“They just dropped people into the Kerr hole and washed their hands of them, not knowing if they’d die?”
“When I first got here I thought someone would come for me. Then Lillian arrived and told me they couldn’t, maybe for the same reasons we can’t remember going up ahead.”
“How do they run this place from uptime?”
“They don’t. The station is self-sustaining.”
“And it’s all for us?” he asked, thinking of the tendrils.
“It’s a very lonely place.”
“Well, at least we have each other.”
“For now.”
* * * *
It was a dull life, just as Mae had warned him. Without any means of calculating the passage of time, Herel whiled away the hours with interactive dramas, reading, and watching the tendrils creep out of the walls, floor, and ceiling to clean and maintain the enclosed environment. He guessed that they were nanowire fashioned from potassium manganese oxide, easily able to absorb oil and grease, but that didn’t explain their independent movements. At first he followed them and tried to find out where they came from, where the mechanisms that controlled them were stored.
The air was circulated through wall slashes so thin he couldn’t insert a finger between them.
He searched the premises thoroughly. Other than the airlock hatches in the docking node, he found no entryway into the time station’s guts. Holes opened like mouths to receive the empty food and drink packets, and then closed again seamlessly. The tendrils seemed to grow right out of the solid walls, disappearing when they finished a job until the next time they were needed. They fascinated him, but once he’d seen them working a few dozen times he lost interest. After a while, he hardly noticed them, except for the occasional frisson provided by catching their movements in his peripheral vision.
He spent hours drifting through the time station, making observations, never giving up on finding out what made it all hum. He noted that the pastel walls consisted of soft material and that there were no sharp corners, no tools or knives and forks. Herel estimated the time station’s interior at just over 2,000 square meters—2,028, as nearly as he could tell without precision instruments.
He made it his purpose, his work, to learn about it. When he tired, he sought out Mae, because her company was the only genuine pleasure he derived from his new surroundings.
“I feel rather frustrated,” he confided to her in the galley, “expending all this effort and learning so little. I have no idea what powers this place or how it reacts to our needs.”
She nodded. “The time station seems to be alive, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, almost as if it’s been endowed with consciousness.”
“Maybe it has.”
“That would explain a lot, but I don’t see how it’s possible.”
They talked often about their earlier lives. Herel got to know Mae. He thought she was wonderful—literate, kind, intelligent, and warm. They were nearly the same age, or had been when they were dropped into the Kerr hole. He was thirty-seven and she was thirty-five, even though he was born twenty-eight years before her. He admired her heart-shaped face, her dark eyes, her diminutive figure, the mole on her cheek. He enjoyed listening to her soft voice. She often read to him. He felt protective toward her.
“Why didn’t you pay your taxes?” he asked during one immeasurable day as they chatted.
“It was a matter of principle,” she said. “I was an activist in the peace movement.”
“How did you get involved in that?”
“I was part of a triad marriage, and we were all in it together—or so I thought.”
“What happened?”
“Suzanne and Lodzi, my partners, relented and paid their taxes. They got suspended sentences, but I wouldn’t do it. I never heard from either of them again.”
“I’m sorry, Mae.”
“I was foolish enough to believe what my attorneys told me.”
“What did they tell you?”
“That I’d get probation. They didn’t count on the court’s hard line,” she said, tears coming to her eyes. “The state made an example of me.”
“But why you?”
“Because the court thought everyone would see that if they’d do this to a nonviolent person, they’d do it to anyone. It cost a lot to wage war on the colonies. Imagine if billions of people refused to pay their taxes.”
“So they cast you into the darkness.”
“You could say that,” she said, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. “But I’d like to know more about you, Herel.”
“I volunteered.”
“Yes, I know, but why?”
“I wanted to lead the way through the Kerr hole.”
“You’re an idealist,” she said.
“No, I’m a mechanical engineer.”
“And an explorer,” Mae said with an admiring smile.
“Call me Magellan.”
She frowned. “You should be proud of what you did.”
“Why, because I stumbled on a new kind of prison?”
“It could be worse.” She shrugged. “There’s only one prisoner so far.”
“I know, Mae, but it’s you.”
Mae looked at him with appreciation. “Thank you, Herel,” she said. “But I have my function here.”
“Caring for lost travelers,” he said, his heart pounding so violently that it hurt. “Yes, I suppose it is important, and you’re the perfect woman for the job. They made you into an example, all right, a beautiful example.”
Their eyes met, reminding Herel of lines from a poem, “The Ecstacy” by John Donne, that Mae had read to him several times:
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double string;
So to entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
He took her warm hand in his. She didn’t look away. It was then that Herel knew he loved her. He hoped to consummate that love very soon.
* * * *
It still hadn’t happened when a man was brought to the time station.
