There was a moment of complete silence, when everything seemed suspended. He stared at the man, aghast. Per was still expressionless, clutching the wooden box under his arm, and the king’s guardsman, still smiling cruelly, sitting in a relaxed pose with his long legs stretched out in front of him. And then Per turned and fled, his feet clattering on the wooden stairs.
It took Darren a second more to react. He barely missed being decapitated by the man’s sword, which he brought out more quickly than seemed possible. He almost met disaster a second time by stumbling in the middle of the staircase—he grabbed the handrail to save himself from falling, but it snapped off in his hand. He went airborne, narrowly avoiding smacking his head on the crossbeam at the bottom of the staircase, and landing improbably on his feet still holding the useless chunk of wood in one hand. A moment later he thundered across the front room of the inn.
“Aren’t staying for a beer, then?” the innkeeper said glumly, as Darren crashed out into the road, the bellowing guardsman right behind him.
It probably would have been better if Per Olafsson had fled into the woods, or ducked into someone else’s house. In the dark, it would have been difficult to find him, even for someone as experienced as the guardsman. But Per made a beeline back for the smithy. Darren saw ahead, in the pale light of the rising moon, Per’s long, thin legs disappearing through the door, and heard a bolt being dropped to bar the front door behind him.
“Well, shit,” he said. “That’s not good.”
Fortunately, the guardsman wanted the box more than he wanted Darren. Within a few strides, he had reached him, but instead of running him through then and there, simply gave him a hard shove. He lost his balance, and fell face first into the mud. He lifted his head, wiping the grime off his face with one arm so he could see.
The guardsman stomped up to the door of the smithy, and pounded on it with one meaty fist.
“Silversmith! Give me the box, and we will talk about terms for my sparing your life.”
Per’s voice came from an upstairs window. “Go to hell,” he said.
“You treasonous dog. You would be an accomplice to men who would kill our king?”
“I would be an accomplice to no one,” Per said calmly. “All I want is to be left alone, and to lead the life I should have led. That is all I have ever wanted. But you can’t give me that. No one can. So I repeat—go to hell.” And then Per laughed, for the first time that he had heard. “And you should know—we found the note, and destroyed it. So what you are looking for doesn’t exist any more. You can kill me now, I suppose.”
“Well enough,” the guardsman growled, and there was the sound of breaking glass.
Behind the window was the oil lamp, still lit. The guardsman picked up the lamp, and threw it onto the wooden floor of the shop. Oil spilled out, splattering the planks with sizzling flames.
“No!” Darren shouted, struggled to his feet, and ran around to the side of the burning house. “Per! Jump from the window!”
But Per laughed again, and Darren saw his thin, pale face looking down at him from the open upstairs window. And Per said, “No. This was your divergence, Darren Carlsson. This is what you were sent to do—to make certain that I die here. I wish you could have fixed things, but I see now that was impossible in any case. But here! Catch!”
Per flung the wooden box out of the window.
Darren caught it fumblingly, heard a metallic clink as the key, still hanging from its cord, struck the side of the box.
“Take this to your grandmother, Darren Carlsson. May it bring her better luck.” Then his face disappeared from the window, as the flames climbed higher, roaring through the little house.
“Per! Come out! You can’t just die!”
The guardsman turned, and saw him standing there holding the box. There was a glint of reflected firelight and a ringing noise as his sword was drawn.
“I will have that box,” he said, “whether the note is there or not. Was the silversmith lying, churl? Did the two of you destroy the message?”
Darren backed up, his eyes huge, until he bumped into a wall behind him. There was nowhere else to go. There was a clucking noise, and he realized it was the side of the chicken shed. He was going to die, not grandly self-immolating in a fire as Per Olafsson had chosen for himself, but beheaded amongst the chicken shit. It figures, he thought.
The guardsman brought his sword up. Darren clutched the box to his chest. There was a whickering noise as the blade sliced through the air, then a blast of wind, and silence.
Part 3: A Dog and Pony Show
“God damn!” Darren screamed, and backed into a file cabinet, upsetting a precarious stack of manila folders. The entire pile slithered to the ground, dumping its contents all over the floor and startling Ivan the tomcat, who gave an annoyed hiss and trotted out of the room, every whisker radiating disapproval.
“Good afternoon to you, too,” Fischer said, from his seat behind his desk, and then looked him up and down. “You’re filthy.”
“Oh, don’t even start with me,” he said, glaring at Fischer and still clutching the wooden box to his chest as if it were a shield.
“Whoa, you’re a little grumpy. Who pissed in your cornflakes?”
“I haven’t had any cornflakes. All I’ve had is tasteless porridge, and dumplings that are like compressed tasteless porridge balls, and dried fish that has too much taste, if you get my drift, and I haven’t even had a decent cup of coffee in days, and a Norwegian guy with a sword just tried to chop my head off, and if you’re planning on getting me to change my clothes and sending me off to Kentucky without having a good night’s sleep in a real bed, then you can go fuck yourself!”
Fischer’s pale eyebrows rose. “I don’t think I’ve heard you swear before. I didn’t know you knew how.”
