Curious Notions ct-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "Okay," Paul said. Lucy wondered how many different worlds— alternates, he called them—there were where people said that. Then she wondered how many there were where people didn't. And then she wondered which number was bigger. She had so many questions, so few answers. But now, if everything went right, she'd have the chance to find some of them, anyway. No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than Paul said, "Ask you something?"

  Lucy laughed. "Sure. Go ahead. But I was just thinking about all the questions I want to ask you."

  "About alternates and things?" he asked, and Lucy nodded. He managed a laugh, too, but it sounded self-conscious. "That isn't the kind of thing I was going to ask you."

  "Well, what is?"

  "When we get this mess straightened out—i/we get it straightened out—and you're all settled in the home timeline and everything, you still want to go to that movie with me?"

  "Yes, I would like to," Lucy said seriously. "It will probably take a while for us to get used to how you do things there, and it would be nice to know somebody who already knows his way around." She frowned. That hadn't come out quite the way she wanted it to. It sounded as if his knowing his way around was the only reason she would want to go out with him. She tried again: "It would be nice to be friends with somebody who already knows his way around." There. That was better.

  Paul tipped an imaginary cap. "Happy to play tour guide for you, ma'am. All tips gratefully accepted."

  "You're ridiculous," she said. He bowed sitting down, as if she'd paid him a compliment. One of her nine million questions came to the surface: "What are movies like in the—the home timeline, did you call it?"

  'That's right. But that's one more thing you can forget you ever heard, too, okay?" Paul thought for a little while. "They're mostly dumb, but they're not dumb the same way they are here. Here they're kind of sappy, at least to me. Boy finds out he's really a duke's nephew so he can marry the countess he's in love with, that kind ofthing."

  "Sure," Lucy said. She'd seen at least four movies with plots like that. They were a way to kill a couple of hours. Her whole family could go for eighty-five cents—three quarters, plus a dime for Michael till he turned twelve. That was a pretty good deal.

  "Well, when we make movies, what we mostly do wrong is use too many special effects—too much trick photography, you'd say," Paul told her. "We can do more of those, and fancier ones, than you can here. And sometimes, if we see lots of things blowing up or funny-looking people from other planets or ghosts or werewolves or whatever, we don't care if there's any real story behind them. But what you remember is mostly the spectacular stuff, not the people."

  "People are what matter," Lucy said.

  "They ought to be, anyhow," Paul agreed.

  "How much does it cost to get into a movie in the, uh, home timeline?" she asked.

  "Usually about 800 dollars," he answered. She gave him a nasty look, sure he was pulling her leg. He held up his right hand— he might have been taking an oath. "It really does, so help me. But a dollar there isn't like a dollar here. It isn't even like a penny here. Dollars are teeny-tiny small change. Benjamins start to be real money. A benjamin is a hundred dollars, so a movie costs eight benjamins or so."

  Lucy thought about that. "So one of your benjamins—what you call a hundred dollars—is worth about three cents of our money?"

  "Three cents, a nickel—something like that." Paul sounded as if it didn't matter much. To him, it didn't: "What difference does it make, as long as people have the money they need to buy what they want? And they do, or most of them do. They're better off than people are here."

  She wondered if she ought to believe him. To try to find out, she asked, "Can they afford the things you were selling in Curious Notions?"

  Instead of answering right away, Paul broke out laughing. "Lucy, that stuff is junk in the home timeline. We make it for the export market. We don't use it ourselves. We've got better—lots better—at home. You'll see."

  Lucy had trouble believing that. To her father, what Curious Notions sold was far ahead of the state of the art. The Triads and the Germans felt the same way. Junk? But the way Paul said it make her take him seriously. And if he and Sammy Wong and their people could travel back and forth between worlds, what could they do when they stayed at home? Maybe, before too long, she'd find out.

  The front door opened. In came Wong. He was carrying a great big sack. By the way he handled it, it was bulky but not heavy. When he dumped it on the floor, four tightly rolled sleeping bags spilled out. Lucy caught his eye. He nodded back to her. "Three for your family—and one for your dad, Paul."

