The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  When she reached the table, the slim hand that had let go the glass flared out like a cobra and slashed Curtis across the face.

  “Well,” she said, “you win the bet. What am I supposed to pay you?”

  He’d had these one-sided scenes with women before, and supposedly assumed this was only another, one more girl he had forgotten. He said to her, matter-of-factly, “I’m sure you can find your own way out of here.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I remember now. You warned me. Last time.”

  “I probably warned you you were a fool, too. Either get out of the bar, or I will.”

  “Fifteen years is a long time,” she said. Her eyes were like scorched freckled topaz, and there were white flowers enameled on her crimson nails. “I presume I’ve changed. Even if you haven’t. Oh, but I don’t expect you to recollect me. How could you? I just wanted to see, to understand—”

  Curtis got up. He was moving by her when she caught at his arms. Her face was stark with the genuine terror the anger had been all along, and she said flatly, “Suddenly I’ve worked it out. I do understand. I’ve been afraid for years, and now I know why. You’re dead, Curtis. Or you will be. Tomorrow – soon—”

  She’d started to retreat from him even while she said it, in a dazed, bewildered glide, but of course now he reached out and caught her back. A threat was a threat, and even a woman off an artisan’s vessel could be in Confederation pay.

  “All right,” he said, holding her pinned. I’m interested. Tell me more about my death.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please let go.”

  “I let go when I hear what you have to say. Perhaps.”

  “I don’t, after all, have anything to say.”

  “What a shame. Let me prompt you. You’re dead, Curtis. Or you will be.”

  “We all could be,” she said with an attempt at somber lightness. ‘There’s a war going on out there.”

  “There’s a war going on in here,” he said. “You just started it.”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Not yet.”

  She went on looking at him and he went on holding her. The room was full of piano currents and utter listening silence.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said. “Let me sit down, and I’ll tell you.”

  He nodded, and she slid into the booth, but he kept a grip on her wrist. They sat facing each other, almost holding hands, almost like lovers, ignoring the rest of the room, and he said to her gently, “In case you forget this is a truce zone, you’d better bear it in mind I can break your wrist in two seconds flat.”

  She smiled dismally.

  “I believe you would.”

  “What’s more important, I believe it.”

  She looked at the tabletop between them.

  ‘This is going to be difficult.”

  “Only for you.”

  She said bitterly, “You know, you’re almost funny.”

  “The word ‘funeral’,” he said, “also begins with the word ‘fun’. Think about it.”

  “All right.” Her eyelids tensed like two pale golden wings pasted across her eyes. Then her face smoothed out, relaxed, lost every trace of character. She might have been a doll, and her voice might have been a tape. ‘When I was sixteen, around half my lifetime ago, I was here in Tempi. I was traveling in my grandfather’s ship, the Hawk, before the war really hotted up. We’d come from Sirtis and we were heading for Syracuse. The ship was just a little cargo runner, completely legitimate and authorized up to the hilt. He wasn’t expecting any trouble – the cargo was safe and dull – and he’d brought me along to get me out of military school for a few months. I was so glad to be away, glad to be playing female and adult, and not just guns. He brought me in here, and gave me my first sunburst in a tall narrow glass. About seventeen hundred all the Alert panels started going off. An unscheduled lifeboat had blown into the Parameter. The markings were scalded off, and when they got the casings open, there was only one man in it. There was quite a squall then, because the name of the vessel he claimed to have come from wasn’t down on any of the listings. Besides, he was talking about a tempest out on zero 98, a time gale that cost him his ship, and there was no gale registering anywhere. Even so, he kept insisting there must be other survivors to be pulled in, but no one came, and when they used the sonar to scan, they picked up nothing, just as they weren’t picking up the gale. They questioned the man from the lifeboat until about nineteen hundred, and then they let him come into the Rouelle Etoile, with an official escort. He went over to the bar counter, and then he turned and looked right round the room. There was quite a crowd. My granddaddy was playing Shot over on the baize, and I was sitting exactly where you are now, in my grown-up frock, with one of the young helmsmen off the Hawk. The man who’d come in out of space looked at everyone until he got to me. Then he walked across. He dragged me to my feet and held me by my shoulders, and he swore at me. Jove, my helmsman, landed out at him, and the stranger thunked poor Jove across the head. Granddaddy came running with the official escort, and there was something of a fight. When somebody finally laid the stranger out with one of those chunk ashtrays from the bar, I took stock of my feelings. I was scared, horrified, and very flattered. It was all crazy. But I looked at the crazy stranger on the floor, with blood running through his hair, and he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and, for whatever reason, I was the one he’d singled out. Quite logically, though I didn’t know it at the time, I fell in love with him. And it was you, Day Curtis.” She raised her eyes again, and gazed at him again. “You. Exactly as you are now. And I was sixteen.”

