Which was so unexpected that, after an instant's shock, I up and followed her. It didn't occur to me not to. There was something strange about the way she held herself, about her expression, her posture. Something unfamiliar.
She didn't even walk like herself.
The vies had dismantled several tents to make a large open space surrounded by canvas. Propane lights, hung from tall poles, blazed in a ring about it. I saw Gevorkian slip between two canvas sheets and, after a moment's hesitation. I followed her.
It was a rat fight.
The way a rat fight works, I learned that night, is that first you catch a whole bunch of Norwegian rats. Big mean mothers. Then you get them in a bad mood, probably by not feeding them, but there are any number of other methods that could be used. Anyway, they're feeling feisty. You put a dozen of them an a big pit you've dug in the ground. Then you dump in your contestant. A big guy with a shaven head and his hands tied behind his back. His genitals are bound up in a little bit of cloth, but other than that he's naked.
Then you let them fight it out. The rats leap and jump and bite and the big guy tries to trample them underfoot or crush them with his knees, his chest, his head—whatever he can bash them with.
The whole thing was lit up bright as day, and all the area around the pit was crammed with vics. Some shouted and urged on one side or the other. Others simply watched intently. The rats squealed. The human fighter bared his teeth in a hideous rictus and fought in silence.
It was the creepiest thing I'd seen in a long time.
Gevorkian watched it coolly, without any particular interest or aversion. After a while it was obvious to me that she was waiting for someone.
Finally that someone arrived. He was a lean man, tall, with keen, hatchetlike features. None of the vics noticed. Their eyes were directed inward, toward the pit. He nodded once to Gevorkian, then backed through the canvas again.
She followed him.
I followed her.
They went to a near-lightless area near the edge of the camp. There was nothing there but trash, the backs of tents, the razor-wire fence, and a gate padlocked for the night.
It was perfectly easy to trail them from a distance. The stranger held himself proudly, chin up, eyes bright. He walked with a sure stride. He was nothing at all like the vics.
It was obvious to me that he was an Owner.
Gevorkian too. When she was with him that inhuman arrogance glowed in her face as well. It was as if a mask had been removed. The fire that burned in his face was reflected in hers.
I crouched low to the ground, in the shadow of a tent, and listened as the stranger said, "Why hasn't she turned it in?"
"She's unstable," Gevorkian said. "They all are."
"We don't dare prompt her. She has to turn it in herself." "She will. Give her time."
"Time," the man repeated. They both laughed in a way that sounded to me distinctly unpleasant. Then, "She'd better. There's a lot went into this operation. There's a lot riding an it."
"She will."
I stood watching as they shook hands and parted ways. Gevorkian turned and disappeared back into the tent city. The stranger opened a radiant door and was gene.
CAUSE END EFFECT. They'd done … whatever it was they'd done to that woman's daughter just so they could plant the bippy with me. They wanted me to turn it in. They wanted our government to have possession of a device that would guarantee obedience. They wanted to give us a good taste of what it was like to be them.
Suddenly I had no doubt at all what I should do. I started out at a determined stride, but inside of nine paces I was running. Vics scurried to get out of my way. If they didn't move fast enough, I shoved them aside.
I had to get back to the bippy and destroy it.
WHICH WAS STUPID, stupid, stupid. If I'd kept my head down and walked slowly. I would have been invisible. Invisible and safe. The way I did it, though, cursing and screaming. I made a lot of noise and caused a lot of fuss. Inevitably, I drew attention to myself.
Inevitably, Gevorkian stepped into my path.
I stumbled to a halt.
"Gevorkian," I said feebly. "Linda, I—"
All the lies I was about to utter died in my throat when I saw her face. Her expression. Those eyes. Gevorkian reached for me. I skipped back in utter panic, turned—and fled. Anybody else would have done the same.
It was a nightmare. The crowds slowed me. I stumbled. I had no idea where I was going. And all the time, this monster was right on my heels.
Nobody goes into the camp after dark, unless they have to. But that doesn't mean that nobody goes in after dark. By sheer good luck. Gevorkian chased me into the one part of the camp that had something that outsiders could find nowhere else—the sex-for-hire district.
There was nothing subtle about the way the vies sold themselves. The trampled-grass street I found myself in was lined with stacks of cages like the ones they use in dog kennels. They were festooned with strings of Christmas lights, and each one contained a crouched boy. Naked, to best display those mods and deformities that some found attractive. Off-duty soldiers strolled up and down the cages, checking out the possibilities. I recognized one of them.
"Sergeant-Major Pathak!" I cried. He looked up, startled and guilty. "Help me! Kill her—please! Kill her now!"
Give him credit, the sergeant-major was a game little fellow. I can't imagine what we looked like to him, one harridan chasing the other down the streets of Hell. But he took the situation in at a glance, unholstered his sidearm and stepped forward "Please," he said. "You will both stand where you are. You will place your hands upon the top of your head. You will—"
Gevorkian flicked her fingers at the young soldier. He screamed, and clutched his freshly crushed shoulder. She turned away from him, dismissively. The other soldiers had fled at the first sign of trouble. All her attention was on me, trembling in her sight like a winded doe. "Sweet little vic," she purred. "If you won't play the part we had planned for you, you'll simply have to be silenced."