The robot was much taller than a human being and more slender. Herel felt as if he were seeing a figure from his falling dream when it came through the airlock carrying the barely conscious man in its long, segmented arms. The examination room was right off the airlock’s inner hatch.
Four gleaming hands stripped the traveler of his pressure suit and thermal underclothing, calipers extended from slender fingers to measure him, and other instruments slid in and out of its hands and torso to pierce him and tweak him, to take blood, stool, and urine samples, to swab the inside of his mouth and to record his temperature. Tests were quickly administered to determine the condition of his organs, nervous system, circulation, and respiration. Herel identified with the robot’s efficiency. Watching it work was like observing some superior species.
When the robot finished the job, it silently made its way to the airlock and went back outside, firing jets built into its elbows and heels to direct it back toward the white hole’s tractor radius.
The new guest was a stocky young fellow with titanium plates embedded in his temples and bas-relief tats adorning most of his body. He gaped, his head lolled on his thick neck, and his eyes were unfocused. His head was shaved but the rest of him was hirsute. Herel didn’t like seeing the young man’s muscular, nude body.
But Mae didn’t mind. She rubbed his wrists and fetched him water, explaining to him that he’d been yanked back from the future and spat out of a white hole. He looked at her as if she were speaking in tongues.
“What’s your name?” Mae asked.
&n
bsp; “Conway.”
“I’m Mae and this is Herel.”
“We inside?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly high and light.
“Yes,” Mae said. “How did you know?”
“I been inside before,” he said.
“You have?”
“Uh-huh, third time.”
“You mean you’ve been in prison three times?” Herel said.
Conway’s sleepy blue eyes regarded him. “Yeah, what else?”
“I thought you meant inside time,” Mae said.
“I don’t blink.”
Herel didn’t understand what Conway meant, but Mae kept on trying to explain the time knot to him.
“Just three of us here?” Conway asked, as if he hadn’t been listening to her.
“That’s right,” Mae said. “And Herel won’t be here much longer.”
Conway’s eyes cleared as he began to understand that he was not dead or sentenced to some hellhole, but alive in a safe place with a lovely woman, soon to be alone with her.
“What were you convicted of?” Herel asked, intending to make Mae see what kind of man this was.
“Armed robbery,” Conway said with an unmistakable sense of pride. “Chipped it true.”
Herel glanced at Mae, but he couldn’t tell what effect this admission had on her, if any.
“It was on Ogle,” Conway went on. “Had it skivved. Gonna slide right after the chip. Got slapped at Customs.”
No colony had existed on that massive world in Herel’s time. In fact, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb had barely been explored in those days.
“Yeah, heavy world,” Conway said, “I chipped a gravity case and slipped speedy. Headed back to Mars, maybe Earth. Live big and true.” He sighed. “But slip into slap instead.”
Mae and Herel didn’t speak. Conway’s eyes glanced furtively from one to the other.
“I hurt nobody,” Conway said, a whine creeping into his braggadocio.
“I thought you said it was armed robbery,” Herel said.
“I spill crediscs,” Conway said, “not blood.”
“What if someone had done something you didn’t like during the robbery?” Herel persisted. “Would you have killed her?”
Conway didn’t answer the question. He glowered, understanding that Herel was his enemy, but not fearing him at all.
Mae fetched a red jersey for Conway.
“Hungry,” he said, after she helped him put it on.
They took him into the galley to get him some food.
“Once you’ve eaten,” Mae said, “you’ll be fine.”
“I’m all right, just tired,” he said, taking a squeeze of brown glop in his mouth. “What’s this?”
“It’s synthesized food,” Mae said. “I know it doesn’t taste like much, but it’s good for you.”
“Sweet.”
They ate quietly for a few minutes.
Conway whistled when the tendrils came out of the walls and ceiling.
“They do all the cleaning,” Mae explained.
He laughed, pleased that he would have no chores in this prison.
“So where am I?” Conway asked, as if they’d never told him.
They explained it all to him again. He didn’t seem to comprehend what they were telling him, except for one salient detail.
“I’m here—” he said, “—forever?”
Mae didn’t say anything.
“Looks that way,” Herel told him.
Unexpectedly, Conway grinned at Mae, revealing filed incisors and canines. “And Conway thought this would be skiv.”
Feeling depressed, Herel showed Conway to his bunk after the meal, choosing the cell across the corridor from his own, all the way on the other end of the station from Mae’s stateroom. He intended to keep an eye on Conway.
Herel strapped Conway into the bunk and watched him fall asleep. He went to his room and brooded for a few hours. After thinking things over, he found Mae reading in her room and said to her, “We’ve got to talk, Mae.”
“All right,” she said, letting her reader float away, its projected words swimming above it. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Herel pulled himself inside her room and said, “I don’t like the way Conway leers at you.”
