Alice Payne Arrives

by Kate Heartfield

“No. You can’t.”

  He’s a big man, and seems even bigger here, in this room. There is too much history here for these four walls to contain.

  “If it’s . . . I know there are limits to what a woman of colour can do in this setting, but I can work with Vetsera just as I worked with Mitzi. I’ve got a prep package to be an American artist, like Edmonia Lewis. Vetsera could be convinced to take art lessons.”

  “It’s not that. We’re shutting down this mission. Putting our resources elsewhere, in 2016. Let’s try 2016 again.”

  “But 2016 is completely fucked,” she says, trying to keep her voice even. “You know that. Sir. We have to go back earlier.”

  He shakes his head. “Obsession happens to all of us but we have to see it for what it is. It’s my fault. I wanted this too. I let you stay here far too long. But no single moment of history is everything. It’s a long war, Major Zuniga. If we fight one battle forever, it will never end.”

  She nods, because she doesn’t trust herself to speak. He’s right. The war of attrition for human history will never end, not if the Farmers keep fighting the Misguideds battle to battle, moment to moment.

  General Almo is right. It is pointless to keep trying to push history one way while the Misguideds are trying to push it in another. But he doesn’t have the courage to do what needs to be done. The only way to end this war, to end all wars, is to stop anyone from changing history ever again.

  CHAPTER THREE: Companions; or, How Alice Is Transformed

  1788

  ALICE LOSES HER PURSUERS at the creek bed. Havoc picks his way back up the bank and into the woods, where he knows the paths to home.

  She urges Havoc to go faster, although it’s nearly too dark to see. She does not dare light the mica lantern in her saddlebag. She needs to return unseen. By now, Lord Ludderworth’s carriage will have arrived at Fleance Hall. Alice is meant to be at the door with Father to greet their guest, to distract his attention from the fewness of servants with bluster and goodwill.

  There’s a lantern at the second servants’ entrance, around the back of the house, where Jane waits, holding a candlestick.

  She takes Havoc by the bridle and says, “I’ll tie him here and stable him later before the groom does his rounds.”

  The fact that the groom is also kept busy being the coachman, the footman and man-of-all-work makes taking horses out of the stable very convenient. Before Father went away to war, Fleance Hall had nine servants. Now it has four: a cook, a housemaid, the groom and the indefinable Satterthwaite, her father’s butler/valet/man-of-business.

  “Your gown is just inside.” Jane points. “What kept you, Alice? Your father has been asking—he thinks I’ve gone up to your room to help you with some womanly requirement.”

  “Time for that later,” Alice says, and kisses her, snaking one arm around her waist.

  “Go on,” Jane hisses, pushing Alice, but she’s smiling. “Your father’s guest will be here any moment.”

  Alice slips through the propped-open door into the little anteroom, where her clothes are laid out on the bench. Her best yellow gown, of course. Jane’s lit two candles on the wall sconces, but it’s still gloomy. She kicks off the high riding boots and wriggles out of the breeches. She’s shivering in her shift when Jane slides in and closes the door behind her.

  Ten years they’ve lived together now at Fleance Hall. It was Father’s idea to bring his cousin’s ward here to be Alice’s companion, when he went away to America to fight. Alice was only twenty-two then, and Father held great hopes that she’d marry. Truth be told, she’s never done much to encourage proposals, and actively discouraged them whenever any of her lovers got too close. In those early years, while Father was away, Jane was a friend. Over the last year, she’s given Alice a reason to discourage proposals forevermore.

  She plops the purse full of coins and rings into Jane’s white hand.

  “Ah, you and Laverna got your man.”

  “We did.” Laverna is the name that Jane gave the automaton, early on: the patron goddess of thieves.

  Alice wriggles into her slim modesty petticoat, then pushes the clothes over enough on the bench to give herself room to sit, and points her toe. Each white stocking rolls up under Jane’s white fingertips, which brush the tops of Alice’s bare knees, under the modesty petticoat.

  “You know,” Jane says, “I was never jealous of any of your lovers, but sometimes I feel a little jealous of Laverna.”

