September 1, 2088 (supposedly)
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Philippa said. She sat on what looked like air, a clear chair that was more comfortable than anything she felt in weeks. “I have to stay here?”
“Not here, exactly,” said the man who had dragged her. His name was Roland Karinki, and he worked for the Time Unit in the Federal Reserve. At the moment, they were in the Manhattan Fed, in a room that literally vanished in the clouds. “You’re free to leave this job, to do whatever you want.”
“But I can’t go home,” she said.
“If by that you mean 2057, no, you cannot. It’s forbidden to you now. But we can use your services here or in the distant past. We have a lot to do.”
She tried not to look panicked. She tried not to be panicked. Her training had warned her that she might get stuck out of her time. It wasn’t supposed to bother her. She was positively bloodless, after all.
But she didn’t feel bloodless.
“I liked 2057,” she said. “No, I loved 2057.”
“I believe you,” Karinki said. “At least you’re not trying to lie to me by saying that you’re leaving behind friends and family. I know Time Division forbids both of those.”
“Not friends,” she said, although if she were being truthful, she had not been encouraged to have good friends.
Which made her wonder about all those girls she’d worked with in the House of Morgan. Had they made it out safely? Were they badly wounded? Would she ever know?
“You’ll like it better here,” Karinki said. “I promise.”
“Promises from a man who grabbed me and tossed me into a room, then took me out of my life. Great. How do I know I can trust you?”
“Because,” he said. “I have orders from your boss. Do you recall Prescott Lane? He left a file for you, which you can view at your leisure.”
She narrowed her gaze. “I know nothing about 2088. You could have faked it.”
“I could have,” Karinki said. “But I didn’t. We didn’t. And we will help you adjust.”
She leaned her head back, and thought for a moment. She was somewhen else. That was what she wanted when she woke up this morning in that wretched two-room flat, with two smelly girls beside her on a flea-ridden mattress. And she had a hunch the food would be better than it had been in 1920. The attitudes would be better as well. And then there was the matter of comfort.
Maybe she was positively bloodless. Because she could feel herself transitioning to the new when.
“I need a hot shower,” she said. “Some new clothes. And a bed in a place that has climate control.”
“That’s easy,” Karinki said. “How about dinner?”
“Sure,” she said. “Alone. In my new apartment. With all kinds of information at my fingertips about the last thirty-one years. I won’t make a decision until I know what my options are.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and then extended his hand. “Welcome to the future.”
She looked at his palm. It was clean, but it had bite marks on the fleshy part that he hadn’t yet cleaned up.
“It sure as hell better be nicer than the past,” she said.
“Time periods are never one thing,” he said. “You should know that.”
She did know it. Maybe better than he did.
Maybe better than anyone.
She looked out that window at Lower Manhattan. Sunlight reflected off the Equitable Building struggling to survive between skyscrapers she couldn’t identify. Through the buildings’ canyons, she saw the Upper Bay, Battery Park, and a clean Statue of Liberty. Saw New Jersey in the distance.
“What month is it?” she asked.
He grinned. “September.”
She looked outside again, but not down this time. Up, like people on the sidewalks in 1920. She saw a clear blue September sky. The kind that promised one of those spectacular New York days, the kind that made you wonder why you lived anywhere else.
“I’m staying in Manhattan,” she said. “I don’t care when. But I do care where.”
He studied her for a moment, then nodded. “We can arrange that.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I wouldn’t work for you any other way.”
Introduction to “Time, Expressed as an Entrée”
Award-winning writer Robert T. Jeschonek sees the big picture. Ask him to write about something small and he’ll see its grand implications. When I asked him for a time-travel story, he decided “to play with the nature of time itself, exploring the perception of time versus the reality of it.”
This isn’t the first time Bob has written something vast for me. His grand-prize winning story for Strange New Worlds took place over a billion years. Another of his stories, “Fear of Rain,” was nominated for the British Fantasy Award. His young adult novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist, won the Forward National Literature Award and was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels for Youth. Day 9, his novel told in part from the point of view of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família cathedral in Barcelona, Spain, won a 2013 International Book Award.
