Irregular Verbs

by Irregular Verbs

  “It was obviously something,” Jacob said, quietly. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to protect it.”

  “But why?” Rachael said, her voice breaking slightly. “There was—nothing. No answers, no . . .” She stopped herself, took a breath. “Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was some kind of decoy.”

  Jacob nodded slowly. “Your decoy,” he said; still quiet, but a note of anger slipping through. “And I think I’ve played your game long enough.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Jacob held up a finger. “One. We deactivate the alarm, but it goes off anyway. Two, the delay switch fails nearly twenty minutes early.”

  “I don’t know why—”

  Another finger. “Three, you attract my attention and lead me on a wild goose chase, so that I’m left with less than a day left before I have to trigger the relay, and no way to find out anything useful about this line. Four—”

  “No. No, Jacob, you’re wrong.”

  He took a deep breath. “Four, you claim to be a Short, but are working without a partner. More importantly, Shorts only go forward a matter of days, sometimes hours—certainly not long enough for things to have changed so much from your time, and yet you claim to have no more knowledge of this time than I have. I don’t see more than one logical conclusion.”

  He sat on the bed, waiting for her response; finally she laughed.

  “As the butt of the joke, I’m afraid I don’t find it so—”

  “No. You don’t get it.” She shook her head. “If the joke is on anyone, it’s on me. You’re right; I am a Short, and my Now is just two days ago. That’s what’s so funny: my time is nothing like this. This is as much an Outline to me as it is to you.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  She laughed, bitterly. “Tell me about it. I was supposed to go just two days ahead, check on the first test of battery algae, and instead I got—this.” She did not move, but something in her posture collapsed. “Why do you think I even spoke to you? I knew the risks; I might not even exist after all this—this me, I mean.”

  Jacob sat, looked at her. Either story, he supposed, was equally plausible. “What about the delay switch, then?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been a Short for two years now, and that’s never happened before.”

  “This line’s forecasters could have cancelled it,” he said thoughtfully, “but only if they knew how to. And—assuming for a moment that you didn’t inform them—” He was interrupted by a knock on the door, three hard raps. Turning to Rachael he made a phone with his left hand, thumb and pinkie extended, to signal Did you call anyone? She shook her head, made the twirling bug-out signal with her index finger, and readied a finger over the control pad on her belt. When they arrived they had prepared a timelock field in the room, in case they needed to get out quickly; thirty seconds of frozen time to give them a head start on anyone who came after them.

  The door opened, and two men came into view, blocking the doorway. Jacob tensed, keeping an eye on Rachael; she would trigger the timelock as soon as they were far enough in to open a space to get past them.

  “This is a private room,” Jacob said calmly. “Are you with the police?”

  Neither man looked like a police officer. They both wore the bright clothing of this line, though they looked uncomfortable in it; each had pinkish-red skin, burnt by too much light in unfamiliar wavelengths. “No,” the first man said. He was the taller of the two, but skinny, with Cassius’s lean and hungry look. “But you’re coming with me.”

  Jacob nodded, watched Rachael out of the corner of his eye as the two men took another step inside. She gave him a tiny nod, triggered the timelock. A shimmering wall, the edge of the timelock field, appeared around the edges of the room. Inside it the world would be frozen for thirty seconds. Jacob began to rise.

  The two men were still moving.

  “Don’t,” the second man said. He was shorter than the other, with a mess of red hair that fell nearly over his eyes and a pair of thick round glasses. “We’re in the field too; keyed in before we opened the door.” He lifted the broad hem of his shirt, revealed a belt with a control pad like they each wore.

  Jacob looked over at Rachael, who looked as surprised as he was. “Who are you?” she said, backing away slowly.

  “Easy,” the taller man said. “We’re not here to hurt you, just make sure you don’t go anywhere. Mike, how long do they have?”

  The red-haired man, Mike, unhooked an instrument from his belt. “Just over an hour. She’s got the switch.”

