I returned to Elizabeth, sat down beneath a tree, leaned against it. Though it seemed that I closed my eyes for only a moment, when I opened them, the woods were suffused with a sickly gray light, and somewhere a bird was cawing.
Before me stood a stranger.
He was dressed in rather dusty and shabby dark clothes and carried an antiquated but effective-looking short rifle. The muzzle, which was pointed at my midriff, looked wide enough to accommodate a banana. By his right hip hung an equally antiquated revolver in a holster, by his left, a wooden canteen on a strap. His black slouch hat had seen better days. The shadow of its brim smudged the details of his face above his whiskery chin and solemn mouth.
I raised my hands and showed him my palms.
He gestured with the rifle in the general direction of the burned area and asked, in a low, soft drawl, “You looked at all that?”
I found my voice, but it was barely more than a hoarse whisper. “Y-yes.”
“What do you think?”
“It – it’s horrible.”
The stranger tilted his head back slightly, and something like a smile distorted the solemn mouth. “Oh, I don’t know. Those’re the first Yankees I’ve seen in a while that are cooked just the way I like ’em.”
I had the distinct sensation of icy fingers stroking my shoulder blades.
“Not much like the videos at all,” he said, “now, is it?”
“You’re from up the way!”
“You folks ain’t from around here, either.” The “ain’t” sounded like an affectation. “I could tell that even without seeing your trails. You’re anachronistic at worst,” and he shot a look at Elizabeth, “and inappropriate at best.”
Elizabeth was still asleep, with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped protectively around her head. I knelt beside her and shook her gently. She gave a grunt and a heave, and that was all.
I shook her again and got a petulant moan out of her this time. She rolled onto her back, ran her parched tongue over her cracked, blackened lips, peered out from under the arch of her elbow.
“Company,” I said, nodding in the stranger’s direction.
She blinked, not understanding. I helped her into a sitting position, and then she noticed him. They studied each other for several seconds.
“Another time-traveler,” I told her. Elizabeth looked relieved. I didn’t know how to set her straight.
“Judging from your clothes,” he said, “or what’s left of ’em, I’d say you’re just a couple of lost sightseers.” There was offhanded contempt in his voice as he spoke the word “sightseers.”
“I think she’s some kind of reporter—”
“Documentary film-maker!”
“– and I’m from the University of—”
He cut us short with an impatient wave of his rifle. “Where you folks suppose’ to be?”
“The Crystal Palace exposition in London, England,” I said. “Eighteen fifty-one.”
“That so? Then you only missed it by about a dozen years and a couple thousand miles. This is Virginia—”
“Virginia!” Elizabeth and I exclaimed in unison.
“– and it’s the first week of May, eighteen sixty-four.”
He let us gnaw on that all we could stand. After a while, Elizabeth struck her knee with her fist and bawled, “Where the hell is John?”
The stranger made a shushing sound at her with his mouth, a shushing motion with his hand. “My guess is your guide’s trying to sort your trail out from everybody else’s. There’s been a lot of fighting right around here over the last few years, and there’ll be some more for a while to come. There was a big battle over by Chancellorsville just last year. Big or little, past or future, each one of these fights has got its own crowd of spectators. You can just see ’em out of the corner of your eye. Well, I guess you can’t see any of ’em, since you’re just passengers. But when I look, this whole area’s all criss-crossed with – it’s like seeing one of those time-exposed photos of a highway at night. All streaks of light, except that this ain’t just a time-exposed picture. It’s double- and triple-exposed a hundred times over.”
“May we please have some water?”
Elizabeth had cut in just as he obviously was getting going on a subject dear to him. He stopped and glared and seemed to have to shift mental gears.
“We’re very thirsty,” she continued. “We haven’t had anything to drink since yesterday. We’re incredibly hungry, too.”
He stared at her for a moment more, then shifted his rifle to draw the canteen strap up over his head. He handed the canteen to me. I uncorked it and handed it to Elizabeth. “You’re so gallant,” she said as she took it.
