“Hey,” a familiar voice hissed. The door cracked open and in slipped the boy. He left the door ajar, the welcome light bringing their temporary cell out of the deep dark and into murkiness. “I knew you’d get yourselves in it deep and end up losing me my money.”
“Did you call the police?” Gordon asked.
“Police? No damn police. Just Slim Tim.”
“Who’s Slim Tim?” Ixtli moved closer to the boy.
“Who’s Slim Tim? he asks. Slim Tim is me!” Slim Tim slit the ropes off.
“And no one noticed you?” Gordon asked.
Slim Tim shrugged. “They was busy with the lights.” He smiled, and then counted off his fingers. On the last one something boomed loudly and Slim Tim chuckled. Light flashed and danced brightly.
Gordon pulled the last of his rope free. “Let’s make a break for it.”
They glanced out of the closet. Nothing but people tending the machine.
“Run,” Ixtli said.
They skirted the dark walls, ducking and weaving around the dangerous moving parts of the living machine. The escape almost worked, but near the doors a man throwing switches paused, frowned, and shouted at them.
The cry went up all throughout the warehouse, and the ten men with rifles ran through an aisle of machinery, blindfolds loose around their necks. “Stop.”
“Only two of the guns will kill us,” Ixtli said. “Run for it, and whoever survives, get out to call the officials.”
“Scatter,” Gordon said, and they did. All ten rifles fired, and Ixtli felt relief. Nothing had hit him, no bullets pinged, they were all blanks. He turned the corner with the other three before the second round of fire, this one not loaded with blanks, could be fired.
They burst out of the main doors, ran down the corners out to where the hansom waited, and all three piled in shouting, “Go, go, go.”
“You pay me now,” Slim Tim said. “Very next thing.”
Ixtli grabbed Slim Tim’s shoulders. “You’re damn right we pay you next.” He shook the boy. “You will make a small fortune tonight, Mr. Tim, a small fortune.”
Gordon met Ixtli the next morning at the airfield before he left and stuck his hand out. “Mr. Ixtli, my thanks.”
Ixtli regarded the offered hand. A strange custom. He took it carefully and finished the American ritual, a sign of respect for what they had both been through. “Did you get Hollerith?”
Gordon shook his head. “They smashed the machine, and took their punch cards with them. We reduced their abilities significantly though, thanks to you.”
“Thanks to you. I imagine my superiors would find this a fascinating tale. I have to wonder what they will do with the information. Computer-run governments and humans no better than automatons, run by small dots on a piece of paper.”
“What a barbarous idea, letting machines rule you.”
Ixtli looked around. “What is a government but rules and ideas that are set down on paper, and then interpreted and run by individual human machines? Is it really that farfetched?”
“But cogs and wheels? We will find these people and their cards and burn them out.”
Ixtli nodded, relieved. The Constitutionalists had taken all their punch cards with them. Good. “Of course, that is the typical response of a nation. But Gordon remember this: all ten of those weapons fired were blank, we were never hit.”
“What do you mean?”
“A government is the will of its people, and the will of Hollerith is twisted. He and his people want land, and revolution, and blood. Revenge against the British. Manifest destiny above all else.
“But if the pure ideals of an idea were really input into a machine, maybe it fought back, Mr. Doyle. Maybe it told all those soldiers to load blanks. And Hollerith indicated that maybe the machine hadn’t ordered that man’s death at the museum, but merely suggested they look for such an incident.”
“Maybe,” Gordon said. “Maybe.”
“Consider it, that the ideas are what are important. If you ever come to Tenochtitlan, make sure to visit,” Ixtli smiled. “Where the pursuit of truth reigns free, and all manner of theories live side by side, jostling each other.”
They shook hands again, and then Gordon grabbed Ixtli’s shoulder.
“I have a favor to ask, now that we have solved this crime and my men are looking for Hollerith, might I get your permission to send my notes and files to my brother? He fancies himself something of a writer and follows such things. Intrigue, and the sort.”
