by Anthology
I looked dubious, but didn’t say anything.
Mac went on: “They was the best leetle watchdogs in all creation, too. They had to be. Why, if they spotted a burglar or any suspicious character, they’d shriek like a banshee. And when one saw a burglar today, he’d shriek yesterday, so we had twenty-four hours’ notice every time.”
My mouth opened. “Honest?”
“Cross my heart I Y’ want to know how we used to feed them? We’d wait for them to go to sleep, see, and then we’d know they was busy digesting their meals. These leetle time pussies, they always digested their meals exactly three hours before they ate it, on account their stomachs stretched that far back in time. So when they went to sleep, we used to look at the time, get their dinner ready and feed it to them exactly three hours later.”
He had lit his pipe now and was puffing away. He shook his head sadly. “Once, though, I made a mistake. Poor leede time pussy. His name was Joe, and he was just about my favorite, too. He went to sleep one morning at nine and somehow I got the idea it was eight. Naturally, I brought him his feed at eleven. I looked all over for him, but I couldn’t find him.”
“What had happened, Mr. Mac?”
“Well, no time pussy’s insides could be expected to handle his breakfast only two hours after digesting it. It’s too much to expect. I found him finally under the tool kit in the outer shed. He had crawled there and died of indigestion an hour before. Poor leetle feller! After that, I always set an alarm, so I never made that mistake again.”
There was a short, mournful silence after that, and I resumed in a respectful whisper: “You said they all died, before. Were they all killed like that?”
Mac shook his head solemnly. “No! They used to catch colds from us fellers and just die anywhere from a week to ten days before they caught them. They wasn’t too many to start with, and a year after the miners hit Pallas they wasn’t but about ten left and them ten sort o’ weak and sickly. The trouble was, leetle feller, that when they died, they went all to pieces; just rotted away fast. Especially the little four-dimensional jigger they had in their brains which made them act the way they did. It cost us all millions o’ dollars.”
“How was that, Mr. Mac?”
“Y’ see, some scientists back on Earth got wind of our leetle time pussies, and they knew they’d all be dead before they could get out there next conjunction. So they offered us all a million dollars for each time pussy we preserved for them.”
“And did you?”
“Well, we tried, but they wouldn’t keep. After they died, they were just no good any more, and we had to bury them. We tried packing them in ice, but that only kept the outside all right. The inside was a nasty mess, and it was the inside the scientists wanted.
“Natur’lly, with each dead time pussy costing us a million dollars, we didn’t want that to happen. One of us figured out that if we put a time pussy into hot water when it was about to die, the water would soak all through it. Then, after it died, we could freeze the water so it would just be one solid chunk o’ ice, and then it would keep.” My lower jaw was sagging. “Did it work?”
“We tried and we tried, son, but we just couldn’t freeze the water fast enough. By the time we had it all iced, the four-dimensional jigger in the time pussy’s brain had just corrupted away. We froze the water faster and faster but it was no go. Finally, we had only one time pussy left, and he was just fixing to die, too. We was desperate—and then one of the fellers thought o’ something. He figured out a complicated contraption that would freeze all the water just like that—in a split second.
“We picked up the last leetle feller and put him into the hot water and hooked on the machine. The leetle feller gave us a last look and made a funny leetle sound and died. We pressed the button and iced the whole thing into a solid block in about a quarter of a second.” Here Mac heaved a sigh that must have weighed a ton. “But it was no use. The time pussy spoiled inside o’ fifteen minutes and we lost the last million dollars.”
I caught my breath. “But Mr. Mac, you just said you iced the time pussy in a quarter of a second. It didn’t have time to spoil.”
“That’s just it, leetle feller,” he said heavily. “We did it too dog-goned fast. The time pussy didn’t keep because we froze that hot water so damned fast that the ice was still warm!”