Time Streams ends with Bob’s story because, really, “Time, Expressed as an Entrée” says it all.
Time, Expressed as an Entrée
Robert T. Jeschonek
The rainbow leviathan opened all his trillion trillion mouths at once and gobbled up the next-to-the-last day of the timeline.
Centillions of life forms screamed at once, but that was background static to the leviathan. All the time in all the universe rushed into its trillion trillion mouths with staggering force, but that was filet mignon with a side of lobster tail to the creature.
Not that filet mignon or lobster existed in this universe-which-was-not-our-own. Not that there was anything precisely like either delicacy in the milky-orange reaches of this alien space, with its red-and-white-striped sun-swarms and its planets like tangled neon tubes in constantly shifting configurations.
The last precious seconds of the next-to-the-last day gushed into the trillion trillion mouths. The “sound” it all made as it died—the simultaneous screaming of a multitude of life-forms across all frequencies, followed by the flushing of an entire universe down the gullet of the leviathan—was what the creature had taken as his name: EeePavoosh.
If the EeePavoosh—a matrix of sentient energy, subatomic strings, and gray matter—had actually had lips, he would have smacked them in satisfaction at the last bites of his food. As it was, he settled for thrashing his light-years-long shimmering rainbow tail through the infinite black void that was left in the wake of the devoured day.
Then, he turned his pale, rippling face toward his next meal. He sensed it beyond the shuddering veil of the void, glowing like a single flickering flame in a pitch-black abyss. One last taste of the timeline awaited—one last day, glittering like a perfect jewel.
The EeePavoosh had eaten all the rest, swooping like a shark through what had once been an octodecillion-year timeline, biting off every other day, year, century, and millennium. Now, he was down to one. One more feast of a day, and this timeline would be extinct.
Then what? Then nothing, perhaps. The EeePavoosh had no idea where he would go next. He had gobbled up every other adjacent timeline and could sense no others beyond this one.
Not that he was worried about that. He had been born to eat and move on, to never stop moving. He possessed a simple faith that he would somehow find more food and survive.
And so, with one last triumphant roar in the emptiness, the EeePavoosh plunged into the pristine bubble of the last remaining day.
On the other side of the veil, it was like nothing had happened to the rest of time. Space spread out in all directions, swirling with sun swarms circling planetary bodies.
The EeePavoosh’s multi-frequency, infinite-range senses captured every detail of his food, judging the meal’s suitability...and any irregularities that could interfere with consumption and digestion. He didn’t expect to find any; he hadn’t, in any of the other days he had devoured.
And yet, he found one here. He found an anomaly, something that didn’t belong in what was left of this timeline and universe.
Like a bird in flight spotting one tiny worm in the earth far below, the EeePavoosh zeroed in on the anomaly and dove toward it. Rainbow tail lashing, he rode gravity waves and solar winds, crossing the sprawling universe in one tiny fraction of the one last day in which it existed.
Arriving at his destination, the EeePavoosh coasted to a stop, gazing at a planetary body of purple and yellow neon tubes. The anomaly occupied one tiny spot on the surface.
Extruding a sliver of his gargantuan body, the EeePavoosh created an avatar small enough to interact with the anomaly. Rainbow colors flickered to life along the avatar’s ten-meters-long tail, and dozens of mouths flexed open and closed along its flanks.
Satisfied, the EeePavoosh rode his avatar down to the planet’s surface. Emerging from a layer of pale violet clouds, he gazed down with the single multifaceted red eye that occupied most of his face and saw what he had come for. Hundreds of feet below, sitting on green-and-purple-striped stones on the bank of a bright yellow river, was the anomaly.
Specifically, it was a life form with four appendages, one head, and pink skin. Its head was topped with a soft mane that flowed midway down its back—mostly gray, streaked with dark brown.
