Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  “Sure. As long as you keep it to single digits.”

  I take a long sip from the glass of wine he hands me. Then I place it on the dresser and glance down at my nightshirt, which is purple with tiny orange witches on brooms. “I should have worn something nicer.”

  “I don’t know. It looks pretty comfortable.”

  “It is,” I agree. “But it’s not really the visual I want either of us to have from the first time we make love.”

  He smiles softly. “I can think of an easy fix for that. If you’re absolutely sure it’s what you want.”

  “I’m absolutely sure.” I whisper the words against his neck.

  Jack’s arms tighten around me, and then he takes the hem of the nightshirt and lifts it over my head. As I begin unbuttoning his shirt, he slides his hands along the sides of my body, his thumbs grazing the edges of my breasts. I arch into him and everything dissolves into a delicious, mindless blur. There’s little of the awkward fumbling that so often happens the first time, or maybe it just doesn’t feel awkward. It feels like an exploration. I want to know what he likes. What makes him happy. We strike an easy balance of give-and-take. The tense threads in my body and mind slowly untangle, and thoughts of the past few weeks fade until there is nothing but me and him, and much later, a dreamless sleep.

  Jarvis awakens us with a notice that Alex needs us in the lab.

  “It’s six in the morning,” I mumble into Jack’s shoulder. “Doesn’t he sleep? And it’s a frickin’ library, not a lab. There are books everywhere.”

  “I think it’s kind of both at this point,” Jack says.

  “True. And I guess I need to get moving anyway.”

  Jack pulls me back down. “Jarvis, tell Alex we’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Yes, Master Jack.”

  Jack groans and whacks me with one of the pillows. “You programmed him to do that, didn’t you? He never calls you Mistress Madi.”

  “He calls me mistress.”

  “That’s not the same thing. Master Jack makes me sound like a street urchin in a Dickens novel.”

  I fight to keep my face straight. “You don’t know what Jarvis calls me in private. And we have twenty minutes. Do you really want to spend them discussing my virtual assistant?”

  He does not, as it turns out. And it’s more like forty minutes before we finally make it to the library.

  When we join Alex in the library or lab or whatever, he is in his swimsuit, with his hair sticking up wildly. “Finally,” he says. “Everyone in this house needs to get their libidos under control.”

  “You’re kidding?” Jack says. “Lorena and RJ? From his perspective, they just met.”

  “So? The exact same thing happened when they just met at a party five years ago. They’re very decisive. When they see something they want . . .” Alex shrugs. “Anyway, I was going to get Madi to do this, since she can hold her breath for longer, but I got tired of waiting. Here.” He hands Jack a CHRONOS key. “This is the one from the pool. I swapped them out. The other one works perfectly well for maintaining a protective field around the house, but there are some weird differences. Look at this.”

  “Hold on a second.” I tap my comm-band to start recording. “Otherwise you’re going to have to repeat it all so that I can share it with Tyson.”

  Alex waits until I’m ready and then flips one of his holoscreens toward us. “These are the two keys, front and back. The first is the key that was in the shielding device in the pool. The other is the one you brought back from Montgomery.”

  There are two sets of side-by-side images of CHRONOS keys on the screen. One is a front view, and the other is the back. Almost every detail is the same on the pictures of the front of the key, but the hourglass in the middle is more curved in the image on the left. There’s also a tiny ridge that runs through the spokes that come out from the middle of the medallion. The back of the key is blank on the left-hand image, just as it is on the key I’ve been using. In the second image, however, there’s a single word engraved on the back. CHRO-NOS.

  “They could have been made at different times, I guess?” Jack says. “Or customized? The hyphen seems odd, though. Haven’t seen that in any of the diaries or in A Brief History of CHRONOS. It’s always one word.”

  I shake my head. “Tyson says the keys were all created at the same time. Or at least all activated at the same time, and they have a chronometer of some sort on the inside. That’s apparently so that every key gets a notice about a time shift at the same instant.”

  “Normally, I wouldn’t put much stock in stylistic differences,” Alex says. “But the CHRONOS field on the other key is slightly different, too. I had to make some minor adjustments in order to get it to work with our shielding setup.”

