by Debbie Moon
‘Oh, cut the politicking crap, Warner. I don’t have any choice and you know it. If I stay here, I’m a lab rat for GenoBond. If I do manage to ReTrace to another part of my life, I have nowhere to settle, no one to go to. And now these Travellers of yours know I’m still around, and I’m a threat to them, they’ll track me down, right?’
‘I would imagine so.’
‘But I want you to know that you’re a liar, a traitor and an accessory to illegal and treasonous activities, and I’m not doing it for you.’
His jaw tightened, just a little, and he stood up. ‘I don’t give a shit who you do it for, Jude. Just as long as you do it.’
Year Zero. This is nuts. I wasn’t even born then. I’ll probably get lost – or arrested as a lunatic or something.
‘Got a sedative in that medical kit?’
‘But of course.’
Jude rolled up her sleeve.
As the needle went in, she thought back to the Hurst, and Schrader, fading like a good memory the morning after. ‘So, when I ReTrace, will I disappear, like Schrader did? Completely?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Warner admitted, depressing the plunger. ‘I’ve never actually seen them in action. Why don’t you pop back, after you’ve finished the job, and I’ll buy you coffee and tell you all about it?’
FOURTEEN
Year Zero
Bang.
For a moment, Jude thought she’d run out of time and hit ground, future/present/now. Expected to feel herself bleeding, slipping, falling away for good into whatever not-darkness lay beyond.
Then the sound came back on. Caught up with her, snap, like someone had leant on the mute button. And there was noise. Traffic, voices, music, hurry-bustle-chatter-desperation-noise.
Jude was face down on the pavement, too winded to cry out, one arm trapped under her, and people were stepping right over her.
To be fair, they had to. There was no room on the pavement to step round. Wall to gutter people, shoving, squirming, pushing, clinging to a partner’s arm as if afraid to lose them. Children squeezed between their feet. Dogs squeezed between the children.
It was like the worst ever fire evacuation from Club Andro – the one where every single customer seemed to be doped and couldn’t tell the fire exits from the wall paintings – but with purpose. Going places, and fast.
What the hell was happening?
To her right, a glimpse of the wall, and safety. She took it. Concertinaed to her feet like a gymnast and leapt for it, screaming.
People got out of her way. The look on her face, they’d have been stupid not to.
A moment’s deep breathing, sweaty palms pressed to the cold metal of locked security shutters, and Jude felt ready to lift her gaze from the few precious inches of empty pavement between her feet, and take a look at the street.
Solid with people. Faces at all the windows, on the doorsteps, huddled on the traffic islands. All the way to the blinking stop-go lights and the snail’s crawl of cars, glistening from recent rain. Attack of the Sardine People.
And most of them didn’t smell so good, either.
Crowds were one thing; but the noise, the cars, the way the air hung heavy around her, thick with other people’s sweat? The sheer pressure of being hemmed in by buildings full to the brim with people, and people’s things, and the things people were about to buy and make and consume? There was no way she could cope with this.
And then she remembered. The heat, the exhaust haze, the smell of random, entangled perfumes. Being carried on her mother’s shoulders though a crowd so deep that she couldn’t see the other side, leaning down to listen to murmured reassurances: ‘Just a couple more shops now, Jude, and we can go home.’
It really was like this, before the Migration.
‘All right?’
An old woman, leaning in to frown at her. Too close: close enough to smell her hair lacquer, see the red veins of her eyes, an unimaginable invasion of space outside a club or an extremely intimate relationship.
Wrinkled fingers poked her in the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. ‘I said, are you all right?’
Resisting the urge to shrink back into the shutters, Jude managed a nod. ‘Fine. I just – fell. I’m fine. Thanks.’
The woman nodded, as if she was relieved not to have to get any further involved, and slotted herself back into the contraflow of the crowd. Within seconds, she was gone; another perfectly fitting piece in the ever moving puzzle, another drop in the ocean.