He goggled at Fischer for a moment, and then screamed, “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”
Maggie appeared in the door of the office, and she looked at him, mild surprise registering in her eyes. “Ah, Mister Ault, you have the words, but you don’t have the music. I suggest you pay close attention to Fischer’s command of the art of the curse word. He’s a master.” She paused. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I think I heard you mention something about coffee before your subsequent outburst, and I just put a fresh pot on.”
He stared at her for a moment, and then said, “Um, sure. Thanks.”
Fischer leaned back in his chair. “So, how was the vacation in fourteenth century Norway?”
“Vacation.” He plopped down in the folding chair that stood next to the wall, set the box on the floor next to him, and put his face in one hand. “It was peachy.”
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. That an uneducated silversmith from the fourteenth century is smarter than the two of us put together.”
“Really?” Fischer said. “And what did this medieval rocket scientist come up with that so impressed you?”
“Well, Fischer, what he said was that there’s no way Lee can have gone back in time and screwed things up. We’re chasing shadows. Whatever caused the divergences, it wasn’t Lee. Or at least it wasn’t Lee personally.”
“Why not?”
“Well, remember when you checked the computer, and tried to find Lee, and found out he’d been erased like everyone else when the first divergence happened? If he evaporated when he fired the gun at my head, along with the rest of the human race, how can it have been him who went back in time and changed things? He wasn’t alive to do it.”
Fischer considered this. “Hmm. Well, maybe firing the gun propelled him into the past.”
He shook his head. “Won’t work. Everything stopped the moment the bullet hit my forehead. He didn’t have time. And in any case, why would killing me throw Lee into the past? Or accomplish anything, other than my being dead? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“And your silversmith friend thought of all of this?”
“Yes.”
“Impressive.”
“Not that it did him a lot of good. He died in a house fire.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He stared at the Librarian for a moment, and then exploded. “Look, Fischer, you can’t keep sending me places when we don’t have any idea what we’re doing! I’ve gone two different places already, and accomplished nothing whatsoever. This is pointless.”
“You’re not going to start screaming ‘fuck’ at me again, are you?”
“I feel like it.”
“Well, don’t. It’s kind of off-putting, you know? In any case, you haven’t accomplished nothing. You gained your Scottish girlfriend an extra four decades of life, right? That’s something.”
“Yeah, but in Norway I seem to have cost Per Olafsson several decades, so it all comes out a wash, you know? I’m the one who suggested he go find Lars Jonsson, and the result was that this big ape of a guy burned his house down and killed him.”
Maggie walked back into the room, carrying two steaming cups of coffee, and handed one to him and one to Fischer. “Two sugar, no cream, as I recall, Mister Ault?”
“Yes,” he said. “Thanks. Coffee helps.”
“Okay,” Fischer said, “why don’t you tell us both what happened, besides your having a nice roll in the mud.”
“That was unintentional.”
“I figured.”
He launched into a highly abbreviated description of his time in Norway.
“Started out your time there getting run over by a horse,” Fischer said. “Not the most auspicious start I’ve ever heard.”
“It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t landed me in the middle of a road at night.”
“And no sign of Lee?”
“No. I just don’t think we’re approaching this the right way. Per was right, Lee was wiped out along with everyone else. There’s no way he could have gone back in time and messed with things. He wasn’t alive to do it.”
“Hmm. This may force a revision of our theory. What do you think, Maggie?”
“I can’t argue with his logic, Fischer,” she said. “But I am rather curious about the artifact he brought back. May we see it, Mister Ault?”
He picked up the box from where it sat on the floor and handed it to her.
“It’s extraordinary work.” she said, running her finger gently along the incised design on the lid. “As is the key. You were certainly right about one thing, Mister Ault. Your silversmith friend was a master craftsman.”
“All the more pity he died.”
“Not to appear callous, but he’d have been dead by now in any case,” Fischer said.
“Not in a house fire, and not senselessly,” he shot back. “It didn’t have to happen that way.”
When Fischer responded, his voice was uncharacteristically solemn. “Nothing has to happen a particular way. If I’ve learned one thing since I started working here, it’s that. Nothing has to happen. Everything is contingent, not only on one event or person, but on millions. Everything that had gone before led to Per Olafsson dying in that house fire. Trying to tease out one cause by itself is impossible. So you shouldn’t do it. Not even so that you have something more to kick yourself with, a pastime you seem to enjoy.”
He ignored the last comment. “But isn’t that what we’re trying to do? Set things back where they were, fix things back the way they should have been? That seems like a contradiction.”
“Yes and no. The point is, no one should be allowed to go back and jerk things around for his own gain. The choices of an individual have to be made without foreknowledge of the outcome. Don’t ask me why, it’s just the way the system is set up. It may be that Lee McCaskill learned how to go back and fuck around with things, based on his research into time travel. If so, he must be stopped, and the damage he did repaired. On the other hand, it might be that your friend Per Olafsson was right, and somehow the act of killing you was what caused all of this, and Lee was as much a victim of circumstance as the rest of humanity. In that case, we need to figure out why, improbably, your death seems to have created a temporal paradox, and undo that somehow.”
