Alice Payne Arrives

by Kate Heartfield

  That’s all right. Prudence can recruit people. She used to do quite a lot of it.

  Alice frowns and gestures to the chairs by cocking her head. She keeps the pistol trained on Prudence as Prudence walks over and sits, then she takes the other chair. She spins out the truth, little by little, to see what it will hook.

  “I’m Major Prudence Zuniga. Born in 2132.”

  The woman narrows her eyes. “You mean to say that anno Domini 2132 is through that gateway?”

  She says it “two thousand one hundred and thirty-two” rather than “twenty-one thirty-two.”

  “Not quite,” Prudence says. “I was coming from 2145. From Teleosophic Core Command. The headquarters of a military operation.”

  “The same military organization of which you are a major. A military organization that accepts women into its ranks, and as officers! For which country?”

  “For no country. For an idea.”

  “Ah. A revolutionary.”

  “Not quite,” says Prudence. “Down past 2139, the world’s in Anarchy. Things went very, very wrong with humanity and with the planet itself. The present, my present, does not look salvageable. So the teleosophers—people who study the way that time travel changes history—started trying to fix the past.”

  “To change history. Truly?”

  “Yes. We’re in 2070 now, you know. My past. Your future.”

  The woman looks around, as if she might see some wonder in Prudence’s particleboard furniture. She looks at Prudence, at her khakis and T-shirt.

  The future must seem very drab to her. As it should.

  “But soon enough,” Prudence continues, “there was a difference of opinion about how to fix things. Those of us who remained under Teleosophic Core Command, the original organization, we’re called Farmers. The others, those who went rogue, they call themselves Guides. They believe in a more aggressive approach.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  Prudence switches on her marketing-copy brain.

  “The Guides are not malicious. They’re just wrong. They believe in the perfectibility of humanity. In progress. We call them the Misguideds. They try to speed up change, while we try to reverse humanity’s mistakes.”

  “So you’re a Tory,” Alice says.

  Prudence laughs. “Ha! I guess so, in one sense. I believe that there is a virtue in the status quo, and that change should be cautious and deliberate. A Tory. And the Misguideds would be—what is it in your time? Whigs?”

  “Yes,” says Alice. “I am a Whig.”

  “Ah.” Shit.

  “Well, everyone’s a Whig nowadays. But I’m one of the ones you’d call radical, I suppose. I’ve published an anonymous essay against slavery. I believe in progress too, Major Zuniga. I am misguided, I suppose you would say.”

  Prudence should have trained better for the eighteenth century. She’s going to have to get Alice on board, quickly.

  She leans forward, lowers her voice, although there is no one here but them.

  “It isn’t what the Misguideds believe that makes them my enemy. It’s their actions. And, to be honest, the actions of my fellow Farmers too.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not working for the Farmers anymore. I’m secretly working to put an end to this war.”

  Alice frowns. “An end to war is a noble goal.”

  “Indeed. And our war—our war is the war that starts all wars. So much of the world you know is a consequence of our arrogance. We’ve changed the past. You are in the cross fire. You ever wonder where your King George got the nickname ‘the Farmer’?”

  Alice pulls a face. “Surely not.”

  “He’s one of ours. One of these times around he’ll stop the American Revolution entirely, and you won’t know that history was ever any other way. He’s been prolonging it . . .”

  “Prolonging the American war?”

  “Indeed.”

  Alice shakes her head. “Then I must support your goal, Major Zuniga. My father’s service in that war has changed both our lives and brought me much grief. If you—but wait a moment. How do you know what’s changed? If history is a certain way, and you’re a product of that history, how do you remember how it was before?”

  She is clever, this Alice Payne. More clever than most Farmer agents Prudence has worked beside.

  Clever enough to be her own fail-safe, built in. Like the time-wheel. With the time-wheel. Good. That’s what Prudence hoped for, from Jane Hodgson. Turns out there is more than one clever woman living in Fleance Hall in 1788.