TIME SHARING
Jody Lynn Nye
Milan, 1494
Lorraine couldn’t decide which was worse, the terrible vinegar taste or the stew of odors that assailed her nose as she struggled to get into the heavy robelike dress and velvet cloak. They had been too hot to wear in the departure lounge of the Timeshares Travel Agency,in between the giant crackling spheres that owed their heritage to Tesla coils, whatever the name the corporation called them to make them more palatable to the unschooled yet moneyed class they wanted to attract. Well, she was no ordinary customer!
Mother was here, in Milan. It had taken some very specific information, threats, and bribes to get the correct information from Rolf Jacobsen, the president of Timeshares. She had based her hunch upon notes her mother had left on a pad of paper in the study of her empty apartment in San Francisco. It was not until she had insisted she would go to the police that Jacobsen allowed that perhaps, yes, he did know Genevieve Corvana and her whenabouts, as well as her whereabouts. Lorraine was proud to know that she was right. She could not, however, place the odd look on Jacobsen’s face when she told him the rest of what she wanted. But she was here now, Marguerite wasn’t, and nothing was more important!
She straightened her ornate lace and jeweled veil. Her thick brown hair was scraped back into a silk net beneath. Somehow, the exposure of her face and neck made her feel vulnerable, all the more since preparation for the trip had involved removal of her eyebrows and eyelashes. Randa Cuddy, Jacobsen’s head of Esthetics, had assured her that the depilation was temporary but necessary in light of the fashions of the day. She straightened her back and marched toward the door. Suddenly a hand grabbed her by the hair and pulled backward.
“Oh, no, you don’t! I got here first!”
Horrified, Lorraine wrenched herself free. The light that streaked through the gaps in the boards of the lean-to was enough to see the glaring eyes in a face that was so much like hers, with its firm, square chin, decided mouth, and wide hazel eyes, but broader across the cheekbones, the image of stubbornness. How? “Marguerite!”
“How did you get through?” her sister demanded. “I gave Jacobsen a huge bribe not to let you.”
“You miserable waste of skin!” Lorraine snarled, feeling her blood pressure rise. She felt behind her and straightened out the net, which was hanging askew. “I am here to see Mother, and you can’t stop me.”
She shouldered Marguerite aside and headed toward the vertical sliver of daylight that must indicate a door.
“I was here first! You’re not getting ahead of me!”
Marguerite pushed back, raking her clawlike nails over the back of Lorraine’s hand. When they burst out into the bright Milanese sunshine, Lorraine could see that it was bleeding.
“Oh, how I hate you!” Lorraine shrieked, wrapping the ornamental frill of lace around her hand.
Suddenly, she became aware that many pairs of eyes were upon them. Men in simple linen shirts over hose and filthy shoes pushing wheelbarrows. Men in gorgeous padded doublets with exaggerated codpieces sticking out just below the hem. Women whose undergowns were tied at the throat as hers, but with the drawstring so loose that their breasts were almost completely on display over pieced bodices that were for support much more than for show. Women in carts and carriages wearing veils or holding up fans on sticks or seated under sunshades to protect themselves from the blazing light, possibly with a tiny live monkey curled around their necks or with a bird on a perch attached to the frame of their conveyance. She and Marguerite were providing free midday entertainment to their fellow passersby.
Lorraine drew herself up. “I am going to see Mother. W
hether you do or not is of no concern to me.”
Jacobsen had promised a guide. She looked around the crowded street. She didn’t expect someone to be standing there holding up a sign, but who was it? Jacobsen assured her he would be easy to spot.
Suddenly, a very dark-skinned African boy in a glorious cloth-of-gold turban, an embroidered tunic, and bare feet skipped out of a storefront and came to bow to them.
“Signorina Corvana?” His diction was crisp but flavored with an exotic accent.
“Yes?” she and Marguerite chorused.
“My name is Iskander. I am here to take you to Signora Genevieve.” He grinned at them, showing perfectly even, white teeth. “This way.” He turned and began to thread his way along the crowded stone street.