“Well, it’s a tall order,” he said. “And like I said, you’re not sending me off to Kentucky until I’ve had a hot meal, a shower, and good night’s sleep.”
“That’s only fair, Fischer,” Maggie said.
“I suppose. Maggie, can you check with Fassbinder and see if there are empty quarters somewhere he can use? I guess in a pinch he could sack out on my couch, but if there’s a vacant apartment, it might be better. And maybe we can find him some other clothes, so that I can have mine back.” He sighed. “Although, given the shape they’re in, I suspect they’ll have to be burned.”
• • •
As it turned out, there was an apartment on the same floor as Fischer’s that was furnished but currently unoccupied.
“The former owner was a library aide who took a vacation to seventh century Arabia,” Maggie explained, “and refused to return. Something about a harem, I seem to recall.”
The apartment itself was spacious and well-fitted out, and like Fischer’s, it had a huge picture window. This one looked out over what appeared to be high desert, the sort of scenery Darren had seen on a visit to Taos, New Mexico. He knew, from what Fischer had said, that what he was seeing wasn’t real—at least not real in the way that the Seattle skyline that he saw through his own apartment window was real—and briefly wondered what would happen if he tried to open it. He decided it was inadvisable, and continued exploring.
He’d only been there for ten minutes when there was a knock on the door, and he opened it to find a dark-haired boy who looked like he couldn’t have been more than fifteen holding a pair of plastic grocery sacks.
“Delivery from Missus Carmichael,” the boy said, in a bored sort of voice.
Darren thanked him and took the bags. To his delight they contained a few simple, but important, things—soap, shampoo, bread, jam, peanut butter, a small carton of milk, and other very welcome household items.
“Missus Carmichael and the Librarian also said to tell you that you shouldn’t leave your apartment unsupervised,” the boy said.
“Oh,” he answered, not quite sure how to respond. “Okay.”
The boy hesitated, and Darren wondered briefly if he was waiting for a tip. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, and then the boy gave up, turning away with a scowl. Darren watched him stalk off down the hall, and then went back into the apartment, closing and locking the door behind him.
First order of business was a shower. He was filthy, and probably smelled terrible, even if the days in a place where everything and everyone smelled bad had forced his brain into dulling his olfactory senses out of enlightened self-interest.
He went into the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, and spent nearly a half hour luxuriating. He got out, dried himself off, and only then realized Fischer hadn’t provided him with a change of clothes. He thought about it for a moment, looking at his muddy, sodden pile of garments, and decided that no power on earth could have persuaded him to put them back on. The air in the apartment was comfortably warm—quite a change from his days in Norway, when he had only been able to escape the chill if he was fewer than five feet from the fireplace. So he wrapped his towel around his waist, and went into the living room.
There was a huge flat-screen television on the wall, and the remote was sitting on the coffee table, along with a couple of out-of-date Time magazines. He picked up the remote, and turned the television on. There was an old movie on, some science fiction thing with Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, and he had gotten about five minutes into it when he fell sound asleep.
• • •
Darren was dreaming, some vague, pleasant thing that seemed not to have much more in it than a hammock, a couple of palm trees, sunshine, and a large fruity drink with an umbrella in it. The lack of plot in this dream was actually fine with him. A warm wind caressed his face, a
nd he dangled a leg out of the hammock and pushed off gently, setting it swinging.
I could get used to this.
He took a sip of his drink. But as he did so, an unpleasant and rather insistent noise intruded. At first, he thought it was a mosquito, but if so, it was a loud and impressively deep-voiced one. The unseen insect—if insect it was—buzzed obnoxiously several times before falling silent.
He took another sip on the bendy straw, and looked around, frowning in a bemused sort of way. Then the noise came back, strident and uncomfortable, and this time succeeded in pulling him upward, and reluctantly, out of his dream, first into a cloudy semi-awake fog, and finally into the reality of the empty apartment.
The television was still going—another movie, in the middle of a strange scene in which Brad Pitt was leaping around inside a van pretending he was a monkey. He picked up the remote, fallen where it had dropped from his hand, and shut it off.
The noise came again, and this time he recognized it as the buzzer at the front door. He stood up, lost his towel, recovered it, and cinched it tightly around his waist before going to see who it was.
The person at the front door was no one he had ever seen before—an amiable young Asian woman, round-faced, with a ready smile. If she was disturbed by finding him standing there behind the door, wearing less than the expected amount of clothing, she was quick enough to cover it up smoothly.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Sophie. I work for the Historical Artifacts department. Fischer sent me here for two reasons. One was to give you some clothes.” She smiled, and he looked down at his bare chest and towel-covered midriff, and his cheeks heated up.
Sophie handed him a plastic shopping bag. “I understand you’re going to nineteenth century Kentucky. These are period, or at least as close as we could get. They’re typical of the frontier states during that time period, so chances are they won’t be too far off.”
“I’m not going right now, am I?” he said, a little panicked.
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