Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine

by Anthony Francis

  “‘We can’t erase men’s history at a stroke,’” Jeremiah said, wryly quoting her mother. “Sorry to tilt the family windmill at you, Miss Cross, but my great-grandmother, Mary Wollstonecraft the Younger, started the trend of women taking male names when she became Mark Willstone—”

  “Mary Wollstonecraft the Younger . . . you mean, Mary Shelley?” Rosalind said. “You’re the granddaughter of the woman who wrote Frankenstein?”

  “Great-granddaughter,” Jeremiah said. “We call her book the Neopromethicon—the new Prometheus. Though for us, mastery of electricity was less Promethean and more Pandorican.”

  Jeremiah fired the Kathodenstrahl at the far wall on its lowest setting. A blue-green beam lanced out and dissipated, the lights flickered—and Rosalind popped out of her chair, first raising her hands to her head, then running to look at the crackling spot on the wall.

  “You—you shot my wallpaper!” Rosalind said.

  “At that setting, your wallpaper will be all right,” Jeremiah said. “That’s the point. They’re our greatest prize: the guns that civilized warfare by eliminating killing. It took sixty years—it took that young rogue Einstein—to figure out that they attracted the attention of Foreigners.”

  “Those guns attract . . . aliens?” Rosalind said. “I’m sorry, but what?”

  “The reaction chamber that makes thermionic blasters work isn’t actually electrical. It’s a unified field reaction. And every single time you fire one, it sends a ripple out into space,” Jeremiah said. Her face grew grim. “A little ripple that says, ‘hello, here’s a habitable world.’”

  Marcus’s mouth fell open.

  “The first blasters only brought the locals down on us,” Jeremiah said. “A Martian sortie, a Venusian envoy, a handful of other nasties out of the dark. But after Einstein explained how the guns really worked, scientists tried to confirm his theory with experiments. Think of it: planetary-level fumbling, signaling, across the whole interstellar expanse, that a civilization not advanced enough to mount its own defense was sitting on a habitable world ready for the taking.”

  “Jesus,” Marcus said. “So every time you fired one of those lightning guns here—”

  “In my den, no less,” Rosalind said, sitting back down, irate, and Jeremiah winced.

  “—you were calling aliens down on us?” Marcus finished. “You said floodgates—”

  “Your world is different,” Jeremiah said. “You have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to sterilize the planet, backed by a massive industrial complex equipping millions of soldiers proficient in killing your own kind. No Foreigner in its right mind is going to come here.”

  “Famous last words,” Rosalind said, shaking her head. “Look, aliens—we’ve never seen them. Well, there are crazy stories, of Roswell, of government cover-ups, mostly in the fifties, before the Cuban missile crisis, before our nuclear stockpiles got so huge . . . Oh. My. God. That fits—”

  “Maybe our nukes did scare them off,” Colin said. “But they really came to your world?”

  Jeremiah scowled. This really was a different world. She took a swig of her mint julep.

  ———

  “Like the rain,” Jeremiah said at last. “We call it Noah’s Second Flood.”

  34.

  Women, Liberated

  “THE EARTH THAT I come from is under full-scale global assault,” Jeremiah said. “We call it the Flood because ‘the islands sank first’—attacks on England, Sumatra, Madagascar—but now we’ve had Foreign Incursions in every continent of the globe. Even the word Incursion is a hopeful fiction, the dream that we could make their stays brief as possible—but the bitter truth is Foreigners have conquered parts of Siberia and much of Antarctica and have colonized Iceland—”

  “Jesus,” Rosalind said. “But . . . why? What’s so great about Earth?”

  “It’s habitable,” Jeremiah said bitterly. “Scientists say there are few habitable worlds, so when one is found, everyone wants a piece of it. Even Foreigners who don’t want Earth seem compelled to come here to stake a claim, just to forestall others—like the scramble for Africa in reverse, waves of explorers coming in, rather than going out. Some question whether humanity will survive.”

  “That sounds grim,” Colin said.