  There was a pause. Curtis appeared bored, and simultaneously very dangerous. When she didn’t continue, he said, “If I let you go on, I imagine you’ll eventually reveal why you’re giving me this time cliché myth.”

  “The nature of time,” she said, as coldly as he. “What do we really know about it? Two thousand streams, and us playing about in them like salmon.”

  “The kind of time paradox you’re doling out is the sort of junk a Parameter is there to invalidate. Assuming it could even happen. You should change your brand of dream pills.”

  “All right, mister,” she said. “Do I go on, or do I get out?”

  He sat and studied her. He said, “You can tell it to the end.”

  “Thank you,” she said icily.

  “It’ll be interesting, seeing you hit the rotten wood and fall right through it.”

  “Damn you,” she said.

  “It takes more than you to do that.”

  She stared at the tabletop again. She said, “They put you – it was you, Curtis – in the Medical Center on the Second Level. Guess what I did?” She glanced at him, and away. “I was sixteen, and I was in love. I went to your room. You were sitting staring out of the port at that blind-black Parameter sky, and your eyes looked just as black... though they’re not black at all, are they? Never mind. You said, ‘What the hell do you want?’ Wasn’t that a tender greeting? I didn’t know what to do, whether to fight you or surrender, or go away, or stay. I stayed. I stayed, Curtis. And gradually you started to tell me. About the time storm, about the number of the Cycle – fifteen years on from where it really was. You told me how I’d be when I was thirty-one, and how I’d walk into the Rouelle in the last hours of this twenty, and I’d see you, and drop my glass on the floor... I had to come in here tonight, to act it out. I didn’t think you’d be here. No. I did think you would. But if you were, it had to be some joke. You’d be in your forties. You’d laugh at me. But you’re not in your forties, and, my God, you’re not laughing. You’re just the way you told me, warned me, you’d be, that night I was sixteen and you told me not to come to Tempi ever again. But I had to. You can see that. Anyway, my ship came through Tempi, I didn’t have any choice this time. I could hardly have avoided it.”

  She stopped, and detached one of the long white cigarettes from the dispenser. She drew on it and the ignition crystal broke, and the end glo
wed a pale, dull rose. The smoke made a design round her words as she said, “Tomorrow you take your ship out and you meet the storm. Your ship dies out there in the Warp Lanes. So do you. It’s just some part of you that’s left wandering there, lost, unaligned. And somehow, I draw you back, to the wrong Cycle, the wrong time, back to that night I was sixteen and I sat here in the Rouelle Etoile. I said, some part of you. Much more than that. You. It had to be because—” She faltered remotely, as if reading from a board abruptly obscured. Then: “I made you come back out of nowhere, and you hated me for it. It was the first intense emotion you’d ever felt for any human being. I think you wanted to kill me more than anything. And I think I’d have let you kill me. My own first really intense emotion, too.”

  “So,” he said, “you got laid to the sound of discordant violins.”

  She smiled tightly. “You should know. Unfortunately, you can’t. It’s my past, your future.”

  “There are two alternatives,” he said. “Either you’re insane, or someone paid you to spook me about the next flight I take. Which is it?”

