Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  She was crying harder, voice shaking. Shocked by her collapse into violent tremors, Jenna reached out, grasped her aunt’s chilled fingers, held on tight. “Hey. It’s okay,” she said gently.

  Cassie tightened her fingers around Jenna’s, shook her head. “No,” she choked out, “it isn’t. You’re his little girl. It’s going to hurt you so much when all of this comes out. I thought you deserved to know. If . . .” she hesitated. “If you want to take off for Europe for a while, I’ll pay for the tickets. Take Carl with you, if your roommate wants to go.”

  Jenna had to scrape her lower jaw off the table.

  Cassie tried to smile, failed utterly. “You’re going to need a friend, someone to protect you, while this is breaking loose, Jenna, and . . . well, your father and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. He’s never approved of either of us joining the Lady of Heaven Temple or the food I eat or the men I divorced or the way I make my living, any more than he’s ever approved of your friends or your choice of career. You’re growing up, Jenna. Who you’re friends with—or sleep with—is your business, not mine or his or anyone else’s, and frankly, a blind man could see Carl’s good for you, say what your father will. For one thing,” she said bitterly, “you’re standing up to that bastard for once in your life, insisting on a film career, and I know how much Carl’s had to do with that. And I know what’s in that bank box of yours. Frankly, I approve. It’s why I’m sending him with you. I know he’ll take care of you for me.”

  “What?” Jenna gasped. Cripes . . . Where did Aunt Cassie get her information from? But her concern was so genuine, Jenna couldn’t even take offense at the invasion of privacy which her really serious snooping represented.

  Cassie tried to smile, failed. “Don’t be angry with me for prying, sweety, please. I’m just trying to look out for you. So.” She slid an envelope across the table. “If you want to go, you can probably get out before the press gets wind of this. And don’t go all stubborn and proud on me and tell me you’ve got to do things on your own. You think the press has been savage before? You have no idea how bad it’s going to get, hon. They’re going to crucify us. All of us. So take it, grab your passports, both of you, and get out of town. Okay, Jenna?”

  She just didn’t know what to say. Maybe that crazy scheme to get down time to film the Ripper terror wasn’t so crazy, after all—and here was her aunt, handing Jenna enough cash to keep her hidden safely down time from the press corps for months, if necessary. Carl, too. Maybe they’d win that Kit Carson Prize in Historical Video, after all, with months to complete the filming, rather than a couple of weeks. The envelope she slid into her handbag was heavy. Thick, heavy, and terrifying. She poured another glass of wine and drank it down without pausing.

  “Okay, Cassie. I’ll go. Mind if I call Carl?”

  Her aunt’s attempt at a smile was the most courageous thing Jenna ever seen, braver and more real than anything her aunt had ever done in her presence. “Go on, Jenna. I’ll order us dinner while you’re gone.”

  She scooted back her chair and kissed her aunt’s cheek. “Love you, Cassie. Be right back.” She found the phones in the back beside the bathrooms and dug into her purse for change, then dialed.

  “Hello?”

  “Carl, it’s Jenna. You’re never going to believe—“

  Gunfire erupted in stereo.

  From the telephone receiver and the restaurant. Carl’s choked-off scream, guttural, agonized, cut straight through Jenna. Rising screams out in Luigi’s main dining room hardly registered. “Carl! Carl!” Then, as shock sank in, and the realization that she was still hearing gunfire from the direction of her aunt’s table: “Cassie!” She dropped the receiver with a bang, ignoring its violent swing at the end of its cord. Jenna ran straight toward the staccato chatter of gunfire, tried to shove past terrified patrons fleeing the dining room.

  Someone shouted her name. Jenna barely had time to recognize Noah Armstrong, elegant clothing covered in blood. Then the detective body-slammed her to the floor. Gunfire erupted again, chewing into the man behind Jenna. The wall erupted into splinters behind him. The man screamed, jerked like a murdered marionette, plowed into the floor, still screaming. Jenna choked on a ghastly sound, realized the hot, wet splatters on her face were blood. A booming report just above her ear deafened her; then someone snatched her to her feet.

  “Run!”

