When she asked Paul if he knew what the difference was, he said, "Yeah. Here they sweeten it with corn syrup. In your alternate, I think they still use real sugar."
"Why don't they here?" Lucy asked. "Is sugar extinct in the wild, too?"
That made him laugh again while he shook his head. "No. Corn syrup's cheaper to use, that's all."
"But it's not as good!" Lucy said.
"That counts, but so does the other," Paul said. "I guess the people who decide what goes into Coke figured they made more money with corn syrup than they lost flavor, and so they kept on putting it in."
Lucy took another sip. This Coke wasn't bad. If you didn't know how it was supposed to taste, you'd think it was fine. She suspected the people in the Triads would think the same way the Coke-makers here did. A little bigger profit margin did count. But so did having something really good, not just good enough. Lucy thought so, anyway.
They rode the bus back toward the apartment Crosstime Traffic had got for her family. It was bigger than the one the Woos had had in Lucy's San Francisco. It had a TV and a computer and a fasarta and all the other things people in the home timeline took for granted. In Lucy's alternate, even the richest German noble couldn't have had most of them.
The apartment wasn't far from the western edge of this San Francisco's Chinatown. Lucy had been there a couple of times. It amazed and fascinated her. It was so much more Chinese than the one she'd grown up in. In her San Francisco, Chinese was a secret language only the Triads and a few other people remembered. Here, people spoke it on the street. There was a Chinese-language newspaper. There was even a Chinese-language TV station in this San Francisco, with most of the shows in Mandarin and some in Cantonese.
Lucy wasn't alone in being of Chinese blood but speaking only English. That came as a relief. But here she found herself wanting to learn some Chinese, too. In her alternate, that hadn't even crossed her mind.
Paul got off the bus with her and walked her to the apartment. He stayed on the sidewalk when she started up the stairs. She turned back to him from about halfway up. "Thanks ... for everything," she said. "I had a terrific time today."
"Good. That's what you're supposed to do," he answered. "I'll see you again before too long." With an awkward little half-wave, he headed back toward the bus stop.
"Yes. You will." Lucy nodded. Except for her family, Paul was the only person she saw here who knew about the alternate where she'd grown up. A whole world, and it was gone forever. Part of her missed it, the part that misses an old house even after you've moved into a better one. Most ways, this was a better world—but it wasn't the one she was used to.
She slid the security cardkey into the lock in the apartment building's front door. A light flashed green. She turned the knob. The door opened. She closed it behind her. The card was just a flat piece of plastic. She wondered how the lock knew it was supposed to go in there.
Electronics, she thought. That meant a lot more here than it did in her alternate. Would she ever catch up with people who were born here and had had all these things their whole lives? She sometimes doubted it. Those were the times she got homesick. That other San Francisco might not have been so much, but she'd belonged there. It was hers. Here, she felt like a stranger, a tourist. But she wasn't going home again.
She didn't have to walk upstairs, the way she would have in her old apartment building. The elevator here was fast and silent as a dream. When she walked down the hall to her apartment, the carpeting muffled her steps. The cardkey that had let her into the building also let her into the apartment. It wouldn't let her into any of the others, though—she'd experimented. How did it know which was which?
Michael was playing a game on the TV screen. Lucy had never imagined such a thing, but her little brother took to it like a duck to water. The game involved killing dragons and the evil wizards who rode on them. Had dragons been real, they would have been extinct by the time Michael got done slaughtering them.
He's the one who'll do best here, Lucy thought suddenly. He has the fewest things to unlearn.
Father sat in a chair with his back to the chaos on the television set. He looked up from the book on his lap and managed a smile for Lucy. "How was your day?"
"It was great. We went to the zoo. It's a lot fancier—it's a lot cleaner—than the one in our San Francisco," she answered. "And the bus went through the Sunset District on the way there and back. It really is a nice place here." She pointed to the book. "What are you reading?"