  “I don’t remember the past being different,” says Prudence lightly. “I can only remember things the way they are now, even if I didn’t actually live through them that way. But I keep a diary in the Precambrian.”

  “Where?”

  “A very long time ago, before any teleosophic interference. A lot of us do it. It’s not a nice time to visit, but we have ways to protect ourselves while we’re there. The diary is just paper, so no fool antiquarian can dig it up. There are smaller clues, though, clues we can’t avoid, and we leave them all over like rabbits leave droppings. The more people time-travel, the earlier humanity discovers time travel, bit by bit, and the mess gets bigger.”

  Prudence makes an expanding motion with her hands, as if there’s an explosion between her palms, and continues: “There are scholars trying to predict this effect through mathematics, and philosophers writing new treatises on something we call the dialectics of time travel. All from the safety of twenty years before the Anarchy, of course. From whenever the Anarchy happens to land at the time.”

  Alice shakes her head. “I still don’t understand—well, there is very much I do not understand. But let’s begin with why you opened a gateway on my road.”

  Her road. There’s a clue in that; there’s something Prudence might be able to use, if she can grok its significance.

  “I need your help. Alice, if you’d like to protect your family, the people you love, even your England, from further harm, then the best thing you can do is carry out the instructions I mentioned at our last meeting. Everything I told you was true.”

  “But not the whole truth.”

  Prudence leans back, spreads her arms wide. The pistol is still pointing at her liver, give or take, but Alice won’t shoot her now.

  “The whole truth is bigger than me, Alice.”

  “Tell me the part I need to know,” Alice says. “Tell me what you are asking me to do.”

  Prudence looks at her face. There’s a lot of intelligence there. She’ll only come on side if she believes in the rightness of it. Show, don’t tell. The first rule of propaganda.

  “If you trust me, I can show you why I need you. It will be horrible. Like nothing you’ve ever imagined. But you’ll be safe. Well, safe enough. Well, as safe as I’ll be.”

  Alice frowns even deeper, then points the pistol to the sky. Prudence thinks for a moment she’s going to let off some kind of warning shot, blow a hole in the ugly drop ceiling, but Alice flips something down on the top of the pistol, shakes it to the side so gunpowder blows into the air, moves the hammer on top, then thrusts it into the holster at her belt.

  “Good,” says Prudence. “Now close down your portal so we don’t get any more Georgian visitors, and I’ll open one to the future. And then, I think, you’ll understand what we must do.”

  They stand together as Prudence opens the shimmer. Only a fool would not hesitate at this threshold and she is not a fool. She tells herself she doesn’t want this herself, as penance or as last hurrah.

  “Ready?” Prudence asks. “Remember, just stand and watch. You’ll be safe so long as you do what I tell you. And don’t take that gun out, whatever you do.”

  Alice nods. “You lied, or were in error, about one thing at least.”

  “Hmm?”

  “You said you’re not my mother. But you don’t know that, do you? You can’t know it. It could happen in your future. It could happen in you
r past, if someone changes history.”

  She’s right, technically. How old did Grace say Prudence is now? Thirty-eight? Something like that. Time travel is always there, waiting to call your bluff on your regrets. But not giving birth to a child is definitely not among Prudence’s regrets. The change a teleosopher would have to make, for that to change in her makeup, would be a cataclysm.

  And anyway, time travel will soon be impossible. One more day.

  “Well? It’s possible, isn’t it? I could be your child?”

  “I think the odds are low,” Prudence says, in a voice she hopes is kind.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: On a Battlefield; and in a Ballroom

  1916

  ALICE LURCHES THROUGH THE aura and all her limbs shudder. Her heart is racing faster than it did when Grigson and the footmen were chasing her. She believes in her gut that her body has travelled across some vast divide—the sensation convinces her—but she reminds herself that the machine could be creating the sensation, that the whole thing could still be some sort of trick.

  What it is, at the moment, is loud. Booms like cannon fire, rattling like many muskets at once, and the whinny of horses and shouts of men.

