Red, White, and the Blues
Page 1
ALSO BY RYSA WALKER
CHRONOS ORIGINS
Now, Then, and Everywhen
THE CHRONOS FILES
NOVELS
Timebound
Time’s Edge
Time’s Divide
GRAPHIC NOVEL
Time Trial
NOVELLAS
Time’s Echo
Time’s Mirror
Simon Says: Tips for the Intrepid Time Traveler
SHORT STORIES
“The Gambit” In The Time Travel Chronicles
“Whack Job” In Alt.History 102
“2092” In Dark Beyond the Stars
“Splinter” In CLONES: The Anthology
“The Circle-That-Whines” In Chronicle Worlds: Tails of Dystopia
“Full Circle” In OCEANS: The Anthology
THE DELPHI TRILOGY
NOVELS
The Delphi Effect
The Delphi Resistance
The Delphi Revolution
NOVELLA
The Abandoned
ENTER HADDONWOOD
As the Crow Flies (with Caleb Amsel)
When the Cat’s Away (with Caleb Amsel)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Rysa Walker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542019590
ISBN-10: 1542019591
Cover design by M. S. Corley
To my fellow travelers in this strange alternate timeline, in hopes of better days ahead.
Contents
PART ONE
FROM THE BOOK OF CYRUS (NEW ENGLISH VERSION, 3RD ED) CHAPTER 4:7–8
1
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
2
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
3
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
4
FROM A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHRONOS, 4TH ED (2302)
5
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
6
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
7
FROM THE BOOK OF CYRUS (NEW ENGLISH VERSION, 3RD ED) CHAPTER 6:1–12
8
FROM THE BOOK OF CYRUS (NEW ENGLISH VERSION, 3RD ED) CHAPTER 7:18–19
9
FROM THE TEMPORAL DILEMMA USER’S GUIDE, 2ND ED (2293)
10
FROM A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME TRAVEL, 4TH ED (2302)
11
FROM THE PEOPLE’S GUIDE TO US HISTORY SINCE 2000, 15TH ED (2136)
12
FROM THE TD OFF-WORLD PLAYER’S GUIDE
13
FROM THE BOOK OF PROPHECY
14
PART TWO
15
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
16
FROM THE DAILY INTREPID-HERALD REVIEW OF BOOKS
17
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
18
FROM THE COMPLETE DUMMY’S GUIDE TO US HISTORY SINCE 1950, 23RD ED (2022)
19
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
20
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
21
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
22
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
23
FROM THE VERSES OF PRUDENCE
24
PART THREE
25
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
26
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
27
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
28
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
29
FROM THE BOOK OF CYRUS (NEW ENGLISH VERSION, 3RD ED) CHAPTER 7:20–21
30
FROM THE BOOK OF CYRUS (NEW ENGLISH VERSION, 3RD ED) CHAPTER 7:13–14
31
FROM THE BOOK OF CYRUS (NEW ENGLISH VERSION, 3RD ED) CHAPTER 7:15–16
32
FROM THE VERSES OF PRUDENCE
33
34
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PART ONE
GAMBIT
Gambit [from ancient Italian gambetto, meaning “to trip”]: A sacrificial offering (usually of a pawn) used to gain an early advantage in time or space during the opening moves of a game.
FROM THE BOOK OF CYRUS (NEW ENGLISH VERSION, 3RD ED) CHAPTER 4:7–8
7Do not attempt to conquer the world with force. Force yields only resistance. 8True power comes from persuading the conquered that they have embraced The Way of their own free will.
∞1∞
MADI
BETHESDA, MARYLAND
NOVEMBER 18, 2136
“And that’s also not food.” RJ reaches into his daughter’s mouth and fishes out a mangled leaf. There’s no complaint from Yun Hee this time, so the leaf apparently wasn’t as tasty as the yellow dandelion he’d extracted from her chubby cheeks a few minutes ago. She still looks a bit put out, though. RJ scoops the baby from the lawn and swings her up toward the bright autumn sky, earning himself a mostly toothless grin, followed by a string of leaf-flecked drool to decorate the front of his shirt.
He wipes the baby’s chin with his sleeve. “June Bug and I are going inside to get some cheese puffs, since she seems to be in the mood to nibble. Do you guys want anything?”
Lorena and I both shake our heads. RJ’s cousin, Alex, is too deep into whatever he’s reading on his screen to even hear the question. It’s a minor miracle that we were able to lure him outside for brunch on the patio and some fresh air. He’s been holed up in the library, surrounded by his various computers and 3-D displays for at least twenty-four hours. The goal was to get food into him and then convince him to sleep. But I think the second half of that plan may be doomed, given that Alex just gulped down a large mug of black coffee and is now munching his way through the bag of caffeinated jelly beans he keeps at his desk.
