Weighing Shadows

by Lisa Goldstein

  But she still didn’t know who was right about the company, Meret or Da Silva. And until she figured it out she would have to keep Meret’s confidences to herself.

  “I don’t remember that part very well,” Ann said. “I think I just wandered around the city. Then I realized that my clothes were torn, and I sold some jewelry and got some new clothes.”

  “You seem to have sold all your jewelry,” Da Silva said. “You came back without any of it. Someone got a bargain, that’s for sure.”

  “I guess. I think I gave all my money to a man selling clothes.”

  “And what did you do with your old clothes?”

  “I changed behind the booth and left them there.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I tried to get back to the inn. I got lost a few times, though.”

  “Do you know how late you were?”

  “They told me—they said you were waiting for about five hours.”

  “That’s right. And you really can’t remember what you were doing all that time?”

  “I remember some things. I saw a harbor, I think, and some ships. Some churches and temples.”

  “And you’re sure you’re all right now? You haven’t even asked me what our assignment was about, why we had to move those lamps.”

  “Well, it was pretty obvious, wasn’t it? We wanted people to be able to find books quickly, and get them out of the library before it burned down. How did it work? Do you know?”

  “It went well—the company’s done the computer modeling, and it looks like people saved books in three out of the four rooms we went to. They’re fairly happy with us this time. What did you and Meret talk about?”

  Ann blinked at the sudden change of subject. She understood it, though; Da Silva was still trying to trip her up. “About Hypatia. What a terrific person she was.”

  “Did she talk about Core at all?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Da Silva asked some more questions, easy ones finally, and then Ann was free to go. She went back to the room the company had given her and studied the thumb drive, as she had every day since she’d gotten back. She was eager to access the information on it but she couldn’t use the computer the company had supplied; they might have equipped their computers with keystroke loggers and been able to read everything she wrote.

  She was surfing the net when her phone rang. It was Da Silva, asking if she wanted to visit the fifth floor, the place where the computer modeling was done.

  Of course she did. And did that mean that they trusted her, that she was ready to be shown more of the workings of the company? She logged off the computer and hurried down the corridor to the elevator.

  Da Silva was waiting for her there. Zach and Franny showed up a few minutes later, and soon they were all talking eagerly about the taces they’d visited. Franny had watched Chartres Cathedral go up in France, and Zach told them about all the things he’d seen while Ann had been ill. Normally she would have felt annoyed with Zach for being so insensitive, but ever since the destruction of the library she’d wanted as little to do with Alexandria as possible. Anyway, it didn’t matter that he’d visited the lighthouse and the palaces of the Ptolemys; she’d met Hypatia, who was worth all the Ptolemys together.

  The elevator came and they got on. Da Silva took out a thumb drive and plugged it into a port near the elevator buttons. A panel slid open and Da Silva moved in front of it, blocking Ann’s view. Ann had gotten a brief glimpse of the drive, though, and she thought it looked like the one Olympia had given her.

  The elevator opened out into a huge windowless room, one that seemed to take up most of the building. People sat at individual workstations, and others congregated around large screens in the center of the room. It smelled of electricity, and her skin prickled.

  “Here’s where it all happens,” Da Silva said. “There isn’t much to see, really, but I wanted to show it to you because you might be working here some day. These are the holographic computers, where we test our models. You can look around if you want, but don’t bother any of the team.”

  The large screens were transparent, like glass. Ann watched as a man ran his hand across one of them, moving an image from one side to the other. A woman spread her hands apart and the image grew larger.

  Ann went closer. Her fingers itched to touch the screen, to move the images and equations, to manipulate data with her hands. Well, it might happen sooner rather than later, if Da Silva had been right about time sickness.

  “Look at this, Tarquin,” one of them said.

  Tarquin? Their speech sounded strange, too fast, the vowels slightly different from the ones she was used to. And now that she was looking around she noticed other differences as well. Most of them were not black or white but somewhere in between, ranging from dark to light brown—more like Elias than any of the others she had already met. All of them looked a little sickly in the harsh light.

  She had known that these people were from the future, but for the first time she understood it physically, as a real thing. What had these people seen, Da Silva and Elias and Meret and even Walker? Did they know what would happen to her, to Zach and Franny? Had they, like Seshat, measured her life and death?

  One of the screens in the center darkened, then switched to a three-dimensional scene of a man walking along a trail in a forest. More men and women clustered around to watch. Someone called out, “Joe, over here.”

  A tall thin man came over, sat down at a keyboard, and entered some numbers, his fingers moving so quickly they seemed to blur. The image on the screen changed, became the same man walking up to a cabin.

  “Better,” the man named Tarquin said. “One more jump, I think.”

  Joe entered more numbers. The man on the screen knocked at the door to the cabin, and a woman opened it.

  The programmers cheered, as if they had just accomplished something enormously difficult; it reminded Ann of old videos she had seen of the moon landings. She found herself smiling, caught up in the spirit of celebration, though she had no idea what had happened.

