Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “Can’t,” she said.

  “But I thought . . .”

  “Movers are closed.” She looked up at him, smiling. “You’ll have to wait till morning.”

  It was five years before Gadwin reappeared. Kyle was hurrying to get to the hospital, where Cathy was already in labor with their first child, when the image popped into the space between Kyle and the loft’s front door. Kyle dropped the tote bag he’d been loading up with last minute necessities. Reds and yellows spilled onto the floor. They’d forgone the traditional pink and blue, preferring not to know the baby’s sex until it was born. He gathered up the loose items while Gadwin launched into a replay of the message from five years before.

  “I don’t care!” Kyle yelled. “I can’t help you. I have my own life to worry about.”

  “I tried your father,” Gadwin said, “but your background isn’t very clear. I don’t think you two were close.”

  Kyle checked his watch. It read 3:27. Minus five minutes. Time enough for the darkness to pile deeper, for the uncertainties to coil around his throat, for regrets to flow, leaving damp trails on his blood-drained cheeks. Not quite time enough, though, to forgive the past for not doing more.

  “If I have time, I’ll try your son,” Gadwin said. “After that, things get muddled by the war. The lineage is there, but no places or times.”

  My son. It’s a boy. For chrissake just tell me everything, why don’t you?

  Someone banged on the door, but it was Gadwin who looked around. Someone, sometime in the dim, dark future, was going to bang on Gadwin’s door. Kyle wished they’d just arrest him already, get him out of Kyle’s life, out of his son’s life. Sorry, Gadwin, but fuck off and leave me alone. It wasn’t his time. It wasn’t his life. It just wasn’t his problem.

  Kyle fingered the tiny pistol’s barrel as he sat alone on the bed. Bright Long Island sun streamed in through the windows, glinting off the weapon’s sleek side where it rested on his lap. The metal was smooth and polished and so unlike the wrinkled flesh that touched it. He was sixty years old. Sixty! Time had gotten away from him. It always seemed to do that. It was slippery that way. Had it really been twenty-five years since he and Cathy had moved out of the city?

  Gadwin hadn’t been back, but he didn’t need to this time, did he? Gadwin, you bastard. There was so much he hadn’t mentioned. He’d never mentioned the Nobel Prize, never mentioned the book deals, never mentioned the money. At the very least, he could have warned Kyle about the short-lived disaster that was Kyle’s television show. As if you really could popularize theoretical physics in mass media. On second thought, maybe Kyle should have seen that one coming on his own.

  But that was all done now. Kyle had had his fling with fame, leaving him with enough of the fortune to keep them comfortable for the rest of their lives. His son was grown and married and his daughter-in-law was just three months away from Kyle’s grandson. Oh, yes, they’d chosen to know the sex right away. No surprises for his boy. Get the future over with. Bring it on.

  It made sense in a way, didn’t it? Out there in the living room, Cathy kept company with their son and his wife and the foreshadowing bulge in a dark, dangerous womb. That’s why Kyle had to kill her. What else could he do? If only she’d kept her mouth shut. If only she’d broken with tradition, stepped away from the past, chosen a future of her own.

  But she hadn’t, had she? No, she just had to blurt it out about their son and the grand tradition her family had carried on for umpty-ump generations spanning two hundred years of mindless, spineless cowards who just did what their long-dead ancestors had told them to do. Damn her! He could still hear her sweet little bell-like voice tinkling along, explaining how in every generation, unbroken, her family’s male children had been saddled with the weight of their ancestors. It didn’t matter if it was the first, the middle, or stuck in a string of five, but every male child had one thing in common: the name Gadwin.

  Kyle felt himself crashing against a stony shore, dragged by tides from the future and tossed by waves from the past. All along he’d been pushed this way and that, shoved along a course without any turns. He’d had no choices. There were no changes he could have made. It had all been predetermined. Well, that ended today.

  He shoved the pistol into the pocket of the silly button-up sweater he wore because Cathy had given it to him. She’d seen Einstein wearing one like it in an old photograph and decided there was something “all dignified and emeritus-like” about it. It made her happy when he wore it. And the pistol fit nicely in the pocket.