"No," I whispered.
She touched my wrist. I was helpless to stop her. "You and I are going to go to my office now. We'll have fun there. Hours and hours of fun."
"Leave her be."
As sudden and inexplicable as an apparition of the Virgin, Shriver stepped out of the darkness. He looked small and grim.
Gevorkian laughed, and gestured.
But Shriver's hand reached up to intercept hers, and where they met, there was an electric blue flash. Gevorkian stared down, stunned, at her hand. Bits of tangled metal fell away from it. She looked up at Shriver.
He struck her down.
She fell with a brief harsh cry, like that of a sea gull. Shriver kicked her, three times, hard: In the ribs. In the stomach. In the head. Then, when she looked like she might yet regain her feet, "It's one of them!" he shouted. "Look at her! She's a spy for the Owners! She's from the future! Owner! Look! Owner!"
The refugees came tumbling out of the tents and climbing down out of their cages. They looked more alive than I'd ever seen them before. They were red-faced and screaming. Their eyes were wide with hysteria. For the first time in my life, I was genuinely afraid of them. They came running. They swarmed like insects.
They seized Gevorkian and began tearing her apart.
I saw her struggle up and halfway out of their grips, saw one arm rise up above the sea of clutching hands, like that of a woman drowning.
Shriver seized my elbow and steered me away before I could see any more. I saw enough, though.
I saw too much.
"Where are we going?" I asked when I'd recovered my wits.
"Where do you think we're going?"
He led me to my office.
THERE WAS A stranger waiting there. He took out a handheld detector like Sergeant-Major Pathak and his men had used earlier and touched it to himself, to Shriver, and to me. These times it flashed red, negative. "You travel through time, you pick up a residual charge," Shriver
explained. "It never goes away. We've known about Gevorkian for a long time"
"US Special Security," the stranger said, and flipped open his ID. It meant diddle-all to me. There was a badge. It could have read Captain Crunch for all I knew or cared. But I didn't doubt for an instant that he was SS. He had that look. To Shriver he said, "The neutralizer."
Shriver unstrapped something glittery from his wrist—the device he'd used to undo Gevorkian's weapon—and, in a silent bit of comic bureaucratic punctilio, exchanged it for a written receipt. The security officer touched the thing with his detector. It flashed green. He put both devices away in interior pockets.
All the time, Shriver stood in the background, watching. He wasn't told to go away.
Finally, Captain Crunch turned his attention to me again. "Where's the snark?"
"Snark?"
The man removed a thin scrap of cloth from an inside jacket pocket and shook it out. With elaborate care, he pulled it over his left hand. An inertial glove. Seeing by my expression that I recognized it, he said, "Don't make me use this."
I swallowed. For an instant I thought crazily of defying him, of simply refusing to tell him where the bippy was. But I'd seen an inertial glove in action before, when a lone guard had broken up a camp riot. He'd been a little man. I'd seen him crush heads like watermelons.
Anyway, the hippy was in my desk. They'd be sure to look there.
I opened the drawer, produced the device. Handed it over. "It's a plant," I said. "They want us to have this."
Captain Crunch gave me a look that told me clear as words exactly how stupid he thought I was. "We understand more than you think we do. There are circles and circles. We have informants up in the future, and some of them are more highly placed than you'd think. Not everything that's known is made public."
"Damn it, this sucker is evil."
A snake's eyes would look warmer than his. "Understand this. We're fighting for our survival here. Extinction is null-value. You can have all the moral crises you want when the war is won."
"It should be suppressed. The technology. If it's used, it'll just help bring about …"
He wasn't listening.
I'd worked for the government long enough to know when I was wasting my breath. So I shut up.
WHEN THE CAPTAIN left with the bippy, Shriver still remained, looking ironically after him. "People get thé kind of future they deserve:' he observed.
"But that's what I'm saying. Gevorkian came back from the future in order to help bring it about. That means that time isn't deterministic." Maybe I was getting a little weepy. I'd had a rough day. "The other guy said there was a lot riding on this operation. They didn't know how it was going to turn out. They didn't know."
Shriver grunted, not at all interested.
I plowed ahead unheeding. "If it's not deterministic—if they're working so hard to bring it about—then all our effort isn't futile at all. This future can be prevented."
Shriver looked up at last. There was a strangely triumphant gleam in his eye. He flashed that roguish ain't-this-fun grin of his, and said, "I don't know about you, but some of us are working like hell to achieve it."
With a jaunty wink, he was gone.
The Hotel at Harlan's landing
Kage Baker
One good thing about meddling in time is that you then have all of time in which to hide from the consequences of your actions. Sometimes, though, no matter how isolated and remote a location you find to hide yourself away in, it isn't nearly isolated enough …
One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late '90s, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov's Science Fiction, and has since become one of that magazine's most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company; of late, she's started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a High Fantasy milieu as any we've ever seen. Her stories have also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Sci Fiction, Amazing, and elsewhere. Her critically acclaimed novels include In the Garden of 'den, Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, and her first fantasy novel The Anvil of the World. Her short fiction has been collected in Black Projects, White Knights, and, most recently, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories. Her most recent books are a chapbook novella, The Empress of Mars, and two new Company novels, The Life of the World to Come and The Children of the Company. In addition to her writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.