  "How do we get him back?" Tension tugged at Paul's voice.

  Sammy Wong grinned. "I think I've got something worked out."

  Not long before, Paul had been wild to go out on the streets of San Francisco. Now he wished he could stay in. Whenever he saw a cop, he wanted to run. He didn't—he knew better—but he wanted to. He and Lucy had to be hotter than a two-benjamin pistol. But as long as he acted as if he belong here, knew where he was going, and knew he had a right to get there, nobody paid much attention to him. Evening twilight helped make him harder to recognize from any distance, too.

  Even though he had the address, he almost walked past Stanley Hsu's jewelry shop. It didn't go out of the way to call attention to itself. He paused with one foot in midair when he spotted the plain door with the right number on it. Then he opened the door and went inside.

  The jeweler was working on something—an earring, Paul thought—behind the counter. He looked up when the bell above the door rang. "Young Mr. Gomes!" he said. "It really is you. I tell you frankly, I had trouble believing it."

  "I'm here." Paul rubbed at his left upper arm. "Where's Dad?" A scrabbling noise came from overhead. "And what's that?"

  Stanley Hsu shrugged. "A repairman on the roof. My landlord warned me he would be there. Not a Feldgendarmerie man, believe me. As for your father . . ." He went into the back room. When he came out, Lawrence Gomes was with him.

  "Good to see you!" Paul exclaimed. A little to his surprise, he found himself meaning it. He and Dad were like cats and dogs a lot of the time. But they were still family. That counted. And, in this dangerous alternate, they were both from the home timeline. That might have counted for more.

  Stanley Hsu studied Paul. "How on earth did you get out of the Feldgendarmerie jail? Do you have any idea how upset the Germans are?"

  "I'll tell you something, Mr. Hsu—I'm not very happy with the Germans, either," Paul said. With luck, the jeweler wouldn't notice that he hadn't answered his questions.

  But Stanley Hsu did. Paul wasn't very surprised. The jeweler didn't miss much. He said, "And is it true that you brought Miss Woo out with you? I gather she is also among the missing from the jail?" Paul's father stirred at that. For a wonder, though, he kept his mouth shut.

  "I don't know where Lucy is." Paul kept his eyes on some carved jade not far from Stanley Hsu. As long as he was looking at something like that, his face was much less likely to give him away in a lie.

  Whether it did turned out not to matter much. Stanley Hsu's smile stopped short of his eyes. "Do you really expect me to believe that?" he asked. "She could not have escaped if you did not. Will you try to tell me anything different?"

  More rattling and scraping from the roof made Paul look up. The jeweler ignored the racket. He was good at ignoring anything that didn't matter to him. That was part of what made him so formidable.

  He went on, "We still have a bargain to finish, too, don't we? Now you and your father are both free of the Germans. That means we have some talking to do, eh? I look forward to asking you a lot of questions."

  Paul believed that. He also knew he could afford to answer none of them—not with the truth, anyway. What had Dad said to the Tongs? For that matter, what had Dad said to the Feldgen-darmerie? Dad was looking back at him, but Paul couldn't tell what his expression meant.

  Dad yawned. So did Stanley Hsu. They
both crumpled to the floor. The jeweler banged his head on the counter as he went down. Paul hoped it wasn't. . . too bad.

  A couple of minutes after that, Sammy Wong walked in the front door. He wore denim overalls and carried a tool chest. Except for the derby perched on his head, he could have been a repairman in the home timeline. 'They out?" he asked.

  "You better believe it." Paul pointed behind the counter.

  "Okay." Sammy Wong went over there and gave Paul's father the antidote for neofentanyl. As Lawrence Gomes grunted and sat up, Wong began breaking into jewelry cases and putting some of the best pieces in the toolchest.

  "Hey!" Paul said. "What are you doing that for?"

  "Let 'em think it's robbery," the man from Crosstime Traffic answered. "Let 'em think the whole thing with Curious Notions was just a setup to rip them off. They'll want to kill us, of course, a millimeter at a time." He sounded much too cheerful about that. "They'll want to kill us, but they won't believe in crosstime travel, any more than they believe in Santa Claus."

