumbled to life. “Next stop, Hierosolyma,” the sergeant said.
“Oh, boy,” said Pheidas’ buddy Antenor.
He spoke softly, but Sergeant Dryops heard him anyway. “You better hope Hierosolyma’s our next stop, kid,” the noncom said. “If we stop before we get there, it’s on account of we’ve got trouble with the Moabites. You want trouble with the stinking ragheads? You want trouble with them on their terms?”
Antenor shook his head to show he didn’t. That wasn’t going to be good enough. Before Pheidas could say as much, Dryops beat him to the punch.
“You want trouble with them on their terms?” he yelled.
“No, Sergeant,” Antenor said loudly. Dryops nodded, mollified. And Antenor’s reply not only took care of military courtesy, it was also the gods’ truth. The Moabites caused too much trouble any which way. As far as they were concerned, their rightful border was the beach washed by the Inner Sea. The Philistinians? Invaders. Interlopers. Never mind that they’d been on the land for more than three thousand years. In the history-crowded Middle East, that wasn’t long enough.
They don’t even believe in Dagon, Pheidas thought as the APC clattered north and east, one of a long string of armored fighting vehicles. It wasn’t that he wanted the miserable Moabites worshiping the same god he did. If that didn’t ruin the divine neighborhood, he didn’t know what would. But too many Moabites didn’t believe Dagon was a god. Some thought he was a demon; others denied he was there at all. They felt the same way about the other Philistinian deities, too.
Antenor’s mind must have been running in the same direction as Pheidas’, for he said: “They’re jealous of us. They’ve always been jealous of us.”
“Sure,” Pheidas said. You learned that in school. Right from the beginning, the Philistinians had been more progressive than the tribes of the interior. They were the ones who’d first learned how to work iron, and they’d done their best to keep the hill tribes from finding out how to do it. Some things didn’t change much. The Moabites were still backward, but there were an awful lot of them, and they didn’t mind a bit if they died in the service of their own grim tribal gods.
Around Gaza, the land was green and fertile. The Philistinians always had a knack for making the desert bloom. That was why so many nasty neighbors had coveted their country, almost from the very beginning.
Pheidas nudged Antenor. “Hey!” he said.
“What?” Antenor had been about to light a cigarette. He looked annoyed at getting interrupted.
“You were good in school. What was the name of that guy Lord Goliath knocked off?”
“Oh. Him.” Antenor frowned, trying to remember. After a moment, he did—he had been good in school. “Tabitas, that’s what. Tabitas of the Evraioi.”
“That’s right!” Pheidas nodded. He couldn’t have come up with it himself, but he knew it as soon as he heard it. “Crazy, isn’t it? Here we are all these years later, going off to do the same cursed job all over again.”
“Miserable mountain rats don’t go away,” Sergeant Dryops said. “They want to make us go away, but that ain’t gonna happen, either.” He paused. “Is it?”
“No, Sergeant!” This time, all the troopers in the APC sang out as loud as they could. Once bitten, twice raucous. Dryops not only nodded, he even smiled a little. Pheidas wondered if the world would end. It didn’t. The world was a tough old place.
As he peered out from time to time through the firing port by his head, Pheidas watched it get tougher, too. The people of the hills and the people of the coast had been enemies since the days of Goliath and Tabitas, maybe longer. Sometimes it seemed the landscapes were enemies, too.
Things went from green to brown as soon as the land started climbing and getting rougher—as soon as it went from a place where more Philistinians lived to one were there were more Moabites. Chickens and goats and skinny stray dogs roamed the streets of Moabite villages. The houses and shops looked a million years old despite their rust-streaked corrugated iron roofs. Pheidas wouldn’t have wanted to drive any of the ancient, beat-up cars. The sun blasted everything with the force of a tactical nuke.
Spray-painted squiggles in the pothook Moabite script marred whitewashed walls. Pheidas could read it. Learning enough Moabite to get by was part of basic training. PHILS OUT! was the most common graffiti. Pheidas didn’t mind that one so much. He didn’t like the Moabites any better than they liked his people. He would have been happy to stay out if his commanders hadn’t told him to go in.
But then he saw one that said CHEMOSH CUTS OFF DAGON’S SCALY TAIL! Chemosh was the Moabites’ favorite god. For lots of them, he was the only tribal god. A few even said he was the only god, period. You really had to watch out for fanatics like that. They were the kind who turned terrorist.
The scrawl that really raised his hackles, though, was THE SWORD BUDDHA AND THE FOUR WITH CHEMOSH! The Turks of Babylon were newcomers to these parts; they’d brought the Sword Buddha down off the steppe hardly more than a thousand years ago. But Aluzza, Allat, Manah, and Hubal had been worshiped in Arabia for a very long time. And Babylon and Arabia were both swimming in oil, which these days counted for even more than the strengt
h of their gods.
Sergeant Dryops saw that one, too. He muttered into his gray-streaked red mustache. Pheidas couldn’t make out all of what he said. From what he could understand, he was surprised the steel by Dryops’ head didn’t melt.
“We’ve got friends, too,” the veteran noncom said when his language grew a little less incandescent. “The Ellenes in Syria don’t like the Moabites any better than we do. And they really don’t like the Turks.”
That made Pheidas feel a little better—until Antenor went and spoiled it by saying: “They don’t have much oil, though.”
Dryops looked at him as if he’d found him on the sole of his marching boot. “Blood’s thicker than oil, by the gods,” he growled.
Antenor didn’t say anything at all. His silence seemed more devastating than speech. There were ties between Philistinians and Ellenes, yes. But they were ancient. Some of the Philistinians’ ancestors had come from Crete before settling on the mainland here. But the languages now were as different as Galatian and Irish—more different, maybe, because they’d been separate longer. And Babylon outweighed Syria about three to one.
A couple of Moabite men in headcloths and white cotton robes—good cover against the sun—scowled at the armored column as it clattered past. Scowls were basically honest. As long as nobody did anything more than scowl . . . Pheidas could look out through the firing port instead of shooting through it. That suited him fine.
It wasn’t far from Gaza to Hierosolyma, not as the crow flew. But a crow didn’t fly back through the years, and Pheidas felt he’d fallen into a different century when his convoy rolled into the hill town. Gaza was a city of steel and glass and reinforced concrete, a city that looked across the Inner Sea to the whole wide world. Hierosolyma, hidden in the hills, was built of golden limestone and wood and brick, and looked as if it had been there forever. Had it seemed very different when the Turks sacked it, when the Romans wrecked it, when Philip of Macedon besieged the Persian garrison there, or when Lord Goliath took it away from the Evraioi? Pheidas had his doubts.