Jude exhaled.
This wasn’t going to be a pleasant trip.
For a start, just look at these people. Oh yes, there were some ugly bastards working for GenoBond. No gene jobs, no quick fixes for them, with their talent hanging in the balance every time someone stirred up their DNA. Some had the free plastic surgery the company offered – though more for self-preservation than aesthetics. People who looked like that and didn’t do something about it were obviously anti-bioteching Luddites, and in most areas of the city, Luddites were only safe while carrying serious armaments.
Even if they didn’t have the surgery, most people in her time were born of variously ‘perfect’ parents, inheriting whatever genetic fixes they’d had. None of them looked like this.
Scowling, limping, hunching, hobbling and crawling. Sick. Old. Anorexic with self-disgust, swollen with self-pity. Unrefined, random and different.
And there were millions of them.
Pressing her back against the metal, reminding herself that she was safe from one direction at least, Jude spent a while just concentrating on breathing. Standing here, that was fine. That was manageable. And if she got desperate enough, she could always climb the drainpipe, hopefully there weren’t laws against that…
Year Zero. Yeah, great idea.
As soon as she caught up with Warner again, she was going to break his immaculately re-gened nose. Of course, he wouldn’t know why, because things would be dealt with, the loop would be closed, he would never have met her in ’32 and told her to do any of this. She’d probably get fired.
Yes, that was definitely going on her ‘to do’ list.
She shrugged, trying to shift the weight of her heavy jacket. Leather. Probably real leather, too. That was vile. Plain top, jeans, running shoes. Pretty much what the downmarket end of the crowd were wearing. Some things hadn’t changed much in the last few decades.
This looks like my body – but I wasn’t even born in this year. Did I create it as I arrived? Bringing it back with me from ’32? How?
You could definitely go crazy thinking about all this.
A child’s arm lashed out, catching her across the knee. A boy in ugly trousers, one arm locked in his mother’s deathgrip, the other flailing in wild aggression at anyone within reach. Jude understood exactly how he felt.
Sooner or later, she was going to have to move from here.
What was it they said in school, about the time the Migration started? That urban overcrowding caused aggression, and the only way people could cope with it was to ignore each other, dehumanise each other, treat people the same way as the lampposts and litter bins. And that, of course, led to all kinds of problems. Crime and aggression and lack of social skills, all the way down to mass murder and dropping litter. So they’d said. ‘Of course, it’ll all be different out in the Hursts…’
Treat people as fixtures and fittings. Fine. She could do that.
That bastard Schrader did it all the time.
Trying to disguise her trembling as an occasional shiver of cold, Jude took a sidestep into the crowd, and somehow made it all the way to the curb without screaming.
It was quite easy, once you got the hang of it. She let the crowd carry her around for a while. Cushioned by a ring of arms folded, eyes-averted people, even crossing the road was easy. Green light or not, any car faced with that amount of mass was going to let it through.
She even knew where she was. Up on the northern edge of the main commercial area. Shop signs, brighter than she remembe
red, drew her in, a moth to a half-familiar flame. Dark windows crammed with dusty salvage had given way to sparse and brilliantly illuminated displays of pristine boxed electronics. Most of the contents would be back here, displayed in the same windows, in her time, hawked for a few coins or for barter.
These were even the same people. Tourists and time-wasters, the rich and the under-employed. Kids skipping school; an easier proposition in her time than in this, from the furtive way they watched any uniform appearing in the crowd. Teenagers, lacking all sense of urgency, squandering money and time with equal abandon. All the same types, just multiplied a hundred-fold.
The pub they’d raided to furnish the house for Fitch was just round the corner. She ought to go round and check out the decor. See if the bead curtains were up yet. They’d certainly looked old enough.