He has good reason to be stressed. Even though we managed to restore the timeline, Jack is still stuck in 1966. It feels wrong, being here without him, and I suspect that it’s at least as hard on Alex as it is on me. His best friend is stranded 170 years in the past, thanks to technology Alex himself invented—or rather, will invent at some point in the future, apparently with our help—so it has to be making him crazy that he can’t bring Jack home. In my case, however, I can sort of be two places at once. I can spend the entire day and night in 1966 with Jack, pull out my CHRONOS key and drop in here for as long as I want, then blink back to Jack ten seconds after I left.
When I glance over at Lorena, there’s a knowing look in her eyes. “When are you heading back to Memphis?”
“Not sure. I haven’t had a swim in days, so I may head down to the basement for a bit. And Jarvis says I have messages waiting. I’m pretty sure at least one of them is from my thesis advisor, wanting to set a time for our meeting on Friday, and I haven’t even thought about my research in over a week. So I need to spend a little time looking over my notes before—”
“Mm-hmm.” Given Lorena Jeung’s eerie knack for homing in on what I’m thin
king, I’m not surprised she’s unconvinced. “You should at least try what I suggested, Madi. If Jack is all comfy and cozy there and then, he’s going to have a much harder time getting back to the here and now.”
Last night, I’d promised to simply deliver Jack’s suitcase and head back home. And I’d actually planned to do that when I left, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked him being there alone. Her theory that Jack needs to avoid getting too comfortable in the past is bunk anyway. He spent all day yesterday trying to jump home. Even after he said we were done for the day, that we’d try again this morning, he still reached for the CHRONOS key tucked inside his T-shirt at least a dozen times during the night, centering the medallion in his palm, no doubt praying that this time it would work. But it never did. He could lock in the location and could even see what was happening on the other end, but he couldn’t jump—which is pretty much exactly what has happened on every other occasion Jack Merrick has tried to use the CHRONOS key.
Every occasion except one, that is. If Jack hadn’t been able to make the key work that one time, I would be dead. John Lennon would have died, as well. Lennon was eventually murdered anyway, but his death would have been fourteen years early. Stopping that assassination—along with the premature deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., singer Mary Travers, and author James Baldwin—put our timeline back on its original track, averting a reality where the Vietnam War went on for six months longer and resulted in the deaths of nearly thirty-five thousand additional people, erasing millions of offspring they would have produced, including Lorena and Yun Hee.
Lorena is convinced that a chemical reaction is the only logical explanation for Jack’s surge in time-traveling ability. She thinks watching someone kill me flooded his system with a mix of stress hormones and neurotransmitters that she can rattle off instantly and I can’t remember at all, aside from adrenaline and testosterone. And she’s probably right, but . . .
“I just don’t think making Jack homesick is going to have the same effect as him seeing someone kill me. And I’m not sure how we could safely replicate those circumstances. I mean, one of you could hold a gun to my head, but I doubt Jack would believe it, so even that wouldn’t trigger the same chemical response.”
She doesn’t say anything, which I’m beginning to realize is Lorena-speak for You may have a point.
“How long do you think it will be before you have a serum ready for him to test?” I ask.
Lorena shrugs. “A few days, at least, depending on whether Alex is confident about that field extender he’s working on for the CHRONOS diary.”
“It should be ready by tomorrow,” he says without looking up from his screen. “I’m just running a few last tests to make sure the diary doesn’t give off any signals that might be picked up by the security scanners in your building.”
“Thanks,” she says, flashing him a tiny, nervous smile. “I can’t take any more days off. I’m in the hole as it is.” Turning back to me, she adds, “I’m not scheduled for lab hours until Wednesday morning, though. Even then, my ability to work on this will be heavily dependent on who is in the lab at the same time. If it’s anyone at Georgetown who’s even remotely familiar with my current research, they’re going to wonder why I’m dealing with blood samples, stress chemicals, and the like.” She grabs the plates from the table and heads toward the kitchen. “I’ll have to be extra careful. I can’t afford to risk my job, especially with the future of this side venture currently up in the air.”
The side venture, as she puts it, isn’t really up in the air, although the set of her mouth tells me she and RJ may well decide to back out once we get Jack safely home from 1966. I can’t blame her. Lorena, more than any of us, has a firm grasp of the dangers posed by the technology. Between the medallion that I uncovered, literally, in the garden and the one that my great-great-grandmother left hidden in the basement, we seem to have conveniently skipped the whole research-and-development phase of our newly formed company, AJG Research. Despite that, however, I’m still listed, along with Ian Alexander and Ryan Jefferson, a.k.a. Alex and RJ, as one of the three inventors of time travel in A Brief History of CHRONOS. I’m a historian—a literary historian—so I’m quite certain that the only thing I bring to the partnership is the genetic ability to use the device. Alex is the temporal physicist in the group. He’d heard rumors of a device like the medallion being tested by the government decades ago—rumors that Jack was able to confirm—but Alex said the research he’s been working on in his postdoctoral program is still years away from human time travel, so he’s almost as mystified by all of this as the rest of us.