  “It’s a challenge. There are only a billion of us, and we’d almost wholly given up lethal weapons after the destruction of Atlanta in 1864. Our War of Realignment, your Civil War, was the last war fought with conventional projectile weapons and our single use of atomic weapons.”

  “So you nerfed yourselves,” Colin said, “and made yourselves vulnerable.”

  “Oi!” Jeremiah said. “We’re threatened, not vulnerable. We haven’t needed lethal weapons to beat back Foreigners—and you lot are some of the toughest people I’ve seen, and I still held my own without lethal weapons against your agent friend Simeon, if that is his real name—”

  “Simeon?” Colin said. “What about Simeon? He’s an NSA agent too?”

  “Jesus, Jeremiah,” Marcus said, rubbing his face. “Look, guys, we’re sorry to barge in and dump this on you—but please keep it cool and don’t repeat any of this. It’s gonna go bad enough for me as it is. I’m pretty sure I threw my career away the moment I helped Jeremiah—”

  “So that’s what you’re running from,” Rosalind said. “You helped Jeremiah get away from your own people. Jesus. If half of what she’s said is true, it sounds like a noble cause—but it’s still outright treason, or a brave act of conscience—or possibly both.” She scowled, then glanced at Colin. “You’re his friend, so . . . my money’s on brave. I’m proud of you, Marcus.”

  “Why did you help me, Marcus?” Jeremiah said. “I don’t mean back at the hotel room, so don’t say it’s because of my skills at persuasion—or as a matahari. You had cover to say you were duped, but you came back to help me fight off Simeon. Why?”

  Marcus looked away. “Look, the moment I saw your Lord Christopherson . . . I got a bad feeling. He’s up to something. That little message he sent to you back at the hotel proves it. He’s playing us. He’s playing all of us over that egg. We’ve got to stop him.”

  “But your superiors—”

  “—brought me in because they suspected him, but when you confirmed his ill intent, the bastards turned on you to get your airship,” Marcus said. He smiled sadly. “They’ve taken their eyes off the ball—but no one’s going to listen to me, because I ‘fall for the pretty girls.’”

  “They have you there,” Colin said.

  “I get he’s bad, we’ve got to stop him,” Rosalind said. “What I don’t get is why he’s here.”

  “I . . . honestly do not know,” Jeremiah said. “When he raided the Providence Museum of the Insane, we at first assumed he’d stolen a weapon, but once we found out it was a living egg, the natural assumption was that he wanted to create an Foreign Incursion—”

  “You keep saying that,” Rosalind said, “but I still don’t quite get what ‘Foreign Incursion’ actually means and why they’re so bad. Translate her dialect for me, Marcus.”

  “Alien invasion. Actually, think the movie Alien. ‘Can’t let that shit get back to Earth—’”

  “Holy shit. And he wants it to hatch here?” Colin said. “What did we ever do to him?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Jeremiah said. “And why would he bring it here? This is the last place that a Foreigner would want to assault. You’ll just kill it with your atomic weapons—and then declare war upon our reality! How would that profit my uncle?”

  “Well . . . maybe there was something else here he wanted,” Colin said.

  “Another unknown,” Jeremiah said. “We speculated widely about what he came here for. Perhaps to trade his invisible airship for a different kind of weapon, like your atomics. Or perhaps he’s simply observi
ng this world, getting a template for a history more to his liking—”

  “Your uncle wants to change history?” Rosalind asked. “Why? To stop the aliens?”

  “No, he—” Jeremiah began, then stopped. “That would be wonderful if true.”

  Rosalind’s brow furrowed. “Jeremiah . . . why do you think he came here?”