  Killing his daughter-in-law wouldn’t make Cathy happy. Or his son. Or himself

  “Kyle?” Cathy called from the living room.

  “In a minute,” he called back.

  What else could he do? How else could he break the chain from Gadwin to Gadwin that led to that final Gadwin’s brother and his evil alien weapons? Kyle checked his watch—that watch. He’d replaced the band a couple of times, and his mental adjustment was eight minutes, now, but the thing was still with him. Sorry I couldn’t do more.

  Sorry wasn’t enough. You couldn’t just regret things. You had to fix them. You had to do more. If you wanted to send a message, send a good one.

  Yes, that was it. Kyle pulled the pistol out of his pocket and stuck it back into the nightstand. He didn’t have to hurt anyone, didn’t have to kill. He just had to send a message. His life’s work had been about sending messages back in time. He’d been looking the wrong way. He needed to send a message to the future. He took the watch off his wrist for the last time and went to join his family in the living room.

  In the following months, a great many people had cause to think that Kyle was losing his mind. As far as he was concerned, they may have been right, but he had enough notoriety—and enough money—that no one really cared. He chose the three most stable and prestigious law firms he could find and paid them staggering sums of money to contractually obligate them for at least two hundred years. As long as there were laws and courts and a country to keep them all enforced, those firms would keep his packages safe. They would watch over his descendents, tracking each generation of offspring. They would follow the trail of Gadwins no matter where it led, until one day Gadwin Smith would arrive.

  The packages themselves weren’t cheap, either. Paper alone wouldn’t do. He etched his story into thin sheets of stainless steel. He had it encoded into every form he could think of and stored on every medium available. One of them had to make it through.

  If you were going to send a message, make it a good one.

  Kyle Preston checked his watch, subtracting the usual five minutes. He had plenty of time. It was still two hours before he had to meet Anna for lunch in Union Square. He was just about to sit down with a newly-arrived journal when the stranger appeared in the middle of his coffee table. There was a flash and a pop and there he was.

  “My name is Gadwin Smith,” the stranger began. “I don’t understand how you knew about all this—this machine, my brother, the war.” His eyes closed as his lips pressed themselves into a thin, pale line. He looked tortured. “Your message says that I told you about it—will tell you.”

  “What the hell?” Kyle walked toward the image, moving around the side of his found-on-the-sidewalk sofa. From every angle, the image still faced him. The coffee table sliced through the stranger’s legs just below the knees.

  “All these years I thought it was a joke,” Gadwin Smith went on, “but I believe you now. And you have to believe me.” The image held up two objects that appeared out of nowhere. One looked like a sheet of stiff, shiny paper. The other was a watch. “I can’t stop him. No one can. Not now.”

  Kyle looked at his wrist and back at the image. It definitely looked like his watch.

  “Give me some time,” Gadwin said. “I need to tell you a story.”

  “You want to tell me something,” Kyle said. He took Anna’s hand across the tiny café table, nearly knocking over the salt shaker.

  �
�How do you know?”

  “I just do.” He barely flinched when he heard the explosion. They were at a place on 13th Street, nearly a block away from Union Square. He clutched Anna’s hand as he felt his own begin to shake. It was New York. Loud noises were part of the scenery.

  She looked past his shoulder. “What was that?”

  “Not important,” Kyle said. He smiled, shifting sideways to put himself in her line of sight. “You’re what’s important.”

  She smiled back at him. “Good,” she said. She reached over with her other hand and touched his bare wrist. “Your father’s watch?”

  Kyle stared at the spot where Anna’s fingers touched skin that had been kept too long away from the light and air. “His watch,” he said. “Not mine. I can do better.”

  “Yes, you can,” she said. “And you will.” Then she told him her news.

  By the time they heard the sirens in the distance they were too deeply wrapped in their life together to notice. Kyle smiled, took a deep breath, and cast himself into the unknown, uncertain future.

  THIS TRAGIC GLASS

  Elizabeth Bear

  View but his picture in this tragic glass,

  And then applaud his fortunes as you please.