“Now don’t gulp,” the stranger warned her.
She took a gulp and began to cough.
“Serves you right,” said the stranger. “Sip.”
She gulped again and coughed again.
Since she patently wasn’t listening to him, he spoke to me. “Can’t give you food. Only got some hardtack and a little salt meat, and it’s got to last me a bit. Just make you thirsty again anyway. But you won’t starve before your guide finds you and takes you home.”
“I’ll be sure to mention your solicitude to the folks back home,” Elizabeth said, dangerously close to sarcasm. I could have strangled her.
“I’ll be obliged if you don’t mention my solicitude or anything else to the folks back home.”
Elizabeth handed the canteen over to me. I raised it to my lips and took a careful sip. The water was warm and strange-tasting. The idea crossed my mind that tadpoles had probably swum in it, perhaps swam in it even now, but I didn’t care, and I swallowed gratefully. Then the idea crossed my mind that burning men may have been extinguished in it as well, and I quickly re-corked the canteen and handed it to its owner. He slipped the canteen’s strap back over his head.
“You’d best lay low here till your guide comes. Last thing anybody wants is dead passengers around here, so you keep your heads down. This is a dangerous place for you. Actually” – there was that smile again – “this is a dangerous place for just about anybody. There’re Yankee soldiers and Confederates scattered every which way in these woods. You’re just off the end of the whole battle line.”
Without further ado, he turned to go.
“Wait!” Elizabeth said. “Can’t we stay with your passengers until our guide gets here?”
“Don’t carry passengers.” He was already walking away.
She called after him plaintively, “Can’t you please take us home?”
He paused, half-turned, touched his hat brim. “Ma’am,” he said, “this is home,” and with that he strode off and was quickly lost to view and to hearing as well.
I suddenly realized that I had been holding my breath for some time. I let the air rush out of me and sagged deflated against a tree.
“Now there,” Elizabeth murmured, “is a truly weird person.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
She looked at me curiously, but I just turned away. My hands and knees were shaking. I didn’t know much about the American Civil War, but I recalled reading or hearing that northern Virginia was some of the most fought-over real estate in North America. Anyone who wanted to be a spectator to the Civil War could do worse than to visit Virginia. Anyone who wanted to live the Civil War, and had the power to reach it, and didn’t burden himself with passengers, could come to this place at this time and stay indefinitely and never run out of opportunities to participate – if not, perhaps, in the crazy hope of changing the outcome, then only, perhaps, with the crazy joy of contributing to the carnage.
I felt those cold fingers brush along my spine again.
“What do you think he meant,” Elizabeth said, “when he said this was home?”
“I think,” I began, and paused to ask myself if I really wanted to go on and tell her I believed he meant that this was a mighty fine place to kill people. The answer was no, so I shrugged and li
ed. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
And we fell silent then, and sat almost together in our thicket, fearful and attentive, she listening to the distant incessant clatter of firearms, and I for any sound that might be the stranger returning. I took no comfort from his assurance that he preferred not to have our corpses discovered in his slaughterhouse. Sociopaths changed their minds, too. When, at length, we did hear the unmistakable crack of wood snapping underfoot, both of us uttered hoarse little cries of fright and spun around – just as John stepped out from behind a tree. He beamed at us and said, in his infuriatingly cheerful way, “Not too much the worse for wear, I trust.”
He was dressed as I had last seen him, in a striped cloth suit and a beaver hat. His hair was immaculately waved and curled, and there didn’t seem to be a speck of dirt anywhere on his person.
Elizabeth squawled at him in the voice cats use when their tails get caught in doors: “Where the hell have you been?”
He looked at her amusedly. “Oh, around. Before that, at the exposition, of course. I think everybody in England must’ve been there.” He fingered his silk cravat, stroked his moustache, looked past her to give me a man-to-man kind of smirk. “Don’t ever let anybody tell you that nineteenth-century gals weren’t lookers, or that they didn’t know how to have a good time.”
