Two other interests that we share are the strange happenings chronicled by Charles Fort and the cosmic horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and I threw those into the pot, too. (Had to hold the lid down—those Great Old Ones don’t take kindly to being boiled.) People often quote Fort’s famous line, “I think we’re property” (and if you haven’t read “The Trouble with Telepaths” yet, stop reading this now, or the story will be spoiled), but there’s another striking line further down the page that’s less familiar: “That something owns this earth—all others warned off.” I don’t know if Lovecraft ever read Fort, but his Cthulhu mythos fits in neatly with the Earth being something else’s property. I hope the story that resulted isn’t too unworthy of a genuine pro writer like David Drake.
Still, I didn’t manage to work Miss Peggy Lee in, though. Maybe some other time . . . something about a cosmic fever, perhaps?
Happy birthday, Dave.
A Cog In Time
Sarah A. Hoyt
“Not that Drake,” the man said. His voice reached me with the hint of amusement that betrays someone choking back laughter. “My family in this time actually sued that Drake and asked him to stop using our coat of arms.”
I looked across the crowded room, crammed full of all the time-displaced people in Elizabethan England at the time, and noted a shock of white hair, nothing more.
It was enough to get my attention.
It is said that time traveling is a young man’s game. It is wrong. There are plenty of us young women at it too, but the truth is that time traveling, at least from the perspective of the Time Guardian Corps, which I’d joined over a year ago, was an old person’s game.
You got sent to a few god-forsaken epochs, you tried to keep the merchants, tourists, and Mormon genealogy researchers from preying on or bothering the natives too much, or even you just carried messages, emptied chamber pots, and wrote a few lines. And then in the fullness of time, you got promoted a grade or two, and eventually you retired to your time of origin with your pension. It was all unglamorous and strange, and not what I’d thought I was volunteering for.
Which was why this party was so well attended, till we were all belly-to-belly and cheek-to-cheek. I think the Guardian Corps knew it had to throw this kind of get-together every once in a while, or it would have mass desertions or mass suicides.
I looked across the well-lit room, with electrical light, praise be, and the tables set with delicacies that were probably not the product of the time-period abattoirs. In the middle of the room, enthroned on a table was the largest, darkest, most splendidly frosted chocolate cake I’d ever seen. It must have been my height and it was surely three times as wide as I was, tier upon tier of delicious chocolate, out of time and out of place and calling out to me.
Never let it be said that biology isn’t destiny. I was a woman and I wanted chocolate. Though, so apparently did a lot of the other people, including not a few men. Maybe it wasn’t all biology but having to live in a time when camphor was considered a spice.
I started moving toward the cake, part volitionally and part by letting the crowd move me there. Suddenly, after ducking between two people speaking in what sounded like Canterbury accents, one of whom said “Well, Master Marlowe was not all that,” and caused his friend to laugh, I found myself by the cake.
The white-haired man was there too, and turned to me to say, “So, will you have a slice of cake?”
I nodded, confused by the sudden friendliness, and I stood there, trying to hold a glass of some fizzy drink, my slice of cake, and the fork, all while the eddies and flows of the crowd pushed us aside and away. But they pushed us still together, and I looked at his tag, and saw it said only “Drake.”
And suddenly I thought, not Drake. I’d heard his stories, after all. He was one of the few operatives allowed to go to the future. But he was also one of the few operatives allowed in ancient Rome, where they took more care to keep the rolls of the people than in Elizabethan England. He could pass. That alone was enough for word of him to have made it through the ranks to the newbies. I didn’t know how much of the embroidery put on his exploits was fictional, but I knew that we’d studied one of his missions in school.
“I . . . have read about you,” I said. And noting the marginal closing in his eyes, I added, “I heard what you said about not being related to Sir Francis Drake.”
His eyes lit up and he animated to his topic, “That ass, Drake,” he said. “That—”
Suddenly and without warning, reacting to something I couldn’t see or hear, he grabbed my arm and dove to the floor, near the cake.
There were screams from the crowd and sounds that might be some weapon firing. I wasn’t sure, not exactly, but the sounds were like someone sucking air through a horn. They might very well be weapons.
The problem of being in the Time Guardians, of course, is that there are other time organizations from varying epochs, all of which have different weapons.
Drake must have recognized the sound, though, because he looked up and towards the place the screams and the sounds were coming from, and then made a sound that might be cursing or some really specialized cat imitation. Problem with a man who had been everywhere, his cursing tended to be highly diverse, too.
He looked around us, then grabbed my hand, “Do you know your way to the Theater?”
“What?”
“The Theater,” he said. “Burbage’s place. Shakespeare—”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “I work in a tavern—”
“Yes, yes, good. Can you lead me there?” He’d changed yet again. The jovial man who’d laughed before I’d met him, the near-social talker who had set out to tell me Francis Drake’s stories—a perennial only less popular among us time-worker-bees to the Sir Walter Raleigh stories. I’d heard more stories about how Sir Walter Raleigh had impregnated someone in public than I cared to think about—was now the professional, alert, alarmed, somewhat worried and definitely competent.
