by Anthology
“My mother sent me to look for game,” said Micah. “She believes that meat broth will soothe Annie’s innards.”
“Who is Annie?”
“My little sister. She is sick with the smallpox and cannot be moved.”
Droos turned around from the wooden crates in which he was rummaging and stared Smallpox. “Smallpox? We totally eradicated that more than a century go.”
“In our time,” said John.
“Your time?” said Micah confused now.
“Never mind,” said John. “It’s a long story. Where’s your wagon?”
“That way,” Micah pointed back along the river. “About three miles.”
“We should have stayed in Fort Laramie but Annie did not seem so ill then. The rest of the company said they would wait one more day at Independence Rock. I fear by now they will have gone on.”
“But your family stayed alone.”
“Annie cries out when the wagon moves. She is too weak. My mother thought that the rest might help.”
“Your mother,” said John. “What about your father?”
Micah stared at the ground. “He took ill and died of the cholera shortly before the crossing of the Platte.
“God Almighty.” said Droos.
“And so your mother and you have brought the wagon this far since?” John inquired.
The boy nodded. “Some of the men of the company helped us. But they had their own wagons and their families. And many of them were weak with the cholera.”
“Unbelievable,” Droos said. He unconsciously fondled a silver teapot.
“Now we have seen the elephant,” said Micah.
Droos cocked an eyebrow. “Elephants? You actually found one here?”
Micah looked equally quizzical. “It means only that we found far more on our path than we expected. We would return to Ross County Ohio, but it is now just as far to go back as it is to go on. Perhaps we can catch up with the company when Annie is better. Before he rode on the captain told us we would have to move soon or we would all be caught by the winter in the Sierra Nevada.”
The two men stared at him transfixed.
“People truly used to live and die this way,” Droos said bemusedly.
Micah John said slowly, “Can you keep a secret?”
“If it is an honorable secret.”
“What if I told you that we both were from the future?”
The boy shook his head. “I do not understand.”
Droos opened his mouth as if to protest. John held up a restraining hand. “Droos and I are time travelers, and we’ve come a great distance to be here. But we didn’t make the sort of journey you might imagine. Not from England, not around the Horn, but, instead, through time! What year is it, Micah?”
“The year of our Lord 1850.”
“Our world exists more than two centuries beyond that.”
Micah shook his head silently. Food meant something. Sickness meant something. But the future? His mind already reeled with too many burdens.
John turned to Droos who was slowly stowing a silver tea service in a fabric pack.
“Can you explain it more adequately?”
Droos stared down at the objects he held. “These are truly exquisite,” he said.
“Standish Barry, Baltimore, probably about 1820.”
“Droos.”
The dark-haired man looked up and said, “This is against all the rules, you know. Why must you be a compulsive fool?”
“I was the only one in the department you could trust.” John bent down to look at Micah levelly. “Do you know about the Romans?”
Micah nodded. “Father read us stories.”
“Have you ever thought about what it would be like if you could really go back and visit the Romans?”
“Yes,” said Micah.
“Well, we can do that. Micah. We live in your future. We can come back and visit your time, or the time of the Romans, or any other-time of our choosing. We come from a year when smallpox has long since been banished from the earth and most other diseases have been eliminated equally.”
Micah knew he did not understand all that was being said to him. But a few words punched through the confusion. “You can heal smallpox?”
“Our ancestors did.” said John. “Your grandchildren will.”
“Can you cure Annie?”
Time again seemed suspended on the prairie. Everything was still. Micah stared at the men. They stared back at him.
“Well, I suppose . . .” said John.
“No,” said Droos.
“Droos has an emergency medical kit. It might alleviate the symptoms.”
“No.” This time Droos’s answer was more vehement.
John wheeled angrily on his companion. “Just once,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” said Droos. “If I have to pull rank, I’ll do so.”
“One child.” said John. “One life.”
Droos dropped a dozen silver spoons and let them lie on the dusty trail side. “Let me remind you of a few things,” he said. “I’m not being arbitrary about denying your humanitarian impulse. The first thing is that this is not exactly a sanctioned mission, you know. The second thing is that we’ll be strung up doubly by our balls if the department finds out we’ve been salvaging collectibles from the past for resale in the present. Third, there’s the primary travel directive—”
“Come on” said John. “Saving one little girl’s life is highly unlikely to alter the future in any significant—”
Droos interrupted him, raising his voice even higher. “We don’t know that. It’s one thing to scavenge these antiques because nature would have destroyed them anyway. It’s quite another to meddle with lives. Besides, we don’t know that his sister is going to die of smallpox. She might recover. I believe pioneer children were resilient—”
“I say we do it,” said John.
“If I have to, I’ll put your neck on the block without endangering mine,” said Droos, his voice quiet and deadly. “I am capable of that, you know.”
“I know that.” John spread his arms helplessly. “Please?”
“No. There are rules—and these rules we will follow implicitly. We live in that kind of world.” Droos knelt and began picking up the spoons, blowing the dust off and polishing them against his leg, before placing the utensils inside a bag of soft cloth. “Accept that.”