  “Our original hypothesis was, oh, hell,” Jeremiah said, drawing a breath. “I don’t want to offend you, Miss Cross, but my uncle’s backed by renowned misogynists and has talked of rolling back history long before we’d ever heard of time travel. The more I learn, the more unlikely I think it is, but he could be looking for a template of a world without women’s Liberation—”

  “What? Them’s fightin’ words,” Rosalind said, rankled. “This world is liberated—”

  “I don’t doubt that you are, by your own standards,” Jeremiah said, which was precisely the wrong thing to say, as Rosalind’s face flushed with anger. “Clearly you’ve pursued the liberation of women in your own way—I can see that—but the movement we call Liberation never happened here, because its architect, my great-great-grandmother, died in childbirth—”

  “If you’re talking Mary Wollstonecraft,” Rosalind said, softening, “that . . . probably would have set women’s liberation back a hundred years. I know her history, and her death was one of the great lost opportunities . . . but did that setback really leave us backwards? I mean, so backwards your reactionary uncle wants to swap his history for ours? The very idea is ridiculous—”

  “Again, I wasn’t trying to insult you, Miss Cross,” Jeremiah said. “But our world has pursued an, ah, aggressive approach to equality, and there are visible differences. For example, dress is more gender segregated, and there’s a notable presumption that women don’t engage in combat—”

  “Haven’t you heard of sexual dimorphism?” Rosalind said. “Maybe things are really different where you come from, but here the typical man is a lot bigger and stronger than the typical woman.” She snapped her fingers. “Aha—I knew it. You’ve been giving me the stinkeye ever since I had Colin open the door, haven’t you? You can’t expect me to fight off some guy on my doorstep—”

  “Yes, I can,” Jeremiah said, surprised at her own heat. “I’m a third generation female soldier—and you have five centimeters on me and a good frame. I’ll bet I could teach you to break a man’s neck with one punch. Women can equal men—I’ve seen it—yet the men here seem to hold women in contempt, while the women seem to hope those same men will protect them—”

  “You have a chip on your shoulder the size of a two-by-four, little miss airship adventuress,” Rosalind snapped. “We don’t have your nonlethal weapons, so we have to treat violence a little more seriously. Maybe in your world equality is measured by being able to kill with a single blow, but in this world, women are trying to rise above violence—”

  “Come on, Rosie, you don’t speak for all of the women on the planet,” Colin said, glaring. Jeremiah rubbed a hand over her mouth, realizing that she’d been putting Rosalind on that precise spot. He said, “There are plenty of women in our military—like my sister, remember?”

  “She’s a helicopter repairwoman, not a combat soldier,” Rosalind said, glaring back. “What’s wrong with that? So we don’t have women in combat. So what? So I’m not a professional boxer. So what? Her crazy uncle’s trying to undo history, so her whole world isn’t ‘Liberated’ either—”

  “Ah, mint juleps and parlor arguments over Liberation,” Jeremiah said, raising her drink, lightly trying to defuse the conflagration she herself had unwisely started. “Perhaps this place is like home—hang on a tick. You have women soldiers . . . who don’t fight? Really?”

  “No,” Rosalind said, “but women have been fighting for the right to do it for years—”

  Jeremiah colored; she’d far overstepped her bounds. “Forgive me, Miss Cross: clearly you have as much zeal on this topic as I have,” she said, “but . . . a delay on that one issue might satisfy my uncle. He’s not just a known opponent of Liberation; he refuses to use women soldiers in his private army, and finding a way to keep women out of combat might be enough for him—”

  “Why?” Rosalind said. “What’s he have against women soldiers?”

  “Well,” Jeremiah said. She stared at the mint julep in her hand for a moment. “The Baron’s daughter was a soldier, as was his wife, his mother, and even, even his . . . his sister . . . all of them were soldiers, and all are . . . all are remembered for their valor . . .”

  She trailed off, and the room stayed mercifully silent.

  “So the fight for Liberation hasn’t been without losses,” Jeremiah finished at last, staring at the drink. She hadn’t had a mint julep in . . . eleven years. She wanted another sip but spoke with a dry throat. “In the present case . . . it’s pretty effectively pruned my branch of the tree.”

  Jeremiah sighed, raised the drink to toast the fallen—but then got a crystalline image of the tart words her grandmother would have had for Jeremiah disparaging a woman of substance in her own home—or what her mother would have said about disrespecting support soldiers like Colin’s sister. Come to think of it, what would Patrick or Georgiana have said about her performance? They’d have taken her down a peg. She set down the drink, feeling like a right proper arse.