***
The EeePavoosh came to rest near the anomaly, hovering two meters above the ground. For a long moment, the anomaly just stared silently at him with its pair of dull green eyes and its single mouth open wide.
Finally, the anomaly spoke. “Thank God I’m drunk, or this might scare the livin’ crap outta me.” Its mouth curled up at both corners, revealing a sparse arrangement of broken teeth. “Well, don’t just hang there, buddy. Introduce yourself.”
The EeePavoosh rotated slowly, considering. The sounds the anomaly made seemed familiar. He had a feeling he had heard them before in some timeline he had devoured...but he couldn’t remember where or when.
The anomaly raised one of its upper appendages and shook it back and forth. “I’m Matilda Scanlon. My friends call me Tillie.” Tillie leaned forward and narrowed her eyes. “Are you a friend?”
The EeePavoosh thought some more, then understood. A run of connections sparked in his gargantuan memory archives, linking similar sounds, facial expressions, and gestures from various extinct species whose timelines he had eaten. None were exactly the same, but they shared enough traits that the EeePavoosh could use them to cobble together a rough translation.
More than that, the EeePavoosh could algorithmically process the commonalities into a set of responses. “Yes.” He spoke from his dozens of mouths with dozens of voices, each a different pitch, timbre, and volume. “I am a friend.”
Tillie let loose with a flurry of high-pitched stuttering sounds. Comparing them to similar sounds in his archives, the EeePavoosh identified them as laughter (though he didn’t use that word).
“Well, it’s about time you showed up, friend,” said Tillie. “I was startin’ to think I was alone here.”
“You are not alone.” The EeePavoosh’s grasp of the anomaly’s language was quickly improving. The more he heard of it, the better he understood.
He was also gathering other data on the anomaly. Biologically, it was similar to evolved primates from other timelines. The arrangement of its appendages was even the same as that of certain primates—two arms and two legs, ending in hands and feet which in turn ended in multiple digits. Further, the creature possessed physical traits associated in some primate species with the female gender. So Tillie, as it called itself, was a she.
“Let’s drink to new friends.” Tillie’s mouth curled up at the corners again. Reaching into the folds of the loose black garment she wore, she drew out a glass container in a paper wrapper—a bottle in a bag. Unscrewing the cap, she lifted the bottle to her lips and tilted it high. A trickle of liquid flowed down into her mouth, and she swallowed it.
The EeePavoosh identified the liquid as an extract of fermented biological material. Monitoring its passage through her system, he saw it was having an effect on her body chemistry, altering the functions of certain organs. It was a phenomenon he’d observed before: intoxication, an impairment of mental and physical functions which certain species seemed to find pleasurable.
“Nice.” Tillie wiped her mouth on the back of one of her hands. “I’d offer ya’ some, but there’s only a swig or two left. I’m thinkin’ I’d better nurse it, know what I mean?” She screwed the cap back on the bottle and stuffed it in the pocket of her garment. “Unless you know where there’s a package store around this joint.”
“Package store?” said the EeePavoosh. “Joint?”
“If you got one of those, that’d be even better.” Tillie’s laughter started loud, then trailed off. “But y’know what, buddy? I might settle for you tellin’ me where the hell I am right now.” Tillie spread her arms wide, taking in her surroundings. “What is this freakin’ place, anyway?”
“When,” said the EeePavoosh. “The question you should ask is when.”
“Okay then,” said Tillie. “When am I right now?”
“The end of time,” said the EeePavoosh.
“Huh?” Tillie scrunched her eyes and nose in what looked to the EeePavoosh like an expression of displeasure. “Are you trying to tell me I’m at the end of freakin’ time?”
“The end of this time,” said the EeePavoosh. “The last day of this existence.”
“No kiddin.’” Tillie shook her head. “And to think I was just in Pittsburgh an hour ago.”
“Pittsburgh?” The EeePavoosh flicked his tail. “Is that a location?”
