Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition

by Fiction River

  During the Great Recession, Kris started reading about the history of the modern financial system. She says it scares her. She’s writing something big about it. All kinds of serious-looking books about the Federal Reserve have crept into our house. She tells me about things she’s learned, and I try not to listen. Too scary.

  “September at Wall and Broad” explores an attack in Manhattan’s financial district. Only it’s not the September you’d expect, but one eighty years earlier.

  September at Wall and Broad

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Manhattan

  September 16, 1920

  She didn’t want to go to work this morning. Normally, Philippa couldn’t wait to leave the tiny two-room walkup she shared with five other women. The place smelled of grease and dirt so old that no amount of bleach would get it out. She had tried to clean the flat when she realized she would have to live like everyone else in this godforsaken century. She scrubbed the place until her hands were raw, and made no difference whatsoever.

  Ambition was cold comfort when you shared a mattress with two other women—girls in 1920 parlance—neither of whom had bathed in the last week. The flat had two windows, both of which overlooked the brick building next door. No breezes, no sunlight.

  Not that it mattered. She stayed out of the flat as much as she could, coming back to sleep and change clothes. She probably smelled no better than her companions. The bathroom was down the hall, the bathtub foul, and the toilet an atrocity.

  She’d been counting the days to September 16, not because that was the day she’d been waiting for, but because she’d be able to go home, real home, bathe, sleep in a bed with Egyptian cotton sheets, and turn on the air conditioning, even if she didn’t need it.

  For the first time in her entire career, she missed the middle of the 21st century. She missed it with a mad passion, realizing that with all the rising sea levels, the incredible population growth, the poverty that no one could quite wipe out, the life she led there was one of privilege, even though she associated more with the upper class here than she ever had there.

  Still, she stood at the door of her apartment building, and looked up at the azure sky. A perfect blue, the temperature in the low sixties, promising to be one of those spectacular New York days, the kind that made you wonder why you lived anywhere else. The city, about to enter its ascendancy in American life, glowed under the September sun.

  People were walking outside and gazing upward, some even smiling, probably planning a series of errands that would get them out of the office. Folks who worked outside had smirks of superiority; they got paid to be outside.

  A few people were probably thinking ahead to lunch, planning to splurge at one of the food carts, and maybe even sit on one of the benches lined up along the streets or head to one of the city’s parks, if only for a few minutes. A few snatched minutes that no one would ever get.

  She shuddered. She’d been in Manhattan before on a perfect September day. On one of her first jobs, in fact. She’d stood not far from here and gazed upward at a building that wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s eye this morning, and watched, at 8:46 am, as American Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s north tower.

  The same sort of sunshine. Same kind of optimism in the air.

  Only then that crisis had been more deadly, using weapons not yet dreamed of, hitting a building impossible to build in this time period, while an entire nation watched on a machine that Philo Farnsworth wouldn’t even imagine for another year.

  That day had been hard, but she had been prepared. She had watched the footage, read the accounts, talked to others who had also visited September 11th. And that day had been the final test in her training: could she maintain her composure as people jumped to their deaths to escape flames, as buildings pancaked around her, as first responders who wouldn’t live out the day ran past her to save as many lives as possible?

  She had been, in the words of her instructor, “positively bloodless.” He had meant that as a compliment, and she had taken it that way. “Positively bloodless,” meant she kept her composure, did her job, and got out with a minimum of notification and a minimum of fuss.

  Yes, she had nightmares. Everyone did; it was part of the job. But they weren’t debilitating, and she was able to work through the worst of them with the therapist the department had assigned her.

  She was, in other words, a stellar candidate, the best of her class. A woman who had since completed dozens of difficult assignments.

  A woman who did not want to walk to the corner of Wall and Broad on this beautiful September morning. A woman who did not want to enter the House of Morgan to take her lowly secretary’s desk with its fancy expensive Underwood typewriter, something she had been instructed to be very, very careful with because it was delicate. It wasn’t delicate. The damn thing was a tank and it would take a sledgehammer to destroy it.

  She would wager, if she had anyone to wager with, that the Underwood would survive today’s bombing with nary a scratch.

  She sighed, and stepped into the sea of humanity. Only four hours left, and she needed to make the most of them.

  Washington, D.C.

  March 23, 2057 (supposedly)

  Assistant Attorney General Preston Lane needed a moment to process the information the four people behind him had just presented.

  He pivoted and faced the floor-to-ceiling window of his office in the Time Department’s building. The building was known as the Bubble for a variety of reasons. The first was obvious: its round glass shape looked like a bubble. But the second was because it was protected by time bubble after time bubble after time bubble. “Time bubbles” were the nickname for “time-guards.” In some ways, time bubble was more accurate, in that the bubble froze a time period into place.

  He worked here instead of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice building (which was a nice, but old building) because the Time Division of the Justice Department, like all time-related government departments, had offices here. The Bubble protected all who served.

  The yard outside was in full spring bloom. Cherry trees lined the wall, their blossoms in full pink flower. The green grass, the emerging foliage, all spoke of a fantastic DC spring.