  “I do apologize, Ms. Cross,” she said. “I’ve my own prejudices, as unfair and as uncharitable as anyone else’s, and like dirty laundry, the proper thing to do with one’s prejudices is scrub them in private, rather than air them in company. But this is more than an abstract issue to me. When my mother died, my uncle stepped up as a father figure, even mentored me—but when he lost his daughter, he turned about face, doing everything in his power to sabotage my career.”

  “What’s that called?” Colin said. “Displacement?”

  “Whatever it’s called, it motivated my uncle to try some rather nasty tricks to get me expelled from Academy,” Jeremiah said. “I’m fighting to preserve my personal freedom and my mother and grandmother’s legacy. As I said, the more I learn, the less likely I think it is he came here for a template—but still, he came here. I know my uncle, and I’ve learned, the hard way, not to trust him. Not to trust him a centimeter. He’s up to something. He came here, on purpose, for something. What?”

  “Well,” Rosalind said thoughtfully, “what could he get here he couldn’t get at home?”

  “If it isn’t a template,” Colin said, “perhaps it’s like Jeremiah said, a technology.”

  “Computer electronics,” Marcus said. “Or, as you said, nuclear weapons—”

  “Either of those . . . could be it,” Jeremiah said. “But we have formidable human computers, and I’m not convinced he has anything you lot would trade for one of those bombs—”

  “What about atomic isotopes,” Colin said. “Or advanced medicine?”

  “Isotopes, perhaps,” Jeremiah said. “Medicine . . . hardly.”

  “Even if you knew what he was after,” Rosalind said, staring at Jeremiah intently, “what good would it do you? He’s got an invisible airship, an army—and the whole might of the NSA behind him. You can’t take them all on with a couple of nonlethal rayguns—”

  “Don’t need to take them all on,” Jeremiah said. “All I need to take is his cornerstone: that egg. We don’t know his ultimate aims: acquiring weapons or altering history are just hypotheses. But that egg, it’s a concrete fact—and it wasn’t something he acquired lightly; it took half his fortune and most of his forces. He needs it. Capture it, we stop his plan.”

  “Even if you knew where it was,” Rosalind said, “how would you ‘capture’ it?”

  “Extreme boldness,” Jeremiah said. She thought about her conversation with Natasha; was Jeremiah again striking first without thinking things through? No, this was precisely what Natasha recommended
: targeting your enemy’s goal. “The one who hits hardest, fastest, wins.”

  “Even with nonlethal weapons,” Rosalind said. “You, a soldier, hit without killing?”

  “Of course, whenever I can. What do you take me for?” She stopped and stared at Rosalind, who was staring back, almost like they were once again in an argument. Jeremiah said quietly, “Miss Cross, if there’s a life you’re worried about, I’ll move Heaven and Earth not to take it.”

  “Thank you,” Rosalind said. “I figured it out five minutes ago, but I’ve been afraid to say anything, because the moment I do, Marcus will figure it out too—and I needed to know that you spooks wouldn’t hurt my friends.” Now everyone was looking at her. “You guys have it all wrong. You’re dealing with an alien, and you’re thinking physics and culture and technology and history. But what really makes an alien? Its biology. And if your uncle is working with the government, and he’s interested in biology, then I know where he’s probably taking the egg . . . because I work there.”

  Marcus jerked upright. “Of course! That’s why I wanted to recruit you in the first place—thank you, Rosalind. Jeremiah, one of the quid pro quos your uncle demanded was a visit to a nearby biological facility. I don’t know all the details, but they planned to give him a tour—”

  “Where?” Jeremiah said.

  ———

  “Your uncle demanded to visit,” Marcus said, “the CDC.”

  35.

  Assault on the CDC

  IT WAS A HUGE, sprawling place, in ways more impressive than the massive complex of buildings downtown. The city center had been dense, but rich, organic, alive; this compound was easily equal in size, but sterile: mammoth squat buildings, each set out on its own, surrounded by round concrete barriers disguised as tree planters and further separated by wide expanses of cover-free, oddly lined paving, slicked black by the rain, that Marcus again called “parking lots.”