“John,” said Elizabeth, “I am riven with nausea at the mere thought.”
He laughed. “I just didn’t know you two’d gotten lost. Not at first, anyway. When we arrived in London,” and he looked very pointedly at me, “you weren’t around,” and he looked as pointedly at Elizabeth, “and she wasn’t around, and I just sort of figured both of you’d run off into the crowd or, ah, somewhere.”
Beside me, Elizabeth groaned in disgust. “Give me a break!”
I took my cue from that and said to him, “We didn’t even know each other before we wound up here. We don’t seem to like each other now that we have gotten acquainted.”
“Pity. She’s really not bad-looking underneath all that dirt, you know.”
Elizabeth went straight at him, spewing curses. Though he would have made two and a half of her, he retreated, stepping surprisingly daintily through the plant debris as she reached for his lapels with her two very dirty hands. She was half-unshod, however, and there were thorns in the mat of plant stuff underfoot, and it was no time at all before her lavish description of his mating habits was cut short by a yelp of pain. She grabbed her foot and hopped backward a couple of steps to sit on a fallen bole.
I asked myself, bitterly and not for the first time in all the long while I had known John, why he had to be the one with the special affinity for my favorite place and period of history. I stepped over to Elizabeth and knelt before her. “Let me see your foot.”
“Oh God, what is this? Sight of blood turn you on or – ow! Damn it!”
I showed her the thorn, then tossed it aside. “John,” I said, “give me your handkerchief.”
I noted with a certain sense of satisfaction that he looked distressed as he drew the handkerchief from his pocket. “This is real silk, Lew. Silk.”
“So it is, John, so it is.”
“Ah, jeeze.”
“God,” Elizabeth murmured as I bound her foot, “for a guy who can’t find his own ass in the woods, you’re such a damn Boy Scout.”
She said it almost tenderly. Very surprised, I looked up at her face. She smiled fleetingly. After a moment’s hesitation, I smiled back. Removing a thorn from someone’s foot is vastly underrated as a bonding experience. I felt like Androcles.
Then her attention swung from me and her foot back to John, and she immediately took on the aspect of Mount Pelée about to blow.
“Hey,” he told her, “give me a break, okay? I did have other people to look after on this little excursion. I am sorry about losing you. But you know how it is. These little slippages happen.”
Mount Pelée exploded. “This little slippage nearly got us killed!”
“But it didn’t actually get you killed. And I did come looking for you as soon as I realized that you really weren’t around. And now I have found you, haven’t I? Well? Haven’t I?”
Elizabeth sullenly yeah-yeahed. I didn’t respond. I was dead tired. All I wanted to do was go home, and he grated on the little I had left that could be grated on. There is no one more smug than somebody who has your signed waiver stashed someplace safe.
A resounding crash of gunfire from downstream made us look around. John’s expression was mildly reproachful. “Boy,” he said, “everybody seems to have got up on the wrong side of bed this morning. But, as I was saying. Sorry it took so long to locate you. You’ve really got no idea how many time-travelers are wandering around this area right now, right at this very minute. Their trails are everywhere. I mean, everywhere. New trails and old ones, too. Who’d think so many people’d want to come watch two armed mobs chase each other around the countryside? Give me the good times, thank you.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said wearily. “The battle’s starting up again.”
He nodded, but he also said, “Where’s your spirit of adventure, Lew?”
“Same place as my sense of humor. Gone.”
“Boy, I guess so. Well, come on, the twenty-first-century express is now boarding.” He stepped closer, gave his spotless gloves a sorrowful look, held out his hands to us. I took one. Elizabeth started to take the other, then held back.
“My hands are dirty,” she told him. “Mustn’t mess up your nice clean gloves.”
She reached out and deliberately wiped her black fingers against the front of his coat.
“Much better,” she declared, and entwined her still-nasty fingers with his.