  Which hadn’t quite arrived in DC yet.

  The permanent staff blew smoke up his ass about the yard. It’s enclosed, so it follows its own schedule, the head gardener told him when he’d asked. Think of it like a greenhouse.

  A greenhouse with a manipulated timer. He’d gone into the archives shortly after receiving his assignment and looked. This year’s cherry blossoms mimicked last year’s weather. Last year, the trees had reached full bloom by the end of March, just like they had for the past thirty years. This year, the trees outside the Bubble had returned to their April schedule, the one that had made this city and its cherry trees justly famous.

  Plants didn’t cooperate inside a time bubble. If you wanted plants to bloom and grow, they actually needed care, just like they would in a greenhouse. If you wanted to pretend that they followed the same schedule as the outside world, you didn’t speed up the timeline or import different plants from different time periods. You set the yard’s chronometer to its own schedule, and prayed that it worked like the rest of the world.

  Which it did not. The world was/is/will always be a messy place. For the plants inside the yard, the world had an unbreakable schedule, and theoretically, the entire staff enjoyed that.

  It made his skin crawl. All of this did. The deeper he got into his assignment, the more unhappy he became.

  Especially with the Wall Street case.

  Before he got appointed to the Time Division, someone on staff had noticed that Manhattan’s financial district had been time-guarded from mid-August to mid-September 1920. Time-guards in the United States needed approval from the Time Department. The Secretary of Time had claimed she knew nothing of this, and indeed, there were no records of who or what had installed that bubble.

/>   Plus, the bubble did not conform to government regulations.

  Government-formed time bubbles existed throughout the United State’s history, and they also existed now. The White House had its own time bubble, as did Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Pentagon. All of the buildings housing the Cabinet had them as well. Not every place could be protected—if someone could easily get to a United States Representative, for example, because the country did not have enough money to protect district offices. The money instead went to time-guarding polling places on each and every election day in the country, no matter how small the election.

  Lane did not have the ability to reset time. Officially, no one did. But he suspected someone held that power unofficially, and that someone or those someones existed in the very government he served.

  But the answer to that question was above his pay grade.

  What happened to Philippa D’Arco, however, was not.

  Lane took a deep breath. He’d go out into the yard and walk among the cherry blossoms if he weren’t allergic to the damn things. Because he needed to move.

  But he couldn’t, because he had to finish this meeting. He turned his back on the windows. Wilhelmina Rutger and her three assistants still stood behind him, ignoring the comfortable chairs and the hollow tables that allowed for some selected time viewing.

  His wife would be furious. He was supposed to accompany her on some important dinner for her hedge-fund business. She had probably given up on him anyway. She didn’t understand the government’s mandate: anyone who worked in the Bubble had to take a second oath, vowing to never ever use time travel for personal gain. Even if that gain was keeping peace in a marriage already on the rocks.

  He forced his attention back to the problem at hand—not his problem, but the division’s problem. They were related, after all.

  “Okay, let me see if I get this straight.” He had started so many conversations like this in the six months since his appointment. Time travel’s complexities made his brain hurt. “D’Arco had ten windows for return and missed all of them, which is, apparently, unlike her. She’s also the first investigator we’ve sent to the September 16th bombing who failed to return.”

  “Yes.” Wilhelmina was petite and blond, with a friendly face completely at odds with her take-no-prisoners personality. “Philippa’s body didn’t return either, which is our failsafe.”

  Wilhelmina peered at him, as if she were testing whether or not he actually knew that. He wasn’t sure he did. He tried not to look even more creeped out. He hated the way that people just vanished when they stepped into the time chamber, even if the vanishing was only for a moment or two. He didn’t want to think about how he’d feel if they came back a few seconds later as a corpse.

  “In other words this is extremely unusual.” Lane sighed again, and swept his hand at the chairs. “Let’s sit.”

  They did. He frowned at the assistants, having no idea who they were. Wilhelmina always seemed to bring a different set of assistants to every meeting. Lane wasn’t sure if that was because she couldn’t keep assistants or if her assistants swapped out due to those time complexities.

  “Philippa is the first woman we’ve sent to the Wall Street bombing,” Wilhelmina said. “Our previous investigators were all men. The first one arrived just after the time bubble burst, 12:01 pm on September 16, 1920, one minute after the bomb went off. He couldn’t even get into the bomb site at Wall and Broad. We tried to have our second investigator arrive at 12:02 pm, and he couldn’t do that. He could travel outside the time bubble around the financial district, but he couldn’t time-travel inside it within hours of that explosion. We sent our third investigator to Manhattan one month before the explosion with the idea that he would get a job that would allow him to investigate the entire area, and see if the historical record is missing something that we should know.”

  Lane remembered now. “That last guy is the reason we ended up sending Philippa.”

  “Yes.” Wilhelmina smiled, even though the smile did not go to her eyes. The smile said, We’ve had this conversation and you should remember it. All of it. I hate repeating myself. Sir.

