by Anthology
Attending scholars were to present pro and con papers on the theoretical possibility of time travel.
That wasn’t my primary concern, though, just an intriguing side-note. What worried me was that three founders of the movement that evolved into the Revolution Academe had been born in Virginia. I wondered if the history of Mark’s Imperium was similar. I had to wonder if the attendance list included any future grandparents of interest.
“Registration starts tomorrow morning,” I mused. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, Mark? To see to it that someone misses a presentation, or never meets a mentor. Something like that.”
He didn’t say anything.
“How are you supposed to do it? Let the air out of tires on a parked car? Make a prank phone call?” I asked, then paused. “Tell me you’re not supposed to kill someone.”
He flinched and I knew I’d hit a nerve. Oddly, I found the reaction reassuring. Whatever the specifics of his assignment, he had his doubts. That was good.
Doubts made it easier. Doubts gave me something work with.
“You’re not an assassin, Mark,” I said gently. “If you try to do the job, you’ll hate yourself. And if you succeed, you’ll hate yourself even more.”
“I can do what has to be done,” he said doggedly. “Sizemore says that desperate times call for desperate measures. He says—”
“He says that expedience dictates morality,” I said, interrupting again. “That the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and that the survival of civilization is worth getting your hands dirty. What a bunch of hooey.”
I’d heard it all before. Only Mark knew how his last experience with Sizemore had played out, but I remembered mine all too well. Fat-bellied and balding, the older man had been the closest thing to a father I ever knew and I guess in my own way I’d loved him. That hadn’t made it easy to watch him labor over the chronal displacement unit’s controls, lab coat spattered with blood from his wounds and breath coming in ragged gasps. All around us, laboratory lights had flickered and components smoldered while I waited anxiously inside the transit module’s containment field. The machine’s specific workings were a mystery to me, but I knew that I was the first text subject any larger than a neutron and the idea terrified me. The jumble of historical data and combat techniques he’d force-fed me with sleep tapes and deep conditioning hadn’t helped my state of mind, either.
Sizemore hadn’t cared about any of that, of course. He’d had his own priorities. “Just do what I told you and you can save us all,” had been his final words to me. No good-byes, no benediction, just a last command as the door came down and the rebels swarmed into the lab.
The next thing I knew, I was huddled behind the bushes in a present-day public park, alone and confused, but still focused on a mission that didn’t matter anymore.
“He told you that they were dead and dust, anyway, didn’t he?” I continued. “That it was worth one more death, a century ago, if it saved the Academy.”
Mackenzie came back with our desserts. They were huge, in tall, footed glasses cloudy with frost. Ice cream rose from them in smooth white domes topped with fluffy whipped cream. She set one in front of each of us, along with straws and long-shanked spoons. I felt better just looking at them. As far I was concerned, root beer floats were the best part of living in the past.
“Academy?” Mackenzie asked. I’d been speaking too loudly, and she’d overheard my last words. “You guys are here for the conference?”
“Sort of,” I said, I said, and hazarded a guess. “You’re attending?”
“Sort of,” she said, echoing my words. “The dean said I could audit a session. I’m Engineering now, but I might change my major. I always liked numbers.” She paused. “Hey, is everything okay?”
Everything wasn’t. I felt as if the world was slipping away a second time, and it must have been shown on my face.
Mackenzie was the reason that Sizemore had sent Mark. By chance, I had brought them together!
Even as I made the connection, he did, too. His mouth opened and his cheeks went pale, and the boyish cast of his features abruptly fled. He looked away from Mackenzie, as if ashamed of what he was thinking.
“Everything’s fine,” I said slowly. Part of me wondered how many times I’d said those words. My whole life seemed to be made up of things I had to do again and again.
“How about you?” she asked, turning to Mark. “You look like you just saw a ghost!”
Under the table, I prodded him with my foot, using enough force to command his attention. “Manners,” I said pointedly.
“I-I-Everything’s great!” Mark said. Like I’d told him to earlier, he made eye contact and even managed a pro forma smile. “Really!”
“Well, okay,” Mackenzie said, dubious. She set our check on the table’s Formica surface. “I can take this for you, or you can pay up front. Maybe I’ll see you two at the conference?”
“Maybe you will,” I told her. Once she was out of earshot, I continued. “How about that, Mark? Isn’t it nice to have somebody pretty smile at you?”
“Shut up,” he said, eyes narrowing.
“Mackenzie seems pretty bright and lively for someone who was dead and dust long before you were born, doesn’t she?”
“Shut up!” he said and I felt sorry for him. It’s hard enough to think about killing someone you’ve met, let alone a pretty someone who’s smiled and given you food and asked how you felt.
Even so, I pressed the issue. “She’s young and looks healthy, Mark,” I said. “Probably has a lot of years ahead of her. I wonder what she’ll do with them?”
He slapped the tabletop hard enough to make the glassware dance, and looked away from me. “Shut up, I said! I don’t want to hear it!”
