The Curiosity Killers

by K W Taylor

  The woman looked confused and somewhat chagrined. “I, um, is…yes?” She coughed and looked down at the hem of her dress.

  White stepped forward and narrowed his eyes. “Are you sick in the head, madam? Do you know the year, Goodwife Fallon? Who is the Queen? And what is your Christian name?”

  Cage gaped at the governor. “Sir, this lady is in clear distress,” he protested. “Is it kind or fair to imply she is of unsound mind?”

  “We have faced dangers before,” the governor said. “I will not be contradicted.” He looked back at Fallon. “Now, if you would be so charitable as to indulge an old man’s suspicious nature…”

  The woman laughed and touched her forehead. She paced and stared out each window of the meeting room. “It’s so beautiful here,” she said. “So unspoiled…”

  “Madam.” White banged a fist on the table. “It is the dead of night. Please. Just give me your name. Your origin. And tell me, how on earth did you come to be here?”

  “Sinéad,” Fallon replied. “And…” She sighed, her shoulders sagging. “Ah, hell, I don’t remember what I told you guys.” She laughed again, this time her face splitting into a mad grin, and then bolted for the door.

  White stared after the retreating figure. “Guards!” he called. He gestured at her, and the two younger men were soon in pursuit. “That woman is a spy.”

  ~

  Fallon ran on and on until she reached almost all the way to the shoreline. Behind her, the colonists added to their numbers and were now wielding honest-to-God pitchforks and torches. “I’m not you people’s Dracula,” she muttered. “Goddammit, I thought this kind of thing was a cliché.”

  She didn’t figure they’d go after her as a spy. That was the funny thing. Depending on how she’d been found, the worst the agency warned her against was accusations of witchcraft. Hide, they instructed her. As soon as you realize you’ve made it, you’ve got to hide until you can collect yourself.

  She’d have to tell them they got the clothes wrong. Way too fancy and impractical. As she ran, her breath growing ragged and labored, Fallon wished she could rip the moldering skirts off, escape from the confines of her petticoats, and run in just her linen knee-length drawers. When she caught the cry of men shouting “Whore!” behind her, Fallon knew this idea would add fuel to that fire. “Damnable whore! Spy!”

  So much for solving a mystery. Shit, what a disappointment.

  At the shoreline, she scanned the roiling waves for… “Fuck, where is it?” she grunted in frustration. She crouched low, picking her way down the precarious rockface, making sure to keep the beach in sight. If she wasn’t precise in her aim…But no, she dropped down and knew as soon as she felt the ground give a little more under her weight that she’d made it.

  This wasn’t the retrieval spot, though. Fallon raced toward the tree line, the colonists at her heels.

  They’ve made me. They know there’s something not right with me. I’m not from here. I’m not from now. And they all know it.

  It wouldn’t do to already go out to Croatan if that wasn’t where the colonists wound up. No, she would need to go to the groups of Chowanoke or Iroquois in and around the settlement. Fallon scuttled along the beach until she reached the far side of the island, the side uninhabited by the colonists. She shut her eyes, trying to call up the image of the period map she’d almost-but-not-completely memorized. At least one of the tribes shouldn’t be far.

  When she wound her way through the trees to the clearing, she was startled. She expected nudity, savagery, ritual, drums. Instead, there were silent tents and huts, a few men sitting around a fire laughing together and murmuring in what was clearly English. One of them wore deerskins, but another wore a shabby scarlet jacket, a hand-me-down from a British soldier. She found it all incongruous and offensive, these natives wearing the clothes of the colonists. Were they so civilized? How on earth did Roanoke put up with their presence, let alone teach them their language, give them their clothes? Yes, the theories were that White’s group intermarried with them, but Fallon could not fathom such a thing—they were kidnapped, in her opinion. What respectable English people would take up with savages? Once she was back to her own time, she would take up with the RAA, full stop. The Empiricists understood nothing about racial purity.

  She’d been musing too long, and soon she knew they’d sensed her.

  “Come out,” one of the men said, not unkindly. “Governor? Is that you?”