RJ seems destined to be the sales-and-marketing side of our new partnership, but he’s also here because of Lorena. Her job as a geneticist will be in danger if they find out she’s working on a project like this, especially with someone like me. If she were adhering to the rules, Lorena would have already informed my graduate program at Georgetown that I’m genetically enhanced. Or, to be more precise, that I inherited multiple baseline enhancements, something I myself only discovered recently. I probably wouldn’t have been admitted to the university, and I definitely wouldn’t be on scholarship, if they’d known.
In a perfect world, I’d be more than happy to close the entire operation down and return to my studies. That was my plan once we repaired the rift. The past few days have convinced me that time travel is a very bad idea. History is fluid and visiting the past can wreak havoc on the future. But I’m no longer sure that terminating the research is an option. Even if we halt everything right now, there is no way to shove this genie back into the bottle. We might not know precisely how the medallions work, but they exist inside their own temporal field. The fact that we created the technology in some other timeline means that it exists in this timeline. And the folks who caused the rift are still out there, in some neighboring reality. They found a way into our universe once. Hopefully the fact that we’re onto them will be enough to convince them to play their stupid game of Temporal Dilemma elsewhere, although I feel guilty even wishing that. These people traveled through time and space to purposefully alter our history, screwing with the lives of billions of people for their own amusement. As much as I never, ever want to deal with them again, I hate the idea that they might be doing the same thing in the reality next door.
That’s why Alex is currently wound tighter than a magnet’s coil. He was still struggling to figure out the basic parameters of this technology that he should have been more than a decade away from creating when we discovered it had been hijacked by interdimensional travelers. Now he needs to find a way to lock down something he barely understands if we’re to have any hope of keeping them out.
“Alex?” When he doesn’t respond, I tap on the picnic table between us. “Alex!”
He startles and looks up from his reading. “Sorry. Did you say something?”
“Jack is okay. He wanted me to tell you that he’s fine. We’ll eventually get him back here, assuming you don’t kill yourself from stress.” I reach across the table and squeeze his arm when he starts to protest. “I’m serious. Jack being stranded isn’t your fault.”
“Okay.” Alex runs a hand through his blond hair, which is currently sticking up in jagged spikes, giving him a scarecrow vibe. “Maybe . . . maybe he should focus on short jumps first. Has he tried that? I was looking at the notes you made on Kate Pierce-Keller’s diaries. The other guy, the one who was helping her . . .”
“Kiernan Dunne?”
“Yeah. He could use the key, but it was sporadic for him, too, like it is for Jack.”
“Right. He had to wait between jumps. And longer jumps were harder for him.”
Alex nods. “You, on the other hand, don’t seem to be limited, or at least not in any significant way. I need to talk it through with Lorena, but it occurred to me just now that at least some of the traits that were altered may be stronger in females due to X-linked inheritance.”
I raise a questioning eyebrow. �
�Which means . . . what?”
“Males inherit one X and one Y chromosome. Females inherit two X chromosomes. So if a genetic trait—or, in this case, a genetic enhancement—is linked to the X chromosome, it’s more likely to be expressed in female offspring than male. It could also just be the luck of the genetic lottery, but it seems odd to me that you have less trouble using it when you inherited the ability from a great-great-grandmother while Jack inherited the ability from his grandfather.”
That’s true, although as he says the words, the face of my maternal grandmother, Thea Randall, flashes into my mind. Her resemblance to Great-Great-Grandma Kate, and even more so to Kate’s aunt, known as Sister Prudence to members of the Cyrist religion, is absolutely uncanny. Although I don’t think I can entirely discount the possibility that my genetic inheritance is coming from both sides of the family, I’m reluctant to add an extra layer of complexity to Alex’s theory based on a mere suspicion. But it does remind me that I need to track Thea down and ask her some questions.
“Good idea,” I say. “I’ll get Jack to try some short jumps, both in terms of distance and time, when I go back. In the interim, though, would you please get some sleep? We need that brain of yours focused and at full capacity, not hopped up on espresso and buzz beans.”
Alex makes a noncommittal sound. I sigh as I collect the last of the items on the table, and then head into the house. At least I can tell Jack that I tried.
The kitchen and living room are both empty, so RJ and Lorena must have taken the baby upstairs to their suite. I pour some more coffee into my mug, settle onto the couch, and ask Jarvis, my virtual assistant, to play my messages.
The first message is, as expected, from my thesis advisor. Another is from my Grandma Nora. She’s the owner of this house, which originally belonged to her own great-great-grandmother Katherine Shaw, a CHRONOS historian I just met on my jump to 1966, although I kept our relationship a secret. I suppose there’s a possibility that Katherine would still allow her pregnant self and a bunch of her colleagues to get stranded in the past by her fiancé’s sabotage, but that’s the kind of thing most people would probably avoid if given a heads-up on the matter. If she did the logical thing and turned Saul in to CHRONOS security, however, I’m not at all sure what would happen to this timeline, to myself, or to Grandma Nora. It’s the sort of conundrum that tangles up my synapses and gives me a headache.