I shut up. I shucked the paper wrapper from my plastic drinking straw and speared the root beer float. Melting ice cream had turned the soda thick and rich, and the bubbles tickled my tongue as I drank. Mark followed suit without prompting. Too shaken to light up the way he had with his first taste of fresh salad, he still obviously liked what he tasted. Long moments passed in silence that was broken only by the clink of metal spoons against glassware.
“What’s the Academy?” he finally asked.
“Hmm?” I said, still eating. I may not have finished my sandwich, but I never, ever let good ice cream go to waste.
“The Academy. You said that Sizemore wanted to save the Academy.”
“Of course he did. He was the Senior Professor of Applied Chronal Studies.” I managed a snicker. “His job was on the line.”
“Not my Sizemore,” he said sadly. “His title was Duke of Trans-Temporal Physics.”
My Sizemore. He’d figured it out.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“You’re not me, are you?” he asked, plaintive now. “I thought at first you were a later me, that something else had happened and Sizemore sent me back again to help. But you’re not.”
“I’m not you,” I agreed. “I could have been, though. Same genes. I was born in ’48, and Sizemore sent me back in ’73. I was born later than you and I came back further when I was older, but I could have been you. I’ve been here eight years, local time.”
“Eight years,” he said softly.
“It was supposed to be thirty-two hours at most,” I said.
“What was your assignment?”
“Keep someone from being born.”
“How?”
I hated that question. I always do. “Something bad,” I said. “Something I’m ashamed of. But it didn’t work. The kind of tailored changes Sizemore wants don’t seem to be possible. There are just too many variables. And too many old patterns that reassert themselves.”
“Oh.” His straw gurgled as he drew down the last of the root beer.
I told him about my timeline, about the Revolution Academe and all the rest. The broad outlines were all that I offered up; the details didn’t matter anymore. Besides, I’d forgotten most of the
story. The only place that my specific past lived now was in my memories, and eight years is enough time to forget a lot.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said when I finished, but the protest was half-hearted. He was nearly into the acceptance phase now. “It can’t happen that way. That kind of socio-economic elitism—”
“It won’t happen that way, but it did,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for political rhetoric. “It seems to happen that way about half the time, but it happens other ways, too. Your Imperium, for example. And don’t get me started on the Cadre.”
“But you and I—”
“You and I are like the rest of the future. We happen a lot of ways, but we happen again and again. We’re near-constants, the same bloodline expressed across multiple histories.”
“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” he said.
I shrugged. Sometimes, shrugging is all you can do. “Sure, but it happens,” I said. “Look at Sizemore. There’s no such thing as fate, but there are patterns that play themselves out again and again. The Academy rises, dominates the world, then falls to be replaced by something worse. The Cadre does, too. The same thing, only different.”
Eight years had been long enough to read a lot of the local literature. Much of it was very good. One writer I particularly admired had likened the future to a booted foot, smashing down into an unprotected human face. He’d been right, but what he hadn’t known was that the style of the boot would vary, even if the foot and the face stayed pretty much the same.
Mark continued. “But for our parents to meet over and over, and our grandparents, and—”
His words trailed off into silence, and I shrugged again. “It happens.”
“What now?” he asked. “If I can’t go home again, I mean.”
“You can’t. Home’s gone, Mark, even if something almost exactly likes it happens instead.” We were almost finished. I pushed my empty glass aside and reached for the slip Mackenzie had left. “And after a while, you’ll be glad you can’t go back,” I said. “I sure am.”
The diner was an old-fashioned place, even by the standards of the day, and the check was handwritten. Mackenzie had dotted the i in her name with a little cartoon heart. Mark watched as I added up the numbers in my head.
He really did have a lot to learn, but he’d manage. “What am I going to do?” he asked, echoing my thoughts.
“Do? You’ll do what I did. You make a place and a life for yourself,” I said. “I can get you a new name and show you how the world works. I’ve done it before.”
I left some bills on the table, enough money to cover the check and a healthy tip. With well-honed waitress skills, Mackenzie looked up from working another table and waved to us as we left. She really was a sweet girl. Mark waved back and I smiled; there was hope for him yet.
Even so, I have to admit that I was relieved when we stepped outside and those two were no longer in the same room.
By now, it was midafternoon. The sky was clear and the air was fresh and clean. I knew next to nothing about Mark’s world, but this one had to be better, even if the seeds of the Academy and the Cadre and the Imperium were already sprouting. I was sure that Mark would come to agree. He already liked the food, which was a good start.
Life gets lived best lived in the present. The futures could take care of themselves.
“You’ll like it here,” I told him. “We always do.”
“You keep referring to others,” he said, as if he’d just realized it. “I’m not the first? After you, I mean.”
Now that the hard part was over, now that I’d explained the situation and kept another me from making the same mistake that I had, I could manage a laugh.
“No,” I said. “You’re not the first. You’re not even the first one this week.”
TRY, TRY AGAIN
John Gregory Betancourt
Success would come with the flip of a switch.
