I’d made it again.
I smiled and glanced down to find out what I was wearing. In the instant before materialization, the image sampler in my head had reached out for a compressed burst of media, sought out images of people who looked like I did, young and female, and adjusted my camo clothes and hair to fit local custom. The audio portion of my sampler program gave my brain’s language center a quick overlay of local usage. Voila! Instant new me.
Of course, this only worked in eras that had a lot of media to sample. For earlier times we had to rely on stealth vids shot by explorers and banked in the vast Collector-Corps information library.
Hramm. On this version of me, the hair was chin-length, and what I could see of it from the comers of my eyes told me it was flat, lusterless, and magenta. The clothes? Solid black. The top was long-sleeved, a tight shirt of shiny black material, tucked into black leather pants, and below that, I wore black, thick-soled boots, With black laces that crisscrossed almost up to my knees. I wiggled my toes, felt lumpy socks inside the knee-high boots. I wondered if the socks were black.
“Hey. Give me those,” said a grumpy voice.
Oh. Him. I had forgotten Scott, my partner on this trip, a man I’d only known half an hour. He’d told me to shut up three times already. Not everybody had the mental stamina to cope with my particular brand of badinage, but most people weren’t as rude as Scott. Few guessed I was conducting a screening process. Scott had definitely flunked.
He stood on the other side of the car, dressed in the standard business suit of the middle-aged American male for a period from about 1930 to 2026, the navy version with off-white shirt. For guys who looked like Scott, this was a broad-tie-and-wide-lapel era, coupled with a flat-topped haircut which his brown hair was almost too thin for.
None of what he wore suited him.
All right, I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t do puns. Not on purpose.
“Sissy! Give me those!” Scott said again. He held out his hand across the car roof.
I glared at him with narrow eyes, then glanced around.
Venice Beach, California, August, 1979. When you could still buy a copy of Marvel’s The Minus Men #121 for cover price at a liquor store or bus station, if you had local currency or a reasonable facsimile. Marvel thought the series was dying, and put one of their brand new writer-artist teams on it, gave them free rein in terms of plot and concept, not knowing that in the future this team would create Marvel’s longest-running, best-loved title, and that this issue, which introduced the characters who would later become a multimedia sensation, and which Marvel didn’t print many copies of, would go through the roof.
Not only that, but the artist and author would be attending a science fiction convention in Santa Monica tomorrow. Right now nobody knew who they were except people from the future. Autographed copies of Minus Men #121? Practically nonexistent in 2059, at least until we got home with some.
So okay, not the most important mission I’d ever had. But not the least either.
I sure liked the look of the people wandering around here. All different skin colors, from basement-living bleached to totally tan to black-coffee black. Lots of colors in the clothes, but then again, lots of black. Punk was almost passé, but the New Wave had stolen lots of its tropes. I saw spiked hair, neon-streaked hair, Rasta dreadlocks, and no hair.
Scott came around the car, stumbling a little in his shiny leather shoes. Another rookie mistake; we lived in slippers in the future, in padded underground complexes. Shoes took practice, and obviously he hadn’t done his homework. “The keys,” he said. “Give them to me!”
I shoved the keys in a pocket of my leather pants. Tight! They made a bump against my thigh. “No,” I said.
“Can you even drive?” He looked at our car. I don’t know how time tressing works. Nobody does. But the CollectorCorps scientists set it up so they can send a couple of operatives and some camo-mass back, masked in blurs that divert the attention of nearby people away from our arrival nodes. Operatives come with high-powered media samplers, the samplers feed images into the camo-mass, and by the time the blurs fade into edges, there’s the appropriate vehicle and the appropriate equipment for whenever and wherever the operatives are.
That’s the idea, anyway. That’s what the PR tells the world we do. Nobody talks about all the screwups—how Washu lost three of his toes when his matter-swap scythed him partially inside something already there, how Mingelle ended up in the middle of a Klan rally in the 1920s and was half-hanged before they pulled her home, or why Bista won’t ever enter a room smaller than three meters on a side again.