  Shit. “Um, no, no, it’s not the governor.” Fallon walked forward into the clearing. Too late, she realized she hadn’t reasoned this out enough to craft an understandable story for them. “I am from the north, and I was shipwrecked,” she tried, simplifying the tale she’d told the colonists. “May I have shelter?”

  They exchanged looks and quiet words in a tongue she didn’t understand. A young woman came forward from between two groups of men. “Roanoke?” the woman asked.

  Fallon shook her head. They couldn’t find her here, not if she wanted to be safe. “No, I haven’t located Roanoke,” she tried. “I was from the Canadian colonies.” Shit, did they call it Canada yet? Her mainlining of seventeenth century North American history meant to prepare her for this all went out the window under the intense pressure of the situation. Her heart pounded, louder and louder, the blood rushing against her eardrums. Fallon felt her face flush hot, red. She laughed, too tired to protest anymore. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she admitted.

  The young woman frowned. “Come, you are tired,” she said. She put her arm around Fallon’s shoulders and steered her into one of the huts.

  Inside, much to Fallon’s shock, was a white man, but his clothes weren’t those of the colonists. Instead they looked centuries newer, though perhaps not as new as the twenty-second century. If Fallon hadn’t worried she was half-crazy with fear and hunger by this point, she’d have thought the tall, slender man was a subject of Queen Victoria, with his dark wool suit and wire-rimmed spectacles.

  “Well, you weren’t one of mine,” he said, looking Fallon up and down. His accent was Midwestern, which was impossible, given the Midwest didn’t precisely exist yet.

  The man smirked, revealing near-lupine teeth and making his thin face look more skeletal in the firelight. “Vere must’ve sent you. Do you work for him?”

  Vere. The man from the travel agency, the physicist. It could be another tourist, Fallon supposed, but she wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “The fact that you chose to come here speaks volumes, miss.” He chuckled. “I’ll have to find you later. Yes, indeed.” He withdrew a pen from his pocket, held it in front of himself, and squeezed it. Fallon thought she saw a small flash of light.

  “Did you—was that—”

  “Your imagination,” the man said. He drifted off to speak to one of the natives, and soon a young woman brought her a bowl of hot liquid. The Victorian man exited the hut.

  Not Victorian. American. Rénartian, in point of fact, if he is from the Midwest.

  Jonson and Vere had led Fallon to believe only the New British Empire had time travel, that their agency was secret to keep the tech out of RAA hands.

  The young native woman was expecting Fallon to drink, and so she pulled herself out of her reverie and did. It was a broth, and she was grateful at the heat and sustenance. “I didn’t even know I was so cold,” Fallon told the woman.

  More women appeared beside the first one. “This will return you,” the first woman said. “That man, he says this will work for your kind, those who dance on the stars. Soon you will be called home and disappear. He says you will sleep now and awake in your own time.”

  Wait, what? No, I can’t leave. And how can they make me? How—

  She felt pressure on her left palm.

  Darkness. And then a rushing like a train, like a thunderstorm, water echoing in a seashell.

  The sea, I have to stay close to the sea…

  Thursday, August 19, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

&nbs
p; “Oh, shit, Ben, the client’s back, but she’s unconscious.” It was a young woman’s voice. Fallon couldn’t peel her eyes open.

  Footsteps. Someone patted her face. “Kris, go get Eddy.” It was a man, the younger one, Fallon knew.

  “He’s no medical doctor,” the girl protested.

  “Go.”

  When Fallon opened her eyes, the young man’s face was above hers. He smiled, his thick black eyebrows relaxing in relief to see her awake. “Welcome back to the twenty-second century, Ms. Fallon.”

  It was gone. Her one and only chance, and Fallon blew it. She wept.

  ~

  Whispers behind closed doors. A first-aid exam by the older of the two men in charge of the agency. Finally, Fallon was given cups of tea and bland, stale little circular things halfway between crackers and cookies to nibble on. A gray and white tabby cat stared silently at Fallon from a bookshelf. Fallon could only muster weak smiles for the young woman called Kris who continued to dote on her and ask if she was all right. Kris returned from some secret corner of the building to ask if Fallon felt like debriefing the staff.