  —Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1. II. 7—8

  The light gleamed pewter under gracious, bowering trees; a liver-chestnut gelding stamped one white hoof on the road. His rider stood in his stirrups to see through wreaths of mist, shrugging to settle a slashed black doublet which violated several sumptuary laws. Two breaths steamed as horse and man surveyed the broad lawn of scythe-cut grass that bulwarked the manor house where they had spent the night and much of the day before.

  The man ignored the slow coiling of his guts as he settled into the saddle. He reined the gelding about, a lift of the left hand and the light touch of heels. It was eight miles to Deptford Strand and a meetingplace near the slaughterhouse. In the name of Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Council, and for the sake of the man who had offered him shelter when no one else under God’s dominion would, Christofer Marley must arrive before the sun climbed a handspan above the cluttered horizon.

  “That’s—” Satyavati squinted at her heads-up display, sweating in the under-air-conditioned beige and grey academia of her computer lab. Her fingers moved with automatic deftness, opening a tin and extracting a cinnamon breath mint from the embrace of its brothers. Absently, she crunched it, and winced at the spicy heat. “—funny.”

  “Dr. Brahmaputra?” Her research assistant looked up, disconnecting his earplug. “Something wrong with the software?”

  She nodded, pushing a fistful of coarse silver hair out of her face as she bent closer to the holographic projection that hung over her desk. The rumble of a semiballistic leaving McCarran Aerospaceport rattled the windows. She rolled her eyes. “One of the undergrads must have goofed the coding on the text. Our genderbot just kicked back a truly freaky outcome. Come look at this, Baldassare.”

  He stood, a boy in his late twenties with an intimidatingly Italian name, already working on an academic’s well-upholstered body, and came around her desk to stand over her shoulder. “What am I looking at?”

  “Line one fifty-seven,” she said, pushing down a fragment of panic that she knew had nothing to do with the situation at hand and everything to do with old damage and ancient history. “See? Coming up as female. Have we a way to see who coded the texts?”

  He leaned close, reaching over her to put a hand on her desk. She edged away from the touch. “All the Renaissance stuff was double-checked by Sienna Haverson. She shouldn’t have let a mistake like that slip past; she did her dis on Nashe or Fletcher or somebody, and she’s just gotten into the Poet Emeritus project, for the love of Mike. And it’s not like there are a lot of female Elizabethan playwrights she could have confused—”

  “It’s not a transposition.” Satyavati fished out another cinnamon candy and offered one to Tony Baldassare, who smelled faintly of garlic. He had sense enough to suck on his instead of crunching it; she made a point of tucking hers up between her lip and gum where she’d be less likely to chew on it. “I checked that. This is the only one coming up wrong.”

  “Well,” Baldassare said on a thoughtful breath, “I suppose we can always consider the possibility that Dr. Haverson was drunk that evening—”

  Satyavati laughed, brushing Baldassare aside to stand up from her chair, uncomfortable with his closeness. “Or we can try to convince the establishment that the most notorious rakehell in the Elizabethan canon was a girl.”

  “I dunno,” Baldassare answered. “It’s a fine line between Marlowe and Jonson for scoundrelhood.”

  “Bah. You see what I mean. A nice claim. It would do wonders for my tenure hopes and your future employability. And I know you have your eye on Poet Emeritus, too.”

  “It’s a crazy dream.” He spread his arms wide and leaned far back, the picture of ecstatic madness.

  “Who wouldn’t want to work with Professor Keats?” She sighed, twisting her hair into a scrunchie. “Screw it: I’m going to lunch. See if you can figure out what broke.”

  The air warmed as the sun rose, spilling light like a promise down the road, across the grey moving water of the Thames, between the close-growing trees. Halfway to Deptford, Christofer Marley reined his gelding in to rest it; the sunlight matched his hair to the animal’s mane. The man was as beautiful as the horse—groomed until shining, long-necked and long-legged, slender as a girl and fashionably pallid of complexion. Lace cuffs fell across hands as white as the gelding’s forehoof.

  Their breath no longer steamed, nor did the river.