  “She is your creation, darling.”

  “All the more reason. I don’t trust anything I build. Do you remember the walking doll I made for Freddy Combles last Christmas? I swear it used to migrate through the house in the night. I was glad to be rid of it.”

  She glances up and Alice offers a weary smile.

  “What is it, Alice? What did keep you, on the road?”

  “Ludderworth’s servants chased me. Don’t worry, Jane, they didn’t get close. But they did delay me. I can’t believe Lord Ludderworth isn’t here already. He must have stopped to wait for his servants. Lucky for me he did.”

  Alice puts her hand on the petticoat, keeping Jane’s hand there, and Jane slides her fingers up the inside of her thigh. Under the shift, under the petticoat, there is nothing between them. Jane’s thumb and finger find their places with absolute confidence as Jane leans into her and says against Alice’s lips: “Later.”

  Alice groans theatrically and stands up so Jane can wrap the stays around her body and lace them down the front, over the stomacher, shaping Alice into the role of Miss Payne. Jane knows every inch of her body, where it will give and where it will swell. Jane slides the wooden busk between shift and stays, and together they tie the yellow petticoat around her waist. A gauze fichu over the shoulders, then she slips into the gown like a jacket and Jane closes it in front, working fast, thrusting the pins into the stays.

  “Damn it,” Jane swears around the pin in her mouth. “It’s crooked here.”

  “Never mind that,” Alice says. She steps into the yellow silk shoes and picks up the white-ribboned cap, the only thing left on the bench, and pins it quickly over the back of her hair. It was braided under the hat, and the frizzes that have come free around her forehead will look just fine with the cap.

  It’s only Lord Ludderworth, anyway. If her gown is pinned crookedly and her hair a little wild, what does it matter? It’s been years since she could afford to keep a lady’s maid. She is thirty-two years old, keeping herself and her family under this roof by dint of adventure, and she does not give a damn if her bodice is straight.

  She tugs the sides of the fichu a little more closely together over her cleavage, and runs down the hallway, leaving Jane to gather the cast-off highwayman’s clothes and hide them in her study. The housemaid never ventures in there; she’s afraid of all the machines and instruments, and especially of the frogs in jars.

  Alice runs, one hand holding her skirt, the other skimming the walls that she loves, although the paper is peeling. Through the parlour, empty, lit only by embers. Voices in the hall just inside the main door. She runs past Satterthwaite at the door and comes skidding to a halt on the chequerboard floor, the only part of the big house that is scrubbed to a polish and brightly lit.

  The four men in the room turn to look at her.

  Father says, “Alice! At last!”

  Standing beside Father is not Lord Ludderworth, or even Lord Ludderworth’s coachman or footman, but the manservant who chased her on his horse. He’s wet with sweat and too alarmed to do anything but bow his head.

  “You remember John Grigson. Lord Ludderworth’s manservant. These two men with him are servants of the earl’s household as well.”

  “Of course,” Alice says, bowing her head. “Mr. Grigson.”

  “Miss Payne,” says Grigson, glancing from Alice to her father and back. She’s seen people do this her whole life, contrasting her father’s pale skin with her own. She takes after her Caribbean mother, whom she does not remember. Grigs
on is black himself, though, and usually it is white people who have more difficulty with the existence of Alice. It dawns that his hesitation, his glancing from face to face, has little to do with her. He’s had a shock. God, could he have some idea that she is the highwayman?

  “Lord Ludderworth went on ahead of us,” he says. “How can it be that he has not arrived?”

  “What do you mean?” Father barks. “You mean to say that your master is somewhere out there on the road, still?”

  Grigson shakes his head. “That he is not, Colonel. I’d stake my life.”

  “Then where, man?”

  CHAPTER FOUR: On the Nuclear Option, with Cocktails

  2070

  PRUDENCE PAUSES OUTSIDE the yellow-brick house and pulls out her EEG scanner. Just to be safe. Two people inside, both of them neutrals. She chose Helmut and Rati with care: radical conservatives, young enough with nothing to lose and smart enough to have dangerous confidence in their own decisions. To the scanner, that’s neither Farmer nor Misguided, but neutral. A person with extreme tendencies on either end of a spectrum sometimes registers the same as a moderate.