"Well, it says it's a basic guide to repairing small appliances." Father's face was unhappy. "I'm following about one word in three. I think I need something more basic than basic."
"They've talked about classes for you," Lucy said. 'They aren't born knowing this stuff here. If they can learn it, you can, too."
"Maybe. I hope so. But they've got a forty-year head start on me," her father said.
"It'll be all right," Lucy said stoutly. "Nobody expects you to understand everything all at once."
He looked more unhappy yet. "No, I suppose not. But / expected to. I've been fixing small appliances since I was younger than Michael is. How much more was there for me to know?" His laugh was harsh. "Well, I've found out. I don't want to be useless here, or on charity. I want to earn my keep." He slammed the book shut with a noise like a gunshot. "Right now, I don't know if I ever can. I just don't know."
Behind him, Michael whooped, "Die, villain!" He had no worries. Lucy wished she could say the same.
Ignoring her little brother as best she could, she said, "You'll do it, Father." She meant it—she had confidence in him. "We'll all do it, sooner or later. Things are new here, that's all. We haven't been here very long. We can learn."
"Maybe. I hope so." Her father didn't sound sure. That worried her. But this new San Francisco had to be harder for him to get used to than it was for her, just as it was harder for her than for Michael. He'd had longer to become a part of the San Francisco they'd left behind.
So had Mother, come to that. But she didn't seem to be having too bad a time. She didn't feel the need to know why things worked, the way Father did. She just needed to know how they worked, and she was fine. When Lucy walked into the kitchen to see if she needed a hand, she found her chopping green onions in the food processor and heating something in the microwave. Till she came here, she'd never seen a food processor or a microwave. That didn't mean she couldn't figure out what they were good for.
"Want any help?" Lucy asked her.
"Not me." Her mother shook her head. "I'm doing fine." She paused. "I heard what you and your father were talking about in there. I think you're right. I think we'll all do fine after a while."
The telephone rang. There were telephones in the San Francisco Lucy had left, but there hadn't been one in the Woos' apartment there. In this San Francisco, phones were everywhere, either in buildings or carried around. Wherever you went, you heard snatches of other people's conversations. Paul carried a telephone. He'd got a couple of calls while they were at the zoo. Lucy wasn't sure she liked that. The phone here rang again. "I'll get it," she said, and dashed off to do just that. "Hello? . . . Oh, Paul. Hello!" Maybe carrying a phone around wasn't so bad after all.
When Sammy Wong told Paul he'd never work for Crosstime Traffic again, Paul had done his best to convince himself it didn't matter. The way his heart thudded when he and his father walked into the Crosstime Traffic San Francisco office said he'd lied to himself. He wanted to go out to the alternates again. He wanted to make a career of it. If he couldn't, if he was stuck in the home timeline . .. That would be pretty hard to take.
His father looked nervous, too, though he tried to hide it. Dad had been going out to the alternates for years. What would he do if his bosses said he couldn't any more?
Paul sighed. When I told Lucy how good the home timeline was, this is the stuff I didn't talk about. But it's here. It's real.
All the security procedures were real, too. They had to show their IDs.
They had to get their retinas and their fingerprints scanned. They went through metal and explosives and biohaz-ard detectors. Terrorists were also real. They liked to strike Crosstime Traffic operations. Why not? The company was big and rich. They'd hit Romania not so long before. They could hit the USA, too.
"Go ahead," a guard said after everything checked out okay. "Your action hearing is set for room 582." He didn't call it a disciplinary hearing, but that was what it was.
A board of three women and two men sat waiting for Paul and his father. The chairwoman said, "These proceedings will be videorecorded for the archives and for further review if needed. Do you understand and agree?" She sounded bored. How many times had she said the same thing?
Dad nodded. Paul said, "Yes."
A man with a white handlebar mustache said, "Summarize the events in San Francisco in alternate 3477 from the time of your arrival there to the time of your departure. Keep your summary focused on the problems you ran into."
