Starlight's Edge (Timedance)

by Susan Waggoner

Zee watched it all unfold around her. For a moment, she thought how nice it would be to join them, to learn to make lace or bake pastries and fall into a nice, cozy niche. But even as she watched Piper and Meli and the others make plans, she knew she wouldn’t join them. Her path had to be different. Even without Piper as an ally, the plan that had been forming in her mind leapt up bright and clear, pointing the way.

  * * *

  In her old life, Zee’s favorite time of day had been arriving at work. The energy of the hospital, the excitement of the shift ahead, and the anticipation of helping sick and damaged bodies heal had always been special to her. On New Earth her favorite time was evenings, when she and David would tell each other about the day they’d had, or curl up together and watch a holo. They didn’t go out much—they were trying to live on David’s Time Fleet salary, which wasn’t really meant for two people. Neither wanted to accept money from David’s parents, and when Zee told him about Mrs. Hart’s diamonds, both agreed that they weren’t meant for day-to-day expenses. But Zee didn’t mind. She barely noticed the lack of money. What she craved most had nothing to do with money.

  Ever since the night of the cab accident, she’d felt vulnerable. A sense of foreboding had settled in like a fog that would not disperse. First had come the accident the night of the party, then the cab—was it truly a coincidence? She felt helpless, as if she and David were walking around with boulders above their heads, boulders that could crush them at any moment. Maybe it wasn’t surprising, given the two narrow escapes they’d had. But Zee had never felt so helpless in her life. She was tired of looking for a job that never materialized and tired of waiting for the next bad thing to happen. She had a plan, and it was time to put it into action.

  * * *

  David was sitting on the couch with a tablet in his hand when Zee sat down beside him. She could see the screen well enough to notice the Time Fleet emblem and a list of upcoming missions.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said, taking the tablet from his hand and holding it. “About this.”

  “I’m not signing up, Zee. Just looking. I’ve got two months of work left on the stuff I brought back already.” He brushed back a strand of Zee’s curling auburn hair. “Besides, I told you, I’ll go on shorter hops. I’m not leaving you alone anytime soon.”

  “That’s not what I meant. What I meant was—” She paused and took a deep breath. “What I mean is, I want to come with you. I want to join Time Fleet.”

  She’d expected an instant reaction, a burst of approval or surprise. What she hadn’t expected was silence.

  “I want to join Time Fleet,” she repeated. “I’ve done some research and found out I can. In fact, they’ve started a program to keep couples together.”

  It was a bit of a stretch to say she’d done the research. Actually, her computer had. Despite David’s warnings about silicon life and computers with hidden agendas, hers was just the opposite—hers had been nothing but helpful. When Zee began searching to see what qualifications were needed to enter Time Fleet training, her computer discovered a policy change that gave partners of Fleet members priority consideration.

  “I know about the program,” David said.

  “You do? But you never mentioned it.” For the first time, it occurred to Zee that he might not want her with him, that time travel might be a part of his life he wanted to keep separate. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have talked to you first.”

  “I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want you to feel pressured.” He looked at her and traced her cheekbone with his fingertips. “Are you sure this is something you really want to do?”

  She nodded. “I’m sure.”

  “Because I meant what I said about taking shorter assignments and staying home more, you know.”

  “I know. But I’ve thought about this a lot, and it’s about more than just being together. I need to use my skills, David. I need to be an empath again, and to keep studying divining, but I’ve been here long enough to see I can’t do that here. There are no hospitals, and maybe there’s a kind of empathy that could help with things like depression, but the truth is, New Earth speaks a different kind of emotional language.” She paused, thinking of how Paul’s touch had thrown her for a loop, but how easily she’d discerned Meli’s mood. “I don’t read New Earthers right and can’t connect the way I do with other time immigrants. And besides, there are no patients to work with, even if I could connect. But I’m sure I could be useful going with you into the past, and I want to try.”

