by Anthology
The Historian was either too stupid or too smart to argue, and Petra’s protest had been cut short by Simone stepping forward to suggest they discuss jewelry for the Historian and plausible wardrobe for the plugs.
“Why, they’re noble too, of course,” the client had said, adjusting his high collar. “What else could they be?”
Plugs were always working-class, even Petra knew that—in case you had to stay behind and fix things for a noble who’d mangled the past, you didn’t want to run the risk of a rival faction calling for your head, which they tended strongly to do.
Petra tallied the cost of the wardrobe for a Roman household: a million in material and labor, another half a million in jewelry. With salaries for the entourage and the fees for machine management and operation, his vacation would cost him ten million.
Ten million to go back in time in lovely clothes, and not be allowed to change a thing. Petra took dutiful notes and marked in the margin, A Waste.
She looked up from the paper when Simone said, “No.”
The client had frowned, not used to the word. “But I’m absolutely sure it was possible—”
“It may be possible, depending on your source,” Simone said, with a look at the Historian, “but it is not right.”
“Well, no offense, Miss Carew, but I’m paying you to dress me, not to give me your opinion on what’s right.”
“Apologies, sir,” said Simone, smiling. “You won’t be paying me at all. Petra, please show the gentlemen out.”
They made the papers; Mr. Bei couldn’t keep from talking about his experience in the Crusades.
“I was going to plan another trip right away,” he was quoted as saying, “but I don’t know how to top this! I think I’ll be staying here. The Institute has already asked me to come and speak about the importance of knowing your escape plan in an emergency, and believe me, I know it.”
Under his photo was the tiny caption: Clothes by Chronomode.
“Mr. Bei doesn’t mention his plugs,” Petra said, feeling a little sick. “Guess he wasn’t the only one that got riddled with arrows.”
“It’s what the job requires. If you have the aptitude, it’s excellent work.”
“It can’t be worth it.”
“Nothing is worth what we give it,” said Simone. She dropped her copy of the paper on Petra’s desk. “You need to practice your running stitch at home. The curve on that back seam looks like a six-year-old made it.”
Tibi cornered Petra at the Threaders’ Guild meeting. Tibi worked at Mansion, which outfitted Vagabonders with a lot more pomp and circumstance than Simone did.
Tibi had a dead butterfly pinned to her dress, and when she hugged Petra it left a dusting of pale green on Petra’s shoulder.
“Petra! Lord, I was JUST thinking about you! I passed Chronomode the other day and thought, Poor Petra, it’s such a prison in there. Holding up?” Tibi turned to a tall young tailor beside her. “Michael, darling, Petra works for Carew over at Chronomode.”
The tailor raised his eyebrows. “There’s a nightmare. How long have you hung in there, a week?”
Five years and counting. “Sure,” Petra said.
“No, for ages,” Tibi corrected. “I don’t know how she makes it, I really don’t, it’s just so horrible.” Tibi wrapped one arm around the tailor and cast a pitying glance at Petra. “I was there for a week, I made the Guild send me somewhere else a week later, it was just inhuman. What is it like, working there for so long without anyone getting you out of there?”
“Oh, who knows,” said Petra. “What’s it like getting investigated for sending people back to medieval France with machine-sewn clothes?”
Tibi frowned. “The company settled that.”
Petra smiled at Tibi, then at the tailor. “I’m Petra.”
“Michael,” he said, and frowned at her hand when they shook.
“Those are just calluses from the needles,” Petra said. “Don’t mind them.”
“Ms. O’Rourke’s kimono is ready for you to look at,” Petra said, bringing the mannequin to Simone’s desk.
“No need,” said Simone, her eyes on her computer screen, “you don’t have enough imagination to invent mistakes.”
Petra hoped that was praise, but suspected otherwise.
A moment later Simone slammed a hand on her desk. “Dammit, look at this. The hair ornament I need is a reproduction. Because naturally a reproduction is indistinguishable from an original. The people of 1743 Kyoto will never notice. Are they hiring antiques dealers out of primary school these days?”
Simone pushed away from the desk in disgust and left through the door to the shop, heels clicking.
Petra smoothed the front of the kimono. It was heavy gray silk, painted with cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums. Near the hem, Petra had added butterflies.
The light in the shop was still on; Petra saw it just as she was leaving.
Careless, she thought as she crossed the workshop. Simone would have killed me.
She had one hand on the door when the sound of a footstep stopped her. Were they being robbed? She thought about the Danish Bronze Age brooches hidden behind the counter in their velvet wrappers.
Petra grabbed a fabric weight in her fist and opened the door a crack.
Simone stood before the fitting mirror, holding a length of bright yellow silk against her shoulders. It washed her out (she’d never let a client with her complexion touch the stuff), but her reflection was smiling.
She hung it from her collarbones like a Roman; draped it across her shoulder like the pallav of a sari; bustled it around her waist. The bright gold slid through her fingers as if she was dancing with it.
Simone gathered the fabric against her in two hands, closed her eyes at the feel of it against her face.
Petra closed the door and went out the back way, eyes fixed on the wings at her feet.
