by John Kessel
She came over to him, made him look at her. "I'm sorry. I had no right to say that to you. But I'm going to tell him, nonetheless."
August wouldn't meet her eyes. "I knew this day would come, but I didn't think it would come like this. All I can say is, I hope he understands how lucky he is. And for you--I hope it's a hell of a ride." He smiled. "After I give the bride away I can sell his relatives some stock in our fifth-century platinum mine."
"I'd like that." She kissed him on the cheek, squared her shoulders and headed for the restaurant, trying hard not to run.
In the lobby soldiers guarded the entrance. A trooper stood conspicuously beside the main desk. Gen hurried out to the atrium restaurant. It was another beautiful day. The morning sun was bright and the air cool.
She found Owen a secluded table in the plaza, screened by foliage, reading a newspaper. He wore dark glasses, as if that would keep the media away. Watching him from the doorway, she had to smile. The skin above his damaged eyebrow was pulled tight. She could not get over the fact that Owen had thrown himself in front of a rifle for her. Not that it had much to do with her. It had more to do with his absurd romantic notion of who she was. It made her both nervous and giddy. How much fun it was to knock him over and jump on him, tease him out of his coma, wake him into himself. What an enthusiastic amateur he had been in bed.
When he saw her coming he jumped up. He took her hand, kissed her cheek. "How are you?"
"It's not every day I get to have breakfast with a spy."
Owen looked puzzled, then smiled and took off the glasses. "A dumb idea, huh?"
"You look handsome in them. Mysterious."
He stared at her. "The mystery is that you're with me."
Gen smiled. They ordered breakfast. While they waited for it, Gen stared at the tablecloth. She played with her fork against the fabric, trying to get up her nerve. How much harder this was than almost anything she had had to do before. She knew Owen was watching.
"What's the matter, Genevieve? Have I done something wrong?"
She looked up at him, smiled. "No. Excuse me, I need to freshen up."
"You look wonderful already."
"Now don't you be fresh. I'll be right back." Gen fled toward the ladies room.
#
=We taking odds on whether she comes back?=
"Of course she's coming back," Owen said. "Why wouldn't she?"
=She showed every physical sign of concealed stress.=
"That's two of us, then." Owen was relieved to think Gen might be as nervous around him as he was around her.
=You're nervous because you like her. We don't know what she's hiding.=
"Why can't you accept that she's attracted to me for who I am?" he said. "You're supposed to be an advisor, not a lead weight tied around my self-confidence."
=I'm supposed to watch out for you.=
"I'm not eight years old anymore. If I can't watch out for myself now, I never will."
At the next table, watching Owen, sat a stout man with dark hair. Probably some reporter hoping to eavesdrop his way into an exclusive. Owen tried to ignore him, but the man kept staring. Had Owen been talking to Bill aloud again?
Finally Owen decided he might as well face him. "Is this your first time travel vacation?" Owen asked.
The man did not seem taken aback. "No. I've done a lot of time touring. You might say I'm very experienced."
"I've never done any touring proper," Owen said. "I've spent most of my time on research."
"So you never met that woman I just saw you with before?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because I did. In the 18th century, she swindled me."
"You're mistaken."
"What does she call herself--Gabrielle Tourtereau? She's a con artist. She and her partner, an older guy, gray hair, looks to be in his fifties. And as soon as she comes back, I'm going to turn the bitch in."
Owen sat up straighter. "Sir, I don't know who you are, but you had better watch your mouth. This woman is my fiancée. I traveled with her myself, from the future."
"Then you must be her accomplice."
"My name is Owen Beresford Vannice. I have a private fortune of fifty trillion dollars. I don't hang around with confidence men. And if you keep this up I'll have the management throw you out of this place."
"Well, don't get huffy. It's your funeral, if you want to play games with that little trollop. But when she takes you and your fifty trillion for a ride, don't say I didn't warn you." The man took out his wallet, pulled a card from inside, and tossed it toward Owen. Owen caught it, awkwardly.