  “You don’t have to,” Kris assured Fallon. “Doctor Vere at least would like to speak with you if you’re not up to a formal interview.”

  Fallon nodded. “I’ll talk with him a bit.”

  Doctor Vere looked to be in his early sixties. His hair was tightly curled, his complexion tan but his features Caucasian. Fallon herself might have thought him handsome in a shabby way under different circumstances—that is, if she could be sure he was white, which was hard to tell—but his gruff demeanor was tough to get past. He spoke in the affected tone of a Mid-Atlantic accent, despite its having gone back out of favor at least twenty years earlier.

  “Did you go to one of those ‘new etiquette’ schools?” Fallon asked after he’d seated himself.

  Vere smirked. “You’re not nearly as backward as you seem, Ms. Fallon. Very perceptive of you.”

  Fallon gaped. “Backward? What do you—”

  “Let’s cut through these miles of bullshit,” Vere interrupted. “Look, I’ve met others like you before, Empire citizens wishing they lived in the RAA, who use history as an excuse to proliferate racism.” He glared at her. “I’ll not have good people like Miss Moto and Mr. Jonson exposed to your twisted ideologies.” Vere leaned forward. “They’re naïve, you see. But I’m not. It may not exist anymore as an organization, but people who want to see Virginia Dare, the first white person born in this fractured country, just because she symbolizes some horrible racial purity ideal to you…my God, woman, you make me sick.

  “And so,” Vere went on, sitting up straighter, “when we finish procedures today, you’ll not pursue this line any further lest you get an unwelcome visit from me that perhaps involves something metal placed in an uncomfortable spot in your person.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Are we clear?”

  “You don’t want me trying this again,” Fallon clarified, “because you dislike my politics? Or are you just embarrassed I made it through your screening?”

  Vere pounded the table. “It’s not politics if it’s sheer hate, madam, and we are within our rights to refuse service to anyone.” He pointed to the closed kitchen door. “That young man out there, our Mr. Jonson…he didn’t start this agency in order to help people destroy others. Do you understand?”

  This was all getting a trifle overdramatic for Fallon’s tastes. “Look, I’ve been through a lot today,” she said. “Do you want to hear about what happened or not?”

  Vere folded his arms in front of his chest. “Sinéad Fallon, did you discover what became of the lost colony of Roanoke? Or were you somehow stymied in these efforts?”

  Fallon was startled at the way the question was phrased. “Stymied,” she blurted out. Shit. “I…I mean…oh, hell, fine. Yes, yes, I was stymied. I couldn’t get where I needed to go in time, and they thought I was a witch or something.”

  Vere nodded. “It’s funny. Some research Mister Jonson hadn’t found a few days ago sprang up just this morning.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from an inside pocket of his jacket.

  Fallon stared at it, a feeling of dread settling over her. “What is that?”

  Vere unfolded the paper with agonizing slowness and passed it to her. Fallon scanned the blurry photocopy, feeling the first stirrings of panic.

  Before the trip, before contracts were even signed, Jonson and Vere went over everything with grave seriousness. “Client shall in no way impact historical events,” the stipulation went. The younger one, Ben, read that one and smiled at her. “But that’s super unlikely,” he’d assured her. “You’d have to really screw up to do that.”

  And yet here was a page out of a history book showing a woodcut of a woman with short hair who looked all too familiar.

  “Is that me?” she murmured. Her stomach felt heavy and yet empty at the same time, as if she’d been filled with air. “Oh, my God, that’s supposed to be me.”

  Vere snatched the paper away. “It isn’t you, Ms. Fallon. Of course it isn’t you.” He cleared his throat and drew a pair of half-moon spectacles from his shirtfront pocket. “It seems there’s an old legend amongst the Iroquois of a sorceress who served as a kind of portent of the Roanoke disappearance.” He lowered the paper. “And of course, that would have been centuries ago. So it couldn’t be you.”

  Fallon’s eyes darted to the corners of the room.