  She and Major Zuniga are in a tiny, low-ceilinged room. On one side, there is a shallow, open window just at ground level; the room is mostly buried.

  “I’m always a little surprised that this place is still here,” yells Major Zuniga, but the noise is so great that Alice has to stand even closer to hear what she’s saying. “It’s our training room, but it’s as vulnerable to shelling as anything. First lesson of training: You’re actually there. Always. There. Part of it.”

  Alice steps closer to the window, looks out. A bloody, muddied hand, the fingers dragging the earth, passes right by her and she steps back in shock, then looks out again. The man’s face is contorted. He’s being carried on another man’s back. They’re both in browns, greys, greens, and the man doing the carrying is wearing a metal hat. There’s a line of men in those hats, like medieval crossbowman’s helmets, with long guns at their side, wearily carrying their bloody colleagues as if there were not cannons booming, as if the ground were not spraying all around them.

  It’s hot and it stinks of wet ground and carrion. War. Much changed.

  “We have to get out,” she gasps. “The guns.”

  A flash of fire lights up the room like daylight. Someone screams, and runs past the window.

  “We’ve been here many, many times,” Prudence yells. “It never gets hit.”

  “But history changes! Doesn’t it?”

  “We won’t stay long. All you need to know is that this is 1916, in France. Near the River Somme. Have you been there?”

  Alice shakes her head. “I’ve never been out of England.”

  She wants to go to France. Mrs. Thackeray asked her to go with her, three years before, but she suspected Mrs. Thackeray would treat her like an object to display.

  Alice’s head is spinning and she wants to retch. She puts her hand out to the sweating wall to steady herself. Major Zuniga catches her arm.

  “Look, now.”

  Alice steps gingerly to the window and peers out. There’s a ridge of a kind, dotted with trees like gallows, painted in putrescence, and figures of men running up to the ridge, and falling. Gunfire so rapid it is one continuous drumbeat. Something whines, a sound Alice cannot place; it could be anywhere. It sounds as if it’s overhead. She can feel the muscles in her jaw working, rebelling, feel the heat in her eyes.

  “This was not in the history books, when I was born,” Major Zuniga yells. “When I was born, there was no fighting on the Somme in 1916. In 1916, Austria and Hungary were ruled by a man named Rudolf. He was a liberal ruler, concerned with the welfare of his people, and so the Misguideds saw him as someone with potential.”

  She spits the word potential.

  “What happened?”

  Major Zuniga fiddles with something at her waist. The quality of the light inside the portal changes to gold, and Alice thinks she catches a strain of music. She takes Prudence’s offered hand and they step through

  1888

  and Alice gasps. The ceiling over her head is robin’s egg blue where it is not whorled in gilt. Instead of guns, she hears violins, and people are dancing all around them. The women wear close-fitting jackets like redingotes.

  The people smell of rosewater and wine. She is still ill from the stink of murder, from the lurch and then the other lurch. Bile rises and she holds her hand over her mouth.

  “Careful,” Major Zuniga murmurs. “If you vomit on someone’s shoes, some gallant will think you’re an easy mark.”

  Alice doesn’t trust her voice. With her left hand still over her mouth, she holds up her right in a gesture that means every question.

  “In Vienna, in the year 1888,” says Major Zuniga. “That man there, with the enormous moustache and the medals and the thin face like a philosophy student? About thirty? That’s our Rudolf. The Crown Prince. In the first draft of history, his father will abdicate in five years’ time, leaving Rudolf to forge a better relationship with France, and Hungary and the Balkans, and to enact a number of liberal reforms.”

  “And is this the first draft of history that we’re watching?”

  “No. Not even close. See that girl he’s dancing with?”

  The girl is a doll, all curves and dimples, with black hair piled high and blue eyes. Her face is flushed with dancing.

  “Her name is Mary Vetsera,” Major Zuniga whispers. “In three months, he’ll shoot her dead and then kill himself.”