"When you get tired of being taken, read that." He crumpled his linen napkin onto his plate, and left.
The card was a electronic file. The label read Saltimbanque Temporal Security.
=Do you want me to say anything?= Bill whispered.
"No."
A con artist. She couldn’t be. But then Owen thought some more, and the scaffolding of euphoria he'd been climbing for the last days began to feel shaky. Learn to pretend, she'd told him! But the dancing, the trip to the club, the brush of her hair on his cheek?
Just remember, she'd said, I'm smarter than you are.
He ejected the newscard from his paper and inserted the electronic file. He paged past the intro to the first image. It was a photo of Genevieve and August, seated on a sunny plaza overlooking a beach. Beneath it:
August Alexander Faison, aka Colonel Alexander Harrington, aka Sir Alfred Mcglennan-Keith, aka Arthur Greenbaum, age 53, and his daughter Genevieve Faison, aka Jean Harrington, aka Eve Sedgwick, aka Gabrielle Tourtereau, age 28, on the esplanade in 1926 Cannes. Bunko, short and long confidence games, fraud, theft...
Owen turned it off.
The waiter returned and set out their breakfast: eggs, sausage, melon slices, croissants, and two perfect glasses of Galilean orange juice. Owen pushed the juice away. "Get me a vodka. A double."
The waiter left.
How coolly she had drawn him in. Why not? He was easy pickings. All the time teasing him along, setting him up. That comedy of errors with Wilma, aborted by the terrorist raid. And he had risked his life for her. He was going to ask her to marry him.
Images of the last three days flooded back to him, and he began to feel ill. The lectures on dinosaurs he'd swamped her with, his theories, his plans. Genevieve must have been torn between tedium and laughter. He was just a mark, a fool to be mocked and used. And last night? His ears burned, and he stared at the table, blinking back tears.
The waiter brought back the vodka, and he drank a couple of gulps. It burned going down. He was a bumbling clown, a man with dinosaur dung on his boots, a clumsy oaf who stepped on small animals. How could he have imagined that a woman like her would really be attracted to him? It was a bitter joke.
"Mighty early for strong spirits, Professor. What will your dancing instructor say?"
He looked up and there she was, impossibly beautiful. White dress swirling around her legs, the broad white hat pulled low over one eye. He looked away. "I felt like a drink."
His head spun, swept by a mix of emotions so strong he felt the corners of his eyes burn. He saw her lying in his bed. How she must have laughed with August when she'd gotten back to her room. How sure she must have been that she'd had him on the hook. What a fool he'd been. He belonged back in the Cretaceous, waiting for the asteroid to blow him to bits.
She touched his arm. He did not look at her.
"It's a beautiful day," she said. "After breakfast, let's go for a walk. I have something I want to tell you."
"I'd love to hear what you have to tell me," Owen said.
Gen put her hat on the table. "What's wrong, Owen?"
"Absolutely nothing. Everything is perfect. It's a beautiful morning in 40 A.D." He played with the card in his hand.
"What's that?"
"This? It's just evidence of--of a historical discovery."
"A discovery?"
"That's right. We've discovered
something about the women of the past that we did not know."
Genevieve looked sober. "You can't always trust initial findings. What they mean depends on your point of view."
"The researcher who gave me this says I can trust his point of view. He's not suffering under any illusions. Shall we run it through the newsreader?"
She saw the label on the card. The silence stretched, and Owen waited, hoping for Gen to deny it, to say she could not imagine what he was talking about. Instead she gave the tiniest of sighs. "Oh," she said.
"It's full of interesting material," Owen said. "Very revealing."
"When did you get this?"
He turned to her. She was achingly beautiful. Her eyes glistened. "Two days ago. Before the dance."
"Before the dance? Why didn't you say anything?"
"I wanted to see just how far you would go. It gave me the advantage. That's what it's all about, isn't it?"