“I—Yes?” The yes was qualified only by the fact that first I’d have to find my way within this complex that was literally out-of-time and to Elizabethan England again. After all, while London of the time was bewilderingly unplanned, I’d been living there for sixteen months, and it wasn’t that difficult to figure out.
“Oh, good, then let’s go.” Keeping an eye on the area from which the disturbance had come, he grabbed my arm, and started pulling me towards an exit. We were walking hunched over, and I tried to straighten. He didn’t even say anything, just the look in his eyes was enough. I swallowed hard and let him pull me.
Through the exit, which was near the restrooms, we came to a totally empty corridor, through which he led at a trot. We passed, in quick succession: a ballroom with couples dancing to swing music—they parted, startled either at our running or at our Elizabethan finery—through a bar which looked medieval and where people in homespun seemed to be discussing of all things crops, and then through something refined and high tech where a strip tease appeared to be in progress. We ended up in another hallway, near a restroom, and he looked at me, “Well?”
I oriented myself, feeling for the direction. “I think we’ve been going the exact opposite direction of the portal to Elizabethan England, sir.”
He made a sound, “Why did you let me lead, then?” he asked. “I have no sense of direction. I once crossed three time periods in search of soap.”
I laughed, startled at the idea, and he dropped out of annoyance, joining in the laughter, “Stop laughing at me, you wretch,” he said. “Besides, you know, we couldn’t go in the other direction. There were Varian separatists there, and they’d shoot anyone.”
“Shouldn’t we be saving the people at the party?” I asked.
He shrugged. “No. We are going to what the Varian’s are going to attack. This is just to prevent our people responding. We’re going to respond. And we’re going to stop them there.”
“Where?”
“The Theater.”
; Um . . . all right. Sometimes I thought that everyone coming to Elizabethan England was trying to do something to Shakespeare. The surprise was not that the man had signed himself differently a few times. The surprise was the man still knew his own name. Yeah, yeah, I know the theory. Node in time and all that. It was still annoying.
I took the lead, taking him down a narrow hallway. At the end of it we had to crawl sideways through an opening that wouldn’t normally admit people, and then through a room that looked like storage. We climbed over what looked like cases of wine, then past a bookshelf. I thought he grabbed something, but wasn’t sure what. On the other side, I found the public hallway and the portal to Elizabethan England.
It was guarded by men in a uniform I couldn’t recognize.
I stopped short but he didn’t. He took something from his pocket. There was no sound but the men fell. I’d never had to kill anyone in my profession, yet. Though of course, we trained for it. I ran after him into the portal, thinking that maybe he’d just tranquilized them, but not really wanting to look too closely as we passed.
On the other side of the portal, we were in a normal Elizabethan street, and I swallowed hard and said, “No, this way,” as he’d determinedly taken off in the wrong direction.
We walked down a mud alley within sight of traitors’ gates, where the body parts of the latest conspirators against her majesty were on display. I’d grown inured to the smell of rotting human, and barely spared them a look. It seemed less real, after all, that these people were dead who had been dead since before I was born. But fresh from the shooting to get through the portal, I realized they were human too, and had been alive when I’d come here.
Then I turned my mind from it, and towards the task of getting Drake to the Theater.
This was easier said than done, as apprentices seemed to be rioting again. Or maybe it was all a merry prank. A very merry prank, judging from the groups running around hitting people with clubs and terrorizing merchants. It was sometimes hard in these days to tell “merry making” from revolts. Not that the apprentices didn’t have plenty of reason to revolt, since their contracts made them near slaves, but their idea of fun came too close to serious rebellion.
I’d got used enough to this, to lead Drake into an alleyway, and up another, keeping close to the walls, which actually reduced the chances of being drenched in piss or worse thrown from the window above, because most people put some swing in the arm.
It hit me that he walked as though he were used to this time. Of course, he’d been wearing Elizabethan hose and doublet, with a collar of ruffled lace, but I’d never heard of his being deployed to our time.
I had no idea what his rank was, but surely someone his age and with the experience he had to have was at least an administrator first class? What was one of those doing in the field and knowing Elizabethan England as well as I did, who had been emptying chamber pots and gutting fish at the Mermaid for the last several months?
He didn’t even bat an eye when we approached the Theater and there was what looked like a crowd blocking our path. He made some sound about actors and writers only getting paid when they owned the place, then seemed to take his bearings and ducked through a gate I didn’t know was there. Not a big surprise, since I didn’t normally go into the Theater, not even when I had time. It wasn’t entirely safe. It was so thronged with time-travelers I was likely to get trampled down. I heard the Globe which had replaced it/would replace it in a few years would be/was even more crowded with time travelers.