  "He's right," Paul's father said as he climbed to his feet. He nodded to Sammy Wong. "Nice scheme. Do we know each other?"

  "I don't think so." Wong gave Paul's father his name and went on stealing jewelry. Paul didn't need long to decide it was a good scheme. The Tongs might decide they'd been conned. That was okay, as far as Crosstime Traffic was concerned. While the Chinese in San Francisco might tear things apart looking for robbers, they wouldn't look for people from a different alternate.

  Sammy Wong straightened. "Have enough?" Paul's father asked. Wong nodded. Dad said, "Cool. Let's get out of here."

  "Second the motion," Paul added.

  "No arguments from me," Wong said. Out the door they went. Paul worried. The police, the Feldgendarmerie, and the Tongs all knew what he and his father looked like. The cops and the Germans just wanted them back. Sammy Wong was right: the Tongs would want them dead.

  The Chinese man from Crosstime Traffic strode along as if he hadn't a care in the world. So did Dad. Paul did his best to imitate them. He'd seen for himself that acting normal helped fool anybody who might be after you. It wasn't easy, though. He kept wanting to run, and to look down at the sidewalk so nobody could get a good look at his face.

  When they turned on to Market Street, Paul let out a sigh of relief. True, Market was the main drag, and had more cops on it than other streets did. But it was also packed with people. As long as Paul didn't do anything to draw policemen's eyes, why should they notice him? He kept telling himself the same thing over and over.

  They didn't. He and his father and Sammy Wong got back to the little house south of Market with no one the wiser. They had one problem solved, maybe even one and a half. Too many still lay ahead.

  "We have to be careful around here," Lucy told Sammy Wong. "We don't want anyone from the shoe factory to see me."

  "No, that wouldn't be so good," Wong agreed. "Okay, you lead the way around it so nobody's likely to spot us." Once they got up on Market Street, he nodded to her again. "Very neat. Very smooth. You know your way around, all right."

  "I'd better," she said. "This is my city, after all." How much longer will it be my city? How different will that other San Francisco be? Is that other San Francisco real? Sometimes, when she was feeling what she'd once thought of as sensible, she had trouble believing it. But nothing that had happened to her lately was even close to sensible. When common sense stopped making sense, you stopped using it, didn't you? That was only . . . sensible.

  She tugged at a wisp of hair that had got loose. She was wearing it pulled back into a ponytail, not falling free on both sides of her face. She had on more makeup than she usually used, too. It made her look older, and not much like the serf she was used to.

  She remembered the not-quite-hidden-enough glances Paul had sent her way before she went out the door. She thought they meant he found the changes interesting. She hoped so.

  Then she stiffened and worried about things that mattered right this minute. Here came a Feldgendarmerie man. People got out of his way, where they wouldn't have for any American. He walked past Lucy and Mr. Wong without even seeing them. Sure as sure, to the Germans all Chinese looked alike.

  The streets around her father's shop had a funny kind of familiarity. When she was little, she'd come here all the time. Since she'd got a job of her own, though, she'd gone there instead. So she mostly remembered what things had looked like a few years before. Some of the shops had new owners now. Some had closed. A few had opened. Things weren't quite right, but she wasn't always sure just how they were wrong. She kept blinking and looking around, trying to figure out what had changed.

  "You're not going in," Sammy Wong reminded her. "Too big a chance they'd recognize you. That's one place they will be watching, to see if you show up."

  "I know," Lucy said. "It's okay. We'll do it just the way you planned."

  "Good." Wong eyed her. "You're a solid kid. Paul was right about that much."

  With a shrug, she answered, "I know what needs doing."

  "I think maybe we both just said the same thing." Wong chuckled. "One thing the Feldgendarmerie won't be looking for is an old guy bringing in a radio to get it fixed." The radio he was carrying really didn't work. Lucy liked that. It showed attention to detail.