  “So, do you think this is from some later version of CHRONOS, where they use slightly different equipment?” Jack asks. “And where they like hyphens in their acronyms? Or maybe an earlier iteration, since Madi says this Morgen Campbell guy is younger.”

  “That’s a reasonable explanation. But I don’t think it’s the right one. Look at this.” He spins another one of his data-cave screens and expands a chart at the bottom. “The thin red lines there show the interference I picked up in the chronotron field the times that Madi spun off a clone. Or a splinter, as I guess they call them. The blue line is what I’m picking up from the new key now that it’s activated by the device inside the pool wall. The lines are different in terms of their strength and consistency. You can see how the red ones grow thinner, and then vanish. But . . .”

  “The pattern is the same,” I say. “So, what does that mean?”

  Alex points toward the red lines. “Each of these were an attempt at spinning off a different reality, right? An attempt that eventually failed, but still an attempt. I could be totally off base here, but my best guess is that this key comes from a stable alternate reality. That’s kind of freaking me out, because it shouldn’t be possible. And also because, if it happened once, what’s to stop it from happening again?”

  Jack and I spend the next few hours combing through the stable points that Tyson transferred to my key last night, and that I transferred to the spare key, looking for any odd flashes of light. We sync up the time and go through together, so that we can double-check. If Jack sees something as aqua and I see it as orange, we add it to the list.

  Tyson said the observers were wearing their keys out in the open at the event where Dr. King was killed, but maybe they realized the medallions are a bit odd looking for mid-1960s jewelry, because the only two keys we’re certain we spot are a bit muted. We do locate seven other blips of light that we’re fairly sure are from keys. All of them occur during the time that the Beatles are onstage for the evening performance, so we could have skipped scanning through the matinee and the roughly two hours in each show where the four opening acts perform. The lights we’ve found are never visible for more than a few seconds, though, because the place is packed with kids waving posters and albums in the air. This is one time I’m quite glad there’s no audio on the key. Not because of the music. I’ve had Jarvis play some of their songs. They’re actually quite good. But I’m pretty sure you’d never be able to hear the music over the screams. Every girl—and a few of the guys—that I’ve seen has either been screaming, laughing, or in tears since the Fab Four came onstage in their snazzy dark-green suits. I’m getting a much better sense of why the press at the time called it Beatlemania.

  The task feels a little futile, to be honest, like we’re searching for a needle in a frantic, wildly gyrating haystack. Even going through at double speed, there are dozens of these locations, and we have to take the time to pan around almost 360. Some stable points we’ve been able to eliminate entirely—many of the ones Rich and Katherine set near the center of the auditorium only work sporadically in terms of viewing and aren’t available at all for jumping in, which makes me wonder if they’re smack in the middle of some teenage Beatles fan. As a result, we’ve s
tuck mostly to the locations on the perimeter of the audience, but it’s still a lot to scan.

  And there are so many other flashes of light in the auditorium that it’s hard to pinpoint anything, even with the color difference to guide us. I wasn’t sure what the other flashes were until I had Jarvis look up portable cameras from the era, and I saw the little flash cube on top. Between those and the professional photographers, the lights are making my head pound.

  Jack rubs my shoulder. “We could take another break,” he says, grinning.

  “A break, hmm? Is that what the groovy kids are calling it these days?”

  When break time is over, he says, “We’d best get back to it.” I groan and he adds, “Hey, I’m just glad for something I can do. You have no idea how helpless I feel each time you jump out. I don’t know what sort of danger you might be jumping into, and there’s not a damn thing I can do to help you.”

  I want to tell him that it helps just to know he’s here waiting for me. But that sounds a little like I’m casting him in the role of the faithful Penelope, waiting for Odysseus to return from his journeys. So I just snuggle closer, and we start on the next stable point. About ten minutes in, Jack says, “Did you see that? Two flashes.”