“Of course,” Ixtli said. “What is your brother’s name?”
“Arthur.”
“Just make sure my name is changed,” Ixtli laughed. And with that last bit of business, the two men separated. Ixtli boarded the airship.
Somewhere past French Louisiana and over tribal lands, Ixtli reached under his coat and pulled out a stack of punch cards. An insurrection, guided by machine, could be imminently useful.
The basis of the computing machine’s rules could be corrupted, maybe even by telegraph commands, or a hidden series of codes activated by punch cards slipped in by an agent. An agent who had been called north by a special signal, thanks to a series of preprogrammed instructions.
Ixtli’s world faced threats. Spanish to the south, English colonies and French to the north, and the intermediate and forever fickle tribal societies in the midlands. Tenochtitlan was always aware of the need to keep the Europeans on their toes. Keeping the Europeans divided and fighting among themselves kept them from focusing their eyes on new land.
So now Ixtli held up the punch cards he had taken, the ones he’d replaced were now with the dissidents, and they were none the wiser.
He leaned out over the window, and dropped the cards to flutter in the wind.
Where they would land, he had no idea. It was not his place to know, or ask. He was just another agent in the vast machine that was his government.
Death on the Crosstime Express:--Chris Roberson
A great deal of Chris Roberson’s fiction output, of both novel and short story length, concerns the affairs of an extended family of adventurers known as the Bonaventure-Carmody clan. Like Michael Moorcock’s famous Beck/Begg dynasty and Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold-Newton stories before him, Roberson’s multiverse (in his case called “the Myriad”) is peopled with this reoccurring cast of characters, who manage to inveigle themselves into all the excitement to be found anywhere from zombie-filled Polynesian Islands to Counter Earths, from here to eternity. As he told the Web site Yatterings in an interview conducted July 2007, “I’ve got a real weakness for stories that mix genres, or at least blend different sub-genres, and I’ve always been a sucker for heroes.” The Bonaventure-Carmody clan can be found in his novels Here, There & Everywhere, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, Set the Seas on Fire, and the forthcoming End of the Century.
Chris is also the author of a series of alternate history tales about a space-faring Chinese Empire. To date, these include, The Voyage of Night Shining White, The Dragon’s Nine Sons, Iron Jaw & Hummingbird, and Three Unbroken. Chris is a three-time World Fantasy Award finalist, a two-time John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer finalist, and both a finalist and a winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. It is up to the careful reader to decide where in his Myriad the following story fits.
The airship which hung between the docking pylons, tethered fore and aft, was painted a dark shade of blue and trimmed with gold, the colors of the Crosstime Line. But even if one didn’t recognize the coloration, the sheer size of the craft alone would have been enough to signal its importance. It dwarfed the other airships drifting at anchor in the Texican National Airfields on the outskirts of Waterloo. The smallest of the other craft, neither equipped with translocation engines nor rated for underspace passage if they had been, were locals, carrying passengers and freight to the Anglo-American Confederation, or across the seas to the French Workers Concordat or the Russian Czardom or Chinese Collective. Slightly larger were the intercontinua
airships, which traveled to and from neighboring alternatives, spending hours, days, or weeks journeying through underspace to translocate into other worlds. But largest of all was the blue and gold immensity of the Crosstime Express, the pride of the line, which weekly made the journey from here to Helium and back again.
Vivian Starkweather checked the time. Slipping her watch back into its vest pocket, she held a lit match to the cigarillo clenched between her teeth.
“Don’t worry, darlins,” she said to the young women standing beside her at the base of the gangplank, jeweled bindis twinkling brightly in the morning sun against the dark skin of their foreheads. Starkweather expelled a stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth, and hooked her thumbs through her beltloops. “I expect we’ll be boarding directly.”
The Indian princesses didn’t seem much to mind the delay, though, hardly noticing Starkweather’s assurances, too busy making eyes at the younger members of the crew in their crisp white jackets and peaked caps, and especially at the ship’s young steward, supervising the loading of comestible provisions onto the blue and gold craft.