  The retina lock on the door is disguised as an old-fashioned peephole, because the only houses that would have such security in this part of suburban Toronto would be drug houses. Prudence would rather not attract any official attention. No records.

  The lock clicks and she turns the doorknob.

  “I’m home,” she says, stepping into the dim hall.

  She means it as a joke, but it feels true. Even before she set up her rogue project in this ugly little house, Prudence Zuniga always had a place to stay in 2070. Most of her friends—well, colleagues—are here, and this time around, her sister.

  This year is the destination of choice for discerning time travellers.

  2070: Later than the biggest waves of History War refugees and the backlash to them.

  2070: Twenty-one years earlier than the beginning of the History War itself, although the first rumblings of that war are now only a year away. Teleosophy begins as an intelligence wing of the U.S. military in 2071. Twenty years later, it will explode into a global war between the Farmers and the so-called Guides.

  The technology of 2070 is advanced enough to make life comfortable. Time travel is new but available for those who can pay; upstream in earlier centuries, the only travellers are military like Prudence. The war won’t get bad enough to visibly affect contemporary life until after the Anarchy hits in 2139. That leaves plenty of time for a human to live out a life. Sure, the climate’s a mess already by 2070, but it’s a catastrophe, not yet an apocalypse.

  Visit 2070: It’s Not an Apocalypse. Yet. This Time.

  She hasn’t written marketing copy in . . . what? How many years of her life? Too many to do the math. The voice of it in her head twists itself ever more cynically but never goes silent. Of course, propaganda isn’t all that different. She spent several years behind a desk doing propaganda for the Mao and Peron projects, and various European Union campaigns, before Almo recruited her out of the communications branch.

  Farmer agents never lie unless it’s absolutely necessary. She’s learned how to make the truth do what she wants it to do.

  If Project Shipwreck works, though, there will be a lot less demand for her unique set of skills.

  Helmut and Rati emerge at the top of the basement stairs.

  “Anything I should know about?” she asks.

  Helmut shakes his head. “We’re still running reliability checks. Getting better. Point-two percent.”

  Prudence sighs. Not nearly good enough. But she won’t wait any longer.

  “You look exhausted,” Rati says. “Is 1889 not going well?”

  They are both looking at her with concern. They’re too goddamn young, too new, to know that it’s perfectly normal to be exhausted.

  “Not going at all, anymore. General Almo’s closed it down.”

  “Closed it down?” Rati asks. She’s the sharper of the two. “You mean he . . . gave up?”

  Prudence walks the room, checks their work. They’ve been busy. They’re dedicated, these two. They’re ready. “He wanted to reassign me to goddamn 2016, which if you ask me is too late to do any good for the timeline, and too early to do any good for the History War. I convinced him to send me here to do Berlin Convention sabotage instead.”

  If he suspects anything, he’ll suspect that Prudence wants to spend time with her sister. It’s one more reason she chose to make this time and place the headquarters for Project Shipwreck. She has a plausible reason to want to come here.

  “The leaders won’t lead,” she sloganeers. “So we have to.”

  Rati frowns. “Now? But you said . . .”

  When they began, three years ago in Prudence’s lifeline, it was an experiment to see how much EEG-scanner coverage they could achieve, worldwide. They were going to turn the network over to Teleosophic Core Command, or said they were.

  Prudence, Rati and Helmut have mainly kept up that fiction even among themselves, but the network has been basically complete for months and they haven’t discussed handing it over to the TCC. Even if they could convince the TCC to send a generation of Misguideds downstream, they could never convince the TCC to end time travel altogether. Project Shipwreck won’t be nearly as effective if they allow the enemy to develop counterstrike ability. Mutually assured destruction is exactly what Prudence and her protégés are trying to avert.

  So the three of them have drifted, from rogues to traitors.

  “Almo doesn’t have the stomach to win,” says Helmut. “He just gave up on preventing the First World War.”