Nobody talks about Helen or Crow or Shingawa or Plessy at all. If you don’t come home, you get wiped out of all the records except people’s memories, which is why I’m pretty particular about my memories. I hang onto them all.
Time tressing’s not for sissies. Except me. I mean, Sissy is my name, not my nature. I love tressing, and I don’t know why. Or maybe I do know, but it’s not something I can explain. Anyway, I’m good at it. Nobody on any of my missions has ever gotten hurt. Humiliated, maybe, but not hurt.
I took another look at Scott. I couldn’t figure out how his cover would fit in with our mission. Maybe his sampler was fritzing. AmBizMan on the beach? AmBizMan at a SciFi con? Skewed. Seriously.
“Sure, I can drive,” I said, “but on this mission, at this time, the car is just a portable storage unit.” I took a couple steps. I liked the feel of my clunky boots. I peered through the long narrow window into the station wagon’s cargo space. Black instrument cases? Yep.
I went around to the car’s back door and unlocked it, hauled out a guitar case. Way to get local money? Earn it in some unregulated way. Robbing banks worked, and so did picking pockets. Blur power and camo-mass made each of those options easy. But I liked busking the best. Then people knew what they were buying for the money we took from them. “Looks like you’re elected to play the fiddle,” I said.
“Play the what?”
I pointed to the other instrument case.
Scott looked skrawed.
“Go on. Get it out.”
“What am I supposed to do with I mean, what is it?”
I put my case on the asphalt, got the fiddle case out of the back of the car, and closed and locked the door, then hid the keys in my pocket again. Why did they always send me on missions with dumb rookies? I mean, every time. I wondered if somebody wanted to cook me. I couldn’t remember anybody I had made that mad, but sometimes you couldn’t tell. “How much orientation did you miss, and who are you related to?” I asked.
Red stained his cheeks. “My sister’s on the CC board,” he said.
“And your big itch would be?”
He frowned and swallowed. His Adam’s-apple bobbed. “Petroleum-powered vehicles,” he whispered.
Fritterfrick! Ijits who had some obsession with past things kept creeping through CollectorCorp’s job filters. Why did I always end up babysitting them?
“Pick up your instrument and follow me.” I grabbed the guitar case and strode toward the boardwalk and the beach.
Scott hovered anxiously at the car. “Wait,” he called, and glanced frantically around at all the people. A few of them stopped to study him. Who had programmed his sampler? He was a total unblend. Nobody on the sidewalk looked anything like him.
Maybe his sampler had misjudged our arrival node. Samplers weren’t supposed to be buggy. Then again, nothing else was supposed to be buggy either, and everything more or less was.
I sighed and walked back.
Scott put a hand on the car’s roof. “How can we leave the car? Won’t these people dismantle and steal it?”
Rookies. They thought everybody in every time period was some kind of crook. Obviously Scott hadn’t done any of his homework. “You really should have paid more attention during orientation,” I said. I picked up the fiddle case in my free hand and headed for the beach again.
“The car,” he said, “the ca
r, the car, the car—”
“Oh, eat it. It’s camo-mass keyed to us. Nobody else can do a thing with it. Here.” I handed him the smaller black case.
He looked grumpy again. “I don’t know why you brought this. I don’t even know what it is.”
“You don’t have to know. All you have to do is hold it and act like you’re playing it. The sampler will fill in time-appropriate sounds.”
“We’re doing this why?”
“To pick up a little local tender so we can buy our target acquisitions.”