Someone jogged her arm, startling her, and she decided it was time for a rest. Lean into the crowd, turning yourself to signal which way you were going. Use your hands if you have to, but subtly. Casual gestures that just happened to have the effect of moving people aside. Some people gave way, others didn’t. But that was all right. You moved in stages, taking whatever room you were given. Keeping your arms folded in to keep other people’s hands out of your pockets – and to keep everyone else that little bit further away. Keeping yourself safe.
Switching streams to turn right, towards some kind of park entrance, Jude thought, this Living Before The Migration business, it’s not so bad once you get the hang of it.
The park turned out to be a false alarm. Some kind of garden, yes. And pretty. But the gates were marked PRIVATE and padlocked. Given that there didn’t even seem to be anyone in there, what was the point of that?
She positioned herself with her back to the gates – careful not to hide the PRIVATE sign, which was keeping a three-foot clear zone round her – and considered her options.
Going to the authorities was definitely out. Anyway, they might not know any more than she did. Biotech probably wasn’t even public yet. No, she was going to have to sort this out on her own.
So, yes, Mr Warner, I just strolled into the lab as these all-powerful Travellers of yours were about to destroy the first successful regening experiments, and I simply overpowered them with the force of my personality. All in a day’s work for Jude DiMortimer, super-Traveller.
The lab.
That was another thing. She was going to have to work out where they were.
She must have ReTraced to somewhere in the right area. That was how things worked. And Warner said she was being drawn through time to these Travellers anyway. So, somewhere round here.
And somewhere small. Maybe not officially a lab at all. Bioteching had been perfected during some kind of crackdown, hadn’t it? An attempt to regulate genetic experimentation after some kind of over-hyped disaster. The law-makers cracked down on everything – and ‘everything’ went underground, took stupid, unregulated risks, and made the traditional giant leap for mankind.
What had the first companies been called? So many, now the tech had been licensed, pirated, extorted and stolen. BodyTech, BioDiverse, geneClean… All too obvious. During a crackdown, they’d have been called something neutral, something that might pass for a computer company or a standard medical research outfit.
Century Technology. They’d had a place on Great Windmill Street, a whole block, back before the Migration had leeched all the big players from the city and left the field to backstreeters like Harchak. Now, if they’d started off in that location, and expanded…
It was as near to useful information as she was likely to get. And anyway, this was ReTracing. Her problem didn’t really need to be hunted down. All she needed to do was keep busy until it came up and slapped her in the face.
Then someone spoke her name and she looked up, timestreams colliding in her head. Overlaying the blonde woman’s dreary department-store raincoat with the memory of a silk overcoat and patent shoes, her frown with the smile of a killer.
Little Miss Leather Shoes And Matching Handbag, who’d tried to kill her on the SideRide in Little East Bankside, and succeeded in a tastefully decayed backstreet twenty years later.
Or not. It was getting a little hard to tell.
‘Well,’ Jude said, because it was the only thing that came to mind that wasn’t childishly obscene. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’
‘The place to be,’ Little Miss agreed, ‘if you’re a sardine.’
‘Or a homicidal maniac.’
‘Now, Jude, that’s no way to talk about yourself.’
‘Wow, you’re a natural, Miss Prim. Do they have Friday Night Comedy Showcase in this century?’
The pressure of the crowd was pushing them together, nudging her nemesis towards the rear of the pavement. The blonde woman spread her empty hands and smiled. ‘All right, let’s take the wisecracking as read and get down to the talking.’
She’s scared of me.
‘Talk, right. Like you did last time we met?’
She just kept on smiling. ‘That’s all over, Jude. I can’t hurt you now. Not like that, anyway.’
‘Because I’m dead.’
‘Because you’re like us. The dying – or the continual ReTracing, something – pushed you over the edge. Awakened your latent abilities. I could stick a knife in you right now, and you’d be gone before it touched you. You’re no longer tied to your body – and that makes you indestructible.’
‘Thanks for the tip.’
Little Miss frowned. ‘You don’t believe me.’
‘I don’t believe anyone hands the advantage to their enemy by telling them they’re the Woman of Steel.’