In the ensuing silence Micah said. “Can you cure Annie?”
John did not meet his eye this time. The towheaded man hesitated. Then he said. “No. we can’t. I’m sorry, Micah.”
Micah considered that. Then he asked, “But you could?”
Neither man said anything.
“But you won’t?”
John flushed. Droos stowed the packet of silver and extracted a crystal loop-and-petal candlestick from a crate. “I’m truly sorry,” said John. “I never should have spoken at all.”
Very slowly Micah said, “Father used to tell me. ‘I help my friends. God help my enemies.’ ”
“We’re not your enemies.” said John earnestly. “There are simply rules that say we cannot be the friends we’d wish.”
Micah said nothing. He only turned and, picking up both the dead snake and the muzzle-loader that leaned against a freestanding gilt mirror in its hardwood frame, walked away from the two men.
Micah distractedly shot the rabbit on the way back to the wagon. The big jack darted from the brush and then made the mistake of pausing to assess the intruder on the plains. The ball passed cleanly through its right eye. The meat was unspoiled.
When the boy arrived at the wagon, the sun was long past its zenith. The oxen looked up incuriously to greet him, then bent their heavy heads back to the tough grass, Micah paused by the rear of the wagon.
“Ma?” he said. “I have a snake and a rabbit, Ma.”
His mother drew the canvas flap aside and held a finger to her lips. “Hush,” she said. “Your sister is dying.” The gay colors of her gingham stood in
stark contrast to the somber gray of the canvas top.
They waited an hour then a second hour, beside the small bed, listening to Annie’s labored breathing. They took turns squeezing new compresses for the girl’s forehead. Every few minutes Micah took the bucket to the river for fresh cold water.
Annie’s face continued to shine with sweat, even with the compresses. At the same time she shook as if with a chill, and they kept her bundled in her mother’s hand-loomed, thick woolen blankets.
Finally the breathing stopped. Mother and brother waited minute in the sudden stillness. Micah started to touch his mother’s shoulder. She shook his hand aside. “Let me be alone,” she said. Slowly she unwound the tine wool blankets and took up her daughter’s body in her arms. Without words she stepped down from the wagon and walked through the cotton woods toward the river’s edge.
Micah stood in the rear of the wagon and watched her go. The thought reverberated in his mind: What sort of people would allow a child to die this way? What form of Christian charity would let his sister perish in such a fashion?
He realized he simply did not know.
After what seemed a long long time, Micah emptied his mother’s most prized possession, the finely carved sandalwood chest, and repacked it.
The two men who claimed to be from the future were a half a mile farther down the frail from where they had met with Micah. They were still rummaging through the heaps of abandoned goods, apparently working their way toward Missouri.
Scrub cottonwoods sage, a dusty draw, juts of porous stone, the wagon ruts themselves, all lent Micah cover. The boy knew that an Indian would have discerned him in a moment. But John and Droos had no such skills. For the second time, but for only a moment, Micah truly wondered what it was like in the future. Then his mind told him once again that such speculation was an impossible luxury and he bent all he effort to remaining undiscovered.
For two or three seconds, he actually stood in full view. But both men were apparently absorbed in examining a bulky contraption of legs and drawers. Micah set the sandalwood chest down in the dust strategically in sight only a few yards beyond the men. Then he melted back into the country’s natural cover.
In a few minutes, Micah reappeared walking down the slope toward John and Droos and making no effort at concealment. The two men were looking over a William and Mary highboy touching the smooth finish, sliding the drawers in and out checking the joints. “Note the lacquered Chinese detail,” said Droos. “Though not actually executed by Oriental artisans the figures are Chinese in both feeling and technique.” Buried in his task he did not look up to see why John had not responded until Micah stood before them.
The boy’s face was coated with dust, his eyes felt like burnt holes in a mask. He tasted prairie grit and would have spat out the dirt but he no longer had the saliva.
John sounded unsure and awkward. “Hello Micah. Welcome back. We were just preparing to—leave. Our time is almost up and we must go home.”
Micah looked from one to the other steadily. He had to start the words several times because of the dry rasp in his throat. “You still would do nothing for my sister?”
“We can do nothing,” said Droos. “We come from a quite different world, Micah. There are things we must not do. There are rules.”
Micah turned his gaze to John. John finally stared at the ground and nodded.
“Very well,” the boy said, sounding tired and much older than his thirteen years.
The men looked at him warily. “I truly am sorry,” said John.
Micah said nothing. Nor did he answer any other entreaty made by either of the men. He retreated to sit on a wooden crate that held mining tools and simply watched them.
“We’d best get back to work,” said Droos, checking something on his wrist.
With redoubled energy the two men again busied themselves among the debris. Every once in a while they looked at Micah. The boy remained stationery on the box.
“A swirl bottle,” said Droos. “A second!”
“This looks like a Pennsylvania Dutch door hanging,” said John.
“A full set of eighteenth-century sextant gear.”
“Another Roosevelt teapot.”
“What’s this?” John hunkered down beside the sandalwood chest.
