by RABE, JEAN
Kevin pushed his industrial-sized trash can through the darkened corridors of the physics department and wished he were elsewhere. “Hmmm, what’s going on in 532b?” he murmured. “That room’s almost never open. Maybe I can get in there and clean up the candy wrappers. Those guys never eat anything healthy.”
Pushing open the door, Kevin saw Professor Martinez talking to a thin, older man clad in baggy gray overalls. Somehow the fellow seemed familiar. Creasing his brow in concentration, Kevin tried to remember where he might have seen him before.
“Hey, didn’t I meet you at that Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit last summer?” Kevin charged through the door to confront the gray-clad man.
“Er, no, young man, I’m afraid not,” he replied in a lilting French accent. “It must have been some other Frenchman.”
TRY AND TRY AGAIN
Pierce Askegren
When she came to our booth to take our order, the waitress did a double take, pausing in midstride and blinking in surprise. I didn’t mind. She was pretty, with a good figure and red hair (rare where I come from) and freckles (even rarer). Anything that encouraged her to linger at our table was fine with me.
“Twins?” she said tentatively, looking at us.
“Hardly,” said my lunch mate. His tone and expression said that she’d offended him with the question. Naturally, I found his offense offensive, but I tried not to let irritation show in my voice. The situation was already unstable enough and I figured it would be a good idea to defuse things.
“It’s a long story,” I told her, with what I hoped was my most winning smile. “But we could we have a moment?”
She nodded and flashed a dimpled grin, brief but real and directed just at me. “Just give a holler,” she said. “I’m Mackenzie, by the way.”
I could understand her confusion. Seated across from me, he looked like a distorted reflection: the same lantern jaw and same black hair, even if mine had picked up traces of silver and receded a bit. The gray eyes and high cheekbones matched, too. But his nose had been broken at some point and not properly set, and his teeth were much better than mine. Even seated, he was nearly an inch taller than me and in better shape, too; his belly didn’t push out the way mine does.
“She’s just doing her job,” I told my dining companion.
“She’s a subcitizen,” he said. He spoke with the matter-of-fact arrogance of someone who really hadn’t yet accomplished very much with his life but fully intended to.
I sighed. Laminated menus loomed vertically to either side of the table’s napkin dispenser. I took two and passed one to him. “Choose something to eat,” I said. “And don’t use terms like ‘subcitizen.’ It’s an anachronism and it’s offensive.”
He glanced at me warily. Less than an hour had passed since I had encountered him in the town square, introduced myself, and invited him to lunch. He still hadn’t decided whether to trust me.
“It’s not in common use,” I amplified. “You’ll call attention to yourself, and I don’t think you want to do that just yet.” I paused. “Look, what’s your name?”
“You should know that,” he said, still suspicious.
“I should, but I don’t,” I said. “Look, let’s put it another way. What do you want me to call you?”
“Mark,” he said. “Mark was my grandfather’s name.” For the first time, he smiled, however faintly, and looked five years younger. Memory works like that. A good memory can make you young again.
It wouldn’t have worked with me, though. The pleasant associations just weren’t there. I never met my grandfather and I never met my parents. Sometimes I even wondered if they’d ever met one ather. My childhood memories were of crèche attendants and instructor teams.
“That was my grandfather’s name, too,” I told him, scanning the menu. It was nothing special and held no surprises or mysteries that I could see, but he puzzled over his like an instruction manual. It was easy to see that he’d never been in a place like this before.
Where we were was a small-town diner in southern Virginia, less than a mile off the Interstate and almost as close to a minor, but well-regarded, college. The eatery catered equally to truckers and students. Far from being a “subcitizen,” whatever that was, Mackenzie looked to me like she was waiting tables to earn her tuition. The restaurant air was heavy with appetizing aromas and slightly thickened by cooking grease. We’d taken our seats at the tail-end of the lunch rush and the place was still busy, populated by people too occupied with their own business to care about ours. That was one reason I’d picked it.
Mark was still working his way through the menu, I saw. “What kind of place is this?” he asked. “Everything has meat in it.”
“Not everything,” I said, and pointed. “Here. Vegetarian.”
Mackenzie came back. Mark ordered a salad but I opted for a roast beef sandwich, ignoring Mark’s tch of disgust. If my eating meat was the biggest shock he had to put up with today, he could consider himself lucky.
“How long have you been here?” I asked as she moved away into the bustle her workaday world.
He looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“It hasn’t been long,” I said, matter-of-factly. I had been in town for nearly a week, keeping an eye out for Mark or someone like him. He must have just arrived. “You still have that deer-in-the-headlights look.”
“Huh?” he asked. My word choice had confused him.
I sighed. There was so much that people in our line of work need to know, but no one ever seems able to learn it all, at least not in advance. Local idioms were the hardest. “Shellshocked,” I said again. “Confused. Disoriented.” I paused. “There’s a lot to take in, Mark, and you’re going to have to do it fast. They must have told you that.”
Mackenzie brought our food. At my suggestion, Mark had ordered iced tea, but I’d selected beer, netting me more of his disdain. She’d brought a pitcher of iced water, too, and topped off our glasses.