Aside from being the site for the Crosstime Line’s terminus, the only other item of interest about the alternative was that it was home to the Pinkertons, the private security firm routinely contracted by intercontinua businesses and governments alike. Many a smuggler, freebooter, or suspect fleeing prosecution had come to dread the baleful open eye which was the symbol of the men and women who lived up to their motto, “We Never Sleep.”
Most of the intercontinua craft anchored around the airfield had come here for the same reason, ferrying passengers from neighboring alternatives, who now stood ready to mount the gangplank to the blue and gold airship. Travelers had made the journey here to catch the Crosstime Express, which would continue on to Helium, seat of the League of Worlds and hub of all intercontinua commerce in this region of the Myriad. A journey of less than three days, which shorter range vessels might take weeks or even longer to complete.
If the two young Indian women in their silk saris and silver bangles weren’t bothered, though, there were others less sanguine about the delay. A pair of Russian monks in heavy cassocks shifted uneasily, their gaze darting back and forth nervously as they held their hands against their round bellies. And the mandarin whose ruby button atop his hat indicated the highest level of service to the emperor, in some distant alternative dominated by the Chinese throne, seemed ill-at-ease, as though uncertain about the correct protocol in such situations. But the most distressed by the inability of the passengers to board the ship were the trio of white-skinned men in their wool suits and bowler hats.
“This is intolerable, I say,” blustered the man with the bushy mustache and red cheeks, who was evidently the leader of the three. “The agreement drawn up with the Crosstime Line clearly states that we are to have ample time to examine the security arrangements before departure.”
Behind him stood a short, round man with a sheaf of papers in hand, and a slender man with a long nose and piercing blue eyes.
“I assure you, Mister Engel,” said Captain N’Diklam, soothingly, “it will be only a momentary delay. We have had to take on relief crewmen, and it is simply taking longer to get them squared away than anticipated.” The captain smiled, teeth white and even against his dark brown skin, and turned to confer with the bosun who had just ambled down the gangplank.
The three men were clearly not satisfied, but evidently saw little to be gained from pressing the issue at this point, and turned to walk away. They moved in concert, with almost military precision, the mustachioed Engel in the lead and the other two following at his flanks like a vanguard of birds in flight.
In the end, it was less than a quarter of an hour later before the gangplank was opened and the passengers allowed to board the Crosstime Express. Vivian Starkweather was one of the first onboard, to the consternation of the trio in their bowler hats, who were evidently some sort of security detachment that had booked passage to make preparations for another who would be joining them at a later stop on the journey. Starkweather, for her part, pretended not to notice the three men who glared daggers at her back, but had let her hand rest casually on the hilt of the Bowie knife hanging from her belt, as though to show that she was not without resources of her own. Rumored to be in the employ of one of the wealthier Texican gas-mining concerns, Starkweather was said to be journeying to Helium to negotiate an extremely lucrative trade agreement, but no one knew for certain.
In her mid-thirties, Starkweather was, if not classically beautiful, then at least ruggedly handsome. A few inches shy of six feet in height, with a mass of brown hair worn up in a bun at the back of her head, she had striking green eyes, a long nose, and strong jaw-line. She seemed to favor riding costume, trousers and matching jackets, with dinosaur-hide boots on her feet, a luxury item from an alternative far off in the Myriad where the terrible lizards never died out, a popular destination for wealthy hunters.
The other passengers who mounted the gangplank, after Starkweather and the bowler-hatted trio had boarded, included an Ambassador from the Reformed Dynast of Heliopolis and his slaves, from an alternative where the pyramid-builders still held sway; a group of Berber scholars from an Andalusia on an alternative dominated by a Mohammedan caliphate; the pair of Indian princesses in their finery, their luggage carried on the back of a miniature automaton elephant, steam hissing from its joints with each cumbersome step; a group of Maori from an alternative in which Polynesian princes ruled both hemispheres, though with their fearsome moko tattoos it was impossible to say whether they were diplomats or warriors; the ill-at-ease mandarin; an Aztec warlord in linen suit and tastefully garish waistcoat, with jade plugs in his lobes and a labret through his lower lip, traveling with a silent, unsmiling woman whose hair was cut in a bob and dyed purple, her hands and feet hennaed in sinewy patterns; and finally the pair of Russian monks in their heavy cassocks, whose nervousness seemed to vanish as they stepped onto the gangplank.