  Alice turns to her, half-expecting her to be joking. But Major Zuniga looks angry. She’s watching the couple dance, her body thrumming.

  “Let’s stop it, then!” Alice whispers.

  “Don’t tempt me, Alice Payne. It’s my fault that girl dies. It was another girl, before, but I saved her, and doomed this one.”

  “But why must Rudolf kill anyone?”

  “It started with the Misguideds trying to make things better, of course. Good intentions! They always have good intentions. They wanted Rudolf to be more sympathetic to women’s rights, to avert the Suffrage Riots of 1917. The ones that happen in the history when the First World War does not.”

  “Suffrage? For whom?”

  “For women.”

  Alice can hardly believe it. “It takes a century and a half for women to get the vote?”

  Major Zuniga smiles, glances at her. “The point, Alice, is that it didn’t work. The Misguideds and their tutors and good influences—it all certainly made Rudolf more liberal, and deepened the rift between Rudolf and his conservative father. Rudolf became cut off from his family and from any hope of power or any influence in government. His life began to seem futile, so he spent it on drink and sex. Instead of becoming a feminist, he contracted syphilis. Rudolf is actually quite a horrible person, even if he would have been a decent king.”

  Alice wants to ask about the vote for women in England, about slavery, about a cure for smallpox, about democracy. But Prudence is looking angry again, angry and sad, and the look on her face stops Alice’s words in her throat.

  “I spent ten years of my life trying to stop Rudolf’s suicide from happening,” Major Zuniga says. “Ten years in which I relived a single year, sometimes a single day, over and over. Ten years of Prince Morbid and his morphine habit becoming ever more ruinous to himself and those around him. I did not succeed, and eventually, I was reassigned. We gave up on 1889. We focused our war project on the agents we had in 1913.”

  “We’re going there now, aren’t we?”

  In answer, Major Zuniga pulls her by the arm, back through the crowd, and reopens the portal.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: A Death Is Averted, by Means of Which Prudence Makes Her Case

  1913

  THEY EMERGE IN A FOREST, in the evening. Prudence has never been here before but she knows the coordinates. This mission exists because her own mission, the Rudolf Project, failed. A do
ve calls, and as if in answer, they hear the distant laughter of men, the bark of a dog.

  Everything smells fresh and green. A lie; or a temporary truth.

  “We’re in your England now,” says Prudence. “Well, not your England, of course. This is England in the third draft of history.”

  “Third?”

  More like the seventy-eighth, but let’s keep things simple. And let’s speed things up.

  “You have a choice, here, Alice. You can save a man’s life, in about, oh, four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The year is 1913 and, thanks to my failure with Rudolf, Franz Ferdinand is the heir to Austria-Hungary. He’s through those woods.”

  It is so beautiful, this English forest before the fall. You can walk through these trees as if they were the pillars of a cathedral. You can hunt your prey, so easily, although your prey will see you coming.

  “He is here visiting friends,” she continues, “and shooting pheasants. In three minutes, a man will stumble and his gun will go off.”

  “Well, why are we hesitating?” Alice asks, stepping forward.

  Prudence grabs her arm. She holds out her arm and points toward the distant voices, and feels for a moment like Scrooge’s third ghost. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or the things that May be, only?

  “Wait. I am giving you a choice. If you let Franz Ferdinand die, that terrible war we saw will not happen. His nephew, Karl, takes the throne in 1916. He will pursue peace—at any cost. Half of Europe disintegrates on his watch. The wars are more scattered, but they last longer and are just as bloody. Women get the vote at least a decade later than they would if Franz Ferdinand had lived one more year.”

  “One more year?”

  “That’s option two. If you step forward now, and save his life, Archduke Franz Ferdinand will be assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914. It sets off a chain of geopolitical posturing that becomes the Great War, the First World War, the bloodiest conflict in the history of humanity. It sets the stage for an increasingly bloody century.”

  Alice makes a little incoherent sound of frustration. “You’re telling me that no choice can be a good choice? Can nothing ever be made to get better?”