by Jean Rabe
A shower of flares explodes over our heads. They fall to earth like wounded angels.
Blake stares at me. In his eyes, I swear I see a sea of swaying poppies, exactly like the flowers that will one day cover these fields of Flanders. “And you?” he asks.
I lean closer, to be better heard. “I came here to save a man.” Then I toss my head back and laugh like an ass. “And it turns out to be me.”
I show Blake my broken homing device. “I can’t return. And tomorrow’s the most devastating battle of this war. Time is literally running out. I don’t want to die.” I can hear the tremor in my voice. “I came here to right a wrong, but now all I want to do is save my own skin. It’s futile trying to change history. You can’t. No matter if your intentions are good or bad. And I’m only now realizing this. I’m alone to suffer my fate like all the other men here.”
Blake reaches into his trench coat again. He shoves a photo of a young woman into my hands. “She’s a looker, isn’t she? Nice legs, too. That Mrs. Blake knows how to ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross.”
I smile, but it’s a little forced.
Blake shoves me. “Ah, come on, where’s your sense of humor? Jesus and Mary, you’re making me weep with your drama.”
He furrows his brow, which makes him look exactly like his painting of Nebuchadnezzar.
Rain. Mud. The coils of barbed wire slick. Each barb the cold bite of reality stretched out inside of me.
Dawn is approaching. The stand to order came hours ago in the fug of night. Not that day is any clearer. It’s just less ambiguous. Stark reality glares all around us even without the sun. The dead bodies. The craters. The bloating mules. The endless barbed wire. The screaming and crying of wounded and dying men.
I can’t believe I let Blake talk me into this. Maybe he is as mad as history makes him out to be. But what other choice did I have?
The Timeshares homing device is dead. And Blake says he doesn’t have one.
My mouth goes dry. But it’s not the cottonmouth I experienced time traveling to the trenches. This is produced by fear.
Blake chants at my side. “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
“Is that a passage from the Bible?” asks an ashen-faced young Tommy.
“Shut it,” commands the sergeant.
The long line of soldiers becomes deathly silent.
My heart feels like it’s an hourglass sifting my life away.
The major’s whistle shrieks. “Charge,” he screams, leading the way.
Over the top I go with the rest of the battalion.
The rattle of machine guns. Blood. Screams. A severed leg. A madman cackling in a crater.
And I’m running and flinging poppy seeds like Blake instructed, like he saw in his vision. I don’t even remove my revolver. Just toss the seeds among all the carnage, expecting a bullet in the skull at any moment.
A blinding flash. A loud bang.
Someone’s shaking me.
“Hey buddy, you okay?”
The smoke clears. I’m sitting on a highly polished sanitized floor. The clicks and zips and metallic beeps of computers bombard me.
“Did you have a blast or what?” asks the young tech, his bright, white-gold tooth shining like a piece of shrapnel in his mouth. “Shit, you did, didn’t you?”
By Our Actions
Michael A. Stackpole
Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning writer, screenwriter, podcaster, game and computer game designer, and graphic novelist. His most recent novel, At the Queen’s Command, is the first in his Crown Colonies series. He lives in Arizona and, in his spare time, enjoys indoor soccer and dancing. The idea for this story came to him after too much research and too little sleep. His Web site is www.stormwolf.com.
The Timeshares helicopter thundered around the mountain. This has to be bad. The mantislike air-ship unsteadily lowered itself into the meadow. The pine trees downslope of the cabin hid it, but the fluttering roar of the copter’s rotors echoed from the mountains. Men shouted below and he caught the flash of the first of Jacobsen’s phalanx coming up the crooked path.
Logically he should have put the ax down and readied himself to greet his old employer’s envoy, but he couldn’t. Jacobsen had violated the promise to leave him in peace. Doesn’t matter. The answer’s no.
Perry gripped the ax tightly to stop his body’s trembling.
Then Jacobsen himself appeared, still dressed for the heart of the city. Perry’s mouth went dry. It can’t be.