He sighed. “Lady, you are no lady.”
“Cut the crap,” she said, “and just take us home.”
There was a moment’s lightheadedness, a sensation of blacking out, and then the three of us were floating together through the treetops, unmindful of gravity and spiky branches alike. Now, as we emerged into the open sky, I saw the vast extent of the forest and caught a glimpse of a road below and ahead, and a long swarm of men.
It was only a glimpse, though. Among the trees were many opaque puffs of grayish-white smoke. Rising here and there were columns of darker stuff, some of it shot with red and orange flames. As far as the eye could see, the world lay obscured by a translucent, pungent haze.
Beside me, John said, “I even ran into some visitors from our own future. First time for me. It was some historian with a pack of grad students in tow. Fun bunch they were, too, let me tell you. They got all sniffy when I asked ’em about things up the way. Said it was against the rules. Rules? I said, and the old guy just grinned at me and cackled, There’ll be laws one day, and cops, too. Can you imagine? Cops!”
I remembered the stranger’s smile as he talked of Yankees cooked just right, and I nodded, more to myself than to John. I could imagine cops.
Then, suddenly, we were going.
TIME GYPSY
Ellen Klages
Ellen Klages is an American writer who has published two acclaimed young-adult novels. The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award, the New Mexico Book Award, and the Judy Lopez Memorial Award, and White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book awards. Her short stories have been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, and Campbell Award. Her story, “Basement Magic,” won a Nebula in 2005. She lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things. “Time Gypsy” was first published in 1998, in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel.
Friday, February 10, 1995. 5:00 p.m.
As soon as I walk in the door, my officemate Ted starts in on me. Again. “What do you know about radiation equilibrium?” he asks.
“Nothing. Why?”
“That figures.” He holds up a faded green volume. “I just found this insanely great article by Chandra
sekhar in the ’45 Astrophysical Journal. And get this – when I go to check it out, the librarian tells me I’m the first person to take it off the shelf since 1955. Can you believe that? Nobody reads anymore.” He opens the book again. “Oh, by the way, Chambers was here looking for you.”
I drop my armload of books on my desk with a thud. Dr. Raymond Chambers is the chairman of the Physics department, and a Nobel Prize winner, which even at Berkeley is a very, very big deal. Rumor has it he’s working on some top secret government project that’s a shoe-in for a second trip to Sweden.
“Yeah, he wants to see you in his office, pronto. He said something about Sara Baxter Clarke. She’s that crackpot from the 50s, right? The one who died mysteriously?”
I wince. “That’s her. I did my dissertation on her and her work.” I wish I’d brought another sweater. This one has holes in both elbows. I’d planned a day in the library, not a visit with the head of the department.
Ted looks at me with his mouth open. “Not many chick scientists to choose from, huh? And you got a post-doc here doing that? Crazy world.” He puts his book down and stretches. “Gotta run. I’m a week behind in my lab work. Real science, you know?”
I don’t even react. It’s only a month into the term, and he’s been on my case about one thing or another – being a woman, being a dyke, being close to 30 – from day one. He’s a jerk, but I’ve got other things to worry about. Like Dr. Chambers, and whether I’m about to lose my job because he found out I’m an expert on a crackpot.
Sara Baxter Clarke has been my hero since I was a kid. My pop was an army technician. He worked on radar systems, and we traveled a lot – six months in Reykjavik, then the next six in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Mom always told us we were gypsies, and tried to make it seem like an adventure. But when I was eight, mom and my brother Jeff were killed in a bus accident on Guam. After that it didn’t seem like an adventure any more.
Pop was a lot better with radar than he was with little girls. He couldn’t quite figure me out. I think I had too many variables for him. When I was ten, he bought me dresses and dolls, and couldn’t understand why I wanted a stack of old physics magazines the base library was throwing out. I liked science. It was about the only thing that stayed the same wherever we moved. I told Pop I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, but he said scientists were men, and I’d just get married.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 56
