Alice Payne Arrives

by Kate Heartfield

  He sighs. “I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that they were robbed mere moments before.”

  “But it must be a coincidence. Why on earth would a highwayman rob a man, then go away, then, after being seen, ride back to that man to kill him? And spirit his carriage away?”

  As much as she has hated each of the rapists and wife-beaters she has robbed, she has never contemplated killing any of them.

  “Perhaps the servant, Grigson, chased the highwayman back onto the road. The man was startled, desperate, frightened. Hemmed in. He acted.”

  “And then spirited the carriage away.”

  “Drove it into a pond or something of that nature,” says Auden, uncertainly. “That’s my guess.”

  “Leaving no tracks on the road.”

  He cocks his head. “I didn’t know you were a bloodhound as well as a natural philosopher, Miss Payne.”

  “Oh, I’m no philosopher. That’s Jane Hodgson, my companion. The contents of her study would rival Isaac Newton’s. All kinds of machinery and instrumentation.”

  “How fascinating! Perhaps someday she might show it to me.”

  “Perhaps.” She doesn’t like this turn of the conversation. She and Jane have dangerous secrets, and it is not Alice’s place to expose any of them.

  “Well,” Auden says, looking at the hedges, “if I don’t find them today, I’ll have to alert the magistrate. There will be many nervous people in London. The Bow Street Runners have started running patrols far outside the city. I imagine they’ll come into this area now, if we’ve had a murder. And then there won’t be much for a parish constable to do.”

  “Nor a highwayman,” says Alice, looking down the road where so many of her odious marks have ridden.

  “No,” he says.

  She glances up at him, and there’s that grin again, but his eyes are serious.

  “Shall I escort you home, Miss Payne?”

  She shakes her head. “I would not dream of keeping a constable from his duty. If I meet the highwayman, I’ll offer to ride away with him as his bride, and he’ll be so frightened he’ll leave England for good.”

  Auden laughs loudly. If he came home much changed from the war, his changes are not the same as Father’s.

  She watches him ride off down the road to join the other men, and then she turns Havoc for home. Jane must have a look at the thing Alice took out of the daisy patch. If it isn’t hers, perhaps she’ll know what it is. She has never yet met a clock she couldn’t repair. If the thing has gears, she’ll make it do her bidding.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: A Quarrel Ends in Silence

  2070

  IT TAKES A LOT to surprise a teleosopher, but Grace’s words do it. Prudence looks around the tent, cluttered although she could count the items in it before she ran out of breath, and then catches herself. Grace catches her too.

  “Yeah, I know. Who would have a baby, here and now?”

  Prudence shrugs. “Lots of people do. Those tire swings and sand pits are out there for somebody.”

  “There’s no work. There are too many people. But you know, maybe we could find a better time. An earlier time. Save up enough to all go, the three of us.”

  Prudence nods. “Sure. People do that.”

  The first refugees wanted the comfort of community. They wanted to be in a time when people knew about the existence of shimmering, when they would be understood. So they shimmered upstream only by one hundred years. But there are too many of them in this century, and no work, and drought-pricing is coming. And it costs a great deal for a civilian to shimmer.

  Grace stands up, takes Prudence’s empty plate and her own over to the bucket.

  “It’s a foolish idea. It’s just what comes of us both being nearly forty now.”

  “Are we?” The words come out of Prudence’s mouth. She kept track of the years pretty well during the Rudolf Project, but her own age feels a bit muddled.

  “Yes, we are.” Her sister grins. “Although I meant Alexei and me, but you’re just a year behind. It might be easier to keep track of the birthdays if you spent some with us.”

  Prudence nods. “I have a chart. In my diary. But I’m behind on keeping it up.”

  Grace scratches one ear. “Yeah. Your diary. I wanted to ask you something about that.”

  Here it comes. The one question she fears from Grace: Do I always exist?