  “In that case,” he said, pulling her into the circle of his arms, “I can’t think of anything I’d like better.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AND FOUND

  Within a month, Zee had completed the required physical and psychological testing and was accepted into Time Fleet training.

  “I feel like a soldier now,” she said, showing David the acceptance with its Alliance of World Democracies seal.

  “Sure thing, Private McAdams.” He grinned and raised an eyebrow. “We’re not really that military, you know. Time Fleet is part of the military for practical reasons.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When a way to time travel was discovered, the government knew it had to be kept under control. Otherwise, there’d be all sorts of smuggling, not to mention illegal exporting and importing.”

  Zee tried to imagine someone showing up in the middle of the twelfth century with shock bombs for sale to the highest bidder. Or even someone with good intentions who wanted to save something precious from the coming disaster. What would happen if someone went right back to Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop and bought the Mona Lisa to transport back to New Earth?

  Humans had cells that could be copied, and somewhere in those cells the things that made the person a unique, expressive individual resided, so duplication worked. And tools could be duplicated because objects weren’t expressive individuals. But works of art, she thought, were somewhere in the middle. As she’d seen with reconstructed nano art, you could have all the right molecules and still end up with nothing special. What if you destroyed the original Mona Lisa and discovered, too late, that the copy lacked the elusive thing that had made the original a masterpiece? And even if the copy was perfect, was taking it to the future for safekeeping the right thing to do? She thought of all the millions of people who’d seen the Mona Lisa and been inspired by it, and how it made the world a richer, better place. Was it fair to take it away from all those people? To strip the past of every beautiful thing?

  “I see what you mean,” she told David, her mind reeling back to the present.

  David nodded. “The result would be chaos. Some of our physicists have even suggested that the impact could unravel time itself. So Time Fleet became a branch of the military. This way, we can restrict access to transport bases and maintain them under military security.”

  That night, when Zee woke up and couldn’t fall back to sleep, she tried to imagine all the things that could happen if time travel weren’t controlled. It was beyond imagination, and in the end she agreed with the physicists—time really might start to come undone.

  * * *

  Zee loved getting up to a day filled with purpose again, and the caught-by-surprise look on David’s father’s face when they told his parents made her stifle a smile. She could have sworn she heard Mrs. Hart’s voice saying, That’s what I meant, Zee. Play big.

  Though Zee and David were in different units, they both reported to the base at Reykjavik, and walking to the vactrain together each morning gave them extra time together. With most traffic removed to the skyways above, London streets had become quieter and prettier. Wide streets had turned into narrow lanes bordered with trees and flowers. Zee often felt she’d gone back in time instead of into the future, especially on foggy mornings that hid the skyways, or dusky evenings when the traffic above the buildings glowed like fireflies.

  At the coast they transferred to the ghost, a ride long enough to pick up th
eir conversation or read the news articles that flashed on pop-up screens. One day a headline caught Zee’s eye—Newest Thing in London Is Old-Time Luxury. It was all about the Lost Arts Employment Agency and how there were long waiting lists for dinners and parties catered by Chef Marc Charoy and gowns and laces designed by Melisande de Rambures. There was a long interview with Piper, who listed other services the agency offered—handmade cabinetry, boat building (Viking dragon ships were in high demand), formal garden design, handmade quilts, and lessons in everything from the Japanese tea ceremony and flower arranging to Baroque dances. Zee couldn’t believe the prices quoted, or the number of seamstresses and lacemakers Meli now had working for her. A few days later, Zee saw an ad that said, Don’t just encrypt your family history, illuminate it! Our calligraphers and illustrators use the finest hand-ground pigments and gold leaf for your favorite documents. Contact the Lost Arts Employment Agency.