  “No one paid me.”

  “Which means you were paid. I hope you kept the money. You may need it for medical expenses.”

  “Even if you kill me tonight, which you don’t, I’d still be waiting for you, in my yesterday. Tomorrow you’ll come out of space, and I’ll be there.” She finished the cigarette, and let it die in the glass ashtray. “I don’t think,” she said, “you had any right to come back out of death and time and space and haunt me, and ruin my life. I don’t think you have any right to be here, in my future, and ruin it again. I shouldn’t have tried to find you. But how could I resist?”

  Curtis was no longer touching her, just his eyes, fixed on her, long lids blinking now and then, that was all. The rest of the room hadn’t been able to hear their conversation once it was trapped inside the booth, a low, coldly impassioned murmur of two voices, but mostly her voice, saying what she claimed to be the truth to him, as if it were a poem, the monologue from some play. So the room cast a look at them now and then, but nothing else. The two Shot players had even finished up and left the bar. And the pianist kept the dark blue tides coming and going on the piano keys, and the chandelier snowed its lights.

  “I don’t want you to die,” she said finally.

  “I can make you deliriously happy then,” he said, “because I don’t intend to.”

  “I wish,” she said, “I could show you the proof of what happened. If I could prove it to you – if I could convince you – But I was sixteen, and the proof got lost, snatched and swept away, like everything else.” She met his eyes again, for a long, long time, and then she said, “I don’t think you have a soul anyway. Not this Cycle. I gave you a soul. It grew inside you, like the hate you felt for me, unless it wasn’t hate at all. And in the end, it looked back at me out of your eyes. But your eyes tonight are like the flat disks of sunglasses.”

  He said, “If it meant so much, why didn’t I stay with you?”

  It was the first, and the only admission, that he accepted what she said – not as factual or possible, certainly neither of those – but as a fiction worthy of analysis. But he said it with an edge to his voice that could have skinned an apple.

  She said softly, “You couldn’t or wouldn’t, or weren’t allowed to. Or maybe, if you were some extraordinary kind of ghost, the power to survive in time is limited. Like light-cells. Or an echo. Except—” She put her hands together as if examining some element caught between them. “Next twenty you were gone. They searched. The theory was you’d stolen one of the wheel’s own lifeboats. I suppose one might have been missing. My grandfather said none was. But that was the theory. The wreck you’d come in on had disintegrated under the tests they’d been subjecting it to. They’d been careful, and that surprised them, but it can happen. As I say, you’d vanished without trace. Almost. Almost.” She waited, long enough for seven or eight bars of piano melody to fill the gap between them. At last she said, “You’re not going to ask me what, if anything, you left behind. Are you?”

  The piano shivered like silver leaves, and he was no longer watching her. Two tears, like silken streamers, unraveled from her eyes. They didn’t spoil either her looks or her makeup, and presently they dried and might never have been.

  The glow dawned through the Rouelle’s marble clock that showed one twenty was folding over into another.

  The woman got up. She walked to the bar counter and bought a triple Noira brandy, and took it to the piano, setting the black-gold glass where the Sirtian could reach it. He bowed to her, like the prince he was, and she leaned forward and said something in his ear. He let the waves roll on over the keys while he thought, searching back through the storerooms of his brain to look out what she’d asked for, then, not breaking the rhythm, he tipped the tides of the music over into it. It was one of those old songs the Rouelle Etoile was so adept at conjuring. One of the songs from the celluloid era of twentieth-century Earth. In those same years, in Sirtis, they’d been raising temples of cloudy fire, like blue winter suns. But on the screens of Earth, the black-and-white flickering women, in their high-shouldered dresses that clung to them like snakes, the thin, bruised-eyed men, burning smokily out like the cigarettes in their mouths, had danced and fought and wise-cracked and loved. And all the while the wild pure stars had been waiting, and the Nature of Time, and, two hundred years away another era, of looking back, full circle, amazed, into recognizable eyes and hearts and minds. Everything changes; people, never. No, they never do.