  The taller man moved nearer to Rachael, held out a hand; after a moment she nodded, handed over her relay switch. “There. Two hours from now you’ll be free to enjoy this world for the rest of your lives. Until then, let’s just sit tight.”

  “What’s this about?” Jacob asked. He heard footsteps in the hall—if he could occupy the men’s attention, he thought, the arrival of a cleaner or something might distract them enough to open a chance for escape. “I mean, you obviously know who we are, but you don’t look like you’re native to this line.”

  “Very true,” a voice said from the hall. A woman entered, standing behind the first two. Like the two men, she was sunburnt, and looked uncomfortable in this line’s fashions. Unlike them, though, her face was familiar.

  “Davidson,” Jacob said. “Jan.”

  Rachael looked over at him. “So they are—”

  “As you are,” Jan said. She was not an imposing woman, just over five feet tall, with brown hair worn in a bun and a face full of freckles; her voice, though, had a tone of iron certainty.

  “So it’s true,” Jacob said. “This is what happens to the ones that don’t come back.” He swallowed. “Like you.”

  “Not all of them,” Jan said. “But some. I’m sorry I couldn’t let you know I was safe.”

  “What happened? Miss your relay window?”

  “No.” She signalled to the two men, who each moved to more comfortable but still watchful positions on either side of her. “I tested this line for flaws till I nearly went crazy, and then when I was convinced it really was the Good One I tried to figure out how it had gotten that way. I expect that’s what you two’ve gone through the last few days.”

  “Pretty much,” Jacob said before Rachael could speak.

  “Then you know what I found: nothing. No chain of events that could explain how to get from Now to now. Then, when I met Mike here, I thought I was in luck: I had come as a Long, but he was a Short, and would be able to explain to me how to get to his time, at least. Except that he told me his time was just as far from this as mine.”

  Jacob glanced over at Rachael, but her face showed nothing. “So why did you stay, Jan? Why make me—us—think you had just vanished?”

  “You’re not stupid, Jacob,” she said, anger coming into her voice. “You know what that means as well as I do. They don’t need us in this line. Things are stable enough that they can afford to take risks, not worry about what catastrophe each action might cause. But there’s no path that leads to it, no sequence of actions that goes from our line to this one. You can’t get there from here.”

  “So you decided to stay, rather than give it up,” Rachael said. “You knew you’d never find it again if you left.”

  “You’ve already been thinking about it, haven’t you?” Jan smiled. “Good girl. I knew he’d be the only one I’d have to convince.” She turned back to him. “Because you won’t give up, will you? You never did. You’re so sure you’re smarter than the rest of us, you’ll take your data back and spend the rest of your life trying to find the key we couldn’t.”

  “I’ll stay,” Rachael said, “by choice. But why do you have to keep him at all?”

  “The same reason Pyotr here had to stay, though he didn’t take much convincing once we found him. This line exists; so long as nobody in the past knows that, those of us that made it
here will be able to enjoy it. But if actions are taken in the knowledge of its existence, they might keep it from having happened, and we—temporally native to it, now that we missed our relay windows—really would just disappear.”

  “So the rest of humanity suffers, while you three get to enjoy paradise?” Jacob asked.

  “Five, actually—there’s two more of us outside—and now it will be seven. And who’s to say this line is any less real than Now? The people outside, do you think they’ll listen when you tell them they’re just a probability, and an outside one at that?”

  “You said you’d had a good run, Jacob,” Rachael said. He listened to her carefully, listening for truth in her tone. “Don’t you deserve a reward? Just let time run out.”

  He looked at her a moment, nodded. “I guess I don’t have a choice,” he said, looking at Mike and Pyotr, who were still standing in the way of any escape attempt.

  “You’re so stubborn,” Jan said. “I couldn’t possibly be right, could I?”

  “Looks like you’ll have a lot of time to convince me.”