When she came around the front of the shop the light was still on in the window, and Simone stood like a doll wrapped in a wide yellow ribbon, imagining a past she’d never see.
Petra turned for home.
Disease Control hadn’t made the rounds yet, and the darkness was a swarm of wings, purple and blue and gold.
CORRESPONDENCE
Ruthanna Emrys
Behind the slatted blinds, lightning flashed. I caught my breath, resisting the urge to open the lab window, and glanced at my subject to be sure he hadn’t noticed. No, he tapped away at his response keys, completely oblivious to the storm. If I’d gone into physics, I could be outside right now. But a psychologist can’t simply look up from her particle accelerator and take a walk.
Morning had been bad enough—the first perfect spring day after a tepid but persistent winter. Now as evening drew on, the thunder began. Good storms were rare on Long Island. Even with the lab sealed, the prickle of ionized air made me want to run outside and dance around the courtyard. A subject held up his hand for the next questionnaire in the series; I sighed and fished it out of the pile. The other two bent over their desks, pecking at their keyboards. Three lousy data points, my reward for resisting temptation.
I’d run out of patience with my stack of research articles early in the day, so I spent most of the session rereading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. It’s a short book, and I came back from the silent beach of Earth’s last days to the sound of thunder and voices outside, the slash of rain . . . and my self-imposed imprisonment in the lab. I had time to daydream while I gazed into the rich, velvet light of the storm.
I spent far too much time reading Victorian science fiction, more of it the further I got into my dissertation. The old futures and outmoded theories drew me in. Airships and crystal cities, ether theory and phrenology, mapped the mind-life of a lost age. It was an age deeply flawed and never as civilized as it thought itself, but sometimes I wished I wasn’t too modern to believe in what it wanted to be.
What drew me most was the idea of the scientist as an adventurer. When I went to the library to
add to my stack of literature, I’d sometimes take a side trip to the mezzanine, where the oldest journals were archived. The pages were delicate and a little yellowed; the leather bindings soft but sturdy. A biology paper might begin with a description of savannahs and native bearers: more travel diary than dry description. My data might have been more valid, but my methods section seemed lacking.
“It was in this frame of mind,” I scribbled in the margin of a paper on attentional capacity, “that I began to conceive of how I might partake in the wonders open to mad scientists while avoiding their tendency toward academic ridicule.” I nodded, pleased with the turn of phrase, too ornate for the modern ear. I wanted grand adventure, but tenure as a backup. Impossible, of course. I scribbled more—bullet points, diagrams, thoughts connected to one another by little arrows. I usually fleshed out my ideas this way. I didn’t plan on showing these notes to my advisor, though. In fact, I was going to have to white them out next time I had to Xerox the paper for a student. What the hell, it wasn’t like I was getting anything else accomplished.
The storm passed too quickly. As soon as my last subject left, I tore open the window and breathed deeply of the now dry wind. I ran downstairs to the courtyard, letting the past and future fall away in favor of the moment. It would be easy enough to let my fantasy slip away.
I thought of the Time Traveler racing to touch his machine, seeking reassurance that his memories were real and that he wasn’t crazy. I went back upstairs.
Humans produce ideas easily and prodigiously. Stuck on the World’s Longest Parking Lot, or daydreaming in front of my data analysis, I have thought of song lyrics, utopian social reforms, and plans for toilets that don’t overflow. By the time I have a spare moment, the thought is lost. The people who mark the world are those who, just once, manage to grasp an idea and follow it.
It probably said something about me that the idea I grasped and followed, if it worked, would change no life but my own, and in fact ensure that I would never do anything else of importance. The exact form of the idea also probably said something about me. In spite of my yearnings, I had never lived an adventurous life. I had never taken the most carefully controlled tour of England, let alone led my faithful retainers into the wilds of some unexplored land. The written word had been my only transport to the exotic. So when I personally sought to create a time machine, naturally I chose words for my vehicle.
I rarely found friends in the psychology department; people who knew the same things I did bored me. At need, I could call on a mathematician, a programmer, two physicists, a medical researcher, and way too many English majors. I didn’t know any temporal mechanics, but if I wanted to see the future I would have to find one. For what I needed now, I went to the mathematician. I wasn’t looking for Patrick’s expertise in fractal theory. I picked him because he was also an historical reenactor. He would know what materials were the most durable. He would also know someone who knew someone who could acquire and work whatever material I chose, and no one involved would think that I needed to be locked up.
“Stone.”
“Stone? Not some exotic metal?” I asked.
“It was good enough for Gilgamesh,” Patrick said. “What are you going to do about language?”
“Hope they know English. Either they’re smart enough to figure it out or there’s not much point. We’re not dealing with simple concepts like ‘Yes, we know what prime numbers are,’ or ‘Stay off the nuclear waste.’ I want to talk.”
The hard part was figuring out what to say. I needed something that would matter enough to the inventors of time travel that they would want to come visit me, right along with Jesus and Galileo and Heinlein. My temporal mechanic might work for a government or a corporation, might be a mad genius alone in a basement or part of some institution that I couldn’t imagine. Hell, he might be on a Fulbright. Knowing only that something drove him to want to touch history, and able to send only a single letter to get his attention, I needed to make him a friend.