  “You always said you had no interest in reading my diary.” The words come out more sharply than Prudence intends. Grace did always say this, although “always” is something Prudence can’t quite understand, no matter how many years she does this job. She can’t understand how Grace has always said she didn’t want to read her diary, while most of Prudence’s diary was written by an only child.

  “I don’t,” Grace snaps. “I don’t want to know anything about myself. But if you know something about—about my child. If I have a child.”

  Prudence shakes her head and leans back on the cushion.

  “I can honestly say I don’t know anything about that,” she says.

  Grace looks at her, aware that there is a reason Prudence is hiding behind the technical truth, trying to decide if she wants to ask about that reason, aware that Prudence is aware that Grace is aware.

  Grace nods, and scrubs the plates.

  “We don’t travel to all of the future,” Prudence says, weakly. “Only bits, here and there. I spend most of my upstream time in 1889 and my downstream time down in 2145, where Command is, and it’s all Anarchy then. After we left. Your child would be just a few years down from where we are now, or even further upstream, if you save enough to shimmer, right? So I wouldn’t know.”

  Grace nods again.

  “I can check some records,” Prudence says. “It’s against regulations, and there’s no guarantee history will stay the same, but . . .”

  Grace shakes her head. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  Prudence stands, goes outside to the privy. The conversation’s over. In two more days, there won’t be a diary to argue over, or any chance of Grace vanishing. Time’s arrow will straighten, consequence will follow cause. If Grace has a child, it will live and die a child of the twenty-first century. Without a way to change the past, perhaps that child’s generation will make a better future. No Anarchy, no History War. Just the long walk forward.

  CHAPTER NINE: A Quarrel Ends in Adventure

  1788

  JANE’S TEA IS COLD, a sure sign that she’s absorbed in a good puzzle. Alice puts the cold cup onto her tray and replaces it with a hot cup. The bread from this morning is gone, at least—a good sign.

  The dim garret study is packed floor to ceiling with wooden arms and legs, rubber tubing, alembics and orreries. Alice tries to keep track of the food she’s brought Jane, because it will often go weeks uneaten, tumbling behind some contraption, smelling and bringing mice. Of course, Jane never minds—she traps the mice in cages, and studies their habits.

  She turns to go, but Jane says, “Stop a moment, Alice. I think I have this.”

  “Truly? It looked so complicated.”

  “Well, I suspect it is complicated, but the complicated matter is under these smooth black pieces. Once I had them off, I could not understand the innards at all. Miniature machines of some kind. But once they are connected, all together, then the wheels do seem to have an effect. They are marked, you see? Tiny lines. If I arrange the nine wheels into the same pattern as when you found the device, and I depress this lever . . .”

  Jane holds out the device and the air in the middle of the room shimmers in a circle, and suddenly the study smells like rain and wet pavement.

  “What have you done?” Alice asks. “What is this?”

  “It isn’t magic. But whatever science it is, it’s far beyond my knowledge. Watch.”

  Jane opens the door of a cage and pulls out a little grey mouse. She holds its nose to hers for a moment, whispers something, then puts the creature onto the floor and gives it a nudge toward the sh
immering air.

  The mouse crawls forward, and then it vanishes, not all at once but in a wave from nose to tail.

  “Good Lord.”

  “Yes,” says Jane, frowning. “Poor Cicero. I don’t think he’ll come back. I’ve been tossing bits of bread in all morning, and they do not reappear anywhere, from what I can see. And I watched a beetle walk in an hour ago. Oh, have they found the earl?”

  Alice smiles. Jane’s mind works in mysterious ways.

  “They have not. Jane, do you think this device could make a carriage and three men vanish?”

  “Yes, that has to be our hypothesis, I’m afraid. But what it’s done to them, precisely, I can’t say. Does it shrink matter to a very small size, or does destroy it utterly?”

  “Look!” Alice cries out, and points to the floor, where three drops of liquid have fallen. “Is it rain? I believe it is. If it’s taken our mouse, it’s given us rain. I can smell it. It is some sort of window!”