  Kit rubbed a hand across the back of his mouth. He closed his eyes for a moment before glancing back over his shoulder: the manor house—his lover and patron Thomas Walsingham’s manor house—was long out of sight. The gelding tossed his head, ready to canter, and Kit let him have the rein he wanted.

  All the rein he wants. A privilege Kit himself had rarely been allowed.

  Following the liver-colored gelding’s whim, they drove hard for Deptford and the house of a cousin of the Queen’s beloved secretary of state and closest confidant, Lord Burghley.

  The house of Mistress Eleanor Bull.

  Satyavati stepped out of the latest incarnation of a vegetarian barbecue joint that changed hands every six months, the heat of a Las Vegas August afternoon pressing her shoulders like angry hands. The University of Nevada campus spread green and artificial across a traffic-humming street; beyond the buildings monsoon clouds rimmed the mountains across the broad, shallow desert valley. A plastic bag tumbled in ecstatic circles near a stucco wall, caught in an eddy, but the wind was against them; there would be no baptism of lightning and rain. She crossed at the new pedestrian bridge, acknowledging Professors Keats and Ling as they wandered past, deep in conversation—“we were going after Plath, but the consensus was she’d just kill herself again”—and almost turned to ask Ling a question when her hip unit beeped.

  She dabbed her lips in case of leftover barbecue sauce and flipped the minicomputer open. Clouds covered the sun, but cloying heat radiated from the pavement under her feet. Westward, toward the thunderheads and the mountains, the grey mist of verga—evaporating rain—greased the sky like a thumbsmear across a charcoal sketch by God. “Mr. Baldassare?”

  “Dr. Brahmaputra.” Worry charged his voice; his image above her holistic communications and computational device showed a thin dark line between the brows. “I have some bad news . . .”

  She sighed and closed her eyes, listening to distant thunder echo from the mountains. “Tell me the whole database is corrupt.”

  “No.” He rubbed his forehead with his knuckles; a staccato little image, but she could see the gesture and expression as if he stood before her. “I corrected the Marlowe data.”

  “And?”

  “The genderbot still thinks Kit Marlowe was a girl. I reentered everything.”

  “That’s—
”

  “Impossible?” Baldassare grinned. “I know. Come to the lab; we’ll lock the door and figure this out. I called Dr. Haverson.”

  “Dr. Haverson? Sienna Haverson?”

  “She was doing Renaissance before she landed in Brit Lit. Can it hurt?”

  “What the hell.”

  Eleanor Bull’s house was whitewashed and warm-looking. The scent of its gardens didn’t quite cover the slaughterhouse reek, but the house peered through narrow windows and seemed to smile. Kit gave the gelding’s reins to a lad from the stable, along with coins to see the beast curried and fed. He scratched under the animal’s mane with guilty fingers; his mother would have his hide for not seeing to the chestnut himself. But the Queen’s business took precedent, and Kit was—and had been for seven years—a Queen’s man.

  Bull’s establishment was no common tavern, but the house of a respectable widow, where respectable men met to dine in private circumstances and discuss the sort of business not for common ears to hear. Kit squared his shoulders under the expensive suit, clothes bought with an intelligencer’s money, and presented himself at the front door of the house. His stomach knotted; he wrapped his inkstained fingers together after he tapped, and waited for the Widow Bull to offer him admittance.

  The blonde, round-cheeked image of Sienna Haverson beside Satyavati’s desk frowned around the thumbnail she was chewing. “It’s ridiculous on the face of it. Christopher Marlowe, a woman? It isn’t possible to reconcile his biography with—what, crypto-femininity? He was a seminary student, for Christ’s sake. People lived in each other’s pockets during the Renaissance. Slept two or three to a bed, and not in a sexual sense—”

  Baldassare was present in the flesh; like Satyavati, he preferred the mental break of actually going home from the office at the end of the day. It also didn’t hurt to be close enough to keep a weather eye on university politics.

  As she watched, he swung his Chinese-slippered feet onto the desk, his fashionably shabby cryosilk smoking jacket falling open as he leaned back. Satyavati leaned on her elbows, avoiding the interface plate on her desktop and hiding a smile; Baldassare’s breadth of gesture amused her.