He grumped all the way to the boardwalk. All right, it wasn’t really a boardwalk, it was a wide concrete walkway with muscle boys, bikini girls, rollerskaters (pre-rollerblade), joggers, shoppers, coffee-drinkers, walkers, skateboarders, and leashed dogs on it. On the town side of the walk, there were all kinds of funky little shops and sidewalk cafes mingled with funky little two- or three-story apartment buildings. On the ocean side, there was a line of palm trees and light poles and green trash barrels, and beyond that, a pale beige beach churned with the footprints of thousands and supporting a batch of tan-seeking, cancer-collecting, bathing-suited bodies between us and a beautiful blue ocean. Oiled-up muscleboys worked out as I watched. Younger people whooped and yelled and played Frisbee. A whole spectrum of people played in the water, facing the waves.
I stood for a moment looking at a civilization that still lived above ground. Maybe Scott had a thing for gas-powered engines—and he did, he had leaned toward every parked vehicle we had passed, sniffing as if he could snort exhaust and the scent of sun on hot metal; every time we saw a moving car, fascination glued Scott to the sidewalk, staring.
Me, I liked the sky. So strange to have air lying around free for everybody, whether you paid for your allotment or not. ’Kay, so it wasn’t scrubbed or anything. But it was right out here in the open. People didn’t even need breathing apparatus.
A couple of winos sat under a nearby palm tree. One was asleep, and the other looked at us. Or more like he stared at me, then took a swig from a bottle in a brown paper bag.
I crossed the boardwalk, laid down my guitar case, brushed aside a few cigarette butts, beer bottle caps, and poptops in the sand, and slumped between a couple of palm trees. I pressed my thumbs to the clasps holding the guitar case closed.
“Hey, man. Whatcha doing?” asked a scruffy local. He had filthy bare feet, grease-streaked jeans with holes at the knees and the bottoms of the pockets, and a denim jacket with clusters of safety pins all over it. His hair was long, blond, snarled, and dirty, and his eyes were bloodshot.
“Setting up,” I said.
“Whoa. The people who live in the building across the walk, they’re uptight assholes. They narc on anybody who makes noise nearby.”
“Oh.” I smiled at him. “Where should we go?”
“You got a permit?”
“No.”
He chewed his lower lip for a minute, then said, “Follow me.”
I sealed my case shut and rose as my native guide headed down the walk.
Scott, who had been standing there like an ijit—why didn’t he glance around and realize that no one else in sight stood still and stared at anything with such a stupid look on their face?—grabbed my arm. “Sissy!”
I jabbed my defense fingernail into the back of his hand, and he let go fast. I had a selection of irritants and poisons I could use with the nail; I chose a minor itch. No matter how annoying Scott was, he was still my partner, and I kept my partners intact even if they were useless. “Stop grabbing me,” I said. I followed the Local, and Scott ended up following me.
We came to a spot across from a coffee shop with tables on the walk in front of it. “This place is good for a little while,” said Local. “If you sound good, the coffee drinkers will give you something. You see cops coming, you make all your stuff disappear. You’re not planning to be here long, are you?”
“No. Thanks!”
“ ‘Cause I know some other people who panhandle here. I don’t want to give away their spot, man. But Gracie, she’s sleeping in today.”
“We won’t be here long.”
“Cool.”
I wished I had something to give him, but we hadn’t come with much of anything. I had an armband with enough nutritabs inside it to keep me eating for a month, but that was definitely prohib tech. No sharing, period.
I got my guitar all the way out of the case this time. In this time and place, the guitar was acoustic: pale, almost silvery wood with an ebony fingerboard, and a black plastic pick guard emblazoned with white dancing skeletons. The strap was now black with woven green-and-purple lizards crawling up it. I loved this version of me.
Local shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned up against a palm tree. “Cool guitar. What kind of stuff you play?” he asked.
“Wait and see,” I said. I did know how to play my instrument; pursuing that was one of my personal quirks. On a mission, though, I usually trusted my sampler to supply me with material. Couldn’t sing some song that wouldn’t be popular until two years later—what if the person who was going to play it into a hit stole it from me, and I had stolen it from them to begin with? Who had ever written it? We tried never to set such question loops into action. They could stretch and snap, and then everybody would wake up in a different reality. I was kind of attached to this one.