  And if that means Lord Ludderworth is not dead, perhaps he can be brought back, and his adventures explained, and the Bow Street Runners will not occupy themselves with this part of Hampshire, and the Holy Ghost will be free to ply her trade and keep her roof overhead.

  “But no device can bring a person from one place to another with no connexion in between,” protests Jane.

  “No device you’ve seen, but this mechanism is entirely new and mysterious to you. You’ve said so.”

  Alice stands and walks around the disc of shimmering air, looking at it from one side and the other.

  Jane kneels and puts her finger to the damp spot on the floor, sniffs it.

  Alice says, “I’ll have to go through.”

  “Alice! Didn’t you see what happened to my mouse?”

  “No, I didn’t, in fact. I only saw one side of what happened to him. Lord Ludderworth and his men could be in danger, Jane.”

  “Then perhaps we should show this to Captain Auden.” Jane looks uncertain.

  “And have him take it from us? Before you know what it is, or how to use it?”

  Jane frowns. She doesn’t want to lose control of this machine any more than Alice does. But Jane won’t dive in. Alice will.

  Alice stands before the shimmering disc and thrusts her face into it.

  It feels like the time she touched Jane’s Leyden jar; it feels like the first time she touched Jane. Every part of her face tingles, almost painfully, and she can see a dim outline of a carriage and feel the rain on her face—

  Jane pulls her back, gasping, tears welling in her cheeks.

  “What in the Devil’s name do you think you’re doing? Your face vanished!”

  “Yes,” says Alice, grinning, excitement in her breast. “And look, here it is, still, just as it was! I’m going through. Look, don’t you see that this proves that I will return? That it is another place? I saw rain, and a carriage!”

  Jane puts one finger between her brows and draws one breath. Then, “You did not even ask me, first. You could have been destroyed. And you could have destroyed this machine, this machine we know nothing about, a machine that is clearly an invention of great importance. You don’t care what happens to anyone. You don’t think about the future, only the present moment. Like a child.”

  “Jane—”

  “I am not going to spend my life being nothing more than a useful companion and maker of amusements. I have spent all morning on this, and you stick your head through it like an oaf.”

  “Listen. My love. I am sorry, but nothing has been destroyed. I have shown that I can go through.”

  “Even so. There could be anything, anyone, on the other side. You might come out in Trafalgar Square, or in the jungles of Borneo.”

  Alice sighs. “I’ll bring a knife, then. In case it’s Trafalgar Square.”

  Jane’s mouth is set. “I do not wish to be your assistant, Alice.”

  She says it as if she is turning away a bowl of turtle soup in a tavern. Jane has never been good at turning a phrase the expected way, or speaking it in the expected tone. It was one reason her mother was glad to send her to Alice, sociable Alice, who did not care in the least if her invitations to balls were out of curiosity or a taste for the exotic, and who dazzled every company.

  They did not change each other, not in the way that Jane’s mother hoped. But Alice is transformed, not by Jane herself but by her love for Jane, by her desire to keep something private and safe.

  She steps around the shimmering air and enfolds Jane in her arms. She whispers into her golden wisps around her perfect ear, “Wherever it is, be it Fairyland or Lilliput or Hades, I’ll come back to you. I must go, for our own protection. I have no intention of hanging for murders I did not commit, or even for the thefts I did. And if the Bow Street Runners start patrolling these roads, I’ll have no choice but to hang up my mask and hat and be a good girl with no inheritance but Father’s debts. And then what will become of us? Your mother will marry you to whatever lout can offer five hundred pounds.”

  Jane steps away from her, but her face is calm. “Then I’ll go with you.”

  Alice laughs, and puts her hand over her mouth to stop it.

  “What, is it so outrageous an idea, that I would go somewhere, do something, other than wait here in Fleance Hall for you to return from adventures?”

  “It’s not outrageous. It’s wonderful. But I need you here, on guard, should Father and the search party return.”

  Jane sighs. “All right. I’ll wait, as I always do. But you aren’t going through the gateway here.”