“Let me know if you need anything more,” she said, with a casual touch to my shoulder. I liked her. She was just friendly enough that I could pretend she was flirting, so I smiled, too. Courtship games were another thing that had taken some getting used to.
“She touched you,” Mark said. Apparently, his personal boundaries were very different than mine.
“It’s an old waitress trick,” I said. “Casual contact almost always leads to bigger tips.”
“Tips?”
I sighed again. He really did have a lot to learn. “How old are you?” I asked.
“That’s not an easy question,” he said. Once again, he smiled, however faintly. His sense of humor was like mine, too.
Food for thought, that.
“Work with me here,” I said. Another bit of vernacular welled up in my mind, and I grinned. “If you can’t trust me, who can you trust?” I asked.
Rather than answer, Mark picked up a fork and began to push food around on his plate, as if he’d misplaced something in the jumble of greens and vegetables. He speared a radish slice, eyed it skeptically, then popped it into his mouth. Loud crunching sounds followed, and his face lit with sheer delight as he continued to chew. It was easy to see that he’d never eaten genuine dirt-grown produce before.
The salad would likely keep him busy for a while, so I turned my attention to my own meal, thin slices of beef served open-face on whole wheat toast and awash in a sea of brown gravy. It was diner food, fast and cheap and loaded with more salt than could possibly be healthy. Even so, I made a great show of enjoying it. Mark’s disdain still rankled.
Where I come from, animal flesh was a delicacy, scarce and expensive. I hadn’t tasted beef until Graduation Day, when Academy classmates had convened a dinner to celebrate full citizenship. The serving I ate so casually now dwarfed what I’d been served then. Even the gravy I sopped with extra bread would have cost a day’s credit.
Mark had paused. He eyed my plate skeptically, but this time, with a glimmer of interest. My enthusiasm
had piqued his curiosity.
“How old?” I asked him again.
Sharing food tends to inspire trust, for some reason. Or fellowship, at least. “I don’t suppose it makes any difference now,” he said slowly. “I was born in ’32. They sent me back in ’52.”
He was just a kid. The realization made me feel very old. “Who is ‘they?’ ” I asked.
Whoever they were, they were getting desperate, I decided, sending a kid back on a job like this.
I hoped it had been the Academy. They weren’t fun but they were familiar. I knew how the Academy worked and how Academy agents thought. Not so with the Cadre, though. As near as I could tell, those guys practiced a type of institutionalized anarchism and never did anything the same way twice. Any long term goals they held went beyond my understanding.
“The Imperium, of course,” Mark said.
“The Imperium!?” I asked. I’d never heard of it before. “What the hell is the Imperium?”
If I’d offended him before, it had been with little things that really didn’t matter very much to either of us. This was different. This time, I’d questioned the very bedrock of his life. Worse, I’d done so casually, even dismissively. He scowled at me and set down his fork with dramatic emphasis.
“Was Sizemore running things?” I asked. It was almost always Sizemore, at the Academy and the Cadre alike.
“I know Sizemore,” Mark said, seizing on the familiar name and relaxing. Familiar was good when you found yourself in a new world. I knew that from experience.
“Of course you do,” I said, soothing. “We both work for him. Now, tell me what you know about the Imperium.”
Because he really was just a kid, and one who’d been trained to obey, he did. As we worked our way through the meal, he offered up a brief history of his Imperium.
None of it made a whole lot of sense. Apparently, where Mark came from, the Revolution Academe had never happened, let alone happened and prevailed, and the French government had remained pretty much intact until the end of the century. The revolt’s absence meant that there had been no Academy, not as I’d known it, and no Cadre, either. The Battle of New Flanders had never happened, so the New Monarchism had never been quashed. Thus, the Imperium.
The scenario was new to me, and not easy to accept. I had no tears to shed for the Cadre, but I have to admit that the complete nonexistence of the Academy, even as a footnote, was a bit of a shock. Better the devil you know than the one that you don’t and all that. And it sounded to me like Mark’s outfit combined the worst elements of my people and the Cadre both. The whole thing gave me pause, even though I knew it didn’t really matter.
“So things actually get worse,” I said. I set down my fork and reached for the beer Mackenzie had brought with the food. Two gulps half-drained the bottle and made the world a slightly better place.
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said. He was speaking like a good citizen now. The only reason I didn’t worry about his being overheard was that what he was saying would have made even less sense to eavesdroppers than it did to me. “Antarctica is nearly pacified, and the Biomass Affiance Protocols have been implemented. All we need is more time. In two generations—”
“Mark,” I said, interrupting as gently as I could. “That’s not going to happen. None of it. And Sizemore’s never going to pull you back. He’s gone, too.”
I watched carefully to see how he responded, remembering my own reaction to his news about the Academy. Mark was ten years younger than me, and looked like he was in better shape. Depending on the nature of his assignment, he might be dangerous. It didn’t seem likely that Sizemore would have armed him with a mumble-gun or a nerve-knife or any other technology that could cause long-range problems, but he had a fork in one hand and a knife in the other. A properly trained man in good condition could do a lot of damage with either. I knew that from experience, but I needn’t have worried. He responded with confusion and surprise rather than violence, about the way I would have.