“He looks as if he had orthodontia,” Marguerite murmured.
“Three years’ worth,” the boy agreed amiably. When they blinked in surprise, he grinned again. “I am a graduate student at Stanford. My real name is Arthur Struthers. This is my summer job, tour guide in Renaissance Milan, in the service of my lord the duke Ludovico il Moro. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
It was. Lorraine’s first glimpse of another time and space should have been thrilling beyond words. How wrong it seemed that she had her entire mind upon the woman striding at her side, who had beaten her into the world by a mere thirteen months, and who had stolen all the attention from their mother ever since. She tried to pull her soul out of the quagmire of resentment and enjoy her surroundings. The stench was impossible to ignore, but so were the colors, made even more brilliant by the sun. Flowers bloomed in impossible hues. The people around them were as vivid, arrayed like so many exotic butterflies in silks, brocades, and linen. She, who had lived most of her life among the muted palette of northern California and spent much of her time bent over a microscope, found it exotic and wonderful. The clothing Jacobsen’s employees had furnished her repelled dirt and insects, so minor discomforts were kept at bay. Thousands of humans, many more than she was comfortable rubbing elbows with, crowded the street, shouting to friends, hawking their goods, pushing barrows toward some distant market, all adding to the rainbow palette. The bowl of the sky, an expanse of purest turquoise, was decorated with a few fluffy white clouds. The city was like a master’s painting crossed with a Where’s Waldo poster. Why was Genevieve here? Why didn’t she want to go somewhere more comfortable, where the streets didn’t stink?
“Graduate student?” Marguerite asked. “One of Mother’s graduate students?”
The young man nodded. “Yes. I am on independent study now that she has retired. Officially. But she is still my faculty adviser.” The blinding grin took them off guard again. “Here we are.”
The door of the wide, white stucco-covered house had no portico to protect one from the elements, but opened into a small but gracious hall with polished wood floors and frescoed walls. The cherubim that beckoned to visitors weren’t as simpering and overornamented as many putti that Lorraine had seen in contemporary paintings. She tried to identify the style, but the name escaped her.
Iskander bowed and strode into the burgeoning crowd, leaving them on the stoop. A plump female servant in white apron and tightly-wound headcloth led them down the narrow hallway toward the rear of the house. She opened a door and stood aside. A wave of noise from within all but knocked the two women backward. The sounds of a woodwind and a stringed instrument warred with voices.
The room was filled with people. Men and a few women in smocks sat at easels, trays of color at their elbows. A few men, ranging in age from late twenties to perhaps fifty, linen coifs covering their sweating heads, painted faces of near-photographic quality onto wooden panels on which only a few dark lines suggested the landscaping and buildings that would soon surround them. Those details were being added to other panels by younger artists in their early teens to early twenties. Others, mostly youngsters, some very small, ground the colors in mortars held between their outspread legs as they sat on the floor. The delicacy of their task did not cut down at all on holding conversations with their fellows. A large sheet of paper had been tacked to one wall so that Lorraine could see that all the pieces in the room were intended to be part of a single installation, possibly an altar-piece. In the corner, a pair of musicians in rolled hats and hose strummed and tootled, unperturbed by the seeming chaos around them. More noise filtered in from outside, through enormous windows flanked by wide-flung wooden shutters. Around the walls stood sturdy machinery of iron and bronze. Lorraine could identify the small forge and anvils, but she could not have guessed at the purpose of the standing metal plate with holes of ever decreasing size drilled in it or the odd frame that resembled a loom without a shuttle.
One of the older women, wearing a linen veil on her graying brown hair and an enveloping ecru pinafore over a gown made of good ochre-colored brocade, brush raised, glanced up at the opening of the door. Her cheeks widened in a grin. She put down her brush and rushed to embrace them.
“You found me!” she cried. “So the clues weren’t too difficult?”
“Mother!” Lorraine exclaimed. “Wait, you left those notes on purpose?”