It was a matter of life and death for Dr. Keith O’Conner. Not his life, but the life of his son. That’s why he had invented time travel . . . the transmission of electrically charged impulses back through the years to a human brain . . . his brain, to be precise. He would plant a warning thought in his own head on the day his son had died.
Just in time to save little Jacob.
It had been bad enough when he had lost his wife to cancer. But to lose little Jake so shortly thereafter, and in such a pointless way, chasing a ball into the street . . .
The idea of saving his son consumed him. He had worked tirelessly for twenty years to complete the time-travel machine. He had endured professional ridicule, the loss of his job at Boeing, and more hardships and setbacks than he could count. He would do anything, make any sacrifice, to bring back his son. His wife, Sally, would have wanted it this way.
And now it was done.
Standing back, he surveyed the mechanism that filled the basement of his house, a tangled maze of wires and circuit-boards connecting nearly fifty thousand begged, bought, or scavenged parts. He might be an old man now, but it had been worth it. He would make certain Jakey never died.
He fitted the crude metal helmet over his head, set the controls, and activated the machinery. An electric current made his scalp tingle.
“Come on . . . come on . . .” he whispered, concentrating.
“Grow any hair yet?” Jake asked.
“Not funny, kiddo.” Keith glared at his son. Jacob, at twenty-six, reminded Keith of himself at that age: long brown hair, quirky smile, intense brown eyes. But where had he gotten that sense of humor?
Jake feigned remorse. “Sorry, Dad. Did it work or not?”
“I don’t know.” Keith swallowed hard and glanced nervously at the basement stairs. “Go check.”
Jacob sprinted up the steps two at a time. Keith found himself holding his breath. Would his wife be up there now? Had his warning about her not-yet-discovered cancer—and instruction on how to cure it—made it back in time to prevent her death? The thought of saving her had kept him going these last twenty-odd years. If he could only get that message safely back through time . . .
His son came down the stairs slowly, a dejected look on his face.
“Sorry, Dad. Not this time.”
Keith sighed. Every great inventor had an off day. Sally, his beautiful wife, would be cured if it was the last thing he did.
“Check the settings,” he said. “We’ll try again.”
“Right-o.”
The second try . . . that would be the successful one. They were close, and he knew it.
It took half an hour to review every setting. He and his son adjusted variance compensators, checked and rechecked figures, and at last nodded to each other. This time it would work. It had to.
Keith fitted the helmet over his head, took a deep breath, and flipped the switch. He concentrated on sending the cure for cancer back to his own brain twenty years in the past. Again came a faint electric tingling, but nothing more.
“Well?” Sally asked. “Did it work?”
“I don’t know,” he said, pulling off the helmet. “I don’t think so. Nothing feels different.”
“Poor dear.” She touched his shoulder. “I know how much it means to you.”
He sighed and patted her liver-spotted hand, then looked beyond her at the circle of disappointed faces. The six staff members of the research division at O’Conner Pharmaceuticals all looked grimly resigned. Even the few of them who half understood the principles of time-transmission hadn’t really believed it would work; they had only humored him because he signed the paychecks. His reputation might have been built on a breakthrough cure for cancer, but when he started chasing time-travel, he knew he had lost their respect. Only Sally had believed, as she had always believed in him.
“Let’s see,” Sally said. “Maybe it did work and we just don’t know it yet.”
She motioned at the nearest wall-active, said, “News 4,” and the program flickered on.
“. . . Eighty-six thousand rep
orted dead this month in South Africa . . .” droned the announcer’s voice, as pictures of plague victims flashed past.
The researchers at O’Conner Pharmaceuticals had just come up with the vaccine this week; his plants were hurrying to manufacture enough serum to cure the four million infected men, women, and children throughout the world.
But that wouldn’t help the two million already dead. Only sending the cure back in time could save them.
“Off!” Keith barked. The wall returned to normal. “All right, the cure didn’t make it back,” he said. “What happened?”
“I’ll check the settings,” Dr. Benhurst said. He motioned to the other researchers. “Places, everyone. Let’s find out where we went wrong.”
The third try . . . that would be the successful one, Keith knew. They were close. So many people would be saved, if only he sent the cure back fifteen years in time.
By the time they got to the fiftieth try, His Imperial Majesty Keith I, Emperor of the United Earth, was almost ready to give up.
His life was an open record of achievements. He had cured all major diseases, imposed world peace, and amassed a six-trillion-dollar fortune, which he used for the greater good of all mankind. His companies helped the poor, fed the starving, employed the unemployable. At his orders, human colonists had begun to settle the planets and moons throughout the solar system. Truly, a new age had dawned for mankind.
If only his time-travel experiments had worked, life would be perfect.
As his temporal transmission throne rose slowly from the isolation chamber in the center of the Silver Palace’s experimental medical unit, he had plenty of time to think about what might have gone wrong. The calculations? No, they were correct, to the last decimal! The transducer array? In perfect order! The potential Boltron particle accelerator? Hmm . . .
Then the shielding swung back like an eggshell pulling into itself, and dozens of staff members clustered around, monitoring his vital signs and the equipment functions.