  She found herself dragged through Luigi’s kitchen. Screams echoed behind them. The gun in Armstrong’s hand cleared a magical path. Waiters and cooks dove frantically out of their way. At the exit to the alleyway behind the restaurant, Armstrong flung her against the wall, reloaded the gun with a practiced, fluid movement, then kicked the door open. Gunfire from outside slammed into the door. Jenna cringed, tried to blot from memory the sound of Carl’s scream, tried desperately not to wonder where Aunt Cassie was and just whose blood was all over Armstrong’s fluid silk suit.

  More deafening gunfire erupted from right beside her. Then Armstrong snatched her off balance and snarled, “Run, goddamn you!” The next instant, they were pelting down an alleyway littered with at least three grotesquely dead men. All three were dressed like middle-easterners, wearing a type of headdress made popular during the late twentieth century by a famous terrorist turned politician, Jenna couldn’t recall the name through numb shock. The detective swore savagely, stooped and snatched up guns from dead hands. “It figures! They showed up as Ansar Majlis!” Armstrong thrust one salvaged gun into a pocket, shoved the other two into Jenna’s shocked hands with a steel-eyed glance. “Don’t drop them! If I tell you to shoot, do it!”

  Jenna stared stupidly at the guns. She’d used guns before, Carl’s black-powder pistols, which he carried in action-shooting re-enactments, the ones stored in her bank box along with their time-touring tickets and the diamond ring she didn’t dare wear publicly yet, and she’d fired a few stage-prop guns loaded with blanks. The guns Noah Armstrong shoved into her hands were modern, sleek, terrifying. Their last owners had tried to kill her. Jenna’s hands shook violently. From the direction of Forty-Second Street, sirens began to scream.

  “Come on, kid! Go into shock later!”

  Armstrong jerked her into motion once more. She literally fell off her high-heeled shoes, managed to kick them off as she stumbled after Armstrong. They pelted down the alleyway and emerged into heavy traffic. Armstrong ran right in front of a yellow taxicab. The car screeched to a halt, driver cursing in a blistering tongue that was not English. Armstrong yanked open the driver’s door and bodily tossed the cabby onto the street.

  “Get in!”

  Jenna dove for the passenger’s door. She barely had her feet off the pavement before the car squealed into motion. Armstrong, whatever his/her gender, was a maniac behind the wheel of a car. If anyone tried to follow, they ended up at the bottom of a very serious multi-car pileup that strung out several blocks in their wake. Jenna gulped back nausea, found herself checking the guns with trembling fingers to see how much ammunition might be left in them, terrified she’d accidentally set one of them off. She’d never used any guns like these. She asked hoarsely, “Aunt Cassie?”

  “Sorry, kid.”

  She squeezed shut her eyes. Oh, God . . . Cassie . . . Carl. . . . Jenna needed to be sick, needed to cry, was too numb and shocked to do either.

  “It’s my fault,” Armstrong said savagely. “I should never have let her meet you. I told her not to wait at Luigi’s for you, told her they’d trace her through that goddamned call to your apartment! I knew they’d try something, dammit! But Christ, an all-out war in the middle of Luigi’s . . . with his own daughter and sister-in-law!”

  Wetness stung Jenna’s eyes. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. Her hands shook where she gripped the guns Armstrong had shoved at her.

  “Forget Europe, kid,” the detective muttered. “They’re not gonna let you get out of New York alive. They hit your apartment, didn’t they? Killed your fiancé? Carl, wasn’t it?”
<
br />   She nodded, unable to force any sound past the constriction in her throat.

  Whoever Armstrong was, he or she could out-curse a rodeo rider. “Which means,” the detective ended harshly, “they were going to hit you anyway, even if Cassie hadn’t met you. Just on the chance she might have mailed it to you. And they had to kill Carl, in case you’d said something to him. God damn them!”

  “Who’s ‘them’?” she managed to choke out, not quite daring to ask what Cassie might have mailed, but hadn’t.

  Armstrong glanced sidelong at her for just an instant, long enough for Jenna to read the pity in those cold grey eyes. “Your father’s business associates. One royal bastard in particular, who’s been paying off your father for years. And the goddamned terrorists they’re bringing into the country. Right past customs and immigration, diplomatic fucking immunity.”