  “Weighing shadows,” someone said.

  “You pups ever heard that expression?” Tarquin asked her.

  She fought the urge to melt back into the crowd. She hated being noticed. “No,” she said.

  “It’s what we do here. Judging one shade of difference against another. It’s slow and painstaking work, but it gets us there in the end. Gets you there, I should say.”

  He said something to the others and she continued through the room, looking around her. Their clothes weren’t too different from hers, but all their colors seemed to clash; she saw a dress of orange, salmon pink, and red, and a shirt made up of checks of lime green and turquoise.

  The room was open, plainly laid out. She headed over to the computers ranged around the sides. “Here’s where we figure probabilities,” Da Silva said, coming up behind her. “Do you know anything about Markov chains?”

  Ann shook her head. She walked past them, and to her relief Da Silva went to talk to someone else. Finally she came to a closed-off space at the end. What didn’t the company want them to see?

  She opened the door. Inside were a platform and a large screen facing a row of computers. Another launch room, probably, a smaller one.

  A man bustled up behind her. “Sorry, that’s off limits,” he said.

  She turned around. The man made shooing motions with his hands, indicating that she had to leave, and closed the door behind her.

  By the time Da Silva rounded them up and led them to the elevator she was starting to think retirement might not be so bad after all.

  Back at her room, though, she began to wonder. Would she still be with the company when she couldn’t travel in time anymore? Or would they find out about her involvement with Meret, with Core?

  But she wasn’t really a member of Core; all she’d done was tell Meret a few things. And if she hadn’t, Meret wouldn’t have rescued them in Kaphtor, they might still be there,
locked in the queen’s palace. Or the queen might have killed them, or sent them into the bull games.

  And was the company really all that terrible, after all? They had saved books; you would have to say that, this time anyway, they had chosen the right side, had been on the side of the angels.

  But what did that say about Core? Did she even know enough to make a decision, to come down on Meret’s side or the company’s?

  There were other questions too, things she still didn’t understand. Did her thumb drive give her access to the fifth floor, the place where the computer modeling was done? But why would Meret have wanted her to go there?

  She went to her door and glanced down the hallway. It was empty. She hurried back to the elevator, and when it came she plugged her drive into the port Da Silva had used.

  The panel opened. Behind it was an alphanumeric pad, waiting for her to enter a password. She pressed the button for the fifth floor, but nothing happened.

  THEY SENT HER HOME and gave her another week’s vacation. As soon as she got to her apartment she plugged the thumb drive into her computer.

  The data was password-protected, as she had expected. She typed in “Kore” and “Core” and “Hypatia” and “Meret,” but none of them worked. She tried some tricks, everything she could think of, but none of them gave up the contents of the drive. It seemed to be using standard file and encryption systems—her own computer could see that there was data there; it just couldn’t unlock it. At least, she thought, the drive wasn’t using some far-future operating system that she would have to hack at the bit level. She sighed. There were plenty of tools that could do what she needed, but it would take time. She would have to set up a brute force hack, running the most likely combinations of binary data to unlock the encryption. She didn’t like this type of solution—it was inelegant, and would take a long time—but it was the only option she had left.

  She bought a textbook about probability and Markov chains, thinking that she could get a head start if the company ever put her to work on the fifth floor. To her surprise the subject fascinated her, and she spent hours working out the problems.

  The next day Franny called her, asking if she wanted to get together for lunch. Zach would be coming too, she said.

  She didn’t like going out much, and meals, especially, were filled with social landmines, opportunities for people to discover what a misfit she was. But this was Franny and Zach, people she already knew, and who knew her. Anyway, they were misfits too.

  She had to take three buses to Franny’s house. It was one suburb over, a town she had never visited, with huge comfortable houses and carefully tended gardens. She headed up the front path and rang the doorbell.

  Franny opened the door and led her into an entrance hall with a tiled floor. A room with a pure white carpet lay beyond it. “Could you take off your shoes?” Franny asked.

  Take off her shoes? Who did that? Still, Ann did as she was asked. Her socks had holes in them, she saw.

  They headed through the living room, the carpet whispering against her feet. They went past a dining room with an enormous table and a chandelier, and then into the kitchen. Zach was already there, sitting in a breakfast nook with a pizza box in front of him.

  “Is your husband here?” Ann asked, joining him at the table and taking a slice of pizza.

  “No, he’s at work,” Franny said. Before Ann could ask any more questions about him she said, “Zach and I were talking about our next assignment.”

  “You got your assignments already?” Ann asked.

  “No—we’re just trying to figure out what they might be. Zach wants to go to Rome.”

  “Rome?”

  “Sure,” Zach said. “What we saw was just a colony. I’d like to see the real thing, the emperors, the center of all that power.”

  “It’s too crowded there,” Ann said. “You remember what they told us—they like to go where there aren’t a lot of people. Less of a chance to screw up that way.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the challenge. Going to Rome and fooling all of them. Fitting in. I bet I could do it.”