  Jan stood and stretched, still keeping a watchful eye on Jacob. “How much longer?” she asked Mike.

  “Four minutes,” he said after a glance at the instrument in his hand, yawned.

  “All right, then. Four minutes, Jacob; then you’ll start to see what I mean.”

  He shrugged. There was no point in arguing. “Fine,” he said, glanced over at Rachael. She gave him a nervous smile. “So how are you going to fit us in as natives here?”

  “I don’t need to,” Jan said. “Nobody here has any ID or security numbers. If you want to work, you work; they just believe you are who you say you are.”

  “There’s a lot of work for retired retrohistorians?”

  “We all know how to do some pretty useful things. I’m sure you’ll find a niche to fit in soon enough, if you want to.” She glanced over at Mike, who nodded. “That’s it, then; time’s up.”

  Jacob looked from Mike to Pyotr, stood up slowly. “So what now? Are you going to show us around your private utopia?”

  Jan smiled. “Why not? Come on—” she motioned to Rachael to rise as well “—since you’re natives here now, you might as well know the landscape.”

  The five of them went out into the corridor in a line, Mike and Pyotr still keeping a careful eye on Jacob—not to prevent escape, which the passage of time had just sealed, but in case he should try to take his frustrations out on them physically. They looked smaller, now, and he realized they had just been pretending to be tough guys; they were forecasters, just like him, and used to pretending to be people they weren’t.

  Outside it was as bright and sunny as when Jacob had first arrived, the air crisp.

  “Smell that,” Jan was saying. “I never knew anything could smell so good. Did you?”

  “It’s nice,” he said.

  “And that’s just the beginning. You can relax here—don’t have to worry what the next catastrophe will be.”

  He stopped at the curb, shook his head. “Jan?” he said.

  She looked at him curiously. “What?”

  “Good-bye.”

  He was off, moving more quickly than he had since he’d been a Short; he glanced back, saw that Rachael was following a few steps behind. Jan, Mike and Pyotr were looking at one another curiously, no doubt wondering why he would bother to run when he couldn’t get back to Now. Jan was the first to figure it out—of course, she would be—and started running after them, the other two trailing behind.

  At the first intersection Jacob made a quick diving motion with his hand that he hoped Rachael would understand; a second later he broke left, into traffic, and she broke right. He hesitated for a second while one of the frictionless cars passed, then jumped onto it and kicked hard with his right leg. Suddenly it was going much faster, with nothing to stop it, and he gripped it tight as it sped away. The driver, unaccustomed to this speed, wasn’t sure what to do. By the time the brake strut had hit the pavement he was blocks ahead of his pursuers.

  “Sorry!” he called to the driver, a young woman who was looking at him with amazement on her face. He jumped off as the car slowed, crossed to the other side of the narrow street and started on a zigzag path to the park where he and Rachael had hidden after they fled the bolt-hole. He was half afraid Jan and the others would be waiting there; it was obvious now it had been a decoy, meant to flush out any forecasters like him and Rachael. The park was empty, though, and he quickly made it to the hedge they had hidden under, crouched in its shade. A few seconds later he heard hurried footsteps approaching. He risked a look, saw Rachael headed straight for him and felt a reflex of suspicion.

  “How far behind are they?” he asked quietly as she crouched beside him.

  “I don’t know. They all went after you. Maybe you lost them.”

  He shook his head. “Not for long; Jan was a Short as long as I was. But at least they don’t seem used to working together—we’re probably the only ones ever to run.”

  “So why come here?” she asked.

  “Ah . . .” He reached under the hedge, felt around, drew out his relay switch. “Abracadabra.”

  “So that’s why they didn’t detect yours—why they thought you were on the same deadline I was,” Rachael said. “But why did you think to stash it here?”

  “I didn’t trust you,” he said.

  “Oh.” She looked away; he was not sure if she was looking for signs of pursuit. “And do you now?”