"Be brief," the chairwoman added.
Paul and his father looked at each other. Paul said, "The biggest problem we had was that two sets of locals were already much too curious about Curious Notions."
"No," Dad said. "The biggest problem was that we didn't know they were till too late."
"For whatever it may be worth to you, we have had some things to say to the person who operated the shop before you took it over," the chairwoman said.
So Elliott did get in trouble, Paul thought. He couldn't feel too sorry for Elliott. If the other man had warned Dad and him . . . Well, how much would have been different? Some, maybe.
"We still need to know what you did, though, and why," said the man with the white mustache. He was plainly number two on the board. "We need to know how the locals closed down the shop, why you failed to block that, and what you told them while they held you."
"They came in with submachine guns and yelled, 'Hands high!'" Paul's father answered. "The only way I could have blocked that was with a tank."
"We didn't give away the crosstime secret, either, and the Germans and the Tongs were both sniffing after it," Paul added. He didn't say anything about Lucy. But he hadn't given her the secret. She'd figured it out on her own. And besides, she was here in the home timeline. No matter what she knew, she wasn't going to spread it.
"What about your interrogations?" the chairwoman asked.
Dad said, "I told more lies than a software salesman."
"I don't think the Feldgendarmerie ever thought crosstime travel was really and truly possible," Paul said. "They would have asked different questions—they would have asked harder questions—if they had. The Tongs came a lot closer, but they don't have anywhere near the know-how the Germans do."
"The way we escaped will keep the Germans and the Chinese in that alternate from figuring out we came from a different one," his father put in. He was ready to take credit for that even if it hadn't been his idea.
But the chairwoman called him on it: "By the reports I've read, Special Operative Wong had more to do with your escape than you did. Do you disagree?"
Dad looked as if he wanted to. He also looked as if he knew he couldn't get away with it. Reluctantly, he shook his head. Paul said, "No, we don't. It's true."
"All right." The man with the white mustache looked at Paul. "And what have you got to say for yourself about wandering away from the .. . the Palace Hotel?" He had to check a monitor set into the table to get the name right.
Paul's heart sank. If they were going to blame him for that. . . But they had a right to. "What can I say?" he answered harshly. "I blew it. I was going stir-crazy, and I went out, and I got nabbed. Nobody's fault but mine. I was really, really dumb."
He and his father got a few more questions. Then the members of the board put their heads together and muttered among themselves. The chairwoman looked up and said, "Please wait outside for a few minutes."
Dad managed a nod. Paul just walked out. In the hallway, Dad said, "The condemned men ate a hearty meal." Paul turned away. He couldn't stand jokes just then.
He waited what seemed like forever. By his watch, it was sixteen minutes. The door opened. "Please come in," said one of the women on the board.
In they went. The chairwoman looked from Dad to Paul and back again. "You both made mistakes," she said. "Your testimony and the reports of others all show that. But the situation had been developing before you arrived, and you both showed energy and imagination in trying to deal with the emergency. We don't expect you to be perfect. We do expect you to try. We got that from both of you." Her eyes swung to Paul. "We also expect you won't go wandering off again when you're not supposed to. Special Operative Wong seems to believe you won't."
"He does?" Paul knew he squeaked. He couldn't help it. He'd thought Sammy Wong would nail his hide to the wall. "I won't, ma'am. I promise!"
"That should do." The chairwoman gave him and his father a wintry smile. "You are both cleared to resume crosstime duty, you"— that was aimed at Paul—"as your education permits. Any questions? No? Very well, then. That will be all."
Out in the corridor, Dad stuck out his hand. Paul grabbed it and shook it. They both let out identical sighs of relief. Paul took his phone off his belt. He didn't need its memory to punch in the number he wanted. He knew it by heart. "Hello, Lucy? It's me. We're okay—not great, maybe, but okay. . . . Yeah, both of us. And about that movie tonight..."
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Curious Notions ct-2 Page 24