  Jenna didn’t want to hear anything more. She’d heard all the slurs, the innuendo, the nasty accusations in the press. She hadn’t believed any of it. Who would’ve believed such filth about her own father, for Chrissake, even a father as lousy as hers had been over the years? Jenna had learned early that politics was a dirty, nasty game, where rivals did their damnedest to smear enemies’ reputations with whichever reporters they’d paid off that week. It was one reason she’d chosen to pursue a career in film, following her aunt’s lead, despite her father’s furious opposition. Oh, God, Aunt Cassie . . . Carl. . . . Her eyes burned, wet and swollen, and she couldn’t get enough air down.

  “Ever been time-touring, kid?” Armstrong asked abruptly.

  “Wh-what?”

  “Time-touring? Have you ever been?”

  She blinked, tried to force her brain to function again. “No. But . . .” she had to swallow hard, “Carl and I, we were going to go . . . through TT-86, to London. Got the tickets and everything, used false ID to buy them, to keep it a secret . . .”

  The taxi slewed around another corner, merged with traffic on Broadway, slowed to a decorous pace. “Kid,” Armstrong said softly, “those tickets might just save your life. Because the only by-God way out of this city now is through TT-86. Where did you hide them? Do you still have the fake ID’s you bought?”

  She’d begun to shake against the cracked plastic of the taxi’s front seat, was ashamed of the reaction, couldn’t hide it. “Yeah, we’ve still—I’ve still—“ she was trembling violently now, unable to block the memory of Carl’s agonized screams. “Locked them up in . . . in my lock box . . .” The other secret hidden in that lock box brought the tears flooding despite her best efforts not to cry. Carl’s ring, the one she couldn’t wear openly, yet, not until she’d turned twenty-one, making her legally and financially independent of her hated father, lay nestled in the lock box beside the tickets.

  Noah glanced sharply into her eyes. “Lock box? A bank box? Which bank?”

  Jenna told him.

  Twenty minutes later, after a brief stop at a back-alley stolen-clothes huckster for new clothes—something without blood on it—Jenna clutched the entire contents of her bank account—which wasn’t much—and the false identification papers and tickets she and her secret fiancé had bought to go time-touring, a grand adventure planned in innocence, with dreams of making a film that would launch both their careers . . . and so much more. Jenna rescued the ring from the safe, too, still closed up its little velvet box that had once been Carl’s mother’s, wanting at least that much of Carl’s memory with her.

  She also carried a thick case which held Carl’s two black-powder 1858 Remington Beale’s pistols she’d kept in the vault, the heavy .44 caliber pistols Carl had carried during re-enactments of Gettysburg and First Manassas and the Wilderness campaigns, the ones he’d taught her to use, after he’d won that action-shooting match in up-state New York last month. The ones her father would’ve exploded over, had he known Jenna was keeping them in her bank box. Armstrong eyed the heavy pistols silently, that glance neither approving nor disapproving, merely calculating. “Do you have ammo for those?”

  Jenna nodded. “In the bottom of the gun case.”

  “Good. We’ll have to ditch this modern stuff before we enter TT-86. I’d just as soon be armed with something. How do you load them?”

  Wordlessly, Jenna began loading the reproduction antique guns, but Noah’s steel-cold voice stopped her. “Not yet.”

  “Why not?” Jenna demanded shrilly. “Just because it’s illegal? My own father wrote those laws, dammit! It didn’t stop . . .” Her voice shattered.

  Noah Armstrong’s voice went incredibly gentle. “No, that isn’t it. We just won’t be able to take loaded guns through TT-86’s security scans. We can take them through as costume accessories, but not loaded and ready to fire. Tell me how to load them, and we’ll do that the second we’re on station.”

  Jenna had to steady down her thoughts enough to explain how to pour black powder into each cylinder and pull down the loading lever to seat bullets, rather than more traditional round balls, in each chamber of the cylinder, how to wipe grease across the openings to prevent flame from setting off the powder in adjoining chambers, how to place percussion caps . . . The necessity to think coherently helped draw her back from raw, shaking terror.

  “They’re probably going to figure out where we went,” Armstrong said quietly when she’d finished. “In fact, they’ll be hitting TT-86, too, as soon as possible.” The detective swore softly. “Ansar Majlis . . . That’s the key, after all, isn’t it? After today, it’s even money they’ll hit her the next time Primary cycles. Part of their goddamned terrorist plan.”