  Exit, exit, where the hell is the exit?

  Just as she spotted the door, a hand clamped down on her wrist. She shrieked. “Let go of me!”

  “I think not.”

  Fallon struggled, but then a piece of hard plastic pressed to her temple.

  “What is that thing?” Fallon asked.

  Vere turned his hand over and studied the device now resting in his weathered palm. “This?” He scanned the dark plastic and small white buttons. “This is for our memory erasure, which you’re already aware of as a stipulation of our services.” He turned his hand around so that Fallon could see the buttons. “Can you read that?”

  Fallon squinted. One of the buttons said “Restore.” Another said “Revert.” In a row beneath the other buttons, a third said “Delete All.”

  “This is what I use to erase the memory of your adventure. You know we do this with all our clients, though perhaps in a slightly nicer manner. Because it’s the gaining of the knowledge that’s important, isn’t it? Not so much the keeping? The keeping, well…that’s too dangerous. That’s what our whole business model is run on. Knowledge gain for its own sake, the retention of which is immaterial.”

  “I wanted to know what happened,” Fallon said, “and I knew I wouldn’t get to keep the memory, but…delete all?”

  A wicked grin split Vere’s face, and he let his thumb move to the “Delete All” button. “Yes. Activating this command…”

  “Deletes all?” Fallon whimpered.

  “As in every memory, not only your trip, but everything.” He stared at her. “The sentimental falling of leaves on your first day of kindergarten, your first kiss, your graduation, your parents’ funerals.” He leaned even farther over the table, his face inches from Fallon’s, so close she could feel the heat of his breath. It held a whiff of peppermint tea, stale enough to be unpleasant at this distance. “I mean the memory of how to walk, talk, read…dare I say function. You would be a baby in an old woman’s body.”

  Tears fell from Fallon’s eyes. “Please, no.”

  Vere squinted hard. His eyebrows knit into a long, steel-gray caterpillar. “You won’t try this again.” It was as much a statement of fact as a command.

  ~

  The woman who left Jonson’s Exotic Travel that evening seemed serene. In a freshly pressed pair of jodhpurs and a gauzy white blouse that buttoned down the front, she looked pristine and put together, if a bit confused.

  Fallon could swear she’d been on her way to the library, but this building…this wasn’t it, was it? She glanced back up at the unmark
ed townhouse, gave a shrug, and sauntered down the sidewalk.

  The front windows, they’d looked like eyes in a way, and Fallon felt them boring into the back of her neck.

  A slender man approached her. “Ms. Fallon, I’m sure you don’t remember me,” he said, “but we met once, long ago.”

  Fallon stopped walking and studied him. He wore a dark gray suit, Victorian in style though not like the retro fashions that were popular today. No, these clothes looked vintage, looked dusty and worn and battle-scarred.

  “I suspect we share similar political leanings,” the man went on. “May I buy you a drink?”

  Thursday, August 5, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

  The lobby looked like a nineteenth-century drawing room, though this was not a private residence. A stack of parchment-printed brochures sat on a table near the entry. “Jonson’s Exotic Travel,” the front of the brochure proclaimed. “Services available by referral only.” The room was silent and smelled of eucalyptus, a sweet, heady scent that made it seem as if the dwelling were always on the cusp of Christmas.

  Deeper inside the building, a clerical assistant filed pieces of mail into slotted trays while her employer—the very Mister Jonson of the agency’s title—dabbed a spot of spilt tea from his shirtsleeve. The pyramidal ebony nameplate twelve inches in front of him revealed his given name to be Benoy. A cat slept on a crimson cushion in front of the unlit fireplace. Downstairs, an older gentleman in a white laboratory coat fussed with beakers and wires and keyboards, muttering to himself about quantum theory and transistors.

  All in all, a normal afternoon. That was, until young Mister Jonson sat up straighter in his chair and got a faraway look in his eye. “Shit,” he said, rubbing his bushy eyebrows. “Kris, we got trouble.”

  “We do?”

  “It’s Tuesday afternoon,” Ben informed her. “Look at the appointment book.”