And there was the other option, that I’d play something I knew was good and it would be totally foreign to when I was, and nobody else would like it.
I’d done a little research, enough to know that this was the era of Blondie, the Clash, the B52s, the Police, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, all people I had never heard of until I pulled a fast sample out of the CollectorCorps data files and headjammed it before I left on this mission. None of what I heard seemed like something I could do with just my voice, an acoustic guitar, and the possible addition of Scott on a fiddle, so I decided to try something from an earlier era. “You like folk songs?” I asked Local.
“Folk songs?” He looked alarmed.
“They’re great. All blood and death and stuff.” I set the open case beside the walkway, hoping people would drop money in. “I’ll play you a folk song.” I slipped the guitar strap over my head, pulled a pick out of a pickholder on the guitar’s side, and strummed an intro with only minimal help from the sampler. I sang the first line of “Banks of the Ohio,” about a chipper so crazed with love that when his girl said no, he killed her.
“Whoa,” whispered Local. He stared at my mouth while I sang, with brief glances at my breasts.
People strolling by behind him stopped, gathered. Change jingled into the open guitar case. A few people dropped paper money. Scott stood there like a mannequin, the violin case forgotten in his hand, his mouth hanging open.
I wrapped up the song with a repeat of the creepy chorus, then smiled at everyone who had stopped to listen. A few of them clapped. Most of them moved on.
Local said, “Awesome, man. Great voice.”
“Thanks.” I checked the guitar case. Not bad for a three-minute song. Already we could afford comic books and some of the more exotic local foods. Slurpees, maybe. I’d seen ads for those when I was in a similar time period before, but I’d never managed to taste one. I strummed an A chord. Folk songs could work. . . . I’d try “House of the Rising Sun” next. I picked an E minor chord.
“Well,” said Scott.
I glanced at him. Why was I doing all the work? What was he here for, anyway? The sampler could supply some ominous fiddle in this song. “Get out your instrument.”
“Sissy. Sniggle,” Scott said.
My muscles locked. My left hand gripped the guitar’s neck so hard I felt the guitar strings digging into my fingernails, and the fingers on my right hand curled into claws on the strings above the sound hole.
Unwelcome knowledge flooded my system. I remembered . . . other missions. All these lame gropers I kept getting stuck with, time after time! One of them had some kind o
f masterword he passed on to the next, and the next, and the next. At some point in my training with CollectorCorps, somebody had wired an “obey” circuit into me. Illegal! Criminal! Horrible and humiliating!
Now I remembered every single one of those horrible missions. I had started each one feeling as though I was in charge, shepherding around some lame-o rookie on a quest to pick up this or that small perfect item for some elite who could afford the outrageous price CC would charge. Somewhere along the way, my irritating partner would whisper the magic word, and I would freeze up until he told me what he wanted.
I couldn’t move. I felt the red in my face, though. There were lots of fast ways to make unregulated money besides busking, picking pockets, or bank robbing. Turning tricks, for instance.
One of two of my rookies had been—less horrible than the others. I didn’t have much hope for Scott.
They always made me forget afterward.
I wished now that they wouldn’t. I would be better off if I didn’t sneer at them and insult them and order them around early on, wouldn’t I?
But I didn’t want to live with what I had gone through.
All I had to do was get through the next forty-eight hours, until the autoreturn pulled us back. If Scott followed the pattern, he, too, would tell me to forget everything. We would return to the future with what I would think was the object of our quest, and I would rest up, ignoring the bruises and small illnesses and outbreaks I always picked up on missions. Somebody would give me another assignment. I would do my homework. Then I’d lead some other lawbreaking lamebrain back into the past, and . . .
“Sissy,” said Scott. “Put the guitar away.”
“Hey, man. I want to hear more!” Local said.
Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Page 33