“What extraordinary workmanship,” said Droos, also bending over the chest. “Absolutely gorgeous.” His fingertips ran eagerly over the inlaid panels. Then he raised the lid and said, “Oh yes, yes indeed. Drawing the contents from the chest he said, “Shetland?”
“Looks like it,” said John.
And loomed by my mother’s hand, thought Micah, but he spoke no word aloud.
Droos again inspected his wrist and said, “Damn! It’s almost over. You attach a tracer to the chest. I’ll finish up the rest.”
Their departure was not dramatic.
“Ten seconds,” said Droos, adjusting something at his belt.
John at least spoke to Micah. “Good bye,” he said offering a slow sad wave of his hand. “I’m sorry Micah.”
Both men simply were gone. As though they had never existed. Micah watched as all up and down the trail objects vanished. Crates and bags melted into the air. The massive William and Mary highboy disappeared. Finally, his mother’s sandalwood chest vanished too; and along with it, the fine hand-loomed blankets of good Shetland wool, the blankets that had kept his sister from the frontier cold these past nights.
Micah stood then and hoped his mother was waiting for him at the wagon. The chest and blankets were gone. They had left him there to stand sweating in the prairie sun in a plain of near-absolute stillness, hushed but no longer expectant—a plain on which it seemed to him anything could happen.
And it had.
PREVENGE
Mike Resnick and Kevin J. Anderson
Being a person of firm principles has its pitfalls . . .
It wasn’t the murders themselves that broke his heart. They weren’t permanent. He had the ability to un-do something as simple and straightforward as a murder.
No, the maddening part was that people never stopped trying. Why was the total, cold-blooded obliteration of a human life the preferred problem-solving method for so many men and women? It offended his deep moral sense.
His name was Kyle Bain, and he and the other members of the Knights Temporal had to make things right, either before or after the fact.
Kyle couldn’t help wondering about the killers whose crimes he was assigned to negate. You had a good start in life; you had money, education, opportunity. Where did it all go wrong?
Or you—you had love, and now you’ll never have it again. Do you know what a rare gift you threw away, just like you’d throw out the garbage every morning?
Or this current case: Vincent Draconis, a major industrialist who controlled an empire on three continents. He had been/would be murdered in one unguarded moment, leaving a widow and three fatherless children. The confusion in the aftermath would cost almost twenty thousand people their jobs. So much suffering.
That couldn’t be allowed. It was a situation made to order for the Knights Temporal . . .
Kyle arrived in the afternoon, ten hours before the murder was due to occur. According to the file, Draconis was going to be shot down in cold blood just before midnight while working late at his office. Even without witnesses, the man immediately fingered for the crime was Jason Bechtold, vice president of one of Draconis’s companies.
Dressed just like the hundreds of other businessmen entering Bechtold’s suite of offices, Kyle gained access to the correct, bustling floor. If he followed Bechtold as he left for the day, he could be there later on in time to deflect the murder. A simple enough job, one for which he was well trained.
The Knights Temporal had been founded by Harvey Bloom, a name that hardly seemed destined to go down in history, though Bloom had already placed his name in a thousand alternate histories, maybe more. A theoretical mathematician, Bloom spent the first half of his pro
fessional life finding the secrets hidden in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, and the second half acting upon them.
Bloom was also a moralist, more interested in Doing Good than in Making A Fortune. Instead of taking out patents or using his privately-funded “temporal displacement” work to study the past, Bloom knew in his bones that he had an obligation to right wrongs. And the most unforgivable wrong, commandment number one, was Thou Shalt Not Kill. When he recruited twenty-five Right-Thinking young men and women to be his crusaders, he made sure they all shared his moral values.
Thou shalt UN-kill, whenever possible.
After reviewing the file of Vincent Draconis’s murder, Kyle waited and watched. When Bechtold emerged from his office late in the day, Kyle discreetly followed him out of the building, then in a cab, to where the executive met an elegantly dressed young woman at an expensive restaurant; they kissed, and a head waiter led them to a table.
Kyle holed up in a coffee shop across the street, nursing his small coffee and nibbling a cheese Danish. After an hour he could sense some irritation from the waitress, so he tipped her twenty dollars to leave him alone. He knew that right now, in the restaurant across the street, Jason Bechtold must be planning the murder of his boss, though he didn’t seem particularly agitated. Cool customer. Establishing an alibi.
Kyle would block him before he could get to Draconis’s office late at night. A subtle intervention was best, and if done properly no one would even notice. Waiting too long, cutting too close to the murder event, often raised awkward questions and suspicions.
Bechtold and his lady emerged from the restaurant at ten, and Kyle hastily tagged along, invisible in the street crowds. The woman was swaying slightly as they casually entered a five-star hotel. Nothing in the executive’s behavior gave any hint of his murderous intent.
According to the file, Bechtold’s defense was that he’d spent the night with this woman in room 2145. If she was sound asleep—from a tranquilizer slipped in her drink, perhaps?—and Bechtold was back in bed before she woke up in the morning, she’d corroborate his story.