  “Exactly,” says Prudence. “The Command has just shown it is not interested in putting an end to this war. Too many generals behind desks and not enough of them out in the field to see what the enemy is doing. I’ve seen, over the last ten years, just how fanatical the Misguideds can be. There is no winning against a cult in a war of attrition. The only way is to burn it all down. Almo can’t see that. So it’s up to us.”

  They’re quiet.

  “And what about the 1788 component?” Rati asks.

  “I’ve chosen the naïf and I’ll go today. Jane Hodgson. You two know that name?”

  Helmut shakes his head, but Rati says, “The inventor of the helidrone?”

  Prudence smiles. “Just the kind of person we want, don’t you think? She dies in poverty, so I think the reward, and the lure of a scientific machine she’s never seen, will do the trick.”

  Helmut shakes his head. “It’s a weak spot, but I don’t know what to do about it. I’d go myself, happily, but we just can’t be sure that the causality won’t glitch. I was hoping to figure it out, but—”

  Prudence raises her hand. “Hodgson will work out. And if she doesn’t, there are plenty of other people in 1788 who will take the job.”

  Helmut nods. “All right. Once that’s in place, we’re ready.”

  “Ready? You just said point-two percent!”

  He blushes. “Point-two percent may be as low as I’ll ever be able to get it. EEG scanning has inherent limits, and there will always be some false positives.”

  “OK. Let’s think about the consequences of that. The global population of Misguideds, as of July 1, 2070, will be roughly two-point-two-six billion. Right? Which gives us a false positive of . . . let’s see . . . oh, four and a half million people. Four and a half million people who are actually neutrals, or maybe even Farmers. People like us.”

  Helmut frowns, and his face goes pink.

  “Yes,” says Rati, glancing at him, and back at Prudence. “But it’s not as if we’re killing them.”

  “No, we’re not killing them,” she says. Her voice still sounds like a rusty hinge. “Probably. But it’s the goddamn nuclear option, isn’t it?”

  Their eyes go wide. Shit. She has to tread more carefully here. She’s taking them for granted.

  These two kids are working with second-rate equipment, putting all of Rati’s
ill-gotten funds toward the power cells. They’ve disguised their workshop to fit the period, as much as possible, and to fit their cover story, should any of their fellow Farmers find them. These two young people have chosen not only to blow up their own chances at making a better world, but to blow up everyone else’s chances too. She’s already asking too much of them, but goddammit, she’s going to ask for a little fucking humanity too.

  “Look,” she says. “Our energy supply is going to be extremely touch-and-go as it is. Nobody has ever done anything like this before. Ever. We’re moving two billion people five centuries downstream. I would like to have a little wiggle room in my calculations. OK?”

  Helmut nods, although he’s still a faint salmon colour. White people: always showing their emotions in their skin. Date the Walking Biogenuine Mood Avatar. Never Be in Doubt of How He Feels Again.

  They both nod, dutifully, devotedly. They are exhausted, poor tadpoles. And she needs to do a better job of morale.

  “Let’s get a drink,” she says. “I think Orbital Decays are still popular in Toronto in 2070. You like cocktails, Helmut? Of course you do. Everybody likes cocktails.”

  They close down the displays, power down the cooling fans and the Faraday decoy rig.

  She hangs back, trudging behind them like a chaperone while Helmut and Rati chatter their way down the sidewalk, into the streets of Toronto. It takes twenty minutes to get to the gentrified part of the neighbourhood. They order their cocktails and sit in a dark booth in the back, watching the life of an ordinary bar. Rati has her scanner on the table. It blinks orange, green, blue, as people pass by their table.

  “You’re worried,” Prudence says, grimacing a bit at the sourness of her Orbital Decay. The mix of shrub syrup and gin always takes a few sips to taste anything but awful.

  “Not worried,” Rati says, stirring her own Decay so the tapioca pearls dance and swirl in the martini glass. “Just . . . wondering. Thinking about the timing. You keep a diary, right? You’ve been at this longer than I have. Can you really know that this is the best of all plausible worlds?”