  My key must be a smidgen behind his, because it’s still a second before I see what he’s talking about. It’s the clearest flash of orange I’ve noticed. And he’s right, it’s actually two flashes, one slightly higher than the other, in the last row of the balcony section just to the left of the stage, which is only about half-full, due to the fact that the view of the stage is partially obstructed. The two amber lights are fully visible for a few seconds. Then it looks like they drop their keys inside their shirts. They stand there for about a minute, before they begin moving closer to the edge of the balcony.

  I zoom in as much as possible, but between the kids jumping around and the fact that the couple is moving, I can’t tell much aside from the fact that it appears to be a man and a woman. They push through the sea of screaming girls, thoroughly pissing off one tween who whacks at the man with a magazine she’s holding. He ignores her and moves on, but the woman—tall and very pretty, with vivid auburn hair—turns around and lunges at the girl, teeth bared. The girl, who looks stunned, cowers back toward the group she’s with. For a second, the woman holds the snarl, then she laughs and joins the man. The couple moves out of my sight for a moment, and then the man turns back and I get a clear look at his face.

  The first thing that strikes me is that this very easily could be Saul Rand, based on Kate’s description in the diary, on the stylized paintings of his Brother Cyrus alter ego that I found online, and on the one brief glimpse I got of him in Katherine’s video diaries. He’s tall and thin, with dark hair, light eyes, and pale skin. The second thing that strikes me is the scar running down his right cheek. None of my sources mentioned that. Nor did they mention his right eye, which doesn’t look entirely natural. The pupil widens all the way, completely covering his iris and part of the white as well, as he scans the auditorium.

  He turns to the woman and whispers something to her. She laughs. Then he reaches into his jacket and whips out a pistol that looks quite a bit like the one in the desk downstairs.

  ∞27∞

  TYSON

  CHRONOS HQ

  WASHINGTON, EC

  NOVEMBER 8, 2304 (AGAIN)

  I curl up on my side, wishing the headache would go away. The concussion was bad enough. CHRONOS med patched that up in fairly quick order, but this? They don’t have a cure for this. The only thing is to get through it. Angelo said it would take a day or two, but that was probably only a guess on his part. Double memories are bad enough. But, like Angelo said before, a triple memory will lay you out flat.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  The only good thing about the entire situation is that I was here at HQ when the triple memory hit. I’m not sure I could have jumped back otherwise. It’s still hard to sit up without feeling like I’m going to hurl.

  A voice on the other side of the room says, “You alive?”

  “Yeah. Not particularly happy about it, though. What about you?”

  Timothy Winslow chuckles softly. “I’m doing okay, actually. It’s just one little bit of overlap for me. It kind of tickles the front of my brain if I think about it too long, and not in a good way, but I’ve had worse. Never had a triple memory, though. That takes some doing.”

  I’m tempted to tell him that it really didn’t take much doing on my part. Just him going back to 1965 to deliver an anonymous tip. But I’m not sure how much Angelo has told him about the time shift or even how much the rest of CHRONOS will know when all of this is over, so I just say, “You got that right.”

  When I showed up in the jump room last night—or technically, tomorrow night—covered in blood, Angelo checked the anomalies list and discovered that most of the events surrounding the Selma march were back on track. There were some disturbing ripple effects, however. Viola Liuzzo was killed the next night, exactly the way it happened before, except some other member of Klavern 13 was in the car, instead of FBI informant Tommy Rowe. The young man who was in the car with Liuzzo described their attackers to the police, but it was the word of a nineteen-year-old black man who had been in the company of a white woman who was now dead, so the cops weren’t inclined to take his word. They even tried to pin it on him, but the charges didn’t stick. Without the testimony of a white witness to back him up, the case was pushed under the rug. The Voting Rights Act was eventually passed, but it took longer. And the HUAC hearings never really got off the ground.

  I told Angelo that I’d go back and take care of the problem, but the med tech said I’d need at least twenty-four hours before she’d clear me to jump. So Angelo reluctantly called Timothy in. He was sent back to Montgomery with an anonymous tip about some Klansmen he’d overheard talking in a bar, who planned to kill Mrs. Liuzzo. To back up his claim, he mailed the FBI and the New York Times a cassette tape, fairly new technology at the time, containing a heavily edited audio version of the recording I made in the bar when Shelton and the other Klansmen were talking about stirring up some trouble. While I really don’t think the Liuzzo killing was premeditated, there are plenty of other things those men have done without any repercussions, so I don’t feel too bad about them facing a false charge.