There were some actors rehearsing on stage, while stagehands, or other actors–the two were hard to tell apart back in this time–set up the scenery for the afternoon performance.
No one batted an eye at us, possibly because we’d dressed for a party, and were therefore in the guise of important people, which meant people who could wander about the Theater at will, in case they took a wild desire to give money to the players or extend protection over them.
Drake, however, took a narrow door, and narrow stairs up, like a man who knows his way up the hallways and byways of this place. For someone who’d been lost before, he now was surefooted.
“You’ve been here before,” I said.
“Every damn week, I swear. Irredentists, Redemptionists, Center Supremacists, Varians, Garians, and Florians, they all want to come here and do something to Shakespeare. The things vary, but—”
He stopped near a door, and I walked forward to open it. He pulled me aside, reached over and banged his fist on the door. A ray of light came through the door burning a hole in it and the rickety wooden wall opposite.
“Every damn week,” he said, in a tone that mingled annoyance and tiredness.
By that time I’d recovered my wits. Or at least what wits I had. I’d realized this was one of those bona fide adventures I hoped would happen, when I’d first joined the Time Guardian corps. I wasn’t armed, but we’d trained to be able to do things in these circumstances.
I backtracked to where there was a pile of wooden logs on the floor, probably fodder for some fireplace nearby, and grabbed a couple. Drake had turned to watch me. As I crawled along the bottom of the door, where they couldn’t see me through the turned portion, and he realized what I intended to do, he said “Good woman.”
I threw the logs, obvious as coming from my side, and then ran, very quickly around the bend, chased by the smell of lasers and burning.
I stopped once I’d rounded the bend to make sure neither my long hair nor my long skirts were on fire, but there were no sounds of pursuit. There were sounds, of course, but not of pursuit.
When I got back step-by-step, knit through the wall, ready to rain destruction on the head of whomever tried to detain me with my wooden log, the battle was over.
There were three men dead in the room, and Drake was standing, looking around with an expression of intense disgust.
I looked around too. Two of the men had uniforms that matched the ones of the guys who’d dragged the gate. But the third . . .
The third was Master Shakespeare, formerly of Stratford upon Avon. He lay on his face, immobile. I knelt to feel his neck, and there was no pulse. My heart sank within me.
Drake was barring and locking the door, and propping one of the tables in the room so no one could look through the open hole. He looked like a man on his last shred of patience, which was not the reaction I expected from someone who found a time-node had been eliminated.
“Shakespeare is dead,” I told him, in case he hadn’t noticed.
“Yes, of course he is,” he said abstractedly. “Be a dear and stand by the door and tell me if you hear any sounds like someone is meaning to come knock on the door or something. I’m going to have to call for a time gate.”
“What?” I said. Time gates could theoretically be opened to any room, anywhere. At any time. But there were so many rules and regulations against it, it wasn’t even funny. For one, it could get someone from the past into the future, get a local killed, or do any of the things that the Time Guardians were founded to prevent.
“Only thing to do. You know that.”
“But he’s dead,” I said, thinking that he probably thought he could still save the erstwhile Will. “I mean, really dead. He’s pushing up—”
He looked at me like I was dim and said, “Honey, he’s been dead for twenty years. When someone is a time node, there are too many people wanting him dead to keep him alive. We have to be lucky all the time, they only have to be lucky once. Keep an ear out, will you?”
I wanted to protest, but he didn’t sound like a man with time to spare, so I didn’t. He took some communicator out of his pocket and did something to it. He talked into it in a language I didn’t understand. I wondered if he was speaking in code, or in some long lost dead language I’d never had the need to learn. Something obscure like early-modern twenty-first-century English.
There was something like argument from the other side, and then suddenly a flare of light. Three men rushed out. As I
watched, they propped Master Shakespeare up, took his head off, did something to it. I realized I was looking at electronics and links. The skin that had felt so real under my fingers was some synthetic skin so advanced that even I had never come across it.
Before my eyes, not only did Master Shakespeare become whole and seemingly alive again, even if he took no notice of any of us, but the people in uniforms I didn’t recognize also patched up the door.
Then they left, through the same place.
I turned to Drake, “You’re not,” I said, “from my time.”
He frowned at me. Master Shakespeare was shaking his head, coming awake. “I beg your pardon,” he said.
We begged his in return, said we’d come to the wrong room, and left.
“You’re not from my time,” I said again, in the hallway.
“No,” he said. “From before your time, when they needed people to guard the time stream, before the Guardian corps was established. But I’ve worked in your time.”
“You mean . . .” I said. “As an operative?” There were more time travelers than locals in Elizabethan England, but it had never occurred to me that the same might apply to the twenty-fourth century. Then I thought even in our time we knew he’d worked in the thirtieth and . . .
“I have a Time Guardian Corps identity in your time.” He looked around. “Shall we go back to the party?” he asked.
Onward, Drake! - eARC Page 22