  The woman leaned by the piano, listening to the Sirtian play the song, her head averted from the booth. When the song ended, she turned, and Curtis was gone.

  About five hours later, her own ship pulled off from the wheel. Nothing happened to the ship, she got wherever she was going, and so did the woman who had sat in the bar with Curtis. Afterwards, no one knew her name. The artisan ship’s listing had ten female crew aboard, three female passengers. She could have been any one of those. She became a beautiful strange event, a story that got told around. Because nobody in the bar heard much of the conversation between her and Curtis, guesswork calcified round it, staled it, defused it, and, at length, changed it into just another anecdote, which probably isn’t true.

  What happened with Day Curtis himself, of course, is known pretty precisely.

  At one-oh-seven of the new twenty, he walked along the gantry to the bay where Napoleon lay in her repair webbing like a vast wounded whale. Despite earlier predictions, her crew had got her patched, welded, and in fair shape. Certainly she looked sound enough to take the trip out to 98. Sonic reports were still coming in on that one, and a couple of liners were reportedly adrift, split wide open, and treasure-trove swirling out of them as if from a cornucopia. Some of the little lazy ships were even sneaking out now into Warp; the lions and the jackals would be feeding together.

  Curtis’ crew were eager to be part of the show, and they hadn’t anticipated he would be any different in his reaction. Then Curtis knocked the walkway from under them by canceling the drive order and grounding the ship.

  He didn’t give any reason, but that wasn’t uncommon. Generally the reason for anything he did would have been self-explanatory. Not now, of course.

  If you credit the story of the black-haired woman, obviously you can figure out what the reason may have been. Curtis didn’t credit her, but he did credit she was working on him, and for a larger stake than a fifteen-year-old love affair. Whoever was really behind the scene in the Rouelle had made particular deductions based on Curtis’ presumed psychological patterns. Warned off going back into Warp that twenty, Curtis would, contradictorily, throw himself and his ship into immediate action. Or so somebody might have supposed. And if that was what they had predicted and wanted him to do, there must be some excellent reason also for their desires. Perhaps some very special welcome had been rigged for him, out in the Warp. Or the ship herself might have received some extra-special attention..
. If the girl in the Rouelle had been meant to push him into some type of contrary and precipitate heroism, she had failed. Though not believing her warning, he could act as if he did. Intended to race Napoleon away into space, he could stay put, and watch for what new developments occurred. And for which individuals or which organization was revealed by them.

  Curtis gave his grounding order, and walked back along the gantry.

  He had a crew who respected him totally, and, in most cases, hated him in equal measure. Up until then, their wants and their ambitions had run concurrently with his own. Now they’d been slaving on the tall white hip of Napoleon, in a blaze of sweat, steam and laserburn, and he strolled over from the bar and tolled their hopes of loot and blood, the reward they always needed to have from him in lucre or kind, because he never offered it any other way.

  Half an hour after Curtis walked off the gantry, Napoleon’s Second Officer, a man named Doyeneau, led a ten-minute mutiny. By two-thirty, Napoleon was free of the Parameter and scorching out toward zero 98.

  At two thirty-five, a message was sent back to Curtis at Tempi. He’d made the one immortal mistake of his career, and the message showed it. They were angry enough, that crew of his, to steal his ship, but much too afraid of him to sue for pardon. They would never be back. He must have known he’d lost everything, and when the second message came in, the automatic tracker on sonic, it was only the second most terrible error that twenty.

  An hour out into the Warp, a little storm came up. It was so small it could have passed like the blow of a child’s fist striking the hull. But Doyeneau, already in a kind of panic, panicked himself into an avoidance maneuver Curtis had contrived maybe a hundred times. Doyeneau dove the ship at the eye of the storm, to break the barriers and get through, but there was no eye in this storm, only a center of spurling matter. And when, caught up in that, Doyeneau gave his order to jump the stream, one continuum to another, Napoleon’s patched casing blew, and took out most of the side of the ship.