“What?” he said. “But Sizemore sent you—”
“My Sizemore. He’s gone, too.”
“But—”
“Just a moment,” I said, raising my hand. Mackenzie was coming back to check on us. She seemed to have an excellent sense of timing. “Do you want dessert?” I asked Mark.
“Dessert?” It was as if he’d never heard the word.
I sighed. The Imperium sounded less and less like a place where I would want to live.
The waitress gathered up our plates, with the kind of efficiency and grace that comes only with practice. That was another reason I liked eating at places like the diner; it was always good to see someone do a job well and enjoy doing it.
“You didn’t finish your sandwich,” she said, in mild reproof. “It was okay?”
“It was fine,” I said.
“How about you?” she asked Mark. He’d scoured his plate, but she still wanted to know. “How was the salad?”
“It was fine,” he told her, parroting my words. He was learning.
“Anything else, then?” she asked. “We’ve got banana cream pie today.”
“That sounds good, but I’ll tell you what sounds better,” I said. “Root beer floats. Two, with extra syrup and whipped cream.”
“Good choice!” she said.
“Beer has alcohol, right?” Mark asked tentatively. He seemed relieved to have something else to talk about. “I don’t drink alcohol. It’s forbidden.”
“It’s root beer,” I said. “Something different. You’ll see.”
He looked doubtful.
“Smile at her when she comes back,” I said. “They like that. Make eye contact, too. It’s polite.”
“I don’t think I need to learn the local mores.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “Mark, you’re going to be here a long time.”
He shook his head doggedly. “No more than seventeen local hours,” he said. “Then I go home.”
Seventeen hours. I thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re here for the conference, aren’t you?”
It was a college town. The local school was primarily a liberal arts operation, but the Dean of Mathematics had aspirations. He’d been able to justify and arrange a gathering of promising students from across the country, an invitation-only conclave complete with guest lecturers. In the here-and-now, it was nothing special, but I knew that it was precisely the type of event that loomed large in written histories. People would meet one another for the first time. Insights would be imparted, personal and professional relationships formed. Lives would be shaped. I tried to keep an eye out for events like the conference, and the announced topic had been particularly interesting.
Attending scholars were to present pro and con papers on the theoretical possibility of time travel.
That wasn’t my primary concern, though, just an intriguing side-note. What worried me was that three founders of the movement that evolved into the Revolution Academe had been born in Virginia. I wondered if the history of Mark’s Imperium was similar. I had to wonder if the attendance list included any future grandparents of interest.
“Registration starts tomorrow morning,” I mused. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, Mark? To see to it that someone misses a presentation, or never meets a mentor. Something like that.”
He didn’t say anything.
“How are you supposed to do it? Let the air out of tires on a parked car? Make a prank phone call?” I asked, then paused. “Tell me you’re not supposed to kill someone.”
He flinched and I knew I’d hit a nerve. Oddly, I found the reaction reassuring. Whatever the specifics of his assignment, he had his doubts. That was good.
Doubts made it easier. Doubts gave me something work with.
“You’re not an assassin, Mark,” I said gently. “If you try to do the job, you’ll hate yourself. And if you succeed, you’ll hate yourself even more.”
“I can do what has to be done,” he said doggedly. “Siz
emore says that desperate times call for desperate measures. He says—”
“He says that expedience dictates morality,” I said, interrupting again. “That the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and that the survival of civilization is worth getting your hands dirty. What a bunch of hooey.”
I’d heard it all before. Only Mark knew how his last experience with Sizemore had played out, but I remembered mine all too well. Fat-bellied and balding, the older man had been the closest thing to a father I ever knew and I guess in my own way I’d loved him. That hadn’t made it easy to watch him labor over the chronal displacement unit’s controls, lab coat spattered with blood from his wounds and breath coming in ragged gasps. All around us, laboratory lights had flickered and components smoldered while I waited anxiously inside the transit module’s containment field. The machine’s specific workings were a mystery to me, but I knew that I was the first text subject any larger than a neutron and the idea terrified me. The jumble of historical data and combat techniques he’d force-fed me with sleep tapes and deep conditioning hadn’t helped my state of mind, either.
Sizemore hadn’t cared about any of that, of course. He’d had his own priorities. “Just do what I told you and you can save us all,” had been his final words to me. No good-byes, no benediction, just a last command as the door came down and the rebels swarmed into the lab.
The next thing I knew, I was huddled behind the bushes in a present-day public park, alone and confused, but still focused on a mission that didn’t matter anymore.
“He told you that they were dead and dust, anyway, didn’t he?” I continued. “That it was worth one more death, a century ago, if it saved the Academy.”
Mackenzie came back with our desserts. They were huge, in tall, footed glasses cloudy with frost. Ice cream rose from them in smooth white domes topped with fluffy whipped cream. She set one in front of each of us, along with straws and long-shanked spoons. I felt better just looking at them. As far I was concerned, root beer floats were the best part of living in the past.