"I can't believe last night was just an act."
"You can't? You're the one who told me to try pretending. I've been pretending."
For a moment she didn't say anything.
"Owen, I know you're hurt." Gen's voice was husky. "I'm sorry. Maybe in the beginning I was pretending, too--but not now. Not last night."
"I'm not stupid, Ms. Faison--if that's your real name. You're not the first woman after my family's money."
"Don't say anything you know isn't true, Owen. I came here this morning to tell you."
"Don't bother. I've already gotten what I wanted from you."
He stopped, pulled out his wallet, stuck in a blank e-cash chip and typed in some code. He pulled out the chip and slipped it into her purse. "Here's thirty thousand dollars. It's not too much to pay for the services you rendered. The dog must not have come cheap."
She stood up, picked up her hat. He tried not to notice the tears in her eyes. But her voice was cold. "Does it give you pleasure to pretend that you tricked me?" He would not meet her look. She tried to make him face her, but he just turned his shoulder.
"You must be quite a child to want to hurt me so bad," Genevieve said. "Maybe you did trick me after all."
She clutched her purse and walked back through the colonnade into the lobby. He sat watching through the palms long after she was gone. He finished the vodka. Their breakfast went cold on the table. While he watched, some soldiers led the captive zealots past the entrance, trailing a cloud of video midges and a horde of reporters. One of the reporters spotted him and made a beeline for the table.
FOURTEEN: NOTHING SACRED
He was small dark man with a patchy beard. Blood streamed down his naked back. A dog nipped at his heels as he dragged the wooden beam over the cobbles, prodded by a stony-faced centurion. Some Sadducees and Pharisees walked behind, imperial and sober. Afterward came a couple more soldiers and a gaggle of hecklers. An adolescent girl stood to the side, hands at her sides, silently weeping. Far off, Owen heard the barking of a yet another dog. Their tour guide was paying more attention to keeping his charges out of the way than to the spectacle. In a minute the procession had passed. Beside Owen a matron with hennaed hair stood open-mouthed. She played with her wristward, disguised as a gold bracelet, turning it over and over. "He's so short," she said to her husband.
"So?"
"Can't we do anything?"
"This is just history, Margaret," her husband said. "Get hold of yourself."
The tour was a mixed bag of the overeducated and skeptical, the unconventionally mystical and the plain loony. Since the first visitors to the crucifixion had discovered that Jesus did not rise from the dead, that in fact the gospels, though in some ways remarkably accurate accounts of the life of a great spiritual teacher, were not the biography of a superhuman god-being in human form, few believers desired to witness this brutal execution. They were happier with the Christ of two thousand years of after-the-fact fabrications. For surprisingly many, the discovery of the facts behind the Gospels had had no effect whatsoever on their faith. Time travel, they said, was a delusion, and this Jesus who suffered and died in other moment universes bore no connection to the true Son of God.
What that meant was that the ones who went to see Jesus were not the conventionally religious. Instead you got historians, amateur and otherwise, a mixed bag of Unitarians and liberal Protestants, a few Zen Buddhists and postmillennial philosophers. Jesus: the attraction for secular humanists.
And for broken-hearted paleontologists, waiting to go home, dodging reporters and seeking to swamp their humiliation in some greater tragedy. The zealot Simon had spoken of the crucifixion as something that might give him peace. For Owen it wasn't working. The tour guide led them to Golgotha by a back way. This Jerusalem had no electric lights, no amusement parks, no soldiers with automatic rifles, no hovercraft. Noon had been warm and dusty, but as the day wore on a storm front came through and dropped the temperature fifteen degrees, bringing with it blustery winds, clouds, the threat of rain.
On Golgotha stood four crosses. There was no colloquy between the dying prisoners, no lightning in the skies. When the soldiers came by to break the legs of the crucified men so that they might die before the Passover evening, they discovered that Yeshu was already gone. He'd died silently, without protest or consolation.