  There was the shop. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to. The dragon with the electric-plug tail sprawled across the window. Sammy Wong steered Lucy to the little cafe across the street. The fellow behind the counter was new. She'd never seen him before. Better yet, he'd never seen her before. He didn't know she was Charlie Woo's daughter. She ordered fried rice with pork and sat down where she could keep an eye on her father's shop.

  A man in the cafe seemed to be watching the shop more than he was eating. Maybe she was imagining that. Then again, maybe she wasn't. The man didn't pay any attention to her.

  She knew what Sammy Wong would be doing across the street. He'd wait till he was the only customer—he probably wouldn't have to wait long. Then he'd show her father the TV pictures he'd shot of her. The camera was smaller than her closed fist. The screen was just a little square of plastic with some switches and controls on the back. Nobody in this San Francisco had anything like either one. They'd helped convince her that other Sunset District really was out there . . . somewhere. If they didn't convince her father of the same thing, nothing ever would.

  Mr. Wong came out of the shop as she finished the fried rice.

  He looked down the street, as if towards a friend, and nodded twice. Lucy got up and left the cafe. This was the part that made her nervous. She crossed the street and walked by in front of the shop. She didn't go in. She didn't even look in the window. She just wanted to show Father she really was okay. But if that man in the cafe realized who she was . . . That wouldn't be good at all.

  She came up to Wong. "Everything all right?" she asked quietly.

  He nodded one more time. "They'll be there. Now let's us disappear."

  They didn't go right back to the house south of Market. They made sure nobody was following them first. But Sammy Wong was grinning before very long. So was Lucy. They'd sneaked right under the Germans' noses, and they'd got away with it. How could anything go wrong now?

  Thirteen

  It was after dark. Streetlights near Curious Notions were few and faint. That was true of street lights in most parts of this San Francisco. Cold, clammy fog rolled in off the bay. Paul was nervous even so. If somebody spotted him now, everything could still go horribly wrong.

  And it wasn't just him. His father was there, too, and Lucy, and her folks. Sammy Wong didn't think anybody had followed Lucy's father and mother and little brother to their meeting with him. He was just about sure nobody'd followed them all from the meeting to the now very crowded little house where everyone had stayed.

  Didn't think. Just about sure. When you were talking about most things, those little phrases didn't matter so much. When you were talking about freedom, about getti
ng back to the home timeline . . . Paul wanted to be sure. He couldn't. Knowing he couldn't ate at him.

  "Go on around the corner," Wong said. "I'll be with you in about ten minutes. Then we'll all go back to Curious Notions. And then we'll go."

  He made it sound very easy. Paul hoped it would be. He had trouble believing it. Nothing in this alternate had ever been easy. But then he shook his head. He'd got out of the Feldgendarmerie jail. That had gone as smoothly as anyone could please. This could, too. And from could to would wasn't far. Only ten minutes away, he thought.

  Before they all walked into Louie's, Paul made sure no cops were in there stuffing their faces with burgers and fries. That would complicate things, and things were complicated enough already. But, except for Louie, the place was empty. It wasn't the sort of night that brought customers out in droves.

  The Greek fry cook looked up from a crossword-puzzle magazine when the bell over the door jingled. He did a better double take than any Paul had ever seen on the movies or TV. Those were rehearsed. This one was the real McCoy.

  "You!" Louie said hoarsely. "Both of you! What are you, nuts? You aren't just hot. You glow in the dark." He said something in Greek that sounded as if it glowed in the dark. Then he pointed at the Woos. "I don't know who the Devil you people are, but you've probably got everybody and his brother after you, too."

  Lucy's father gulped and made as if to get out of the hamburger joint in a hurry. Her mom set a hand on his arm. "It's all right. I think it's all right, anyhow," she said. "They wouldn't bring us to anyone who'd sell us out."

  "They've been wrong before," her father pointed out.

  Louie said something else explosive in Greek. "That's for the cops," he added in English. "It goes double for the Feldgen-darmerie."

  The San Francisco police and the German secret police weren't the only ones who wanted Paul and his dad and the Woos. Nobody said anything about that. What Paul's father did say was, "As long as we're here, we might as well have some baklava."