The blonde woman glanced away. Just for an instant, and without her gaze seeming to settle anywhere, but Jude marked the direction anyway and began circling against the slow current of bystanders, to check it out.
‘The fact is,’ the woman said wearily, ‘I’m not your enemy. Why don’t we go somewhere less crowded? There’s a square this way – without the padlocks…
‘No.’ Jude nodded in the opposite direction. Away from whatever Little Miss was so interested in, off in the crowd. ‘That way. Walk.’
‘It’s too busy to –’
‘That way, or nothing.’
Shrugging annoyance, Little Miss started to walk.
By the next intersection, Jude knew the street by name. Collymore Street, leading down into a jumble of theatres, takeways and clubs that still existed, much diminished, in her day. Shapeless blocks of concrete and glass jutted over a narrow road choked with erratically parked cars, offering unpredictable impediments to the speed-crazed cyclists.
The crowds had thinned, but there were still enough bystanders around to make her nervous. People in bad suits smoking in doorways, or grunting and twittering into mobile phones, raising their gaze to the thin ribbon of blue sky now and then, as if in desperation.
She glanced back down the street. It didn’t look like they were being followed, but since she didn’t have much idea who the third Traveller was, it was impossible to be sure. Any of these office boys or lost tourists could turn on her any second.
With what weapons, Jude? You don’t even exist here.
Lunging forward, Jude grabbed the woman by the shoulder and swung her round; fast, hard, stopping her with the heel of her hand on the other shoulder. Looked dramatic, and probably felt it, too. The two lads sharing a cigarette on the steps a few doors away looked up, blank as corpses. Probably wondering if they were about to witness some of that inner-city crime they were always hearing about on the news.
Little Miss Prim wasn’t looking happy. But, despite the obvious shape of an underarm holster showing through the immaculate cut of her jacket, she hadn’t gone for a weapon.
So maybe it was true. They couldn’t hurt her any more.
Riding her new-found confidence, Jude leant forward, deliberately invading her personal space, and snapped, ‘The other Travellers. Where are they?’
‘And why would I
want to tell you that?’
‘Because I’m more powerful than any of you, shit-for-brains. I’m dead – and still moving through time. I have the power to twist time any way I want, and if I decide to throw you down the bottomless pit of eternity, there’s no way you can stop me.’
To her surprise, she sounded pretty convincing. And Little Miss looked faintly worried.
Good. It looked like these Travellers were only half a step ahead of her in the theory department, and weren’t entirely sure where she fitted in to the scheme of things. She could use that.
‘I can’t tell you where they are,’ the blonde woman said, ‘because I don’t know. They arrived separately. Could be anywhere.’
Jude leant closer, clasping her shoulder with one hand, lowering her voice to a growl. ‘So take me to where you’re going to meet them.’
‘All right. Fine. But we have half an hour, so it won’t hurt for you to give me a chance to explain, now will it?’
‘Explain what? How you’re so sorry you tried to kill me – whoops, I mean “actually did kill me”, don’t I?’
Miss Handbag sighed. ‘I did what I had to do. I’m not saying I’m proud of that – but it looks to me like you’re on the “by any means necessary” trail yourself, so maybe you should climb off your high horse for a moment.’
‘I’m not –’
‘A killer? Sure. So how are you planning to stop us from trashing Century Tech and bombing Martin H.’s few remaining brain cells back to the stone age?’
The surprise must have shown on her face, because Little Miss was fighting a smile. ‘Nice to see you were well briefed. Who did send you after us, anyway? Njallsson? Warner doesn’t have the guts. Kelly Kotomo, of course. A conspiracy among you street-kids-made-good, that would really appeal to you, wouldn’t it?’
‘What appeals to me right now,’ Jude muttered, ‘is shoving you in front of the next moving vehicle I see. Unfortunately, this seems to be a quiet street. So state your case, fast, before one comes along.’