  Jenna glanced up, asking the question silently.

  “Those bastards at Luigi’s were Ansar Majlis. Never heard of ‘em? I wish to Christ I hadn’t. Your aunt is—was—a prominent public supporter of the Lady of Heaven Temples. So are the owners of Luigi’s. And half the patrons. The bastard behind that attack back there sent a death-squad of Ansar Majlis to do his dirty work for him. You’ve heard of Cyril Barris? The multi-billionaire? Believe me, kid, you don’t want to know how he made all that money. And he can’t afford to have your aunt’s murder tied to him. Or to your father. Getting the Ansar Majlis involved makes goddamned sure of that. And those bastards have lined up another ‘terrorist’ hit, aimed right at the very soul of the Lady of Heaven Temples . . .”

  Jenna gasped, seeing exactly where Armstrong was going with this.

  The detective’s glance was grudgingly respectful. “You see it, too, don’t you, kid?”

  Jenna truly, genuinely didn’t want to know anything else about this nightmare.

  Armstrong told her, anyway. Showed her the proof, sickening proof, in full color and stereo sound, proof which the elfin actor on the miniature computer screen in Jenna’s hands had managed to give Armstrong before his death.

  It killed what little respect for her father she’d still possessed.

  * * *

  In the year 1853, a stately man with a high forehead and thick, dark hair that fell down across his brow from a high widow’s peak was inaugurated as the 14th US President under the name of Franklin Pierce. Armed conflict between Russia and Turkey heralded the beginning of the disastrous Crimean War. Further south, Britain annexed the Mahratta State of Nagpur, while in the British home islands, Charlotte Bronte published “Villette” and another writer on the opposite side of the Atlantic, American Nathaniel Hawthorne of Scarlet Letter fame, brought out the “Tanglewood Tales.” Noted historian Mommsen wrote “A History of Rome” and the legendary impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh was born. European architecture enjoyed a renaissance of restoration as P.C. Albert began the rebuilding of Balmoral Castle, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and—across the English Channel—Georges Haussmann began the reconstruction of Paris with the Boulevards, Bois de Boulogne.

  In New York, Mr. Henry Steinway began manufacturing fine pianos. On the Continent, Italian composer Verdi wrote his great operas Trovatore and La Traviata and German composer Wagner completed the text of the masterwork
Der Ring des Nibelungen. Alexander Wood shot his first patient with a subcutaneous injection from a hypodermic syringe and Samuel Colt, that American legend of firearms design, revolutionized British small-arms manufacture with his London factory for machine-made revolvers.

  In London, Queen Victoria ensured the increasing popularity of the previously little-trusted chloroform as a surgical anesthetic by allowing herself to be chloroformed for the birth of her seventh child. Britain established the telegraph system in India and made smallpox vaccinations mandatory by law. In America, the world’s largest tree, the Wellingtonia gigantea, was discovered growing in a California forest. And in Middlesex Street, Whitechapel—otherwise known as Petticoat Lane, after the famous market which lined that cobbled thoroughfare—a child was born to Lithuanian immigrant Varina Boleslaus and English dock laborer John Lachley.

  The child was not a welcome addition to a family of six subsisting on John Lachley’s ten shillings a week, plus the shilling or two Varina added weekly from selling hand-crafted items made on her crocheting hook. In fact, in many parts of the world during that year of 1853, this particular child would have been exposed to the elements and allowed to die. Not only could its parents ill afford to feed the baby, clothe it, or provide an education, the child was born with physical . . . peculiarities. And in 1853, the East End of London was neither an auspicious time nor a hospitable place to be born with marked oddities of physique. The midwife who attended the birth gasped in horrified dismay, unable to answer every exhausted mother’s first, instinctive question: boy or girl?

  Statistically, the human gene pool will produce children with ambiguous genitalia once in every thousand live births, perhaps as often as once in every five hundred. And while true hermaphrodites—children with the genital tissues of both sexes—account for only a tiny fraction of these ambiguously genitaled infants, they still can occur once in every one million or so live human births. Even in modern, more culturally enlightened societies, surgical “correction” of such children during infancy or early childhood can give rise to severe personality disorders, increased rates of suicide, a socially inculcated sense of guilt and secrecy surrounding their true sexual nature.