  Well, Zee thought, that was one way to bring back the past, and studying the past was what most of her classes were about. Whether her friends at Lost Arts knew it or not, they were helping New Earth fill in the blanks of their communal heritage. In the dark centuries after the meteors, the past had gotten lost, jumbled, spun around, and forgotten by those who had survival on their minds. Digital books and records decomposed without anyone noticing. Antique volumes, printed on paper, were burned for fuel. Paintings were favorite heat sources, because canvases, with their weave of fabric and layers of oil paint, burned hot and bright.

  The mission of the Time Fleet was to return as much of that history as possible, to reconstruct and put in order not only the big events but the small ones. That was why David had been knocked on the head by an old-fashioned book and brought to Zee’s hospital in the year 2218. He was copying Nancy Drew mysteries, a heroine unknown on New Earth. Zee had thought it was funny at first, but now she understood. History required all the bits and pieces—the Nancy Drews and macaroons and handwoven lace.

  And David had been right about one other thing as well—training was more like college than anything military, a combination of tech courses mixed with a heavy dose of history and anthropology. Except that the history was all in bits and pieces, with gaps in the time line and frequent errors in the texts. Some days, Zee felt she was working on a giant, ever-changing jigsaw puzzle. Time travel was still so new that whole centuries and continents remained unexplored. Most of the time, she enjoyed trying to put details of the jigsaw together, but there were times she felt held back, sure the task would be easier if the New Earthers would embrace some of the psi sciences as well.

  During her interviews, Zee had carefully explained her experiences as an empath and with divining, and detailed why she felt both could be useful to the Time Fleet. The interviewer listened attentively enough, and even took a few notes, but when she finished, he opened a fresh screen and began a new series of questions. Neither empathy nor divining was mentioned again. She refused to give up, though. It seemed impossible that her skills would desert her completely, and she was determined to reclaim them. When she did, surely the Time Fleet would see the usefulness of going beyond their just-the-facts approach.

  “If they’re so determined to gather every little scrap and put it in place, why don’t we just go back to the beginning and work our way forward logically?” she asked David in frustration one night. They were curled up on the couch together. He was searching his cube for music he’d brought back from Prambanan while she was trying to memorize, in case she ever landed in Paris after the fall of the monarchy, when it was okay to praise Napoleon and when he should be condemned.

  “Traveling to another era isn’t as easy as it sounds,” David had explained. “First we have to send the parts for a transmission machine and hope they land close enough to assemble themselves. That alone can take years, and even when you finally succeed, transmission’s not an exact science. You set the coordinates, but time is kind of … mmm”—he looked for the right word—“spongy. It speeds up and slows down. It’s something you don’t notice if you’re there, but although you’re aiming for a pinpoint, you could be off and land years or miles away, and often both. That’s why Paul’s mission to Pompeii is dangerous, and why he’s going solo. He wants to get near the Vesuvius explosion but not get caught in it. The farther back you go in time, the more uncertain and dangerous it is. If Paul pulls this off, he’ll be a hero, at least as far as Time Fleet Command is concerned.”

  Zee had a hard time thinking of Paul as a hero. If she’d had to guess, she’d have said the mission was more about his drive to compete with David and impress their father than anything else. But a dangerous assignment was a dangerous assignment, no matter why you volunteered, and though she was still uneasy around Paul, she also still hoped she was wrong about him. The mystery of who Lorna was had never been resolved, but she did her best to forget about it.

  * * *

  On a warm, hazy Wednesday in August, Zee raced out of class. David was at a briefing in Tokyo and wouldn’t be home until tomorrow, and if she could catch the next ghost, she could get back to London for the tail end of the weekly Lost Arts meeting. But as she hurried down the corridor, she heard herself being paged to report to the Time Fleet Admiral’s office. For a split second, she thought about ignoring it, then turned down the corridor to the office. The Time Fleet might not be strictly military, but you didn’t ignore an order.

  She was shown into Admiral Walters’s office, where the transcript of her intake interview was up on a wall screen. She saw the words empath and divining and felt a clutch of fear. She remembered the notes her interviewer had taken on that score, and the fact that he hadn’t once smiled during Zee’s final interview.