Starkweather, Engel and his security detachment, and the two Russians were the only passengers of European extraction in the first-class berths, with the rest riding in economy or steerage. Fair and even slightly tanned skin was something of a rarity onboard altogether, in fact, with only a bare handful of Europeans at all, and most of those either servants to other passengers or low-ranking members of the crew, like the sandy-haired steward who had so captured the attention of the Indian princesses.
The captain, Mba N’Diklam, was a follower of Sunni Islam, and a subject of a Jolof Empire whose reach extended far beyond the shores of western Africa. He smiled often, teeth straight and white against skin so dark it was almost black, and peppered his speech with words and phrases from his native Wolof. The rest of the crew in their crisp white jackets and peaked caps, on their lapels the blue-and-gold rosette of the Crosstime Line, were a mix of Malay, Tamil, Dayak, Athabascan, and European.
After the passengers had all boarded, and the luggage had been stowed, chimes sounded throughout, the ship, signaling their impending departure. At the captain’s invitation, the first-class passengers gathered in the drawing room to watch the launch through the heavily shielded portholes.
From takeoff through to the next scheduled landing, the Crosstime Express would remain sealed and pressurized, against the airless vacuum of underspace. The sound of the hatches being closed rang through the ship with an air of finality, and a few of those gathered in the drawing room seemed unsettled by the sound. Or perhaps merely unsettled by the thought of leaving the sane world of three dimensions behind when the translocation engine was engaged, and moving into the less sensible realm of underspace. The security detachment, in particular, appeared novices when it came to intercontinua travel, hailing from an alternative which had only recently learned of the Myriad and of the countless alternate worlds stretching out to infinity. But the two young Hindu women, as well, seemed somewhat unsettled, and huddled near one another on a low divan, talking in voices so lo
w they could scarcely be heard.
Elsewhere, deep in the heart of the airship, the navigator cleared her thoughts, and set her mind on their destination. A seer, one of those rare souls able to peer beyond the fabric of the world, into and through underspace into the worlds beyond, the navigator was arguably the most essential member of the crew, as without her to guide them, once the translocation engine was engaged the ship could easily be lost forever, adrift and directionless in underspace. Almost equally invaluable, though, were the ship’s defenders, senders able to broadcast their own thoughts into the ether; there were creatures who made underspace their home, monsters of pure appetite and sense-defying shape who swam in that strange region like sharks prowling the seas, and since conventional weapons were of little use against the creatures’ diamond-hard skins, the only way to repel their voracious attacks was at the level of thought.
With a seer to guide them and a sender manning the defense, the ship required only an engineer to man the translocation engine, a pilot to man the helm, and a captain to command them.
When the Crosstime Express slipped its moorings, the captain ordered her elevated some three-quarters of a mile into the air. It was safest, when moving from world to world, to translocate from high up, to account for variances in elevation and geography from one alternative to the next. Translocation displaced the matter occupying the volume of space a vessel enters, and if the matter is merely empty air, the result will be little more than a brief flash and an audible bang, as the molecules of the atmosphere are excited, forced out of the way of the incoming vessel, nothing more dramatic than a bolt of midday lightning and a peal of distant thunder. If the vessel were to translocate into any material denser than water, though, the mass at the target couldn’t be displaced quickly enough to accommodate the incoming vessel, and the craft would be compacted on arrival. An only relatively dense material like sand would likely only damage a vessel, not destroy it, but with a sufficiently dense material like rock or metal, an entire vessel could be compacted to only a fraction of its original size, with disastrous results for anyone onboard, arid for any living things in the nearby space.
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