“Yeah,” said Tillie. “It’s on the other side of that damn thing.” She pointed a finger at what looked at first like empty space. But as the EeePavoosh stared, the space rippled, revealing the outline of a transparent oval disk floating a meter above the purple ground.
Curious, the EeePavoosh trained all his senses on the disk. “The other side?”
“That’s right, buddy.” Tillie got up from her purple-and-green-striped rock and walked over to the disk. “I walked through it in Pittsburgh and ended up here. Some kind’a doorway, I’m guessin’.” Reaching out, she pushed her arm into the oval...and it went straight through as if the oval weren’t there. “A sucky doorway. I can’t seem to go back through it.”
“And you want to go back through?” asked the EeePavoosh.
“It’s funny,” said Tillie. “All my life, I wanted to get away from it all. I was just wishin’ that very thing when the doorway opened up, in fact. I was homeless and sick and lonely, and I just wanted to get away. But now that I have...” She looked around at the purple and yellow landscape. “...I just want to go home again.”
The EeePavoosh glided closer to the disk, picking up the faintest trace of time energy from it...just a whisper. “If it is a doorway, a portal, it is closed.”
“Apparently.” Tillie laughed. “Just my luck.”
“Luck.” The EeePavoosh drifted closer, sniffing at the time-trace. Was it a sign of a tiny temporal pocket, a bubble that would barely make a light snack for him...or something bigger?
Tillie hiked a thumb at the disk. “Don’t suppose you know how to open it?”
“No.” The EeePavoosh kept probing, straining to amplify the trace. “Not yet.”
“Not yet?” Tillie tipped her head to one side. “So do you think you could open it eventually?”
The EeePavoosh circled around the portal, sniffing at the whispery signal it was giving off. “Not yet. But yes. I think I could.”
Tillie’s face brightened. “When? When could you do it?”
“Soon, I think.” The EeePavoosh stopped circling and glided through the oval outline of the portal. “It requires more study, but it could be done.”
“Ain’t that fine and dandy!” Tillie clapped her hands. “You’re going to help me? Help me get home?”
“I will
open the portal,” said the EeePavoosh. “I will access the other side.” Even as he spoke to her, the EeePavoosh was busy measuring every characteristic of the portal. Though he had devoured an entire timeline except for one day, he was already hungry for what lay beyond the doorway.
Tillie moved a hand toward him, then caught herself and pulled it away. “Well, thank you, buddy. I’m really itchin’ to go back. I was just thinkin’ about it when you showed up, in fact. Prayin’ about it, for what it’s worth.” Looking down, she kicked a purple pebble with the toe of her shoe. “Maybe I shouldn’t care. I mean, I’ve never amounted to much. I’m sure nobody even knows I’m gone. But home is home, right?”
The EeePavoosh kept working. “Home is home,” he said.
“Maybe I had to lose it to appreciate it,” said Tillie. “Or maybe the Lord had a plan in store for me.”
“A plan?” said the EeePavoosh.
“For my life to mean somethin’,” said Tillie. “I always wanted it to, but it never did. I’m just a homeless alcoholic who can’t even help herself. But maybe, comin’ here like this...” She kicked another pebble. “Maybe there’s still somethin’ I’m supposed to do. Whatta you think?”
The EeePavoosh didn’t answer.
Tillie watched him for a moment. “You’re not an angel by any chance, are you?”
“No.” The EeePavoosh wasn’t sure what an angel was, but nothing in his archives made him think the term had anything to do with him.
“Well, thanks anyway for helpin’ with the doorway,” said Tillie. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s done somethin’ this nice for me. A long time.”
“A long time?” said the EeePavoosh. “How long?”
“Years and years.” Tillie shook her head. “Decades, even.”
“Years? Decades?” Aligning the context with similar semantic constructs from the languages in his vast memory archives, the EeePavoosh became intrigued. The way the female talked about units of time distracted him from his work.
“It’s the story of my life,” said Tillie. “Sixty years of bullshit, and it feels like an eternity.”
Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Page 22