  He did remember the conversation now. He had asked her, Why weren’t we aware of the rigid class structure in New York at that time?

  It’s not class structure that we’re running into per se, sir, Wilhelmina had told him. It’s nepotism. To get hired in the House of Morgan, you need to have some kind of relationship with someone who does work there. And in 1920, we’re at the height of the corruption that became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal. Everyone inside the New York Police Department who could hire our man won’t now, because he has no ties to Tammany Hall. We—

  He’d cut her off. He had no idea what Teapot Dome was, and didn’t want to find out. The same with Tammany Hall. He had some historical expertise, but it wasn’t New York in the 1920s. When he accepted the President’s appointment as Head of the Time Division in the Attorney General’s Office, Lane had hoped to use this job to deal with interesting things, like people traveling back in time to murder someone else’s grandmother who just happened to be a federal judge or something.

  Instead, he was dealing with protected time periods that hadn’t been protected by the proper authorities, and hints and allegations of alleged time abuse. Half his staff was somewhen else at the moment, investigating, prodding, poking, seeing there was a case. Or, as his boss, the Attorney General, liked to say when he brought potential cases to her, the staff was seeing if this was something that would “benefit us in the next election, or is it something that we can leave on the scrapheap of history for the next administration?”

  Maybe he should quit, before the cynicism took him out of the game entirely.

  “Sir?” Wilhelmina asked.

  He’d checked out again. He wondered if he could pretend it was because he didn’t understand the time paradoxes.

  “No one looked at young women in that period,” Wilhelmina said through gritted teeth. She was clearly repeating herself. “If they had jobs, they were clearly from the wrong class and being women, they were considered stupid.”

  He had no idea how anyone could find women stupid. There had to have been women like Wilhelmina in that day and age. How had anyone believed they were inferior?

  “Philippa is one of our best operatives,” Wilhelmina said. “She studied the bombing for three months before we sent her back. She’s spent a month In Time.”

  Lane hated that phrase. It came from In Country, military slang for foreign territory, particularly a war zone. But its use here often confused him, because the rest of the world always wanted him to do things “in time” as well, and it meant something completely different. Like “just in the nick of time,” which was the only way he’d make that dinner date now.

  “Philippa couldn’t have been killed in the bombing. She knew where she should stand, what she should do, where the most victims were, the greatest danger. She knew it all. She also knew she could return to us at 12:01, and give us her information. She would have come back, sir. I know it.”

  Wilhelmina’s voice shook as she said that last, not with anger, but with sorrow. Or was it fear? Either way, he’d never heard those two emotions in her voice. Now she had his full attention.

  “So what do you want to do?” he asked.

  Wilhelmina was authorized to do a lot on her own. The fact that she had come here, with a request that she hadn’t yet articulated, meant something was very different.

  “I want to send in an investigator, sir,” Wilhelmina said.

  He frowned. “We already sent in three, not counting Philippa. At a certain point, we have to decide that we have done what we can on this investigation. We only have so many resources.”

  “We don’t leave people in the field,” one of the men snapped. Everyone looked at him. He paled. “Sir. Sorry, sir. I mean, after all. She could be in trouble.”

  Could have been in trouble, Lane mentally corrected. But he didn’t say
it. He continued to address his questions to Wilhelmina. “Do we have information on her after September 16?”

  “In a cursory search of the historical record, her alias, which is Philippa Darcy, does not show up. But it doesn’t mean anything. Thirty-eight people died that day, and 143 were seriously wounded. But that was according to the statistics released long after the fact. No one put up flyers or tracked everyone who had been on the street that day. Even if they had the resources, they didn’t have the will. The newspaper reports, for godssake, only listed names and address of the lower-class victims, and that was only if they got identified. The authorities didn’t even know for certain if the body parts they found matched up to the—”

  “I’m aware of the vagaries of the pre-technological age of investigation,” Lane said. “I’m asking if Philippa Darcy married or showed up in the public records. Maybe she had done her best to leave a message…?”

  The investigators were supposed to send their recall device back if, for some odd reason, they decided to stay in the past. Only a handful of people had ever stayed, and all of those had traveled back just a few years, not more than a century.

  “No message, sir,” Wilhelmina said. “We checked. But Philippa is in the payroll roster in the House of Morgan for the week before. There is no payroll roster for the week of the 16th, and she isn’t on it the following week.”

  Lane placed his hands on his knees and slid back. “Clearly there’s a problem with the time-guard around that time period. What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, so I don’t think sending another investigator into that time-guarded period is the best answer. I think you’ll need to come up with a new plan to figure out how this bubble got placed, and who placed it.”

  One of her assistants slumped, but Wilhelmina’s back straightened.

  “I’m not asking for someone new to investigate the bombing or that time-guard, sir,” she said in a how-dumb-are-you voice. “I’m asking to send an investigator to locate Philippa. I have to believe that she knows something, that she discovered something, and that someone is preventing her return. None of our failsafes have worked, and at least one of them should have. We should have some knowledge of what happened to her, and we have none.”