“To the Time Traveler,” I began. I spoke first of the details of my time—not merely the events of the newspapers, but the way it felt to be living at my particular cusp of progress. I placed myself at the dawn of genetics, with all our uncertainty over what humanity itself could and should become. I placed us in the midst of ecological crisis, torn between fear of our own power and hope that our power could save ourselves and our world. I described the drought of the space age and the sheer density of information. I touched on the politics that would be labeled “history” only briefly, as they added to the experience of living in uncertainty.
I listed my qualifications for time travel. I read science fiction and could think sanely about change. I also knew the dangers of temporal paradox; I was willing to keep any necessary secret. I knew that they could only take me on if I was not historically important (and I was quite humble about the place in the scientific edifice of experiments where people try to remember what color sock they saw). I knew the difference between the laws of nature and the laws of my tribe.
Finally, I begged. “I yearn, as much as you do, to speak to other times and learn other ways of thought. Most of all, I need to know what happens next—at least that we survive.
“With hope, Dena Feinberg, scientist and forever a student.”
The carving cost more than I cared to think about, and I covered a good portion of it in barter. I didn’t relish the idea of helping Patrick cater pseudo-medieval feasts for the next three years, but if I was lucky I would fit those years in around years doing real medieval studies. He and the stonemason would both have waived fees entirely to know if my plan worked, but I knew that if I was willing to tell even one person, I could never be told myself.
I buried the stone for the archeologists and tried to forget about it. I had done what I could, and if it never worked, I had a life to live. More importantly, I had a dissertation to complete. I spent days in the lab with the windows closed, nights praying for miracles from my spreadsheets. The spreadsheets supported my thesis about the nature of memory for objects in rooms: I rejoiced and no one else gave a damn. The twenty-first century was less than a decade old, and I was steadily becoming more eager to leave it.
I took a weekend in the White Mountains, in a cheap cabin without luxuries like newspapers and television. The windows were stuck open, and I woke on Saturday caressed by mountain breezes. The only good thing about living on Long Island was how much I appreciated other places. If you had teleported me with my eyes closed, I would have known I was away from the city by the feel and smell of real air. I hiked Mount Lafayette, something I hadn’t done since before college. Just short of the main summit, the lesser peak overlooks a valley misted over with tall grass and goldenrod. It took six hours of steady hiking to get there from the base, and my peanut butter and jelly sandwich tasted like manna. At the summit I looked across the lower mountains, down the cliffs, until I had to close my eyes because they were full. I felt that I was in my right place, in my right time. Millennia had crumpled the mountains up from the earth like paper and would wear them away to plains; I had been lucky enough to see them like this.
Still, that night I dreamed of airships.
When I returned, two wars had started and several governments were threatening others with the creations of their own mad scientists. There was an editorial about the risks to human nature of immortality, and another about the economic benefits to undeveloped nations of low wages and bad health care. Even a block from the ocean, the air in my apartment felt stifling. It had been a warm winter, and it would be a hot summer. I taught social psychology from my advisor’s notes and learned how to cook venison. My dreams were full of silver cities, omniscient-but-benevolent computers, and gentle childlike people with British accents. In July, I received a package.
The package arrived by Western Union, in a miniature wooden chest with my name and address engraved on a brass plate. It was delivered by a teenager with acne, who made me feel old and glad of it.
“They’ve had this for over a century,” he told me. He looked like he’d rather be somewhere else.
“You’re full of it,” I told him. “People don’t say things like that.”
“My boss said to tell you. I’m just working there for the summer. I’m with you—I don’t believe it. I think he got it from a movie.”
“I saw that one,” I said, surprised that he was old enough to remember. “I don’t think it would work. Even Western Union would lose something after a hundred years.”
“Actually, my boss said there was supposed to be a key, and they did lose it, and not to tell you. Sign?”
I put the chest on the coffee table. It scared me. It reminded me of the little envelopes I got back when I applied to grad school. I never wanted to open them and find out that they weren’t what I wanted. If they were what I wanted, that was scary too. Sometimes the unknown was safer.
I went into the kitchen and tried to do the dishes. My hands shook: I chipped a plate and got water all over my shirt. I told myself I wouldn’t be any good until I let myself get disappointed. I would cry hysterically for about five minutes, take a shower and get on with worrying about post-doctoral positions.
The lock didn’t look too strong. I broke the latch with a hammer, and opened the chest. Inside was a single paper, worn at the edges and a little discolored.
My Dearest M. Feinberg, it began.
On reading this I fear you will be much disappointed, for the journey which was to bring me to you has failed. I have overtaken my goal and found myself immersed in the aging 19th rather than your youthful 21st. The currents we ride so far have carried bold persons only pastward; the yetward direction remains to be conquered in the age when I began. I therefore remain now, and likely no other journey shall seek your moment. I continue, with what resources are available to me, the research that may someday allow persons to meet the future other than in the ordinary course of living. I have friends whose discretion can be trusted and my living is strange but comfortable. Still I grieve the loss of your possibilities.