  “Anyway, they never ask us for our input, just send us where they need us. You’ll see—you’ll probably end up at the Black Death.”

  “Well, there sure weren’t a lot of people there.”

  “Fewer all the time,” Ann said.

  They laughed. She’d noticed this before, the gallows humor people sometimes displayed about the timebound. It was because they could do nothing to change their lives, she thought, they could only stand by and watch as the people they lived among were overrun by history. As they grew old and died, or were killed.

  She didn’t want to think about Hypatia now, though. She looked away from Zach, toward Franny. There was a large bruise, dark purple, on Franny’s upper arm.

  Their eyes met, and Franny looked away. That day’s newspaper lay on the table, and Franny reached for it.

  “You know that company Rengstorff Media?” she asked. Ann didn’t, but she let the other woman continue. “When we left the CEO was Gayle Shapiro, wasn’t it? But now the paper says that it’s some guy instead, that he’s been there for seven years.”

  “Do I look like someone who knows about CEOs?” she asked. “I don’t even know what CEO stands for.”

  “I remembered Shapiro because this was the highest a woman had gotten on the Fortune 500,” Franny said. “But now that memory’s getting fainter, and I have this other memory instead. I think this was something we did—some history that we changed. And no one noticed anything, no one except us, because we were in the center of it. The people here remember that this guy was CEO for seven years—and he was, for them. That’s what they lived through.”

  “Huh,” Ann said. “But why would the company want to change the CEO of—what is it? A media company?”

  “I don’t know. Probably he makes a decision that turns out better for the world.”

  “Or for the company.”

  “You aren’t still thinking about Core, are you? About that weird woman Meret?”

  “No, not really.” But she could not help remembering what Meret had told her, that the company nearly always sided with men.

  She needed to change the subject; the last thing she wanted was Franny reporting her to the company. “Hey, you never said where you want to go.”

  “I don’t care,” Franny said. “It’s always interesting, no matter where they send us. All I want is someplace not too hot.”

  They finished the pizza, and Franny walked them back to the entrance hall. As they stepped outside something whirred at the edge of Ann’s vision, and she turned quickly to look at it. “Hey, a camera!” she said.

  “Where?” Franny asked.

  “Over there.”

  “I don’t see anything. Anyway, why would they send a camera after us?”

  Because the company was spying on them, obviously. Franny clearly didn’t want to hear it, though. Even if she had seen the camera she would deny it, would convince herself it hadn’t been there.

  She wished she could talk to someone, discuss her doubts, get things straight in her mind. Was the company watching them? Why? Or was Franny right, had she imagined it?

  Maybe it was a bee, she thought. Maybe Our Lady of Honey had sent her another message.

  WHEN SHE RETURNED TO work she learned that they were going to study the thirteenth century this time. Franny was in her history class, she was pleased to see, and so was Jerry.

  “Your next assignment is going to be here, Carcassonne, in the south of France,” Professor Strickland said, indicating a PowerPoint map. “That’s where a new religion started, the Cathars. A heretical religion, one that didn’t believe in following the pope or any feudal lord. So in 1209 Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against them.”

  “A crusade?” Franny asked. “I thought the crusaders went to the Middle East.”

  “They did, usually. But the church was very intent on stamping out this heresy.”
r />   “Why?” Ann asked. “What did they do?”

  “It wasn’t what they did—it was what they believed. They thought there were two gods, an evil god that made this world, an imperfect world full of suffering, and a good, perfect god of love and peace. And since this world was flawed, they didn’t see any reason to follow its god, or any of his authorities. So you can see why the church wanted to get rid of them.”

  “We’re not going to be there during the crusade, are we?” Ann asked.

  “No, don’t worry. We’ll get you out before then.”

  A week into the lessons Ann realized something: she didn’t like this time period as much as the earlier ones they had studied. The Cathars wanted to have little to do with the material world, and some, who called themselves Perfecti, tried to keep themselves as pure as possible. They refrained from sex, they ate only fish and vegetables, they dressed without ornament and owned no property.

  The word “cathar,” in fact, meant “pure,” Strickland said. They didn’t call themselves that, though; their name for themselves was “Bonshommes,” which meant “Good Men.”

  And that was the problem, Ann thought—there seemed no room for women in that tace. Women had been important in their last two assignments; the Kaphtorans had even worshipped them. Did patriarchal societies grow stronger as the centuries passed, as they tightened their grip on power? Or, as Meret had said, had the company nudged them in that direction?

  She said nothing about these thoughts to Professor Strickland, of course. She didn’t want the company to think she wasn’t interested in her next assignment. And really, she didn’t care whern they sent her—it was certain to be fascinating, no matter what tace it was.

  In their language class Professor Tran taught them a dialect of French called Languedoc, which had been spoken in the south of France. Most of the troubadours had come from there, Tran said, singers who were attached to the court of some noble, and to help them get a feel for the language she played them videos of local performances.