Jacobsen adjusted his tie—college striping, full Windsor knot—and played at brushing a spot of mud from his black suit’s knee. He smiled, making it carry up into his eyes, and made eye contact. He extended his hand several muddy steps shy of level.
“It’s good to see you again, Perry. The mountain air has done you well, old friend.”
Perry stared at the proffered hand as if it was a snake. His own right hand bore the ax. He swung it up, then rested it on his shoulder. “You shouldn’t be here. Please go.”
“Give me five minutes, Perry.” Jacobsen glanced back over his shoulder as his hand drifted down. “On the copter.”
Perry shook his head. “Whatever you need, I can’t do it. Won’t.”
“I need to convince you otherwise.”
“You can’t.”
The white- haired man’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve lost a leper.”
The shakes hit Perry so hard he dropped the ax. “You lost . . . how could you? You promised!”
“Sometimes promises have to be broken.”
“And this one broke time?” Perry closed his eyes, then muttered a prayer. He used the time afforded him in picking up the ax and burying it in the chopping block to get control of himself. He shifted fear into anger, his eyes opening into narrow slits. He spitted Jacobsen with a stare. “How could you have been so stupid?”
Jacobsen turned, starting back down toward the helicopter. “I will brief you en route. We really have no time to waste.”
“Funny to hear that from you.” Back in the early days of Timeshares that had been a running joke. They had all the time in the world since they could go anywhere, do anything. Perry might have laughed out of habit, but Jacobsen’s flat delivery underscored the urgency of the situation.
Perry swung into the copter easily enough—old habits never really die, just lay dormant. The chemical scent of aviation fuel filled his head, adding to his queasiness. The rolling clack of doors closing, the thrumming thunder filling the cabin, all things that reminded him of days he’d hoped to forget.
A bodyguard handed him a helmet and plugged him into the communications system. The helmet selected the executive frequency as Perry strapped in. As if the click of Perry’s restraints had freed the craft from gravity’s grip, the helicopter leaped into the air with a lurch. It left Perry’s stomach on the ground.
Jacobsen, belted onto the bench beside him, passed him a tablet reader. “Everything you need to know is in there.”
Perry shook his head. “Why did you do it?”
Jacobsen’s gaze hardened as he reached over and turned the tablet on, then tapped open an app. A picture appeared. “That is Senator Harrison Smelton, religious conservative from north Texas. He chairs the Senate select committee on scientific research. He came to us and suggested that he was going to hold hearings into exactly what we do at Timeshares.”
“He never should have known about Timeshares.” Perry had been one of the company’s first scouts. It had been made painfully clear to him that time travel wasn’t going to be a Greyhound Bus kind of a vacation. The ultrarich, maybe some research trips, but not common knowledge in the early days. If folks even imagined time travel was possible, every economic boom and bust cycle would be blamed on profiteering by Timeshares customers. Timeshares had created the cover story of a virtual-reality touring package and even provided the same in some franchise operations. Those satellite fac
ilities helped screen for potential high-end customers, but Jacobsen had been dead set against government regulation from the beginning.
“After you left, we had a couple clients dog-bone us.” Jacobsen tugged at his shirt cuffs. “We dealt with most of them, but one of the early ones made a killing selling some artifacts he’d buried and dug up later. He hadn’t gone for significant stuff, just did a time capsule with some rare baseball cards, comics, that sort of stuff. Smelton courted him for campaign contributions. They became chummy and, one night over cigars and a bottle of scotch that had also been in this guy’s trove—stuff that went missing during Prohibition, nice planning on his part—he confessed. Then I got a call.”
Perry flicked his finger across the tablet’s screen. The picture went from one of the senator alone, to his standing with a young man, early twenties, in front of the Timetank. Flick. A third included their guide.
He looked up. “The Senator extorts a family trip to Jerusalem, 28 A.D.? April, around Passover?”
Jacobsen pointed at the third picture. “We followed your playbook. We sent a guide. They were all three done up as lepers so no one would get near them. This was strictly a holo-safari.”