  “No?”

  “If the earl’s carriage is indeed on the other side, and it comes back through, I would rather not have four horses and three men in my study.”

  Alice laughs again. “I would be lost without you. Come on then, let me get into my disguise, just in case I do find the earl, and we’ll go out to the field.”

  CHAPTER TEN: Of Time and Space, with Four Horses

  2070

  HOW DOES A TRAVELLER find her way in a functionally infinite map of four dimensions? The question plagued the early teleosophic researchers in the 2070s. It was one thing to find a way to find the permeable connections between all points in space-time; it was another to understand what those coordinates might mean, held up against the warp and weft of human history.

  In the latest draft of that history, it was Fatima Sesay who discovered, and gave her name to, the Sesay Beacons. (An early entry in Prudence’s diary describes these as the Yamamura Beacons.) Like their forebears, the humans of the twenty-second century looked to celestial events for guidance.

  All events create gravitational ripples. Some create tsunamis, and each of these gravity storms is unique. By matching the observed supernovae of history to the shape of space-time, the early time travellers were able to grope their way, as if each gravitational event were a beacon.

  From there they filled in the map, down to the minute and the centimetre.

  Five thirty in the morning on June 29, 2070, is rainy and grey. There’s an alley behind the Toronto town house where not even raccoons or junkies meander at this hour. This is where Prudence drinks her coffee, out of a mug that says WORLD’S BEST DAD, wearing her eighteenth-century redingote.

  If any one of the beacons were to become unrecognizable, the map would become useless. Prudence had a teacher who wired seven lights in a series, and showed how the whole line went dark when one was removed. Time travel would still be possible, but no one would know how to get anywhere. They’d be reduced to the same dangerous experiments that led to the discovery of the prehistory coordinates.

  Some of the beacons are particularly subtle in their signatures. Particularly vulnerable to being changed, or obscured.

  If need be, she will do the 1788 job herself, or give it a good try. To replace the beacon with an ever-changing random set of electromagnetic pulses and render space-time unnavigable. Stop the History War before it begins.

  But Helmut is right about the causality glitc
h. Paradoxes don’t cause as much trouble as the early teleosophers feared. Still, actually taking some action in a period that makes one’s own journey to that period impossible is tricky. Ugly things can happen. People can get stuck in a kind of limbo between times, and the action itself can take on a kind of quantum uncertainty, so that the evidence a hundred years afterward can contradict itself about what actually happened.

  This will be true of pushing the button, or of setting a timer. Any human choice seems to carry causality risk. A human choice of this magnitude is not something to play around with.

  So to be as safe as possible, they need a person to press the button in 1788—a person who will stay in 1788, who has not shimmered there.

  She puts the coffee mug on the ground and readies herself. She isn’t using her shimmer belt today, because she couldn’t find a way to hide it in clothing of this period. She is carrying a portable shimmer in her hand, a lovely brass time-wheel.

  She presses the lever. A change in the smell of the air, a glancing beam of sunlight so bright it makes her eyes water.

  She steps through the shimmer, into England in 1788, off to find Jane Hodgson. Onto a hill near a road, a short walk from Fleance Hall.

  She takes one step through and hesitates. She hears horses nearby—on the road, they must be. Hoofbeats and the rattle of a carriage.

  The sky darkens.

  She steps back.

  Something smacks into her and she falls, her head hits the asphalt. Horse hoofs hammering. Pain shattering her hand. She screams and rolls to one side, out of the way of the horses.

  Horses. Horses? Did the shimmer open on the road? Perhaps her calculations were off. Shit.

  Shit.

  They’re in 2070, in the alley, these horses. And the carriage behind them. If it weren’t for the pain in her hand, she could think—

  The man driving the horses shouts something, and yanks on the reins and the horses stand, tossing their heads and flaring their nostrils.

  She whimpers with pain.

  The carriage door opens and a man tumbles out. All silk and buttons and powder, and a face like a pug’s, trusting and uncertain.