  The timeline didn’t shift back entirely, but then we never really expected it would. It took a lot to shove the timeline off its track. It will likely take just as much to shove it back into place. As best we can tell, there’s only one change to the original timeline . . . Dynamite Bob Chambliss spends eleven years longer in prison than he did before. No clue why, but having him behind bars could only be an improvement. And we’re now back to Scoggin and Jones spending a year in jail along with Robert Shelton.

  The unexpected, but definitely not unwelcome wrinkle was that it also halted the murder of Dr. King at the event at Antioch. That’s why I’m in the isolation tank recovering from the triple memory that hit me like a truck just as Timothy returned. Because Dr. King wasn’t killed, there were no observers wearing CHRONOS keys. No one tumbled from the roof screaming. I never tackled Antoinette Robinson to the ground, so she was never in contact with my key. In the new version of events, when I spoke to her outside the drugstore, she looked healthy and happy. Her smile lit up her entire face, just like the first time.

  In some sense, the new memory is very similar to the story she told me about graduation day, and it does solve the mystery of how I helped the Robinson family with their car. I wasn’t the only one helping, and it didn’t require any knowledge at all about automobiles, just strong legs. Six of us pushed the car so that her father could pop the clutch and start it. I was, however, the only one unlucky enough to slip as the car cranked, landing square on my ass in a patch of mud. So I’d been standing there, mud splattered, when her dad pulled back around to thank us. Her little sister had laughed, and Toni had elbowed her, then flashed me a sympathetic smil
e as they drove away.

  These memories joust in my head, each trying to knock out the other two. But as uncomfortable as that may be, I’m glad I’m battling them and not Toni. Everyone around her must have thought she was crazy. At least I know what’s happening.

  “Is that all of the story I’m going to get?” Timothy asks. “No humorous tales of how you screwed up so bad that you’re juggling three memories?”

  “There’s nothing at all humorous about any of this. Just take my word that Angelo has the situation marked need to know for a reason.”

  He’s quiet for a moment, which is a bit unusual for Timothy. “I’m getting the sense that this wasn’t entirely a screwup on your part. Angelo was off in the corner talking to Aaron when I got back, and both of them looked like—”

  I roll over so that I can look at him. “Tim. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.”

  He smiles and waves me off. “Nah, that’s okay. You know me. Evelyn says I’m too damn curious for my own good.”

  I think Evelyn is right, but it’s impossible to be annoyed at him for long. Katherine’s comment about Saul being like an overgrown pup is actually a much better description of Timothy Winslow.

  “Hey, curiosity isn’t always a bad thing,” I say. “If you want to know more, though, you’ll have to take it up with Angelo. He knows everything I do.”

  That’s mostly true. I told Angelo the full story about Madi after the med tech finished patching up my head. While I may end up regretting that, I didn’t see any other option. There was no way he’d have believed I just came up with the information about something hitching a ride on our chronotron pulse. I don’t think there’s a single historian at CHRONOS who has more than a rudimentary understanding of how the technology works. That’s partly because we’re customized for our work in the field, but I suspect it’s also to avoid anyone becoming too curious about the safety protocols, whether they might be tweakable, and so forth.

  I didn’t tell him about Toni, though. In retrospect, that’s a good thing, since it resolved on its own, although I know it’s a bit hypocritical to trust Angelo on the other issues and not trust him about her double memories. The difference is that he has a vested interest in protecting CHRONOS. I also suspected that he could do some checking to find out whether Madi was telling the truth. Turns out he didn’t even have to check. He already knew that the history of CHRONOS had changed slightly prior to the time shift. It was nothing that caused a major rift in the timeline, however. They sold the technology a few decades earlier, but the government decided it was too risky to use, and they shelved the project. There’s a picture of the three founders of AJG Research, and even though Madi and the temporal physicist both look a little older than they did in the vid, it’s definitely them.