“That wasn’t what I recommended. That wasn’t what you agreed to.” Perry shook his head. “Some events are just too hot. People feel compelled to interfere, to interact. What did the senator do?”
“He didn’t do anything.” Jacobsen sighed, a wall of static onto the com channel. “He got hurt, attacked. His guide, too. They hit their panic buttons, heading back. The son, Kevin, is gone.”
Something isn’t right. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“It’s delicate.”
“You came for me. It’s way past delicate.” Perry searched the man’s face for a flicker of humanity, but found none. “Oh, shit. You didn’t do a psych vetting on the kid, did you?”
Jacobsen shook his head. “Kevin is a schizophrenic. The boy thinks, among other things, that he’s possessed. His father was taking him back to get Jesus to heal him. To cast out a demon. Two days without meds, figured out where he was, he freaked out, attacked his father and the guide. “We think he hurt Jesus. Maybe even killed him.”
“Not possible. I’ve been back. I saw . . .” Perry blinked. “So the Kaku Theory of Temporal Elasticity isn’t holding up?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
The Kaku Theory suggested that the arrow of time had a lot of momentum moving into the future. To disrupt its trajectory would take a vast amount of energy. Even if a change were made, Kaku had postulated that a divergent history could change enough that time travel wasn’t discovered; thereby canceling out the change that spawned that timeline in the first place. It was the old science fiction trope of the grandfather paradox all dressed up with a bunch of string theory and arcane math into a suggestion that no one needed to worry about a bug being killed or anything else weird happening on timetrips.
“We’re getting changes in the timetraps. They’re slowly building up.” Jacobsen sighed again. “We need you to fix things.”
“You have other Stopwatches who speak Aramaic, Greek, and Latin.”
“But nobody like you.” Jacobsen punched the tablet’s screen and an accounting sheet appeared. “I pay your bills, so I know what you buy, what you study. You’ve steeped yourself in this stuff, all this biblical history. You know what’s going on then, and not just because you’ve been there. You’re the only one who can fix it.”
“You have the wrong man.” Perry handed Jacobsen his tablet, his hands shaking. “I can’t go back there.”
“Perry, you’re the only man. Truly.”
“I can’t be.”
Jacobsen’s face drained of color. “We’ve tried sending others back. They can’t make it. Closest we’ve gotten is 67 A.D. Damascus. Because you were in Jerusalem, because you’ve seen what happens, the events are a reality for you. You have access to a little bubble of time that is fast collapsing, or so our advance research department thinks.”
Perry shook his head. “It’s against all the rules for me to go back. If I see my future self, I’ll know I live, and that will change history. I’ll make things worse.”
Jacobsen snorted. “Do you honestly think that you then would recognize you now? The weight you’ve lost? The beard?”
The haunted look around my eyes?
Perry sat very still, the copter’s vibrations the only cause of his movement. That trip to Jerusalem hadn’t been his last scouting run, but almost. Prior to it, he’d been the guy who liked to go where the action was. Thermopylae, Tutenborg Forest, Gettysburg, Hue, Stalingrad, and the Horns of Hattin—if there was a war going on, he jumped to the head of the line. It wasn’t that he’d taken great delight in war, but he just understood it as a living creature, watching armies crawl over landscapes, devouring each other. It was a whole different level of seeing things, with technology over the years just making the battlefields bigger and the wounds more hideous.
Perry’s childhood hadn’t involved a lot of church-going or religious instruction. His basic indifference to religion made him a natural for the Easter Run. He accepted the job, more interested in seeing how the Romans worked in the Middle East than anything else. It was just another run.
But after what he saw, it just wasn’t something that could confine itself to a report.
Perry glanced down at his hands. “Father, take this cup away from me.”
“Pardon?”
“The Gospel of Mark, chapter fourteen, verse thirty-six.” Perry shook his head. “I can’t do this.”
“If you don’t, none of us will exist.”