  The Admiral saw the look on her face and released her from her anxiety. “Sit down, McAdams. You’re not in any trouble.”

  Zee had met Admiral Walters only once, when he’d welcomed the new recruits. She could hardly have done anything to impress him during their brief handshake, she thought as she took a seat.

  “Your interview is quite interesting,” he said, glancing briefly at the wall screen before focusing his gaze on her. “I wonder if you could tell me more about your job as an empath, and about divining. Incidents and specifics.”

  So Zee did, nervously at first but warming to the subject, as always. It was a relief, after so many weeks of having no one to talk to about them. She described the basics of empathy, then detailed how different divining was, how it wasn’t a skill she had pursued, as she had empathy, but something that had surfaced in her life with the force of an iceberg. She told about the time she had felt the news of an earthquake and tsunami while it was happening, before any news service carried it, and about how, another time, she’d known that a bomb was hidden in an ambulance. That was the incident that convinced her, she said, to develop her gift.

  She heard the undercurrent of grief in her voice as she said this, and wondered if Admiral Walters had too. It was the same grief that had haunted her for months, since the day her friend Rani had accepted an invitation for a balloon ride with a handsome, mysterious boy and ended up dead. If I had accepted the diviner’s path earlier, Zee often wondered, would I have been ready that day? Would I have felt what was going to happen? Would I have been able to save Rani? It was a thought she’d kept bottled inside her for months, and sometimes used her divesting exercises to get rid of.

  Admiral Walters was leaning forward slightly. “As you know, we have nothing like either empathy or divining here. Our energies have gone in quite another direction. But I could see where it might be of service on Time Fleet missions.” He paused for a long moment. “If you could continue your studies, would you?”

  “Yes.” Her answer was immediate.

  Admiral Walters leaned back and snapped off the wall screen.

  “There’s someone for you to meet. Down the hall, third door on the right. That’s all, McAdams.”

  Confused and slightly disappointed at the abruptness of his dismissal, Zee counted
the doors down the long corridor. She opened the third one and stepped inside.

  * * *

  The oldest human she had ever seen set aside an ancient, papery book the instant she opened the door, giving the impression that he hadn’t been reading at all, but waiting for her. When he looked up, she saw that his face was lined, like a piece of cloth that had been crumpled, unfolded, and crumpled again, over and over. He was nearly bald, with wisps of hair at the base of his neck, but his eyes were alive and alert.

  “Hello?” she asked tentatively.

  The man made no effort to stand but simply looked at her, his gaze warm and deep, drawing her in. “Don’t you recognize me, Zee?” he asked.

  It was an old man’s voice, but there was something familiar about it. Without taking her eyes from his face, Zee found a chair and sat down opposite him.

  “I thought for sure you’d know me, even after all this time.”

  Zee gasped and heard the echo of a familiar chuckle in return.

  “Major Dawson?”

  “Yes, it’s me, Zee. Somewhat the worse for wear, I’m afraid, but me nevertheless.”

  She grasped his hands in her own. They were so light she could feel the bones under his skin, but he squeezed her fingers with a firm grip.

  “Surprised?” he asked.

  “But how did you get here? When did you get here? Did you leave before the meteors? Did you know I was here? Did anyone else come with you?” A thousand questions flew through her head like birds released from cages.

  Major Dawson reached over and touched a keypad. “Tea?”

  Zee wrinkled her nose. “No, thank you. Nano tea is terrible.”

  “I’m trying to develop a taste for it,” he said as the tea appeared before him. “One must adapt, you know. At least it’s hot.” He took a sip. “Now, your questions. But you’ll have to forgive me if the story is a bit, ah, spotty. I have trouble remembering, sometimes. I’m so old, you see, I no longer remember how old I actually am. But yes, I was there when the meteors struck, and for many decades after that.”