She shrugged. “He’s just a kid.”
“Young, yes, but he’s a felon, not a political prisoner.”
“Anyone can make a mistake.”
“He’s a sociopath.”
“A sociopath?” she said, laughing at the dated term.
“Look, I understand that you’re sympathetic, but Conway’s going to make trouble.”
“What trouble can he make here?”
“That’s what I don’t want to find out.”
“There’s nothing for him to steal, and there aren’t any weapons.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” Conway asked from behind him.
Herel shut up as Conway hauled himself into the room to face him. He floated so close by that Herel could smell the stale sweat on him.
“So what is it?” Conway demanded, sticking out his chin.
“We were having a private conversation,” Herel said.
“About me.”
“Conway—” Mae said.
“Not blaming you, Mae,” Conway said. He never took his eyes off Herel. “He’s skivvin me.”
“No, it’s just—”
“I blink what’s just,” Conway said. He turned toward Mae, the plate on his left temple gleaming. “People skiv me all my life. Never give me true.”
“So it’s always someone else’s fault?” Herel said, failing to keep the sneer out of his voice.
“You blink,” Conway said, as if reciting lines from a melodrama. “Born in a whorehouse. Momma bad. She got slapped, and I chipped to live. Had to.”
“Did you ever try anything else?” Herel asked. “Did you make any attempt at bettering yourself, at educating yourself?”
Conway ignored the question. He stared straight at Herel, until Herel saw his own reflection in the blue eyes.
Herel turned and pulled his way out of the room. He was ashamed of letting Conway get to him, but he had to think this through. He went to the observation window near the docking node and stared out into the dark.
How many more like Conway would be sent here? Why were Mae and Conway the only two prisoners here, each from a different century? Was this place intended to eventually house miscreants from different eras, a means of thinning out the overcrowded population? Was it an experimental penitentiary, maybe the prototype?
It did him no good to speculate. All that really mattered was that Herel was going to be taken away when the next ship came, leaving Mae alone with Conway. Would she read poetry to this thug? Would she civilize him?
No, instead he would brutalize her in this most isolated of all places. She would be at his mercy, and he would break her down no matter how much she tried to make him understand compassion and beauty—just as she had failed to make the court understand that her principles were more important to her than the state’s power.
Herel knew he had to do something. But what? How could he stop it? He’d be gone soon.
He had to act before then.
* * * *
Mae spent more and more time with Conway, giving Herel the opportunity to do something he’d had little time for before—reflect. He’d never been good at dealing with people socially. He didn’t know how to talk to women, for one thing. His mother had died in childbirth and Herel had no siblings. He’d studied hard—structural analysis, chemistry, thermodynamics, kinematics, metallurgy—to please his father, who’d been proud of his accomplishments. The old man had
n’t lived to see Herel’s finest engineering accomplishment, the Arrowhead, or his subsequent selection by the Time Travel Institute.
After his father was gone, Herel had only his career to live for. Not only had he never married, he’d never had many relationships at all, certainly none that lasted.
As the years had passed, he’d told himself that he simply couldn’t find a suitable mate; that he was too dedicated to engineering for romance; that he wasn’t like other people, but a man of superior intelligence; he was nobly pushing humankind into the future, and his time was too important for ephemeral dalliances. He was obsessive about his work.
Like any good engineer, Herel prided himself on his ability to solve problems.
He began to plan something while he brooded in his cell. It was no different than outlining any other project: First you become committed to it, and then you arrive at a general method of achieving it. After that you begin to put flesh on its bones, adding details and refining the framework. You try whatever you think might work and discard whatever doesn’t contribute to the plan until it’s perfected.
He had to draw his blueprint carefully. There were variables. For example, Conway was strong and he’d have no compunctions about using violence. Ironically, that might give Herel an advantage. Conway wasn’t afraid of Herel, because he had no idea what kind of courage and determination it had taken to be one of the first to go into the future. How could an illiterate criminal imagine the level of competition that Herel had overcome? He wouldn’t expect Herel to do anything.
Or would he? Criminals were wary, and they believed everyone was of like mind: greedy, violent, narrow, controlled by base urges. Herel had to take that into consideration.
He observed Conway’s habits, looking for patterns.
While he watched and waited, he noticed a change in Mae. At first she tried to ignore Conway’s tales of lawbreaking in two solar systems, perhaps thinking the young man would take the hint. But as she became accustomed to his unfamiliar slang, his swagger drew her curiosity. Herel guessed that her own gentle sense of rebelliousness responded to Conway’s outlaw persona. He was a charismatic young man. Not only that, but he often made her laugh, something Herel couldn’t do. There was so little to occupy oneself with at the time station that it was understandable Mae had become attracted to Conway.
The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories Page 53