THERE WAS JUST the five of us in the bar that night.
The lumber mills were all shut down for good and there hadn't been a ship come up to the wharf in years. No more big schooners down there in the cove, with their white sails flying in at eye level to the bluff top like clouds. Dirty little steamers stayed well out on the horizon and never came in, going busily to San Francisco or Portland. Nothing to come in for, at Harlan's Landing.
All this stuff the weekenders find so cute now, the gingerbread cottages and the big emporium with its grand false front and the old hotel here—you wouldn't have thought they were much then, when they were gray wood beaten into leaning by the winter storms, paint from the boom days all peeled off. No Heritage Society to save us, no tourists with cash to spend. Nobody had cash to spend. It was 1934.
I couldn't keep the hotel open, but after the Volstead Act was repealed I opened the bar downstairs and things brightened up considerably. Our own had some place to go, had sort of a social life now, see? We come that close to being a ghost town that everybody needed to know there was still a place with the yellow lights shining out through the windows, fighting to stay alive.
And it wasn't like there was anyplace else to go anyhow, not with the logging road washed out in winter, which was the only other way to get here from the city back then. I felt I sort of owed the rest of them.
Especially I owed Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina. I had that awful year in 1929 when Mama got the cancer and I lost Bill, that was my husband, he was one of the crew on the San Juan, see. They were real kind to me then. Stayed by me when I wanted to just die. Aunty Irina baked bread, and Uncle
Jacques fixed the typewriter and told me what I ought to write to the damn insurance people when they weren't going to pay. People who'll help you clean your house for a funeral twice in one year are good friends, believe you me.
Then, if Uncle Jacques hadn't kept the Sheep Canyon trail cleared we'd have had nothing to eat but venison, because there'd have been no way I could have got the buckboard through to Notley for provisions most of the time. It must have been hard work, even for him, just one man with an axe busting up those redwood snags; because of course Lanark was no use. But Uncle Jacques looked after all of us, he and Aunty Irina. They said it was a good thing to have a human community.
And, see, once I opened the bar, there was some place to go. Lanark didn't have to stay alone in his shack watching the calendar pages turn brown, and Miss Harlan didn't have to stay alone in her cottage hearing the surf boom and wondering if Billy was going to come walking up out of the water to haunt her. I didn't have to sit alone in my room over the lobby, thinking how my folks would scold me because I hadn't kept the brass and mahogany polished like I ought to have. And Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina had a nice little human community they could come down and be part of for a while, so they didn't have to sit staring at each other in their place up on Gamboa Ridge.
I had it real cozy here. That potbellied stove in the corner worked then; fire inspector won't let us use it now, but I used to keep it going all night with a big basket of redwood chunks, and I lit the room up bright with kerosene lamps and moved some of the good tables and chairs down from the hotel rooms. Uncle Jacques brought me a radio he'd tinkered with, he called it a wireless, and I don't know if it ran on a battery or what it had in it, but we set it behi
nd the bar and we could get it to pull in music and shows. We had Jack Benny for Canada Dry and Chandu the Magician, and Little Orphan Annie, and even Byrd at the South Pole sometimes.
So Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina would dance if there was music, and Miss Harlan would sit watching them, and I'd pour out applejack for everybody or maybe some wine. I used to get the wine, good stuff, from a man named Andy Lopez back in Sheep Canyon. Lanark would drink too much of it, but at least he wasn't a mean drunk. We'd all be happy in the bar, warm and bright like it was, though the rest of the hotel was echoing and dark, and outside the night was black and empty too.
And that night it was black with a Pacific gale, but not empty. The wind was driving the sleet sideways at the windows, the wild air blustered and fought in the street like the sailors used to on Saturday nights. Every so often the sky would light up horizon to horizon, purple and white lightning miles long, and for a split second there'd be the town outside the windows like it was day but awful, with the black empty buildings and the black gaps in the sidewalk where the boards had rotted out, and the sea beyond breaking so high there was spume flying up the street, blown on the storm.
You wouldn't think we'd be getting any radio reception at all, but whatever Uncle Jacques had done to that thing, it was picking up a broadcast from some ballroom in Chicago. And damned if the bandleader didn't play "Stormy Weather"! Aunty Irina pulled Uncle Jacques to his feet. He slipped his arm around her and they two-step shuffled up and down in front of the bar, smiling at each other. Miss Harlan watched them, getting a little misty-eyed like she always did at anything romantic, and she sang along with the music. Lanark was pretty sober yet and making eyes at me from his table, and I smiled back at him because he did still use to be handsome then, in a wrecked kind of way.
He had just said, "Damn, Luisa, you throw a nice party," and I was just about to say something sassy back when the music was drowned out by a crack-crack-crack and screeching static, so awful Miss Harlan and me put our hands over our ears, and Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina stopped short and stood apart, looking like a couple of greyhounds on the alert.
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