The guide led them back to the gathering point. When they had all assembled, the guide used the portable travel unit to translate them back to the time-colonized Jerusalem.
In the midst of this, all Owen could think about was Gen.
As they left the transfer room they passed the main time travel stage. It bustled with activity, at last up and running for hotel guests to return to the future. And there stood August and Gen, with their luggage, waiting at the customs desk to be shot forward in time. It was time for Owen to pack up Wilma and go back himself. He ducked his head and hoped they did not see him.
#
Kyle Johnston had been the first boy she had ever loved. August and Genevieve had been living in Frankfurt, where August was involved in an import-export business that pushed the fringes of legality. For one of the few times in her life Gen was able to attend a regular school.
Kyle was the son of an American business couple from Minneapolis. He had the most beautiful brown hair, parted in the middle and hanging to his shoulders, and pale flawless skin. He was the handsomest boy Gen had ever seen, and she had fallen in love with him from a distance. When eventually she worked up the nerve to speak to him, she was overwhelmed to find that he liked her. They would spend nights in the park by the river, or hanging out in the maglev station playing tricks on the tourists. Gen taught him the gypsy switch. Kyle's American good looks let him get away with murder, even brought people to him as if they were looking to get taken.
The moment they got caught, Kyle abandoned her. He told his parents that it had all been Gen's idea. She remembered how, while she'd hung her head in shame, he'd coolly sat there and lied to the authorities. It was all August could do to talk them out of sending her to a social treatment center, and as a result they'd had to leave town.
She'd cried for what seemed like hours on the train to Switzerland, August holding her hand, brushing her hair. "He doesn't know you," August kept repeating. "He knows nothing about you. You're worth ten of his sort." Eventually she'd fallen asleep. After a month she never thought of him any more.
Until now. Genevieve and August stood waiting at the customs desk for their turn at the transit stage. While they waited a crucifixion tour group returned from one of the unburned Jerusalems. Among them was Owen. Gen spotted him immediately, but he ducked his head to avoid her gaze. She let him pass without a word.
"When I think of the way that jerk treated me . . ." Gen said.
August put his arm around her shoulders. "A completely heartless act takes a lifetime of preparation."
The customs officer passed them through, and the steward carried their bags to the stage. "Oh, father," Gen whispered, "I'm such a mess."
"We are all messes, mo
re or less. I would say that that young man is on his way to becoming a particularly pathetic sort of bad man. But no less infuriating for his pathos."
"The worst thing is that he doesn't know it. He thinks he's the abused party."
"That's almost the definition of a bad man."
"When I think of the way he looked at me as he handed me that cash . . ."
August turned her away from the technicians inside the booth, made her look him in the eyes. "We must spend it on something that he would not approve."
"Someday I'm going to hurt him. You wait."
"Someday. For now, trust me, it's better to let it go," August said. "And if you can't trust a grifter, who can you trust?"
Part II
Connecticut, 2062
ONE: EASY LIVING
Owen crept down the back stairs and out through the kitchen, trying to avoid his parents. The staff was already up, preparing breakfast, but they knew enough not to pay attention. He slipped out the kitchen door and down the exterior staircase to the grounds.
Built early in the twentieth century so the rich might flee pre-air conditioned New York for a month in rural Connecticut, Thornberry, the Vannice summer home, had once been a resort. The big Frank Lloyd Wrightish house offered sixteen bedrooms, an open family room with huge fieldstone fireplace, and a cantilevered verandah that ran along the entire rear of the house. Century-old oaks and pines lined the estate's shady lanes, and a golf course's worth of lawn rolled down to the shore of the Sound. About the grounds of the estate nestled three guest houses and a dozen cabins, a dock and boathouse. And the greenhouse, which Owen had expanded and turned into Wilma's quarters: although global warming had pushed the shoreline fifty yards closer to the house, winter nights could still get chilly.