Genevieve Corana smiled. “Of course I did. I wanted to see you.”
“You did?” She pointed at Marguerite. “Then she needs to go back home. Right now. I have no intention of letting her ruin . . .”
“Me ruin? What makes you think I want to be here with you, you wet blanket! I left home on the twenty-fifth of July.”
“Well, I left on the twentieth!”
“How did we get here at the same time?” Marguerite demanded. “When I get my hands on that Jacobsen . . .”
“Silence!” Genevieve roared. There was no mistaking a genuine teacher voice, or the cold glare that went with it. Lorraine and Marguerite quieted like guilty pupils. The rest of the room fell silent as well. “We will speak in my private study. There will be no more uproar. Have respect! Do you understand?”
Subdued, the sisters followed their mother through a wooden doorway. A playful frieze around the frame depicted demons dancing as though the portal led to hell.
Genevieve shut the door and leaned over to fling open the shuttered window in the dim room.
“You will not upset the atelier again,” she hissed. “There are too many ears listening. You can cause untold trouble. Didn’t Rolf’s assistants give you the entire safety briefing?”
Reduced to children again, the sisters surveyed the hems of their elegant dresses.
“Yes.”
“And you signed the waiver saying that you understood? And what the legal penalties are for disobeying them?”
“Yes.”
“But Mother!” Marguerite wailed. “You disappeared without telling us where you were going.”
Genevieve waved away the protest. “I messaged you both. I told you I was retiring. I said I was going somewhere I enjoyed, and I wanted you to be happy for me. I planned to let you know more in time. I had to establish myself first. It’s taken a few years, but things are going well. You arrived here at the same time because I wanted to see both of you. I am glad you are here, darlings. We’re going to have such a nice time.”
“A few years?” Lorraine asked. “But you’ve only been gone since June.”
“Linear time does not apply in this process, darling. You know that. I told Rolf that when you came looking for me, 1494 was the earliest that he could let you through.”
“But an artist studio?” Marguerite asked. “You’re a scientist.”
Genevieve smiled. “They’re not such different disciplines. Especially not here, not now. I’m happy here. The others think I am a noblewoman’s daughter who became an abbess and decided to retire from the church. They’re a little scandalized by that, but it made them accept me as a scholar, if not a good Catholic. I have formed warm friendships with wonderful women, and a few men, too. This is a marvelous place. I hope you’ll come to love it as much as I do. I bought an annual timeshare of two weeks from Rolf f
or you to use. If you two can behave yourselves in my home.”
Lorraine surveyed the room. A layer of dust stood on the windowsills and anywhere there were not piles of parchments heaped upon trestle tables, stools, and rolled up in cylinders on shelves. Mother had always been so neat. The furnishings, too, were rough and broad in design.
“This is a man’s room,” she said.
“Yes,” Genevieve said, with a broad smirk. “I found the man of my dreams. This is his studio.”
“A man?” Lorraine felt her heart constrict with fury. “Time’s not linear, but you couldn’t spend a single day to tell us your plans before you disappeared?”
Genevieve tucked her arms into her sleeves, an unconscious gesture, but a new one to Lorraine. It must have been something she had adopted in her pose as a former religieuse. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. My duties were done. You two were well on your way. You are both grown up, with your own careers and families. I couldn’t wait to get back here. To him. To the life we had together. It was all I could think about.”
Marguerite’s face had gone red, too. “Mother, that’s ridiculous. You’re in your sixties!”
“Hardly doddering old age. Nothing’s stopped working yet except for my childbearing equipment, and frankly, I’m glad to be done with that. What is it you want of me?” Genevieve asked, with a frown. “Did you expect to find me warehoused somewhere, slowly moldering away, pining for you as you seem to be pining for me?”
“No!” Lorraine protested immediately, but she was too much of a scientist herself not to analyze her mother’s words for the germ of truth. “I suppose I thought you would always be there. For us. For me. I thought that once you retired you might be able to spend more time with us.”