“No more lepers.”
Jacobsen nodded. “I swear to God.”
“Playing the blasphemy card right now, not a good choice.”
“You’ll have everything you need.” The gray pallor of Jacobsen’s face began to warm. “Just ask.”
“What I need is for you to be quiet.” Perry brought his hands together. “And I need a chance to pray.”
Perry timed-in outside Jerusalem and immediately went to his knees. Timeshares was pretty good of dropping people in on schedule, but actual physical locations were dodgy. He’d been aiming for olive groves outside of Jerusalem. They dropped him north of the Damascus gate, on Golgatha.
He knelt there, burying his face against his knees. His stomach twisted in on itself. The scents, the dust, animal dung, hints of smoke, and the stench of human habitation. Even the stink of death because, in the Roman fashion, a couple of bandits had been crucified nearby and left to rot.
On the road to Damascus, so all can see Roman justice.
They had dropped him where it had ended. He squeezed his eyes shut against tears and against remembering. His fists tightened. Two days hence, a man would hang on a cross until he died and, by that act, he would shape the history of mankind.
And I have to make sure it happens.
He struggled to his feet, wrapping his linen sheet around himself more tightly. Timeshare’s experts had suggested he travel back as a centurion. It would allow him to be armed. The implication that he might have to kill a senator’s dangerously psychotic son was not lost upon him. Dicey prospect, but Jacobsen signed off on it.
Then he probably sold options to short his own stock in case I do.
Perry staggered his way down the hill, growing stronger with each step. He remembered clearly where he’d been on his previous journey, and there would be no crossing of paths. Jacobsen had been right, however. The old Perry wouldn’t have recognized the new Perry. Moreover, had he seen him, the old Perry would have viewed him with contempt. The way he walked, the look in his eyes. It wasn’t what Perry ever would have imagined for himself.
The previous Perry likely could have guessed there were four gospels. The new Perry had committed them to memory, and had learned to read them in the original and all translations. He’d started that study as a way to deny what he had seen. He wanted to find room to doubt. He’d
grasped at the fact that there were no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus’ life. Josephus was writing at least forty years after the Crucifixion. The Gospels were written yet later, and no eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ ministry had been discovered. Some scholars went so far as to suggest that Jesus was a fiction picked up by Paul and transformed into something that took on a grand life of its own.
The Roman soldiers at the gate didn’t give him a passing glance. He joined the stream of straggling pilgrims come to Jerusalem for Passover. They had no clue as to how close they were to history being made, their empire being swept away—and had he tried to warn them, they’d have considered him utterly mad.
They would ignore me as did Jacobsen.
The scent of unwashed human flesh, open sewers, and the occasional rotting dog would have overwhelmed most people from Perry’s time. Tourists always had a clean, Hollywood impression—more sound lot than sandlot. On the couple of tours where he’d acted as a guide, his charges constantly made asides about the horrible scars left behind by diseases that had died out in their time, or the way that in-time people were so small and stiff and prematurely old looking.
As Perry moved through the narrow, twisting streets, he listened for any gossip. He heard nothing about the Nazarean, so he finally asked and was directed south. Everyone remembered the rabbi’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem earlier in the week, so pointing out the home where he shared supper with his disciples was simple.
Perry arrived after the sun had set. Part of him wanted to go closer to the building, to listen to Jesus explain what the disciples were to do to celebrate his memory. He would have been interested to see how many of them were confused, and if any shivered with the ominous portent of his instructions. He longed to see Mary Magdelene, to see if she was treated as friend or wife, and to watch her tenderness in caring for Jesus.
He could not, however, do that. It was unlikely that Kevin Smelton would interrupt the Last Supper, but he still had to keep a watch out for him. In fact, Perry was pretty certain where and when Kevin would strike. Biblical accounts of Jesus’ death were fairly exact on details save where he spent the night after being hauled away from the Garden of Gethsemane and questioned. That was the only slip space in the accounts, and Perry had come prepared to stop the young man.