  “Well, you had plenty of chances to betray me back in the room, and you didn’t,” he said. “And you pointed out to me that they’d think my time was up when yours was. So, yes—but that’s not really why.”

  “So why?”

  He shrugged. “No reason. Just—a gut feeling.”

  “You don’t sound much like a forecaster.”

  “I guess I don’t,” he said, and looked like his watch. “This end of the hole’s going to open in about five minutes.”

  “So you’re going back?” Rachael said.

  “Of course. Why else would I have run?”

  “I don’t know. I ran, just because . . .” She put up her hands. “You heard what she said—you’ll never find this line again, and if you try to get here in normal time you might keep it from existing.”

  “Jan’s as good a forecaster as there ever was, and her premises are sound, but her conclusion is exactly backwards.” He peered over the hedge, set the relay switch to warm up. “Before the cage was ever invented there were always people who would make guesses about the future. One of them looked at the past and the future and said that the system he was living in was doomed. It was inevitable, he said, and he pointed out all of the problems in it that would destroy it. A lot of people listened to him and decided he was right; some of them just gave up, but others tried to fix the problems he had identified. So the prediction he made actually kept itself from coming true; the truth in it made it false. Impossible, right?

  “Now look at this line. It’s a stable future, but it always hangs just in front of Now. Something’s keeping it from happening—”

  “Jan,” Rachael said, her eyes widening. “Her, and the others. Someone needs to come back from here to make it happen. But—that means the cause is in the future. That’s impossible.”

  “Pre hoc ergo propter hoc,” Jacob said, smiling. “It’s our fault. Forecasting—messing with time, obsessively calculating every probability of disaster—is what’s kept this time potential. Whatever makes it happen, it’s outside the risks we’re willing to take. But if we go back—make it a reality, not a myth—maybe we can make that leap.”

  “We?” Rachael said. “My time is up. I’m stuck here.”

  There were running footsteps audible, just a few dozen metres away. “Teams of two, remember?” he said. “I just have to key you into my relay. We’ll both go back to my Now.”

&n
bsp; “But you’re from just twelve years ago—I’m already there. It’s impossible.”

  The relay switch flashed green. “We’ve got six impossible things to do before breakfast,” he said, “might as well get started.”

  She smiled. “Down the rabbit hole?”

  “Over here,” Jan’s voice called from not far away. Jacob nodded at Rachael, keyed the relay switch to her control pad.

  “Hold on,” he said, and reached to her.

  She put her arms around him, frowned skeptically. “Is this necessary?”

  “No,” he said, and they vanished.

  CLOSING TIME

  Nep Gao stood on his tiptoes in the quiet garden to the back of the restaurant, working his small silver knife along the thinnest branches of the prickly ash tree, and wondered when his father’s ghost would leave the party. He had died five days ago and was still holding court, entertaining all his old friends and customers. It was just his luck, Gao thought, that his father had died in the middle of qinshon season, the few weeks when the tree’s buds had their best flavour. Already, chewing carefully, he could detect a bitter note in what he had just harvested. At the rate things were going his father’s ghost would still be around in a week, when the qinshon would be inedible. This was usually their most profitable time of year, but so long as his father was enjoying the food and company enough to stay on Earth Gao was bound to provide food and drink to anyone who came to pay their respects. So far there had been no shortage of mourners, most of them just happening to come around dinner time and often staying till past dawn.

  With his basket full of tightly curled green buds clutched under his arm Gao went back into the restaurant. Though it was only midmorning someone in the front room was playing a zither, shouting out parts of the Epic of the Hundred and One Bandits. Louder, though, was his father’s commentary on the action as it was sung: “That bandit’s pretty clever, but not as clever as that butcher that used to try to sell tame ducks as wild. Nobody but me could smell the difference from the blood in the carcass!” and “I heard the great Xan Te play that verse once when I was on a trip to Lamnai. He hardly had a tooth in his head, but he ate two whole boxes of my pork dumplings.”